Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) (61 page)

“I have not forgotten,” Abramm replied grimly.

Carissa pushed herself upright to sit braced against the cool sandstone wall. Abramm stood at the midst of the basin against a backdrop of darkly
striated rock. Every line of his body was taut, his hands flexed and ready, and
though he was now unarmed, Danarin had not relaxed his vigilance.

“Don’t think you can remove this one as easily as Meridon removed
yours,” Danarin went on.

He was speaking of the necklet, Carissa realized, cold and constricting
around her throat.

“Who are you?” Abramm demanded, his voice as tight and strained as the
rest of him.

Danarin chuckled. “You still do not recognize me, old friend?”

A cold breath of air shivered through the basin, and the Thilosian’s face
seemed to focus, as if it had been blurry before. Suddenly she cringed back
against the wall, sick and light-headed with recognition.

Simultaneously, Abramm recoiled with a hiss. “Rhiad!”

Is this a nightmare? Carissa wondered. A delusion? Did I fall and hit my
head?

Yet it was Rhiad, bearded, his pigtail shorter, but Rhiad all the same: head
of the Order of St. Haverall, Saeral’s right-hand man, and one of the most
famous holy men in Springerlan, especially among the court ladies who had
long lamented that his stunningly good looks were wasted in service to the
Flames.

Shock paralyzed her as it apparently paralyzed her brother. Danarin-
Rhiad-grinned back at them, cradling his injured arm to his waist. Memories
scrolled through her head: the Thilosian staring after the White Pretender in
the warrens beneath the arena at Xorofin, swooping down to rescue her at
the city gates, offering aid, pushing them to follow Abramm’s track, convincing her the Dorsaddi meant to harm him….

Chagrin and horror welled up in her. And then shame. And anger.

“I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you,” she croaked. “Right from the start,
I knew it.”

Rhiad swung around, eyes wide as he looked down at her. Then he chuckled. “You should have listened to your instincts, my lady.”

Cooper! Carissa remembered suddenly. What has he done to you? Oh,
plagues, what have I done? How could I have been so foolish?

Misery gave the pain in her throat a knifelike twist.

“The High Father has been quite concerned about you, Eldrin,” Rhiad said, turning back to Abramm. “I spoke with him earlier today. He is eagerly
awaiting our return.”

Abramm glanced around the basin, golden whiskers bristling at the corner
of his jaw. His gaze flicked back to Rhiad, clearly questioning.

Rhiad smiled. “Surely after all the time you’ve spent down here you have
heard of the mystical corridors that traverse the etherworld?” He gestured
toward Abramm. “Look behind you.”

Abramm glanced over his shoulder. A little less than three strides away,
the air shimmered in a column of red, undulating threads. When he faced the
Haverallan again, his cheeks were a pale, sickly gray.

Rhiad laughed. “Beltha’adi is not the only one who knows how to use
them. We’ll be back in Springerlan before an hour is passed. Soon now, after
all this time and heartache, you will get to touch the Holy Flames.”

“I’ll die before I serve them,” Abramm grated.

“Oh, I think not. You want too much to live. And the Father would never
allow it, anyway. Your conversion will be slow and gentle this time. Although
I do not think it will take that long.” He smiled. “Deep down you want everything we have to offer.”

“I want nothing you have to offer.”

“No? My friend, you’ve spent two years in close company with that
Terstan and still you are unmarked. It’s obvious you don’t want what he has
to offer-and rightly so, since it’ll only kill you. Besides. At home you are
king now….” He paused to let that sink in. “Yes, Raynen is dead. Threw
himself off Graymeer’s Point four months ago. The Crown would’ve gone to
you, were you there to receive it. Now Gillard rules in your stead.”

He pulled a leather pouch from his belt and tossed it at Abramm’s feet.
“There’s a vial in there. I want you to drink its contents.”

Abramm frowned at him.

Rhiad sighed, and the necklet cut into Carissa’s throat, pain flaring across
her world. She dug vainly at the collar, her throat crushed, her lungs once
more on fire, the world again spinning wildly. A sharp distant word released
the pressure, and when she had recovered enough to take notice again,
Abramm was sniffing the vial’s contents suspiciously. “Hockspur?” he asked.
“But you already have your hold on me.”

Rhiad chuckled. “You are the White Pretender, my friend. I’ve seen you fight. Besides, you’ll need it to pass through the etherworld since you have
no Guide to shield you. Drink.”

“No?” Carissa cried, but it came out as one more gasp among many.

Abramm stared at the Haverallan, lifted the vial—

And upended it, dumping the contents onto the rock. Then he leapt for
Carissa and grabbed at the necklet. Fire seared across her throat, and red light
blazed up under her chin. She screamed and wrenched reflexively from his
touch even as he jerked his hand back with a cry of his own.

Something white spun through the air between them and burst upon her
brother’s chest, spewing a cloud of lemon-colored smoke into his face. He
staggered backward, hands to his eyes, coughing, gasping. Then he crumpled
like an empty sack and lay still, the corridor’s faint light shimmering behind
him.

By then she was woozy herself, her mouth filled with a bitter taste, her
eyes burning and watering. Through a wavering haze she saw Rhiad kneel at
Abramm’s side and withdraw a new vial from his robe. She was shaking, certain her throat had been cut. Tears trickled down her cheeks, and her breath
came in ragged, wheezing sobs. A sharp pain burned at her waist-she must
have fallen on a rock, though it felt like she had a live coal tied up under her
belt.

But she had no time for hurts. She must do something.

Using his teeth to unstopper the vial, Rhiad pulled Abramm’s head back,
then had to use both hands, one to open her brother’s mouth, the other to
pour in the drug. As the vial tilted, she lurched up. But she was weaker than
she anticipated and did not move quickly enough. The brown liquid streamed
into Abramm’s mouth.

Panic gave her strength. With a desperate cry she flung herself at Rhiad,
bowling him over. Her fingers closed upon the hilt of Abramm’s dagger,
tucked into Rhiad’s belt. She started to pull it free—

Then the vise closed upon her throat, swift and merciless. She lost the
dagger and rolled away onto hands and knees. He started to rise. Ignoring the
choking pressure at her throat, she drove into him, shoving him as hard as
she could toward the shimmering column. He twisted backward, flailing for
balance, and toppled half into it. The necklet’s pressure eased at once, enough
for her to lurch again and shove him the rest of the way, her hands burningtingling with the proximity of the flickering shaft. A shrill whine pierced her ears, and the column flared bright red mingled with silver. Fire scraped over
her nerves, a whirlwind of evil chitterings that sought to turn her inside out.
Then a blinding white fire blasted it all into oblivion-sound, light, all of it.
Even Rhiad.

All that remained was a dull, opalescent disk gleaming in the red sand.

Carissa staggered back, tripping over the weeds and the uneven rock, to
fall on her bottom at Abramm’s side. There, her fingers skittering helplessly
over the collar she still wore, she gasped for breath and finally gave herself
over to bitter weeping.

As soon as Abramm regained consciousness he began to vomit, and at first
that necessity occupied all his thoughts. Once his stomach was emptied,
however, and he had backed away from his mess to settle on the sandy slope
a little distance below Carissa, he began to remember.

Rhiad had been here? Disguised as one of Carissa’s retainers. But-how
was that possible? And he was certainly not here now. Abramm scanned the
bean-shaped basin, seeing clearly there was no way out of it-and that his
only company was his sister.

She knelt beside him and pressed her water bag into his palm. The walls
at her back shivered and shifted as if they were melting. He closed his eyes
against the dizziness and drank, washing away the awful taste in his mouth.

Rhiad had been here, had sought to dull his will with hockspur and bring
him back to Saeral. Or was it just a dream?

He opened his eyes and looked at Carissa, sitting now in front of him.
Her face was pale, her eyes stained with the dark shadows of fatigue and fear,
her neck red beneath the choker with its startling blue-green stone.

“He’s gone,” she said, and the raw hoarseness of her voice pulled another
image from his tangled memory-Carissa gasping at his feet as she clawed at
that choker and slowly turned blue. He had grabbed it, was driven off by a
flash of searing heat, and remembered nothing more. Was it real, then? Was
it not a dream but an actual event? But if Rhiad had been here, where was
he now?

“I pushed him into the corridor,” Carissa offered in that dry-leaves voice,
turning to gesture up the sandy slope.

“Corridor?” His voice came out a low croak, hardly better than hers. And
then he recalled that, too-the pillar of red mist that had set his arm afire
and was to have taken him to Saeral.

“Into the etherworld,” she said. “The disk is still over there. Does that
mean he can come back?”

Come back? It was monstrously hard to make his mind work right, as if
all his thoughts were drifting through fog.

She went back to look at the disk, pointing at it just in front of her feet.
“I think it might be fading, but I’m not sure.”

He stood shakily and went to see for himself. His arm twinged with the
proximity, not so much with pain as with an awakened energy, an awareness,
a drawing of like to like. Surely if Rhiad was able, he would have already
returned. But maybe it didn’t work like that.

In truth, he had no idea how it worked and finally admitted as much.

“Then we’re trapped,” she said, the fear she was struggling to contain raising the pitch of her poor, hoarse voice.

He turned from the disk to examine their prison and saw now that it had
once been a cistern. Its ceiling had long ago collapsed in the large slabs of red
rock that jutted up from the sand. The slit through which they entered might
have fed it, or else was formed by other forces, possibly an earthquake. In any
case, it was hidden to them now, concealed by Rhiad’s magic, and though
Abramm felt carefully over the portion of wall he suspected was not real, he
could find no sign of it. He even tried throwing himself against the striated
surface, hoping to break through the illusion as Trap had pulled him through
in the tunnels outside Xorofin. To no avail. The image was as substantial as it
was indiscernible from the reality, and all he did was hurt his shoulder.

At last he stopped trying and went to stand beside his sister, who had
settled on the ground not far away to watch.

“So now what do we do?” she murmured.

He scanned the curving russet walls, the low, woolly ceiling. “I don’t
know.”

Walking a circuit of their prison, probing his fingers along the walls produced no more than his attempts to find the entry slit, nor did it reveal to him any other means of escape. He returned to Carissa, seated at the basin’s
lower end, and sat beside her.

But only for a moment. Then he was up again, trying to climb the smooth
face of the cistern where the walls curved over the least. That did not work,
so he tried piling the sand higher against the wall in a likely spot. That, too,
proved futile. In between he returned repeatedly to the place where he knew
the slit to be, always finding nothing but solid rock, though he bruised his
shoulder in the effort.

Finally, exhausted and boiling with frustration, he sank down beside
Carissa again. Not to give up, he assured himself, only to rest while he
thought of some other tack. In the day’s uncharacteristic warmth, he had
long since removed his outer robe and headcloth. Now sweat drenched his
tunic and dribbled down his face as thunder rumbled in the distance, harbinger of the imminent rains. Once the skies opened, the channels in these rocks
would roil with hundreds of small rivers and streamlets. It wouldn’t take long
for this cistern to fill. Perhaps the water would lift them enough to climb out.

But that supposed there would be a place to climb out to, where they
wouldn’t get washed away. That supposed it would not be churning so
viciously with all the incoming streams they’d be unable to keep their heads
afloat. It supposed … far too many variables to control.

The overwhelming sense of his own stupidity and helplessness held him
in its teeth, wrenching his middle and filling his throat till he could hardly
breathe. The mist and rock mocked him with their impenetrable, imperturbable faces. It seemed impossible that this could have happened-bizarre,
unthinkable, and infuriatingly unfair. It made him want to shout and hit
things. And when he thought that soon Trap would be facing Beltha’adi in
Jarnek’s amphitheater-if he wasn’t already-he could hardly bear it. That
was a battle Abramm should be fighting-a battle he had been brought here
to fight. He was as sure of that as he was of anything in his life.