HAURRIS
Once more in Tower of the Heavens, Alton carefully
placed Merdigen’s tempes stone back on its pedestal. Immediately
the mage materialized to life beside him.
“Ah,” Merdigen said.
“Very good to be home, and unscathed.” He strolled about, swinging
his arms and stretching.
Perhaps Merdigen had
returned unscathed, but Alton had been battered by his encounter
with the creature in Tower of the Earth. Somehow the creature had
reached through his shields and scored claw marks on his chest, and
the tussle had left him banged up and bruised. Estral’s care and
concern had taken his mind off his hurts for a time, but now he was
stiff and sore.
“Do you want me to
take Haurris’ stone out?” he asked.
Merdigen did not
reply. He was gazing up toward the tower ceiling.
“What is it?” Alton
asked.
“Do you notice
anything different in here?”
Alton glanced
around. Now that Merdigen mentioned it, something did seem
different, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He gazed upward
like Merdigen. Daylight filtered through the hole above, and then
it hit him.
“That hole,” he
said. “Is it smaller?”
“Yes, I think so,”
Merdigen replied. “Not only that, but other damage appears to be
mending.”
It was true. The
tower chamber looked tidier, as if all the minor debris and stone
dust that Alton hadn’t yet touched had been cleaned up. The major
damage remained—the toppled column, other chunks of masonry on the
floor.
“How?” Alton
demanded.
“The guardians are
happier,” Merdigen replied. “In harmony and cadence. Who do you
think put them in that state?”
“Estral,” Alton
murmured, his surge of joy tempered with slight jealousy that it
was not his own doing. It was everything he had been working for—to
fix the D’Yer Wall—and yet she succeeded where he had not. He
wondered if her music had affected the damage at the breach, too.
He’d have to go back and take a closer look.
“You must tell her
to keep singing and playing the song of the guardians,” Merdigen
said, “to keep reversing the damage. It won’t fix the breach
itself, but it can mend what is still standing.”
“What about that
line of music from the book of Theanduris ?”
“She must work on
that too. It may be what fixes the breach.”
Alton was ready to
run out of the tower right then to grab Estral, hug her, and tell
her.
“However,” Merdigen
continued, “even if the wall is made secure again, there is another
problem Theanduris apparently overlooked.”
Alton stilled, heart
pounding. “The creature,” he said.
“Yes,” Merdigen
replied. “Eletians are free to travel through the towers. I would
conjecture this was because the Eletians were staunch allies during
the Long War and they wanted to be able to travel forth into what
was once Argenthyne. Or they wanted an escape route for the
Sleepers should they awaken. Perhaps both. Just theories, mind
you.”
Alton found a chair
and slumped into it. “ ’Ware the Sleeper.’ That’s what Haurris
said. That creature was an Eletian Sleeper, wasn’t it? How did it
get to be that way?”
“Again, theories. I
can tell you Sleepers are Eletians who take a rest from their
unending lives. They become part of the forest, a grove of them
tended by those still wakeful. I can only guess Blackveil’s
influence penetrated the grove, corrupted this Sleeper of
Argenthyne.”
“How many?” Alton
asked, his heartbeat quickening again. “There must be more than
one. How many do you suppose are still there?”
Merdigen shrugged.
“Hard to say. Hundreds, thousands. The largest grove would have
been at Castle Argenthyne.”
“Oh, gods,” Alton
said, nearly overcome by the image of thousands of corrupted
Sleepers descending on Tower of the Heavens. “An army of those
things and they can pass through the towers . . .”
“Impossible to know
if they’ve all been turned, or if they can even be awakened like
the one in Haurris’ tower. Let us see if we can get more from
Haurris.”
With a sense of
foreboding, Alton returned to the center of the chamber and
gingerly removed Haurris’ tempes stone from his saddlebag and
cushioning blanket. The stone had been chipped and cracked when the
creature knocked it from his hands. The color of the tourmaline
remained muddy, dead.
Alton nested the
blanket next to the pedestal and placed the stone on it. Haurris
did not appear at first, but after some anxious moments, his pale
form materialized, his image distorted, fractured.
“ ’Ware the
Sleeper,” he intoned.
“Haurris,” Merdigen
said standing in front of him. “Haurris, can you hear me? See
me?”
“Where am
I?”
“Tower of the
Heavens,” Merdigen replied.
“I am gone, I am
gone . . .”
“Look at me,
Haurris, it’s me, Merdigen.”
“Bridges. I
destroyed bridges. I am sorry. Strengthened tower to protect ...”
Haurris did not speak directly to Merdigen, but only from the
dimmest edge of awareness, a ghost.
“You did well,
Haurris,” Merdigen said. “The Sleeper is dead.”
“Sleeper . . .
Sleeper . . .”
“How did it come to
your tower?”
“She asked
me.”
“She who?” Merdigen
demanded.
“Help them. She
asked me . . .”
“Haurris,” Merdigen
coaxed. “Who? What did she ask you?”
Haurris’s figure
blurred, then redefined itself. “Help them. The queen, she
asked.”
“Queen?” Alton
interjected. “What queen?”
Merdigen gestured at
him to remain silent, but Haurris turned his head to stare at
Alton. His eyes were dark hollows, his cheeks sunken like a
corpse’s. His robes hung tattered and frayed from his shoulders.
His image flickered out, and after several breathless moments of
fearing they’d lost him altogether, he reappeared.
“The Queen of
Argenthyne,” Haurris said, his voice distant.
“Laurelyn,” Merdigen
whispered.
“I failed. I . .
.”
Haurris vanished
again, and a longer period passed before his faint image
reappeared. Like a dying candle flame, it sputtered and
faded.
“... woke the
Sleeper. Tried to . . . am sorry. Found me . . . tried to trap.
Inside.”
The flame that was
Haurris died. He did not reappear and a crack resounded through the
chamber. His tempes stone split in half, the tourmaline
blackened.
Merdigen sighed, his
shoulders sagging. “I’m sorry, too, old friend.”
Alton covered the
halves of Haurris’ tempes stone with the blanket, then stood. “The
Queen of Argenthyne? Laurelyn? How did she talk to
him?”
“We shall probably
never know,” Merdigen replied.
“Haurris was awake
and corporeal longer than the rest of us, but it does not add up,
for Laurelyn was lost when Mornhavon took Castle Argenthyne so very
long ago.”
“He seemed to think
she told him to help with the Sleepers. He must have awakened the
one somehow.”
“But he was not able
to leave the tower,” Merdigen said. “None of us were, even when we
were corporeal.”
“You’ve left the
tower plenty of times,” Alton reminded him. “When you went looking
for the mages on the other side of the breach, or to talk with
Booreemadhe and the others in their towers.”
“But—”
“And I took you out
of your tower to go to Haurris’.”
A mortified
expression crept over Merdigen’s face at the last. “Yes, you did,
but the other times, I did not leave the tower in the conventional
sense and my tempes stone remained here. I will have to think on
what may have happened, but we probably will never know the how or
what of it with Haurris gone. What matters most is that the
influence of Blackveil has corrupted Argenthyne’s Sleepers, and if
they are awakened . . . well, we have seen the
result.”
Alton shuddered,
remembering the spidery limbed creature leaping on
him.
“They can pass
through the towers, my tower,” Merdigen continued. “And I no longer
possess the magic to trap them as Haurris did.”
“Karigan is in
Blackveil, with Yates and Lynx and the Eletians,” Alton said,
thinking that if even one of those creatures was abroad in the
forest, it made their expedition all the more
perilous.
“Yes.” Merdigen
stroked his beard. “It makes me wonder ...”
“What?”
“It makes me wonder
why it was so important for the Eletians to go in there at this
time. I hope they were not planning to
awaken the Sleepers.”
Alton felt the blood
drain from his face, and even Merdigen looked pale.
“My boy,” Merdigen
said, “we must find a way to fortify the towers.”