The Order, page 25
“The Dark One, Garreth Rau.”
He turned to Cain, his eyes shining in the faint light from the cavern. “I had a vision, just now, of his watching us. His anger was like the strongest sun, burning everything it touched to ash. I have never felt anything like it. I fear that he has already begun the rituals that will bring the undead army to march upon Caldeum.”
“Then we have very little time left.”
Mikulov nodded. “I, too, have been questioning our path here. I expected something different as well. But we cannot afford to stop now. The gods have led us here for a reason. We must remain strong, my friend. A great battle is coming, and any weakness we have will be used against us.”
Cain sighed. The weight of the entire world was on his shoulders, pressing down until he wanted to scream out for relief. It was a burden too heavy for one man to carry. “What would you have us do, Mikulov?”
“Get some sleep.” Mikulov smiled, but his face was haggard and drawn. Cain realized that he had gotten used to the monk’s constant serenity and balanced energy, and now that they seemed absent, it was all the more shocking to behold. “We need to heal our minds and bodies. Things will seem better in the morning. They always do. Then we will go to work. What choice do we have? Leave now, in the dead of night? Abandon all that we have come to believe? What we know to be true?”
Cain nodded. Mikulov was right, of course. But Cain got the sense the monk was holding something else back, something that might shake him to the core, if he were to hear it.
There was something important he was missing. Egil had described Garreth Rau’s descent into darkness. His power had grown with every ritual and every demonic spell. Eventually even his physical body had begun to change; he had become a mutated, monstrous shell of his former self. But he had mastered the dark arts with such precision, it seemed as if he could do anything.
Yet he had let his brethren escape. A man who wielded power such as this should have had no problem finding a small, fractured group like these men and laying waste to them. Why had he left them alone? Was there still a shred of humanity left inside that remembered what they had meant to him, something that held him back?
Or was there some other, much darker reason?
“Excuse me?”
Cain turned to find Egil standing behind them, hands clasped at his waist. Over his shoulder was a burlap sack. The young man’s pale face was like a moon in the darkness. “I fear we have disappointed you,” he said. “Some of the others have lost faith, like Farris. They feel that our attempt at reforming the Horadrim is a fool’s game, and that the order died away for good years ago. Many no longer believe in angels or the High Heavens. They say that if Heaven exists, why wouldn’t it act against the evil that is gathering here? But there are those of us who do believe, and have been waiting for someone like you to show us the way to salvation.”
Egil paused, as if hesitant to speak again. “I have heard stories,” he said finally. “My uncle lived near Tristram, for a time, before settling in Gea Kul. He told our family everything he had heard about the demon invasion there. He even claimed to have seen demons himself. And he told us about you. Now . . .” Egil shook his head, “he is gone, taken by Garreth and his feeders. My father and mother survive, but they no longer recognize me. They are victims too.” His eyes met Cain’s and held them. “Those stories about your wise counsel during the dark days of Tristram are what inspired me to study the Horadrim myself. I know you can help us. We are . . . fractured, and in need of a leader. But we are eager to learn. If you join us, the others will come to believe it too.
“I promise you, we will not let you down.”
Deckard Cain stared out at the night, listening to the creak of wood, the faint sound of insects buzzing. His hearing seemed preternaturally acute—the ears of a deer as it lifts its head from feeding at the approach of a wolf, he thought, a half smile crossing his face. I am an old man, but I am not dead yet. The wind seemed to whisper back promises of violence: of cold, dead things reaching up from watery ground, and he knew that Garreth Rau was out there somewhere, standing just as he was, staring into the night sky. He shivered.
Egil’s face was upturned toward him, waiting expectantly. Then the young man took the sack off his shoulder and dug inside, withdrawing something that made Cain suck in his breath with astonishment and wonder.
“We found this among the ruins of a monastery in Khanduras,” Egil said. “We were never quite sure how to use it. But I suspect you could teach us.”
Cain took the object in both hands, turned it over, admiring the workmanship. It had been a long time since he had seen one. It was a bit larger than a man’s skull, and heavier than he remembered, the intricate carved wood seeming to tingle against his skin.
The Horadric Cube.
“You have a powerful tool here,” Cain said. “Its magic is remarkable. You must use it wisely.” But when he tried to give it back, Egil shook his head.
“Please, take it,” he said. “Teach us what you know. Read the texts we were able to save from our library. They told us of your coming, and they may have more information that would help.”
Cain’s mother’s voice came back to him through all these years: The scrolls say that someday the Horadrim will rise up again when all seems lost, and a new hero will lead them in battle to save Sanctuary . . .
And her voice again, this time as a warning: Be careful what you wish for, Deckard.
Cain tucked the cube carefully into his rucksack. “We have much more to discuss before we sleep,” he said. “I want to know everything you can possibly remember about your time in Gea Kul, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant. There may be something important we can use.”
Then he took Egil’s arm, and Mikulov stepped up on his other side, and the three of them went back into the caves, where the others waited for them.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Lund’s Bow
She stood on a platform that soared high above the clouds. The platform was so small she could not sit down, and its edges were crumbling away, and lightning flashed all around her, lighting up the sky with jagged cracks of purple and white. She trembled, terrified, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe. In moments she would slip and tumble end over end into the abyss.
Voices came to her through the crashing storm, a crazy old beggar and a pig-eyed bully: “The sky will turn black, the streets fill with blood . . . where’s your crazy mother? Servicing the men at the tavern? . . . we should toss you in the fountain, wash off the stink . . .”
The sound of flapping joined the voices, and she looked all around but could not see the birds until she faced the front again and a crow at least twice her size was hovering just before her, fanning its wings, its huge, sharp beak snapping forward and nearly grazing her skin, its beady eyes fixated on her own.
She screamed as the crow began to change, its feathers melting into Gillian with crow’s talons for hands, a knife buried hilt-deep in her chest; then that changed to a hood hanging over features shrouded in shadows, the talons rippling into long, bony fingers, a hunched, robed figure hovering just out of reach. It was the dark man. YOU ARE MINE, his voice thundered in her head, and one arm extended toward her as lightning cracked once again and thousands of horrible, skinless beasts gathered behind him. She felt herself being ripped open and laid bare, something pulled out of her like a ribbon unwinding from her stomach, and as she looked down, she screamed again because the ribbon was her own blood, coiling in the wind like a long, red snake and lit with blue fire.
Leah woke up to silence. Gray light trickled in from the mouth of the cave, and the smell of smoke still lingered, but the fire was dead. Lund slept next to her, his giant chest rising and falling slowly, and she sighed and waited for her galloping heart to slow down. The dream had been so real. She knew that the dark man and his demons meant to destroy the world. She shivered in the cold morning air.
The camp came awake slowly. Men stirred, muttered to themselves, got up to fetch water and start the fire again. Lund awoke a short time later and smiled sleepily at her, and Leah felt warmth for him begin in her chest and spread through her limbs, dispelling the chill. She didn’t know why, but he made her feel safe, as if his great strength could protect her from harm. At the same time, his mind was like a child’s, and he had nothing to hide. She liked that.
She looked around the cave for Uncle Deckard and found him deep in conversation with the man named Egil, two others from the camp she did not know (a tall, thin man with glasses and a shorter, round one with no hair), and Mikulov the monk. The old man’s face was deeply lined and gray, his eyes ringed with dark circles. Their voices were low, but she heard the words ennead and ammuit, or something similar; they kept gesturing over a book they passed back and forth, arguing over its contents. Then Cain took out a strange, square object from his sack, pointing to its carved, wooden surfaces as if they held some great mystery. It looked like just another box, and she turned to Lund, who was sitting up, the smile on his face so wide she could not help smiling herself.
“This is yours,” he said shyly, bringing something out from behind his back. It was a tiny bow made from a sapling and antelope sinew, with half a dozen arrows whittled to points blackened by the fire and topped with blue feathers at the other end.
Leah took the bow from him and held it as she might cradle a baby in her arms. Ever since she had seen him shoot his arrow through the tree trunk, she had been fascinated by his bow, the way the arrows whistled, cutting through the air, the low twang the string made as it was released. But she’d been unable to budge the tough wood when she tried to draw back the string and had finally given up in frustration after she’d almost toppled over just holding the huge weapon.
This bow was just her size. “Can we try it?” she asked. “Please?”
Lund nodded at Uncle Deckard. “Ask him first.”
Lund took her out into the clearing and taught her how to stand with her feet firmly planted on the ground, how to notch an arrow to the string and sight down the shaft, squinting, then draw straight back toward her eye with one elbow bent, the other locked. Her first few arrows wobbled terribly and flew into the woods or into the ground; but on her eighth try, the arrow flew straight, missing the target Lund had painted on the tree by mere inches. Lund clapped and jumped up and down like a small boy, then ran and collected the fallen arrows for her to try again.
By lunchtime, Leah had hit the target three times. The muscles in her arms ached, her fingers had grown raw and sore, and her hands trembled, but she did not want to stop. There was strength in the bow, a way for her to take control of her fear, even master it. With a weapon like that, she was no longer powerless against the darkness.
She imagined the huge, dark shape of the crow before her, its beady eye the target. Lund showed her how to let her breath out in a long, slow hiss and hold it while she released, keeping everything else still. This time, her arrow hit near the center of the circle, and Lund finally convinced her to quit for the day.
The camp was busy, the smell of cooking thick in the air. Uncle Deckard had more men around him, and he was talking loudly and gesturing while the others watched intently, nodding or shaking their heads. They pointed to passages in books, looked at maps and objects from Uncle’s sack, drew designs in the dirt. There seemed to be two different groups arguing with each other. The fat, short man with no hair (his name was Cullen, she believed) was saying something about an army of ghouls—feeders, he called them. The way he gestured, his face growing red as his voice grew louder, made her shiver. Lund took her hand and led her away.
Before dinner, they all took turns bathing in the stream that ran below camp, the frigid water making Leah gasp and raising goose bumps on her skin. She used a bar of goat’s fat and flower oil that Lund gave her. It felt good to scrub away the dust and grime that had accumulated on the road, and she dipped her head under the water briefly, her breath catching in her chest, and emerged feeling reborn and new again.
At night they all ate around the fire again, and there seemed to be even more men this time, all of them focused on Uncle Deckard as he told stories about the Horadrim and their great battles from many years ago. Leah listened to the descriptions of Jered Cain and Tal Rasha, two warrior mages who battled monsters like the crow and skinless beasts from her dreams, and worse; she grew sleepy as Cain talked about the town called Tristram and what had happened there, then described his search for someone he called the Dark Wanderer and the battle at Mount Arreat with a monster called Baal.
The men listened intently. Some of the stories should have been scary even to them, but they seemed enraptured by Uncle Deckard’s skill at telling. For some reason, Leah wasn’t afraid anymore either. Uncle’s voice soothed her, and Lund’s presence made her feel as if nothing bad could possibly happen here. The fire in Caldeum, the strange village, and what had happened in Kurast all seemed so far away.
She fell asleep leaning on Lund’s shoulder, more content and safe than she could remember feeling in weeks.
“There has to be more,” Cain said. “The key is Al Cut. The tomb of Al Cut—what does it mean? He was mentioned in a book of prophecies I found in the Borderlands, in reference to an army of the dead. And the name was written at the bottom of the drawings of a boy haunted by feeders just a short distance away in Kurast. How are these things connected?”
The day had dawned gray and cold, the sun hidden behind a thick layer of dark clouds, and as the hours had passed, Cain’s newfound enthusiasm and energy had begun to wane. Ratham was only two days away, and time was running out. The order had listened raptly to his stories around the fire the night before, and he had felt a connection growing with them; but there was so much left to learn, and so much to teach, that he felt overwhelmed and lost.
At least there had been some attempt to recreate the Horadrim in a similar way to their founding, centuries before: the fledgling scholars had dedicated a person to each of the main mage groups, just as the original Horadrim had consisted of mages from each school of magic, and these so-called leaders had taught others within their ranks in the ways of the Ennead, Ammuit, Taan, and Vizjerei. But their teaching had been erratic and often completely wrong, and Cain had found himself spending as much time correcting misconceptions about transmutation, illusion, and prophecy as he did finding out anything useful.
They had already been over everything they had in their possession, but it wasn’t much. Egil had explained that before the group had escaped the town, Rau had already begun to gather hundreds of creatures around him, some of them the drained husks of the citizens of Gea Kul and surrounding areas, others much darker and more threatening. He had become a mage of considerable skill and training by then, summoning things from the netherworld that none of the other mages had ever seen or heard of before. Some of these creatures, the things they had called feeders, had spread out across the land, draining strength from the populace in a way that the rest of the order had not fully understood.
“Has anyone heard of this man, Al Cut? Either living or, more likely, long dead? Someone important from history—a mage, perhaps?”
The men who had gathered around him (Egil, Cullen, Mikulov, and another one called Thomas) remained silent. They were looking for some clue that would help them plan their attack on the Dark One’s stronghold.
Cain dug into his rucksack and took out the book of Horadric prophecies that he had found in the Vizjerei ruins, the one that appeared to have been written by Tal Rasha himself. “The passage is here,” he said. He read it aloud: “And the High Heavens shall rain down upon Sanctuary as a false leader arises from the ashes . . . the tomb of Al Cut will be revealed, and the dead shall lay waste to mankind . . .”
“May I see it?” Egil asked. When he looked it over in his hands, recognition dawned in his eyes. “Is it possible?” he said softly. “It can’t be . . . these ruins in the Borderlands. Was there a library below a collapsed temple, and a foul demon that guarded its contents?”
“How did you know that?”
“We were there, several months ago,” Egil said excitedly, his voice rising. “In those ruins. We were chased out by a foul demon that possessed one of our order. Garreth pushed it back long enough for us to escape, but we were forced to leave some of our possessions behind. A pack with our food, and this text, as well as a book of ancient Vizjerei spells we had found there. Demonic magic.”
Cain held up the book of Horadric prophecies. “You brought this text with you to the very same ruins where I found it?”
Egil nodded. “Garreth said we would need it on our journey, and we never questioned him about things like that. He was always right. But this time . . .” He shrugged. “The demon was not the only threat. There were sand wasps and dune threshers. We barely escaped with our lives.”
A chill ran down Cain’s spine. He and Akarat had followed Rau’s First Ones into the Vizjerei ruins; it was their footprints he had seen in the dust, and their belongings he had found behind the temple. It seemed almost too much of a coincidence to be possible.
Cain skimmed through the text again, most of it already familiar to him. It was full of very old writings that seemed to predict Cain’s own path to these caves, as well as the fall of Kurast and Gea Kul to the darkness. It was almost as if it had been written recently, rather than hundreds of years ago.
A passage near the end, just before the mention of Al Cut, told of thousands of lost souls buried deep beneath Gea Kul, a killing field from the depths of Sanctuary’s history that held something terribly dangerous and important. But the book ended there abruptly, as if the scribe who had written it had run out of pages.
“I need to see the companion texts to this one,” Cain said.
Egil put up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I do not have them,” he said. “If there are more, they must still be inside our Horadric library in Gea Kul. I had returned there to try to find more answers, before I found you.”
