Angst (Book 4) (13 page)

25

Taro didn’t wake up, exactly, since he hadn’t been sleeping.
If he had been sleeping, he would have felt much better than he did. Then he
saw the weird violet-colored eyes looking down at him from a v-shaped little
face that was much too clear for his liking. It had a
dimple
on the
chin, and if it smiled, he would have been able to count its teeth. He tried to
pull away from it, but Abner’s arms held him still.

The violet eyes retreated into the blurry background and
said, “He is aware of us.”

“I thought you were dying, Master Taro,” Abner almost
whimpered as he helped Taro to sit up. “You screeched like one of Dad’s pigs when
he butchers them, and then you stiffened up like mom’s laundry in midwinter.”

“Fey,” Taro muttered, glaring at those around him. There
were too many of them. Abner was supposed to be there, but not the little thing
with the violet eyes. At least the pale ones were far enough away to look like
melons with warts for eyes, but where had they come from? Their bows weren’t
poised with arrows, so they probably weren’t bandits. Then he saw the profile
of the metal giant from his vision, and everything suddenly came into
focus—except his eyesight, which was even more of a blurry mess than normal.
“Hobart,” he said.

The behemoth nodded and asked, “Have we met before, Master
Taro? I do not think I would forget such a one as you.”

“Yes,” Taro nodded vigorously. He glanced around and
recognized the crossroads. “We met here in a vision a month ago.” Before Hobart
could respond, Taro shook his head. “No, no, no. That isn’t right. We didn’t
meet until today, did we? But I saw that meeting in a vision a month ago. You rode
up to me at this crossroads and said, ‘Well met, Old Man.’ Mind you, I didn’t
realize you were talking to me, at first, but then I heard myself reply in my
own voice with ‘Well met, Hobart.’ That’s how I knew your name when I saw you
today because we met a month ago in my vision and I knew it then. In the
vision, that is.” He frowned. How could he have known Hobart’s name today to
say it in his vision if he hadn’t had the vision to tell him Hobart’s name?

Hobart leaned over in his saddle until his forehead
glistened as it reflected back the sunlight. “You speak strangely, Old Man.”

Taro waved his hand dismissively and gruffed, “I just have
visions. Don’t ask me to explain them.”
That’s what I should tell the
villagers!
he thought with excitement.
Let
them
figure out the
riddles for themselves!

“Visions?” Hobart scoffed. “You are a diviner, then?”

“No!” Taro growled. “I am no charlatan wizard claiming to
find the future in the dregs of a mug of ale! I have
visions
. I
see
the future. I need no wizard’s tricks to do it, either. I—” he frowned. He had
almost told them about the incense but realized it would seem like a wizard’s
trick to them. That didn’t bother him overmuch—
he
knew the
difference—but he wasn’t at all sure he
needed
the incense. He hadn’t had
any incense when his first vision had come to him so many years ago, and he had
just had another vision without it. And a strange vision it was, too! He puffed
himself up in a vain attempt to recapture his absent youth and faced Hobart as
if he were about to challenge him to a duel. “I just saw one, didn’t I?” he
asserted in his most defensive tone.

Hobart’s armor clanked as he shrugged.

Taro scowled and was quite close to ranting as he continued
in clipped tones, “I was on the shore of a vast ocean, and I saw the waves part
and an island rise up from the depths. On its back was a graveyard, and in that
graveyard was something so dreadful that I could not bear to look upon it.” It
wasn’t true, of course—he had looked upon it—but it
sounded
true. “I had
to turn away.”

“Perhaps that is why you collapsed,” Abner offered.

“What?” Taro snapped, turning to the young man sitting too
close beside him. “I collapsed?” He had, hadn’t he? That must have been before
the little violet-eyed vixen startled him. “Yes, I suppose that was why I
collapsed.” But it wasn’t, was it? It was what happened next. A great serpent
had risen with that island, and it had slithered out onto the land. It was like
the smoke-snakes that gave him his visions, but instead of being gray-black with
fiery red eyes, this snake was like a green fog spreading out across the land
and it had glimmering jewel-like eyes. That part was okay, but when it looked
at him and opened its mouth….

Taro blinked and shuddered.

Violet eyes were too close to him again. They were
insistent, demanding, as they ordered him to tell her what he had seen. They
didn’t
say
anything, but he didn’t need to be a Seer to know what that
look meant. He told them about the snake trying to swallow him—trying to
swallow the whole world.

Just before the violet eyes turned away, he saw a wave of
fear pass over them. Strange, that. He hadn’t expected his words to convey the
feeling he had felt when he had seen the puffy green snake about to swallow
him. Maybe it was the way he had described it? Maybe he should try to talk that
way about his visions more often. Then villagers might listen to him. Maybe—

“Your young friend told us,” Hobart said from atop his big
white horse, “that you have had a vision of a wizard. I would hear of it.”

“Which one?” Taro grumbled. “I’ve seen him in visions lots
of times. There’s the one where he is surrounded by fire but doesn’t burn.
There’s the one where he’s standing on the platform of a Wizards’ School—that’s
why I’m going to Hellsbreath. I think it’s that one. There’s the one where he’s
angry because a man I can’t see won’t let him go someplace. There’s the one—”

“Why don’t you tell me about all of them,” Hobart said. “But
first, what is this wizard’s name?”

“Oh, that,” Taro said, waving his hand as if it didn’t
matter to him. “The man I can’t see called him Angus. They were in some kind of
room, and Angus was angry about not being allowed to leave. The man behind me—I
was facing Angus no matter which way I turned in my vision—said the king
wouldn’t let him go. He was part of a Banner, whatever that is, and had to obey
the king. Of course, I don’t know when my vision will happen, so he might have
left there by now. He probably has, since I had the vision weeks ago, and it’s
taken me a long time to get this far. Then again, it might be years from now
before it happens. That’s what my first vision was like. Parts of it came true
quickly, but the last thing didn’t happen for over thirty years.” He shrugged.
“Visions come true at their own pace, and there’s nothing I can do to change
that.”

Taro studied Hobart’s frown for a long moment and then
grumbled, “It’s like the vision of you. I didn’t know when it was going to
happen, but I knew it would. When we arrived here three days ago, I thought it
would be soon, and here you are. I don’t know why I had a vision of you,
though, since all my other visions are about the wizard.” He frowned. Was that
true? His vision about the giant snake cloud thing didn’t relate to Angus, did
it? Or was the wizard responsible for it, too? The snake could be a spell,
couldn’t it?

Hobart turned toward Hellsbreath and said, his voice low,
determined, “Perhaps it is because Angus is my friend.”

Aha!
Taro smiled in triumph.
I knew they had to be
connected!

Hobart turned back to him and demanded, “Now, tell me of
these visions.”

Taro nodded, happy to finally have found someone who
wanted
to hear about his visions. “It all started when I was a boy….”

26

“He can’t get by here without us seeing him,” Giorge said as
he put the half-burned candle down at the end of the corridor where the panel
led out to the stairwell. Then he returned to one of the antechambers and put
his pack on the floor. He sat down beside it and asked, “How long do you plan
to wait for him?”

Embril frowned as she sat down in the antechamber on the
opposite side of the corridor. She hadn’t thought about that, and she didn’t
have an answer for him. “As long as necessary,” she hedged, positioning herself
in the entryway so that she could see the candle. If Darby wasn’t already in
the tunnel complex behind them, there was no way he could open that panel
without them seeing and hearing it.

“In that case,” Giorge suggested, “you may want to take
what’s left of the candle and fly up to get our provisions.”

She glanced over at him. If it weren’t for the long years
showing in his eyes, he could be mistaken for a boy, and when he sat with his
knees up to his chest like that, it enhanced that youthful image. The shadows
flickering on his soft brown skin only made him look more childlike, but it
didn’t matter. He was right. If they stayed here for long, they would need
those provisions. “Are you hungry?” she teased.

He grinned, his creamy white teeth dancing in the flickering
flame of the candle. “Always!”

Embril fought back the urge to chuckle and shook her head.
“Tell me more about that curse you mentioned,” she said. “It will take your
mind off your stomach.”

His grin faded and he turned away from her. He wrapped his
arms tightly around his knees, put his chin on them, and rocked forward. Then
he tilted his head to look at her, and asked, “Do you remember what I told
Darby?”

Embril searched her memory for a few seconds. “Some of it,”
she admitted. “I wasn’t listening very closely. I was exhausted from casting
all of those spells.”

“Well,” Giorge said. “It started when….”

By the time Giorge finished explaining what he knew about
the curse, Embril was no closer to understanding it than she had been before he
started talking. But she was hungry, and she decided it was time to fetch the
provisions. As she flew up the stairwell, she thought about what Giorge had
said, sifting through it for hints of something useful. Yes, it was important
that Symptata had hired a witch to punish Giorge’s grandmother twenty-some-times
removed, but that didn’t tell Embril how the curse was woven. Yes, it was
important that the curse followed Symptata’s family line and that only
Symptata’s heir could break the curse, but it didn’t help to understand how the
curse’s magic worked. Yes, the poems were important, but the clues they held
were ambiguous at best—so ambiguous that Giorge had thought the curse had ended
twice
because he had interpreted them differently. Mostly, Embril had
listened, but every now and then she interrupted him with a question. He
answered them as best he could—when he could—but those answers seldom helped
her to understand the curse itself; he simply didn’t know how magic worked, and
without that understanding, his answers weren’t very helpful. What
was
helpful was the Viper’s Skull. When he showed her
that
….

She needed to pay attention to what she was doing, where she
was going. The tunnel was narrow and difficult to fly through, and Darby was in
the temple somewhere. What would he do if he was in the room with the trap door
and she popped up out of it? What if he caught her off guard? She frowned. He
had caught her off guard before, hadn’t he? That’s how he had been able to find
out about the nexus. She hadn’t known he was a Truthseer, and even if she had,
she wouldn’t have expected him to use his Truthseeing abilities on her—
and
she had been arrogant enough to think that something like that couldn’t work on
her. How wrong she had been! What else was she wrong about?

Where was Darby? Why hadn’t they seen him yet? They had been
down there long enough, hadn’t they? He had clearly made it down to the bottom
of the stairwell—his Obscuration spell proved that—but why hadn’t he gotten
further? He
hadn’t
gotten further, had he? The nexus was still intact,
and The Tiger’s Eye still hovered over the chasm. It had spoken to her,
inviting her to join it…. Had it done the same thing to Darby? Had he been
captured by The Tiger’s Eye’s spell? It was a spell, wasn’t it? Even as she
flew through the charred room and into the bright late afternoon sunshine, she
felt it whispering to her, and a part of her wanted desperately to turn around.
It was a small part, easily managed. Had Darby succumbed to it? Is that why
they couldn’t find him?

She paused at the rubble of the outer wall long enough to
set the candle down, and then whinnied softly. It was an invitation, a query, a
request for companionship, and it received a pair of quick responses. In
moments, both horses had joined her, and she smiled as she patted their necks
and rubbed their muzzles. She hugged the one that had brought her to the temple
and reached up for one of the saddlebags filled with provisions.

Darby’s horse is still here,
she thought as she
slowly removed the saddlebag and slung it over her shoulder. If Darby had left,
he would have taken his horse with him. There were fresh footprints leading
into the temple, but none leaving it. Darby had made it to the bottom of the
stairwell, but there was no indication that he had gone any further. If he
hadn’t cast the Obscuration spell to hide the Angst symbol, she would have
thought he hadn’t even gotten that far.

An
Obscuration spell!

A sudden realization swept over her, the kind of insight
that causes a complete upheaval of reasoning.
He wanted to hide the symbol
so no one could find it! So
I
couldn’t find it! But that would mean—

He didn’t want to disrupt the nexus, he wanted to protect
it.

She turned back to the temple and flew slowly toward the
candle. As she flew, she re-thought her suppositions. If Darby had wanted to
protect the nexus, he wouldn’t have had to go any further than the bottom of
the stairwell. If no one could see the magic of the Angst insignia, they
couldn’t open the panel. If they couldn’t open the panel, they couldn’t find
the nexus. If they couldn’t find the nexus, they couldn’t disrupt it. But if
that was his plan, why hadn’t he returned? He had had time, hadn’t he?

Or had he?

She entered the temple and quickly made her way to the room
with the trapdoor. By the time she reached the stairwell, her stomach was
knotting up like a First Order’s tangled up spell. What if Darby hadn’t avoided
the trap? What if he had cast the Obscuration spell when he reached the bottom
and couldn’t fly out of the stairwell like she had done? Flying wasn’t the kind
of spell a Truthseer would typically know, was it?

She dropped quickly down the center of the stairwell.
Giorge
said he hadn’t seen Darby in the pit,
she thought.
Giorge
….

She landed at the bottom of the stair. It would trigger the
trap, but that was what she wanted. She counted off the time it took for the
collapsing stairs to reach her, for the floor to begin retracting. There was
ample time to cast an Obscuration spell before the trap reached her. But Angus
had written about the trap in the scroll, and Darby had the scroll. He had to
know about the trap, and that meant he could have prepared for it.

Unless he couldn’t read ancient dwarf.

While she waited for the floor to slide out from beneath
her, she quickly replayed Darby’s interrogation of her. It had been expertly
done, and by the time it was over, she had told him all he would need to know
to reach this point. But he hadn’t asked about the trap….

The candle’s flame fluttered. It was burning more rapidly
than it should, and it wouldn’t be long before it died out. Even so, the light
it offered was diffuse, and she needed something brighter to see the pit
clearly. She brought the magic into focus and squinted at the bright strands of
flame wavering around her. She reached for one of them, and cringed as it
singed her fingertips. She had never had that happen before, and she tied the
simple knot for Lamplight as fast as she could, not even caring that it was a
sloppy one. The tiny globe roiled and raged in her palm, and flames flickered
across its surface. She thrust it away from her, remembering Angus’s
admonition:
Be careful when casting spells near the nexus. The magic is
powerful there.

Too powerful, she decided. The flame strands around her were
more powerful than any she had ever seen, more powerful even than the ones
beneath Hellsbreath’s Wizards’ School. But they hadn’t been that strong when
they had arrived, had they? And these strands were disordered, unruly….

The floor had nearly reached the halfway point, and she flew
slowly over to the far side, where she could see the pit beneath her. She
already knew what she would see long before Darby’s milky white stare looked up
at her. She quickly turned away as the knot in her stomach becoming a tangled,
misshapen skein. She flew up to the Angst symbol and pressed the missing
teardrop. There was no need to hurry, she knew, but the panel opened so
slowly….

Giorge lied to me about Darby,
she thought.
What
else has he done?

As soon as the gap was wide enough, she squeezed through it
and fluttered forward. She barely glanced at the antechambers as she passed,
just long enough to confirm what she already knew: Giorge wasn’t there.