“Yes, Lady Ch’drei.”
The Keeper stood up from her throne and carefully descended the three steps to the floor of her audience hall. “Tell it to me once again. . let me hear it in your own words. What is your first task?”
“Track the Inquisitor Soen wherever he may go. Leave no trace of our passage. Follow him to a human slave named Drakis-the Drakis who bolted from House Timuran in the Western Provinces.”
“That is right,” the Keeper purred. “What is your second task?”
“When we are assured of his identity, we are to capture this Drakis alive and kill any who may have associated with him. I am then to deliver this Drakis to you personally here in this room.”
“That is right,” Ch’drei said. . and then, holding up her hand, she paused.
The Keeper had thought this through again and again since that day at Togrun Fel, tried to find a different course to take; but her first thought as she had sat on this same throne inside a tomb half a continent away remained her only answer.
Soen was right; this Drakis could easily be mistaken for the bringer of doom to the Rhonas Empire-especially because he was a weapon of untold destruction. The fall of the Empire was coming as Ch’drei, Soen, and a number of other Inquisitors were well aware. Soen wanted to control that fall and emerge victorious from the rubble with the Iblisi to rule.
Ch’drei shared that vision, but she also knew that such power was not something easily held in common with anyone-especially an Inquisitor with boundless ambition. Sooner or later, one of them-Ch’drei or Soen-would have to go.
Better sooner than later, Ch’drei sighed to herself. And better Soen than her.
“And finally?” Ch’drei spoke at last to the darkness.
“And then we are to track and kill Inquisitor Soen,” the voice said, a rasping sound now apparent in its speech.
So it had been said, and having been said was now the will of the Keeper. Killing Soen would not be easy, she mused. For that she had needed someone who was personally motivated and committed to the Inquisitor’s death.
Ch’drei smiled as she turned. From the shadows at the side of the hall, a robed figure emerged. It drew its hood back, revealing a face that would have caused even elven adults to blanch. A flap of damaged skin sagged down over the elf’s right eye, which was now a dreadful and useless milky-gray in color. The skin of his face bore long scars and discoloration from slashing burns that ran up his long forehead to the elongated crown, but one particularly terrible scar pulled badly at the left corner of his mouth, lifting the lip on that side into an unnatural and perpetual snarl.
Ch’drei sighed at the sight of him. “I delayed as long as I dared. I had hoped that the healers of the Occuran could have done more for you, but there is no more time left to us. Are you ready, my son? Can you do this thing that the Order demands of you?”
“To follow Soen to this human, rob him of his glory, and then kill him?” the misshapen elf asked. After a slight pause, the figure fell to his knees. “Yes. Oh, yes, I can with the greatest of pleasure, Lady Ch’drei.”
The Keeper laid her long, bony hand atop the burn-scared forehead of the elf kneeling before her. “Then go with the blessings of the gods and the Will of the Emperor, Inquisitor Jukung.”
Jukung raised his face toward her, his effort at a grateful smile contorting his features into a grim mask.
The dwarf stood on an outcropping of rock, surveying his own mind as much as the landscape spread before him.
There were two obvious paths in the morning light. One lay northward into the broad, unknowable expanse of the Vestasian Savanna that ran to a flat and hazy horizon. The other path led eastward up into the foothill foundations that formed the western end of the Aerian Mountains. He could see the peaks in the distance now outlined in the slowly warming twilight of the dawn.
Northward with Drakis. . eastward with his heart.
In truth, back into the roots of the mountain had been his original-if somewhat desperate-plan. When the Last Throne had fallen, he was trapped with the Heart of Aer, both of them hidden in the midst of the Rhonas Army occupying the caverns surrounding them on all sides. It was only a matter of time before the entirely too predictable elves would come with their gleaners and discover him and his treasure. Then Drakis had come-a gift from the forge of the gods-and the confused human became the means of Jugar’s escape.