Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [120]
“Have I displeased you, my lord?” Mina asked, troubled.
“No,” he said, and he repeated, “No.”
He looked at her, at her body, warm and yielding and soft, clasped in the ghastly armor of a dead man’s bones, and it was the Lord of Death who shuddered.
He snatched the bones off her, tearing them from her and casting them back into the sea.
“It really did not bother me, my lord,” Mina protested.
“It bothered me,” he said and turned away abruptly.
They drifted through the sunlit depths, searching for the ruins of the Tower.
Whatever power Chemosh sensed down here was growing, not diminishing, or so Mina judged by his increasingly dark expression. He did not speak to her. He did not look at her.
She tried to remain focused, to watch for danger. She found it difficult, however. She was in a different world, a world of strange and exotic beauty, and she was constantly distracted. Fish swam past her, darted around her, some eyeing her curiously, some completely ignoring her. Shelves of pink-tinged coral rose up from the ocean floor, home to a veritable forest of strange-looking plants and beings that appeared to be plants but weren’t, as she discovered when she touched what she thought was a flower and it lashed out at her, stung her. The colors of everything—fish and plants—were brighter, more vivid and vibrant than any colors she had seen on land.
She forgot the danger and gave herself over to the enchantment. Schools of silver fish flipped and spun in quicksilver unity. Tiny fish darted at her, nibbled at her hands. Others hid from sight, disappearing into coral doorways and diving through coral windows.
Suddenly, Chemosh hissed a warning. Catching hold of her, he dragged her into the shadows of green and undulating branches.
“What is it?” she asked softly.
“Look! Look there!” he said, disbelieving, and furious.
A building with walls of smooth, glistening crystal thrust up from the ocean floor. The crystalline structure caught the drowned shafts of sunlight and made them captive, so that the building gleamed with shimmering panes of watery light. A dome of black marble topped the building. Atop the dome, a circlet made of burnished red-gold twined with silver flashed in the sunlight. The center of the circlet was jet black, as if a hole had been opened up in the sea to reveal the emptiness of the universe.
“What is that place, my lord?” Mina asked, awed.
“The desecrated, burned-out, meteor-struck, fire-gutted, rubble-strewn Tower of High Sorcery of Istar,” said Chemosh, adding, with a curse, “Somehow, some way, it has been rebuilt.”
ne moment Rhys and Nightshade were in Zeboim’s cell, patiently arguing with the goddess, trying to make her see reason. The next moment, between the space of one breath and the next, one word and the next, one rant and the next, Rhys was standing on crumbling flagstone in the middle of an island fortress, with the lingering echo of a raging sea roaring in his head. Having grown weary of his argument, Zeboim had brought it to an end.
Rhys had never been to the Storm’s Keep. He had heard tales of it, but he had paid scant attention to the stories. He was not one who yearned for adventure. He did not join the younger monks, who thrilled to hear ghost stories told round the fire on a winter’s night. More often than not, he left that cozy fire to go walking alone across the frozen hills, rejoicing in the cold, glittering beauty of the frost-rimed stars.
The bodies of those young monks lay beneath the earth. Their ghosts, it was to be hoped, were roaming free among those very stars. He had set out to solve the mystery of their deaths. Knowing how, he had yet to discover why. His search had brought him here. Looking back on the road that he had traveled, he could not see it for all the bends and twists and turns it had taken.
If he had obeyed Majere and remained at the monastery to seek perfection of body and mind, what would he be doing now? He knew the answer well. The hour was sunset. Almost time to bring the sheep down