Baleful Signs (Dagger of the World Book 3) Read online

  “I am trusting him to keep the Second Family alive through the war that is to come. I have to trust him when he says that he will need those supplies of Demiene Flowers,” she said a little sadly, but matter-of-factly.

  So it was all for nothing? I have failed, Terak was thinking.

  “But that does not mean that I cannot offer you an alternative,” the Mother said, “because you are kin, that is.” Her voice suddenly faltered, and the radiance that gathered itself around her diminished even more. This time, Terak could see small wrinkles about her eyes, and the elf lady’s skin appeared thin like paper . . .

  “We have a Circle that can take you to where the Demiene Flowers grow. You can harvest them yourself, and return to save your friend,” Istarion offered.

  “But don’t they grow in the Crystal Forest?” Terak said in surprise. “In the Aesther?”

  Mother Istarion’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “The humans have taught you well, it seems,” she said. “Yes. They do. I admit that it will be dangerous—the journey will be just as fraught as the Aesther itself—but it is the only chance you have of saving your friend’s life.”

  “But, if I may, Mother Istarion . . .” Terak was confused. “I was told that now that the Baleful Signs are here, any travel between the realms would be . . . ill-advised . . .” The Father had said that it would act like a beacon for the Ungol, Terak remembered.

  “Do you wish to save your friend or not?” Mother Istarion asked, a tad colder than before. “What your human mentors tell you about magic and what we elves of the Second Family know are two very different things, Terak. You would do well to remember that,” she said sharply.

  Terak nodded that he understood. It was the elves of the First Family who made the Blood Gate after all, wasn’t it? The Sorcerer-King and his priest-architects. Admittedly, their creation had gone horribly wrong, but that didn’t mean that the elves didn’t have a thousand more years of experience at this than did the Enclave.

  “Where is your friend now?” Istarion asked. When Terak told her, the spiritual leader of the Second Family nodded to her guardswoman Ulla. “Go find them and bring the girl to my healing chambers.”

  “Yes, my lady.” Ulla nodded and left the hall at a swift jog.

  “Now, come with me.” She was already leading the way to an alcove behind the living throne, where wooden stairs, seemingly grown from the timber of the tree itself, rose upwards. “The journey will be dangerous, and you need to be prepared. I cannot guarantee your safety, Terak of the Second Family, but I can guarantee that I will do my best for the family I protect.”

  Terak felt a mixture of gratitude and sheer terror as he followed.

  11

  The Circle

  Terak found himself in what appeared to be a chamber made entirely of the ancient tree’s heart. The walls flowed with the undulations of bark, and inward-growing stems, devoid of foliage, had been smoothed and polished, and were hung with a variety of drying herbs, opaque stones on strings—

  “Ach!” Terak flinched. His skin shivered as if in the bitter colds of a Tartaruk storm. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, and that familiar ache of magic hurt the bones in his jaw.

  “Ah. I see that you are more progressed than I had thought,” Mother Istarion said, moving under the whorled shapes of “windows,” merely deep holes in the tree’s bark, fitted with panes of colored glass.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand . . .” Terak voiced his confusion.

  “The Ochullax.”

  The younger elf watched as Mother Istarion drew something from one of the deep alcoves in the walls that formed natural shelves. She took a series of thick, velvety cloths and wrapped them over some of the hanging and standing crystal fragments. Terak caught a glimpse of them before they were covered. Each one was the same, opaque and iridescent pearly-white stone. None of them were the rounded orbs that the Chief Arcanum used.

  Although the sense of uncomfortable nausea didn’t go away, the elf felt an instant improvement when the rare mineral was covered.

  “They used that in my Testing,” Terak said, wiping the beads of sweat from his brow.

  Mother Istarion nodded, “Naturally. It is the customary way to determine magical prowess, to expose the student to the star-crystal.”

  “Star-crystal?” Terak asked, trying to remember something that the Father Jacques had told him. Something about the creation of the first Blood Gate.

  “It was a star that created all the ochullax in our world, which is also why it is so rare,” Istarion said, finishing her task and turning to address Terak directly. “The star fell on Midhara, wiping out the Empire of the First Family. It is assumed that it was summoned unwittingly by the Sorcerer-King’s attempt to create and open the Blood Gate.”

  “Which only opened out onto the . . .” Terak hesitated to even think of the nightmare realm, The Ungol.

  “Precisely,” Mother Istarion said. “It is a mixed curse, however, as now we have ochullax–which is incredibly potent as a magical amplifier.”

  “Not for me it isn’t . . .” Terak muttered automatically, before coughing when he realized he had spoken out of turn. For Terak, it appeared that the star-crystal only brought with it pain and nausea.

  “Are you so sure, Terak of the Second Family?” Mother Istarion asked quietly. She turned to take a pouch from one of the alcoves and started to pour a wide circle of fine, silver dust in the center of the room.

  What? Terak was surprised by Istarion’s words. “But I’m—I’m a null. I have no magic.” He remembered that when he had held the three orbs to determine his power, his very touch had caused them to grow lifeless and gray and crack like brittle eggshell.

  “Perhaps being a null is a form of magic, Terak?” Istarion said lightly, as she completed the circle and nodded at the elf. “Step inside, traveler.”

  Terak hesitated. “I thought you said that the Second Family had its own portal to the other worlds. I was expecting a gate or—”

  Istarion’s voice was musical with a sort of sharp-edged humor. “Those drab-robed humans of the Enclave really have been filling your head with nonsense, haven’t they? The Blood Gate is one type of gate, portal, or circle as we call them. It is a permanent gate, which is why it cost so much power to create it. All the other circles are places where the boundaries between our world and the others grow thin.” Her voice now took on a sing-song quality.

  “The three worlds are not like the pictures in dry, human textbooks,” Istarion said. “There are places and times when they overlap, where they are almost touching, and this tree is one such place. When I said that the Second Family has its own circle, I was referring to the fact that we always have this tree. We can use it when we need to.”

  The Mother nodded once more, and Terak took a step inside the circle.

  He felt nothing.

  “Uh . . .” he started to say, but Istarion was already circumnavigating him. She quickly fetched a vial of some clear liquid and threw it lightly for him to catch.

  “Put this on your skin, quickly!” she hissed, before stepping back.

  “But, why?” Terak wondered if it was going to be like the Asai Juice that Father Jacques had once made him wear. It had the effect of making those who greeted him see what they expected to see, and not the only elf of the Enclave.

  A frown crossed Istarion’s face like a shadow over the sun. “Stepping between the realms is no light matter, young elf! You need to be protected, as best as we are able to. The Moon-Water will help you cross safely, and not be torn apart into a thousand pieces and memories!”

  I wish you’d told me this before, Terak thought dismally. He started to splash the water over his face, neck, and wrists—anywhere his skin was exposed.

  In that time, Istarion had murmured something. All of the colored glass windows around them seemed to darken, allowing in only the dim and gloomy, green-tinged glow of the outside canopy.

  “I will send you to the edg
e of the Crystal Forest of the Aesther, where the Demiene Flowers grow,” Istarion said. She made a gesture in the air like she was painting. There emerged a dreamy picture of a yellow flower with five long petals and curling stamens sprouting from its heart, a little like an orchid or some marsh flower.

  “This is what you are looking for. But you must not take anything else from the forest—or anywhere in the Aesther! Every item of that realm comes with a price, and many are guarded!” she said urgently.

  “But how easy are the flowers to find? What should I expect?” Terak asked. This was nothing like any mission that he had been given by the Chief in the Enclave-External. There, he would be briefed and equipped, with possible strategies and plans already agreed in advance. The elves of the Second Family appeared to like throwing their people into the deep-end, Terak thought.

  “You will know when the time is right, young elf,” Istarion said. “I cannot explain if you have never been there, but you will know as soon as you step foot on that hallowed soil. The Aesther has its own way of teaching you.”

  What does that mean!? Terak blinked in even greater confusion.

  “Here,” Istarion threw another object into the Circle, for Terak to catch one-handed. When he looked at it, it appeared to be a large whirled shell, tapering to a ground-down point to create a sort of horn. The surface of the shell was a fantastic blue and green and turquoise, but the inner was a creamy pearl.

  “A Call-shell. When you have the flowers, blow three blasts into it. It is magically linked to this place, and this room. I will hear the call and I will bring you back.”

  “But how long will it take to find the flowers?!” Terak said in exasperation.

  But the Mother had already started to chant, her voice sounding not like an elf’s at all, but high and whistled like the language of birds.

  “Alda, Alfon, Amon, Avu, Aba—”

  “What happens next?” Terak asked, but Istarion didn’t pause in her chant.

  “Agon, Beda, Balda, Burin, Bur—”

  “How dangerous is this place?” Terak asked again, his voice rising a little in panic.

  “Bmema, Cual, Cala, Col—”

  It seemed that the Mother Istarion was chanting her way through some eldritch and complicated alphabet, Terak thought. If that was the case then she barely managed to get through the C’s when Terak felt something in the pit of his stomach.

  It was like falling from a great height, which was an experience that Terak knew a lot about, given his training. Terak couldn’t feel his body moving at all. But he did feel cold, all of a sudden, and he could feel a chill breeze hitting his face, even though all of the windows and the doors were closed. Terak couldn’t see anywhere the current could be coming from.

  Not anywhere in this world, Terak thought in alarm.

  But now, something else was happening to his surroundings. He stared at the wooden floor at his feet to see it start to lose some of its definition. The smooth dark lines of the polished grains were not so sharp and delineated as they had been but appeared to be blurring into one.

  “What’s going on?” he heard his voice say. It was curiously echoed, as if the words hadn’t come from his mouth at all but from a next-door room.

  “Mother?” His last word sounded almost frantic as he saw the wooden floor underneath him shift and change.

  Everything was growing insubstantial, as fine drifts of the darker grains of wood started to rise into the air like mist. Terak opened his mouth to say something else, but no sound came out. When he turned to look at Mother Istarion, her form, too, was shimmering and blowing away into clouds like one of Father Jacques’s strange powders and concoctions.

  The same dissolving process appeared to be happening to everything around him, Terak realized. Had something gone dreadfully wrong with Mother Istarion’s spell?

  Terak was now knee-deep in the mist-stuff of the room that he had been standing in. All definition of shelves, walls, floor—even the elvish woman herself—had gone, replaced by this insubstantial mist.

  No! Maybe it had been a trap. Maybe the Mother hadn’t really trusted him at all, the elf’s panicked thoughts told him.

  Terak tried to take a step forward, but he felt nothing. When he looked down, he saw that his own leg was dissolving into the air.

  And then the sensation of falling ripped through the elf one last time, as he dropped through the thinned fabric of his world—into somewhere else entirely.

  12

  The Aesther

  Terak screamed. Or he would have screamed, if he could hear himself. Instead, all he could hear was a deep silence that surrounded and covered him as heavily as any blanket.

  The Enclave novitiate was surrounded by shifting grays and whites. He had the intense awareness that he was floundering and falling, rolling and turning over.

  The elf thrashed, reached out. He could see his hands and arms now. They appeared as solid and normal as before, only there was nothing to cling to in this madness.

  For a terrifying moment, Terak wondered if he was lost between his world of Midhara and somewhere . . . else. He imagined being stuck here for an eternity, forever falling, and never finding stable ground.

  But just as the elf was about to open his mouth to scream once more, a color shot through the gray. A burning crimson red, like an explosion of fire, seemed to be making its way through the gray clouds toward him.

  The elf flailed with his limbs, attempting to move away from the burning light–but he could no more control his desperate flight than he could hear his own voice. The red light grew larger and stronger. Just when Terak thought that he was going to fall into it, his descent turned, and he, or the light, appeared to move away from each other.

  Instead, flares of purple and orange shot through this strange sea of mists, elongating and becoming columns of flaring light. It looked as though Terak was flying down past the trunks of something strange and surreal forest—

  The Crystal Forest? Terak had a moment to wonder, in the same heartbeat as everything around him blossomed with red—and pain.

  “Ach!” This time, the elf could hear his voice as his whole body convulsed in a shiver of torment. He instantly knew the reason for Mother Istarion’s protective potion. Every part of his exposed skin felt like it was on fire.

  The burning light deepened until all the gray mists appeared to vanish, and the light itself took on different shades and shapes.

  Terak saw the suggestions of a landscape, as if he were falling into it from far above.

  He saw vast orange plains, broken by ridges of torturous rock, dotted with black shapes. He saw dark mountains that were sharper and higher even than the Tartaruk Mountains of his home—and they weren’t crested with any suggestion of snow, just more acres and leagues of the same black rock.

  This isn’t what I though the Aesther was going to look like, Terak thought. He now saw that small black shapes he had thought to be boulders were in fact pillars of black rock standing across the plains, each one perfectly spaced between every other.

  And, as the elf flew or fell closer, he thought he could see shapes moving between the pillars. Beings. Beings that walked and crawled and shuffled and stepped.

  This isn’t the Aesther at all, is it? Terak felt with an unshaking certainty.

  But, just as one of the dark shapes below raised the misshapen lump that could have been a head, there was a flash of white around Terak. He felt himself lurching, as if thrown by a giant hand to one side.

  He tumbled and fell once more through the gray-white clouds. The colors that rose to meet him were this time green and blue. All suggestion of the burning reds had gone. As the colors and shapes solidified, Terak felt himself slam into something solid with a thump.

  When the elf opened his eyes, he realized that he had arrived.

  “Urgh.” Terak’s body ached with the memory of the pain of his traveling, but he no longer felt like his skin was burning up, or the air hurt when it passed into his lungs.


  Instead, Terak realized that the air smelled . . . sweet. It was fresh, like the meadows of Tartaruk flowers in springtime. Terak blinked and saw above him a night sky—awash with the brightest stars that Terak had ever seen—and colors. Ribbons of iridescent green and purple unfurled, faded, and reappeared, like the occasional high winter lights that came over the north of his own world. But these were far richer and brighter than any that Terak had seen in his lonely training exercises over the roofs of the Black Keep.

  It’s night-time here, Terak thought, but he did not feel cold at all. He couldn’t even feel a touch of breeze.

  The elf lay on a bank of deep moss. Its miniature flowerheads were frilled with purple. When he pushed himself up on his hands, he saw that he was in what could only be called a meadow, made up of similar humps of moss.

  And then the hummock that he was lying on moved. Terak hissed in surprise and slid down the edge of the vegetation to the space between mossy mounds.

  His recent bed continued to move, raising itself on brown, scaly legs. From what had to be its front, there rose a long, leathery neck, topped by the wizened and ancient head of a tortoise. The creature turned around to look at Terak. Then, quicker than Terak had given it credit for, its head snapped up to catch something in the air. Terak thought he heard a squeak, as something bright and small vanished down the moss-tortoise’s gullet.

  All around them drifted more of the floating dinner for this creature. Hazy bright sparks of light wafted over the meadow like wind-borne seeds. As one floated gently past him, Terak saw that it was in fact a tiny, glowing person. A being made of light with two gossamer-thin wings like a butterfly and no bigger than his fingernail.

  Snap! The head of another moss-tortoise appeared from underneath its mound of fur to snap at the passing imp, who gave a squeak of mortal—and final—alarm.

  Terak’s sense of peace vanished in an instant, as the meadow around him started to shiver and move with the bodies of the tortoises. The large creatures started to rear up and knock into each other, frantic to feed on their tiny prey.