“I can’t,” I say with what I think is a credible grimace. “Just pieces of it, but one of them was grounding stones. As I received that information, I received the image of small, colorful curved stones buried in a cornerstone of some enormous structure, which I took to mean one of the great houses of the Protectorate. It’s a beacon, I think. A beacon that any skrill can use to light its way. If those grounding stones have been placed at the great houses throughout the Protectorate every time Rihad ventured out—or if they were always there, somehow—and if the skrill are now on the loose and can use them as guides, it’s just a matter of time before they attack the lords and their houses. They have to be ready for it.”
“We handled it here, and with very short notice. They burned and self-consumed in that fire, and it was ordinary flame, right?”
“It did the trick here,” Caleb agrees. “Unless Nazar has put something in his fireplace that he hasn’t told us.”
Nazar doesn’t answer, but Miriam shakes her head. “No. Simple fire destroys them, and a poultice of sage and oleander draws out the poison from the skin, allowing it to heal.” She cocks an interested glance at Tennet. “I’ll be curious to see when the pain returns to your back, or if you experience any other reactions given how long you carried the creature with you.”
“I’ll be fine,” he says gruffly. “If the pain that comes is strictly that of healing skin, that won’t be anything new.”
“But which houses have these stones?” Caleb asks, though no one has an answer to that, of course. “And was it only Lord Rihad who carried these things? He had bards in his employ, and noone would notice if one of them dropped a pretty rock out of his bag and snugged it up against a cornerstone. The bards all fled the First House after Rihad’s fall, supposedly to take the story far and wide. We’ll never be able to warn them in time—and what are we supposed to warn them about? A random curved rock that looks out of place?”
My lips twist in dismay. “That’s only part of the problem. Something is sending these creatures out, something tied to the threat that lies beyond the western borders. These skrill, I assume, are part of that history?”
Miriam nods. “There’s very little left in the libraries about the history of the Western Realms, but Rihad could only control the information in the First House. We will need to travel to the Western Realms in order to understand this history fully. They will have records, I suspect. Records they preserved regardless of Rihad’s demands. Any attempt he would have made to destroy a given book, they simply would have complied with after making additional copies—and they never would have revealed everything to him, even if they trusted him. Which, knowing Lord Daggar…they probably didn’t.”
“So, we need to go there,” Tennet says.
“We need to go there regardless,” Fortiss agrees. “That’s where the threat is coming from.”
“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” I counter, and everyone’s attention flows to me. “If these thingsareDivhs, how did they get here without a summons? Which then begs the question, how did we meet the Divhs in the first place? What specifically happened to incite that first contract between man and monster?”
“I mean, everyone knows that,” Caleb protests, going on to recite the history lesson at rapid speed. “The Imperial army entered these lands and conquered everyone in their wake, all the way to the far western range of the Meridians. There theyencountered an enemy so vile, they knew they must not only block it from entering these lands, but that it was necessary to protect all the Imperium from it as well. But they couldn’t fight it alone. They exhorted the Light, and the Light delivered the Divhs. A great battle was fought and we won.”
He executes a short bow. “Literally, they teach that story to babies less than a week out of the womb.”
I turn to Nazar. “Is that the way they teach it in the capital city?”
He inclines his head to me, the master who at last can acknowledge that his student has learned the lessons he came to teach. “It is what I was taught when I was a child. What I knew to be the truth up until the unbanding of the Divhs and their warriors. From that point forward, the story shifted. In the new version, the might of the Imperium was all that was required to keep our lands safe. The army read from ancient texts to conjure up great beasts of power, but those beasts were little more than distracting illusions. It was the army that fought back the enemy. The army that kept us safe and whole.”
“That’s what they’re saying now?” Caleb asks, aghast. “But the Divhs arereal. We have a tournament every year. They can come and see them for themselves!”
“They could, yet how many of them do?” Nazar turns to Tennet. “While I was priest of the Tenth House, I can say with certainty that the souls who crossed into the Protectorate were mostly marauders and villains, men who were too busy running from the justice of the Imperium to pay much mind to old stories about protector monsters. Those that managed to survive long enough to make a home in the Protectorate weren’t likely to carry tales back to the Imperium. What was your experience in the Twelfth House?”
“The same, though we drew even fewer marauders. The terrain surrounding our mountain holding is difficult and notfavored with the same pass that the Tenth House guards. Our holding was placed there more as an afterthought, I suspect, an auxiliary outpost to lend aid when needed to the Tenth, or to serve as a contact point for the Imperium should the primary pass be compromised. Or that’s how it has always been explained to me. But I understand your meaning, Priest Nazar. If there’s no flow of idle travelers into the Protectorate, and certainly no flow out other than the delegations sent by Rihad himself, there would be no passage of information. And any delegations that he sent would have been carefully managed to ensure their message was consistent with what he wanted the Imperium to know.”
I frown. “How frequently did Rihad send ambassadors back to the capital city?”
“Yearly,” Fortiss says, and Miriam nods.
I glance over to Nazar, and he shrugs. “We received no guests of the lord protector in all the years that I have served as priest of the Tenth House. While he may have sent ambassadors to the Imperium prior to that time, and while of course these souls may have chosen not to divert to the Tenth House while going through the pass to the east, it seems far more likely that he sent out envoys who had no intention of completing their mission. They simply returned months later and shared no tales.”
“So, we’ve effectively been cut off from the Imperium for decades?” Caleb protests. “Do we not provide tithing and reports to the Imperator, or…something? Do they have any idea what’s happening within the Protectorate?”
“They do now,” Fortiss says. “I sent out riders the day after the tournament melee. According to our maps, they would only just now be reaching Hakkir. It’ll be another month and more before they return.”
Caleb scoffs. “We could all be dead by then.”
“Or we could be in possession of a power so strong that we could challenge the Imperium outright, commanding our battalions of Divhs and operating with an ally that could topple the Imperator from his throne,” Fortiss says quietly. “That’s what Rihad has set in motion, and that’s what we have to stop—if it’s not already too late.”
“We can leave at daybreak,” Tennet says. “I pledge my men and my horses. They are both made of sturdy stock.”
“When we leave, it should be in the dark,” I agree. “But not without another full day to prepare and to make sure you don’t turn into a baby skrill, Lord Tennet. Besides all that, we’ll be leaving both your men and the horses behind.”
I wait until they’re all looking at me, the drop my hands to my belt, tucking in my thumbs. “Where we’re going…we won’t need them.”
Chapter 17
It’s another two hours before we break up, and it takes Tennet nearly toppling over with fatigue before Fortiss is willing to let everyone go. He orders Nazar and Caleb to get as much sleep as possible before noon when the councilors will be returning in force with all of the information they’ve been able to scrape together on the Western Realms after Rihad’s purge of the library.
