Azure bonds - Kate Novak [171]
Remembering the recent deaths of all but one of the masters, she looked down to examine her sword arm. The limb still ached from the disappearance of the top three sigils- Cassana's, Zrie Prakis's, and the Fire Knives'. All remaining members of the assassins must have been wiped out by the explosion of Zrie's staff of power. The arm that the sigils occupied had been overgrown with the waving serpent pattern, but only the concentric rings of Phalse's master remained. And the blank space that's left, Alias thought, remembering with a shudder Olive's prediction that something might now grow there.
Alias tried to stand and stumbled to one knee. She was tired and battered. She leaned on Dragonbait's sword, stood up, and looked around. They were atop a very tall tower that thrust into the shining white sky. The crenelations of the wall about them were curved and pointed like the stones about the Hill of Fangs had been.
She looked down from the tower. It rose from a plain of shining, gray stone that spread out in all directions as far as the eye could see. In a circle about the tower's foundation, the stone was solid and unmoving, but just beyond, the ground was cracked and shifting like a mud or lava flow.
"You know, Olive, I don't think we're in the Realms anymore."
She limped over to Akabar and Dragonbait. The stranger's faded garb was a shredded mass of tatters, and his arms and legs were lacerated by a hundred bites the size of large coins. Larger gashes lay across his forehead, chest, and torso, and blood ran freely from his wounds. Olive came up beside Alias and whistled in a low tone.
Dragonbait had the man's head cradled in his claws, and small, bright arcs of yellow bridged the space between his hands and the man's face, visible even in the bright light of the white sky. The smell of woodsmoke filled the air. Before their eyes, the flow of blood ceased, and the wounds on the man's face began to heal. The stranger's grimace faded and his expression grew' peaceful, the deeper wrinkles smoothed from his weather-worn face.
Akabar moved swiftly and surely, tending to the damage that remained when Dragonbait's healing powers were exhausted. The mage smeared a viscous, green paste over the wounds not yet closed and bound them with strips of his borrowed robe.
Alias knelt beside the mage and the saurial. "Who is he?" she asked.
Dragonbait turned a curious stare on her, and Akabar said, "You don't recognize him? Are you sure?"
Alias studied the face. He was familiar. Beneath the gray hair and the wrinkled flesh was a man who must once have been very handsome, with a well-formed figure. "Nameless!" Alias whispered.
She turned to explain to the others. "He was in my dream in Shadow Gap, only much, much younger. Unless this is his grandfather or someone."
"You don't remember him from anywhere else?" Akabar prompted.
Alias screwed up her face trying to think, but she couldn't recall him. He wasn't in her pseudo-memory and there was no other time that she could have known him.
"Of course she can't remember him," Olive said with a sniff. "She was just a baby then."
"What are you talking about?" Alias asked.
"You were just born-so to speak. He set you loose with Dragonbait to look after you. You might say he's your father." Olive reached down to touch her on her right wrist where the tattoo wound about the empty space. "He's the Nameless Bard. Ring a bell?"
"The Nameless Bard," Alias echoed as she leaned back and thought deeply. She knew that story, but hadn't associated it with Nameless from her dream. She rocked back and forth as she recalled the tale in full and began to really understand for the first time what she was meant to be and what she had actually turned out to be.
Nameless opened his eyes, and, though his sight was mostly shielded from the bright sky by the