The commotion in the rebel clearing faded as Corvan raced toward the half-dead tree. He thought he would get his bearings from where the statues stood, but the stone figures were nowhere to be found. His ability to see in the dark must be waning.
Running along one side of the tree, he found what he thought might be the right pathway back to Morgan’s crypt. Jogging along a narrow track he came upon the large sloppy crypt, but there was no one to be seen. Jorad must still be finding his way with Kate in the darkness.
Corvan sat on a crumbled wall to catch his breath. The creak of rusty metal drew his attention to a faint green line appearing along the lid of the large tomb. Corvan shrank back. The light grew brighter as a man’s hand pushed the lid higher, then a face rose in the ghostly light. It was Jorad.
Corvan jumped to his feet, startling the priest so badly, he dropped the lid, knocking himself back into the tomb with a bang of the heavy lid. Corvan quickly shoved it up and out of the way on its stubborn hinges.
Jorad was sprawled on top of Morgan’s body, rubbing his head, while Kate lay curled at their feet, pale and still. Her chest rose a fraction of an inch with each slow breath. Corvan leaned in and placed a hand on her cheek.
“Kate, can you hear me?” She didn’t respond, but the green glow grew brighter. Resting in her limp fingers was the source of the green light; the disk she had taken from Tsarek in the labyrinth. It was smaller than he expected but its markings were clear and bright: a star-shaped medallion on a chain, with multiple star points around the outer edges.
Jorad sat up and groaned. “Next time, warn me before you jump out of the darkness,” he said, his voice low.
“Is Kate all right?”
“We barely made it here before she collapsed.” Jorad said, moving close to Corvan and pointing to the glow. “We were fortunate she had a glow globe in her hand. There’s not a speck of lumien light tonight.” Jorad looked at him closely. “How did you find your way here in the dark?”
Corvan shrugged. He didn’t want to tell the priest anything about the hammer or how it had affected his sight.
Jorad looked into the darkness. “Their leader will send his men out to find us. He is convinced that he is the promised Cor-Van and that he only he needs a counterpart to make his insane dreams come true. He won’t stop until he finds one. We need to get Kate back to the temple.”
Corvan reached into the crypt and touched Kate’s hand. It was cool and clammy. “Kate, it’s me, Corvan. Wake up.” He lifted her hand and grimaced as the black band slipped along her arm to reveal a ring of crusty red blisters around her wrist.
“We’ll have to carry her, Kalian,” Jorad said quietly. “Help me lift her out, then I’ll get Morgan’s litter to put her on.”
They gently extracted Kate from the crypt and laid her limp body on the stoney ground. Her cheeks were sunken and pale. She had lost a lot of weight since leaving home and he hoped the cookies weren’t all she’d had to eat since then. Kneeling beside her, Corvan held her hand and felt a faint squeeze in return. He let out a sigh of relief and checked over his shoulder.
Jorad was inside the crypt, muttering to himself as he worked at wrestling the litter out from under Morgan’s body. He wasn’t being gentle about it.
Shielding Kate from Jorad with his body, Corvan reach under his cloak, drew out the hammer, and brought it down on the black band, just as Kate had done for Tsarek on the Castle Rock. “Release her,” he whispered but nothing happened. He gripped it tighter and looked at the base of the handle. It remained dark. “Please, I … I love her. Please don’t let her die.”
The hammer seemed to grow warmer, but there was still no glow. Corvan pressed his face close to Kate’s. “Let it go, Kate. You need to leave the bracelet behind. Don’t let it control you.” Her head shook ever so slightly, her eyes fluttered beneath closed lids, and a faint sigh escaped her cracked lips.
“If you let it go, I promise I’ll take you home,” Corvan urged. “I want to see the stars from on top of the rock again, don’t you?”
There was a long pause before Kate nodded faintly. The glow from the hammer’s handle came to life and spread softly over Kate’s body. Touching the hammer to the black band, he held his breath, watching and waiting. The band quivered, a small horizontal crack appeared in one of the segmented sections across its surface, then it splet apart, relaxed and fell to the ground.
Morgon’s litter struck Corvan in the shoulder, knocking him on top of Kate as Jorad shoved it out of the crypt.
Corvan quickly sat up, holstered the hammer, then scooped up the black band and held it tightly in his fist. He didn’t want Jorad to see that Kate had been wearing the evil thing.
Jorad climbed out, picked up the litter, and set it alongside Kate. “The light she carried is still in there,” he said breathlessly, “underneath Morgan. I’ll grab it so we can see where we’re going.”
“I’ll get it,” Corvan said quickly, “then we can leave.” He scrambled into the crypt and out of sight. A powerful urge was growing inside him, a desire to examine the black band without Jorad seeing it or taking it away from him.
Crouching down inside the tomb, he pushed Morgan’s cloak aside. The glow from Kate’s pointed medallion leapt out at him and he covered it with his free hand to hide its light. An overwhelming warmth enveloped him. Spreading his fingers slightly, he discovered that the symbols glowing on the medallion were the same as those on base of the hammer. As he leaned in for a better look, an intense pain cut into his other hand as if the black band had just bit him. He raised the bracelet for a closer look and stifled a cry—the hand holding the bracelet looked withered and wrinkled, the bones showing through skin, like an old man’s hand.
He tried to drop the black band, but his hand refused to open. A thought forced itself into his mind: accept it to live; refuse it and you will die.
Intense cold crept up the blackened hand holding the bracelet, but it was immediately answered with a wave of warmth moving up the other arm from the medallion. The two met at his shoulders. Pain shot through his neck and head as snippets rattled through his mind—truth or lies, love or control. He had to choose now, or he would be split in two, just like the half-dead tree, but he could not seem to let either one go.
A clear memory of Kate’s smiling face rose to the forefront of his thoughts. She was not saying anything but the look in her eyes told him what he needed to do. His hand wrapped around the green glow, while the one with the black band opened to reveal the segmented bracelet laying coiled on his palm. The medallion was the right choice for Kate and for himself. He went to tilt his hand to let the black band drop but could not seem to turn his hand over.
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A harsh thump on his shoulder sent the bracelet tumbling across the crypt. Jorad’s anxious voice broke the silence. “Hurry up, Corvan. Did you find her light?”
Corvan held up the medallion, the glow leaking past his fingers. He inhaled deeply, allowing the medallion’s warmth to spread down into his chest as he crawled over the crypt wall.
Jorad stood waiting to pull the lid back over the crypt. As it shut, Corvan caught a glimpse of the black band slithering toward Morgan’s leg, like a glistening leech looking for fresh blood.
Jorad eased the top quietly into position and lifted the first latch.
“Don’t lock him in,” Corvan said, holding up the light in his fist. “If he’s already dead, it won’t matter, but if he’s not …”
“I told you before: this is not your business,” Jorad said firmly.
Corvan pointed the lighted hand at him. “I’m a part of all this. I can’t walk away again and leave him to die.”
“Not even if he is a murderer?” Jorad asked.
“I heard the High Priest say if you kill someone, you can’t be a priest and you can’t get married. Is making sure that Morgan is dead worth that to you?” Corvan opened his hand a bit more, and the light of the medallion cast its glow on Jorad’s tense features. The man stared into the light for a moment, then he let the latch drop with a soft clank.
Corvan turned away and crouched next to Kate. Jorad had placed her arms alongside of her body. Corvan picked up one hand and put it over the medallion in his own. Kate took a deep breath, drew it in close to her side and her face relaxed. Removing his hand from under hers Corvan touched her cheek. “It will be okay, Kate. I’m taking you home now.”
He looked up to find Jorad standing at Kate’s feet between the poles of the litter, a puzzled expression on his face as he stared at the glow beneath Kate’s hand. He seemed about to say something, but Corvan ignored him, turned around and grasped the poles of the litter, facing away from Kate. He had not intended to take the lead, but Jorad lifted Kate’s feet and they moved along the track, into another alley and then along the wall that separated the City of the Dead from Kadir.
The cemetery gates were closer than Corvan thought and as they exited the graveyard, he felt Jorad push from behind to direct him across the road and into the darkened streets.
No sooner were they back within the crumbling ruins than a thin, wailing voice from a building to their right interrupted their shuffling walk. It warbled and settled down to a low cackle.
The tension on the litter poles increased as Jorad urged Corvan on. “Keep in the middle of the street,” he whispered. “Even if they come out, keep moving. I don’t believe the Broken will attack a priest.”
Another wail from the right was answered by two more behind them. The voices were close, but Corvan could not detect any movement even though he was able to make out the features of the ruins around him.
“Turn left,” Jorad urged as he pushed harder on the poles. They began to jog, the haunting voices driving them forward. Jorad was directing him from behind with the poles, but to Corvan it felt like the unseen cries were herding them through the narrow streets.
Rounding a corner, Corvan stopped short. Ahead the street was blocked by a massive pile of rubble. At some point in the past, the cavern wall had collapsed and smashed the front portico of a great building. Tall, fluted columns had been tossed about like a giant’s game of pick-up sticks. “This way,” Jorad said, pulling back on the poles and over to the right. Corvan twisted his end of the litter around to find a square tunnel had cut into the stone wall to the side of the ruins. He ran inside, pulling Jorad along.
It was a dead end.
Jorad swiveled them sideways in the tight space just in time to see a metal gate rumble across the opening and cut off any chance of escape.
“I am a priest of the Cor,” Jorad shouted as the gate clanged shut. “I bring no harm and seek only your peace.”
His echo faded away and then a small door in the side wall of the tunnel opened inward. A gentle push signaled Jorad’s intentions, and Corvan moved inside. As soon as Jorad cleared the door, it shut hard behind them. They both stopped and listened to the reverberations of an immense space before them. Jorad pushed them out from under a low ceiling and into a dimly lit great hall, dwarfed by massive pillars that soared high overhead. The air was thick with mold and a familiar outhouse stench.
Flickering torches highlighted the center of the circular room and Jorad pushed toward them, past heavy stone tables piled high with stacks of rotting scrolls, presided over by small versions of the lumien lamp stands Corvan had seen in the square. The rings at the ends leaned over the crumbling scrolls like empty eyes.
Jorad moved them to the middle of the cathedral like room where firesticks in the hands of four statues on short pedestals, shed their light on a large round table squatting on a single ornate column. “We’ll put her on the table,” Jorad said, the stale air of the huge room swallowing his words.
After sliding Kate’s litter onto the stone table, Corvan turned to look at her seemingly lifeless face. Leaning close, he held his fingertips near her lips and felt a faint wisp of breath. They needed to find someone who could help her, and soon.
The band of gems Kate wore in the rebel clearing had fallen from her hair onto the stretcher. Corvan put it into his pocket, then brushed a few strands of hair away from her closed eyes. Kate liked pretty things, and the tiara would cheer her up later. He pushed away a thought that she might not live long enough to see it again. It would be his fault if she died in this terrible place. He never should have let her use the hammer in the first place, but maybe . . .
Corvan unclipped the cover of the holster and glanced over his shoulder. Jorad was occupied with looking about the room. Would this be a good time to try using the power of the hammer to heal Kate? He shook his head. Since Kate had chosen the black band, the hammer might hurt her, like it did in his room after he had lied to his dad. She was far too weak to risk it. He snapped the cover back into place.
A shallow breath rattled in Kate’s lungs. The power of the hammer might be too much, but the comfort of the medallion seemed to help her. Opening her limp hand, he removed the medallion and gently laid its glow face down in the open neck of her tunic.
Kate took a deeper breath, then both hands moved to cover the medallion’s light. In that pose, she appeared more dead than alive. “Please let Kate live,” he whispered, raising his eyes and looking overhead.
His words floated up to the vaulted ceiling, along with the heat from the four torches to where large painted faces gazed down at him in rapt attention, their eyes focused on the table in the center of the room. Around the faces were smaller paintings of people and other creatures. Many were obscured by the dark smudge of old smoke, but off to the sides, some of the murals were clearer. Was that a blue sky and a golden sun? Corvan stepped back to get a better view, stumbled on a loose brick, and fell backward into a pile of damp scrolls piled against a statue’s pedestal. Getting to his feet, he came up beneath the stone face of one of the statues. It gazed back at him in unblinking silence.
A hand grabbed his arm and pulled him to one side. Jorad looked fiercely into his eyes. “Don’t touch anything. They are watching every move we make.” The man turned away, and Corvan could clearly see that he was not taking his own advice for he had cleared off a nearby table, spread out a large scroll and weighted it down with pieces of stone. Corvan followed the priest back to the scroll and watched Jorad trace his finger backwards under a line of text. The man muttered some words but to Corvan the markings looked like the tracks their chickens left in the mud.
“Incredible,” Jorad exclaimed. “And this is only one scroll of hundreds that are not ruined.” He gestured around the room, and Corvan saw that the walls around them were covered in cubicles of various sizes, many of which contained one or more scrolls.
Jorad moved to the closest wall and pointed above the cubicles, where a balcony ran around the room to meet at a set of curved stairs. “There are likely more up there. I heard stories of the remains of a great library in the broken half of the city, but I never believed it could be this vast. It would take a lifetime to read all of these.” From the tone of his voice, Corvan knew Jorad wanted to start immediately and would not be easily distracted from the task.
The priest moved along, tugging out scrolls, reading the identifying tags, then reluctantly pushing them back into place. “You can see where the water rose up.” He pointed a line of black mold encircling the room about three feet from the floor. “All the documents below are hopelessly ruined, and the dampness in the room will eventually destroy those the water did not touch. And look here.” His voice choked in anger as he kicked at the remains of a campfire made from the scrolls. “They used scrolls for a fire! Fires are not even permitted in the Cor. Our air is much too precious. And there!” His hand shook in wrath, pointing to where long strips from a scroll had been used for toilet paper. “Animals. The Broken have become nothing but animals!”
“Who are you to judge our people?” a woman called out from behind them.
