The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [49]
Tharkis was shaking violently, snot running down his face. In his eyes was a look of stark and empty terror. Yet his words seemed strangely lucid. She opened her mouth, unsure what she should say.
“Aryn?” a voice called from down the corridor. “Aryn, is that you?”
Like a puppet jerked by the strings, Tharkis leaped to his feet. His eyes were crossed once more. “Fear the one alive and dead,” he hissed, “for you cannot escape her web.”
With weird speed, the fool scrambled up the wall, then vanished in the shadow between two rafters above. Aryn craned her neck, searching the ceiling, but she knew it was no use; she would not find him.
“Aryn, there you are! I thought I sensed your thread.”
A silhouette moved toward her, then resolved into Lirith. Her ebon face was paler than usual, as if dusted by ashes.
“Did you hear my call, sister?”
“I did.”
“I thought you had, but I wasn’t certain. You must come at once.”
“What’s happened?”
“I don’t think I can explain.” Lirith took Aryn’s left hand. “Come, you will see.”
Thoughts of Tharkis vanished from Aryn’s mind as Lirith pulled her down the corridor. They reached the door of Melia and Falken’s chamber and slipped through. Aryn didn’t know what she had expected to see, but certainly it had not been this.
Durge pressed himself against the far wall, as if trying to retreat into solid stone, his brown eyes wide. Falken knelt not far from the door, gazing upward, an expression of sorrow on his weathered face. In the very center of the room, Melia was weeping. Wails of grief escaped her, rising and falling with the cadence of a chant. She tore at her blue-black hair, and tears streamed from her amber eyes. However, it was not this that made Aryn stare, her breath caught in her lungs. Rather, it was the fact that Melia floated in midair.
The small woman hovered in the center of the room, several feet above the floor, curled in a tight ball. She spun slowly as she wept, bobbing up and down as if tossed on a stormswept sea. She seemed oblivious to the others in her grief.
At last air rushed into Aryn’s lungs. She must have stumbled, for Lirith caught her arm, then Falken was there, steadying her. Durge edged around the room to join them.
“She’s in mourning,” Falken said, his voice quiet, in answer to Aryn’s unspoken question. “I’m not certain how long it’s going to last.”
Aryn shook her head. “Mourning? For whom?”
“For one of her brothers.”
Fear shot through Aryn, and she clutched the bard’s arm. “Is it Tome?”
Although she had met him only once, it had been more than enough to grow fond of the gentle old man with golden eyes. Like Melia, Tome was one of the Nine who had forsaken godhood long ago to walk the face of Eldh and work against the Pale King’s Necromancers. In the time since, most of the Nine had grown weary and had faded from the world.
“No, it is not Tome,” Falken said. “It is a god of Tarras she weeps for.”
Aryn fought for understanding. “But Mandu is the Everdying. Will he not simply rise again?”
“It’s not Mandu either,” Lirith said in a clipped voice.
Aryn looked to the witch, then to Falken. At last the bard spoke in a grim voice.
“A god is dead.”
Aryn listened in growing shock as Falken told her what he had already explained to Lirith and Durge. That morning, just before dawn, Melia had awakened with a scream, and Falken had rushed to her side. He is gone! she had cried. I can feel it—like a wound filled with nothing! Before she was consumed by her grief, Falken had managed to get a few words from her. The god’s name was Ondo, and he was a minor deity of Tarras—not one of the Seven who were worshiped in the Dominions. Ondo had been revered primarily by the Tarrasian guild of goldsmiths.