The Key That Is Not a Key

Chul’ Tor had chosen a very comfortable place from which to threaten them.

That was Jandar’s first objection. His second was that the Scourge Lord had contrived to be looking down on them again. His third, considerably less important, concerned the state of his boots after the climb. He had mud to his knees and a strip of something adhesive still clinging to his coat from the creature in the cave.

The man on the ledge looked as though he had spent the afternoon enjoying a pleasant view.

“Have you been following us,” Jandar called, “or is this a coincidence?”

Chul’ Tor looked down at him. “Does the distinction matter?”

“I like to know when someone has taken an interest. Particularly someone I’ve considered stabbing.”

Deacon had his crossbow ready. Its point tracked the narrow ledge, but his finger remained clear of the trigger. Zook stood a little farther to the left, bow half raised, watching the cliff for other figures. They had already learned what an enemy above them could accomplish.

Vegon studied the Scourge Lord without speaking. His expression had the taut, distant quality it acquired when something failed to fit what he knew of the world. Xil stood beside Mills and seemed less concerned with the man’s position than with his shadow. It fell across the rock in the wrong direction for the afternoon light.

Jandar decided that was a detail not worth examining too closely.

“Have you come to finish what your friend started?” Deacon asked.

Chul’ Tor’s gaze settled on him. “If I had, would you be standing there asking?”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“Then you and your companions have an unfortunate habit of asking questions whose answers you will not like.”

It was the same voice Jandar remembered from the ruined village: not loud, not angry, and somehow worse for its patience. He could still recall what the other Scourge Lord had done to him. Nothing in his body had been broken. That had been the terrible part. He remembered hands reaching for him, familiar faces stripped of meaning, thoughts slipping away each time he tried to hold them.

He tightened his grip on the rapier without taking a step forward.

Chul’ Tor noticed. His smile barely changed.

“I see you have recovered.”

“Yes,” Jandar said. “I was thinking of celebrating by making an extremely poor decision.”

“An old habit, then.”

“An excellent one. It has taken me everywhere.”

“Not everywhere.”

Something in the answer drew Jandar’s attention away from the sword in his hand. Chul’ Tor was not speaking as though he knew where they had traveled. He spoke as though he knew where they were meant to go.

Vegon apparently heard it too. “What do you want?”

Chul’ Tor leaned forward slightly. “I might ask the same of you.”

“You already know,” Xil said.

“Do I?”

“We want to restore magic,” Vegon replied. “To cleanse what the Sundering left behind.”

The words sounded almost foolish aloud. They were standing in a wet gorge, exhausted from fighting predators and creatures that had no business sharing a world, telling one of the ancient enemy’s servants that they meant to mend four centuries of corruption. Jandar wondered how the company would have reacted if someone had proposed that ambition when they first met.

Probably Deacon would have recommended a smaller assignment.

Chul’ Tor looked pleased, which was the least reassuring response imaginable.

“Then perhaps,” he said, “you have finally come to the edge of understanding how far you have yet to travel.”

“Helpful,” Deacon muttered.

The Scourge Lord stood. Nothing in the movement suggested effort, and the rock beneath him did not shift.

“There are three things you must do. First, find the key that is not a key. Then free the Ancient King. Finally, open the Shrouded Veil. Only then will you find the path toward what you seek.”

Jandar waited for more. When none came, he glanced at Vegon.

“Did that make sense to you?”

“No.”

“Good. I dislike being alone.”

Mills had pulled a little book from his pack and was writing hurriedly. “The key that is not a key,” he said, mostly to himself. “The Ancient King. The Shrouded Veil.”

“You make it sound like a tavern song,” Deacon said.

“Better than forgetting it.”

“An astonishingly low standard,” Vegon observed.

Jandar looked back to Chul’ Tor. “You’re giving us instructions.”

“I am giving you a direction.”

“Why?”

“Because you are incapable of finding it alone.”

“Very flattering. And when we do what you ask?”

“That depends on what you do with what you find.”

Zook shifted his weight, eyes still searching the high rocks. “Why should we believe any of this?”

“Because you will discover it is true.”

“That’s a very convenient kind of proof,” Zook said.

Chul’ Tor regarded him with open interest. “You have already done more than you understand. You should be thanked.”

“For what?” Xil asked.

“For what has begun to wake.”

Vegon went still. “The other Scourge Lords.”

Chul’ Tor neither confirmed nor denied it immediately. His silence did enough.

“You and your companions have been very busy,” he said at last. “The world remembers more than its inhabitants do. What happened four centuries ago did not end what you think it ended.”

The old war, Jandar thought. The dead generals. Fyros. Names from histories he had never found particularly interesting were beginning to turn up in front of him, wearing boots and speaking in riddles.

“Then tell us what really happened,” Deacon demanded.

“Would you believe me?”

“No.”

“An honest answer. We may yet make progress.”

Deacon’s expression suggested that progress would be considerably faster if he fired.

Jandar remembered Chul’ Tor standing between them and a power that had dismantled his mind. He had intervened to save their lives, and he had made it perfectly clear that it was not kindness.

“Do you speak for Fyros?” Vegon asked.

Chul’ Tor’s eyes narrowed, not in anger but in appraisal. “You persist in assuming that the story you were taught is the story that happened.”

“That tells us nothing,” Xil said.

“It tells you that your assumptions have become dangerous.”

A wind moved along the gorge. Dust loosened around their feet, carrying the dry mineral scent of the cliffs. Jandar watched the man above them and felt an unpleasant certainty settle into place: whatever Chul’ Tor wanted, he was not worried about resistance. A threat might at least have granted them some measure of importance. Instructions suggested ownership.

“How do we find this first impossible key?” Jandar asked.

“You are already on the path. At the fork ahead, take the right branch.”

“And if we take the left?”

“You are free to waste your time.”

Jandar opened his mouth to object, but Zook spoke first.

“Is there something waiting for us?”

“There is always something waiting.”

“Another useful answer,” Deacon said.

Chul’ Tor smiled once more. He looked from one face to the next, pausing long enough on Deacon to make the fighter’s jaw tighten. Jandar wondered whether the ancient man could hear the dead soldier who sometimes spoke to his friend. He wondered whether the Scourge Lord had known that soldier in life.

There were too many questions, and Jandar disliked having to admit that most were not his to answer with a blade.

“Remember the order,” Chul’ Tor said. “The key. The king. The veil.”

Then the ledge stood empty.

Jandar had been watching him directly. There was no flash, no rush of displaced air, no visible passage from one place to another. One instant there had been a man above them; the next, bare rock.

Deacon kept his crossbow aimed for several breaths longer.

“Well,” Mills said.

“Don’t,” Jandar told him.

“I was only going to say—”

“I know. You were going to say that we have our next adventure.”

Mills looked injured. “I was going to say I don’t like him.”

Jandar considered. “A better line. Keep that one.”

They made camp beyond the caves, where the gorge widened enough for a small fire and a defensible circle of stones. The mountains rose black against the diminishing sky. Zook checked the ground for tracks while Deacon examined the ridges above them. Neither found anything that offered comfort, though neither found a reason to move.

Vegon wanted to discuss the three tasks. Deacon wanted to know whether they should follow directions given by an enemy. Xil wanted to know why that enemy needed them alive. None of these questions improved with argument.

“We could return to the ship,” Deacon said.

“And tell Eticus what?” Vegon asked. “That we met a Scourge Lord, declined his information and sailed away?”

“We could tell him that someone who helped destroy the world wishes us to perform three unknown acts.”

“That would be more accurate,” Xil said.

Jandar sat on an overturned stone and cleaned his rapier. The blade caught the last light. “He may be lying, but I don’t think he expects us to believe him. He expects us to go and see for ourselves.”

“Which is worse,” Deacon said.

“Almost certainly.”

Zook came back from the trail. “There is a fork farther up. We can look at it tomorrow.”

“Right, then,” Jandar said.

“Not necessarily right,” Deacon replied.

“I was agreeing with him.”

“That may be the problem.”

The argument dwindled when Mills brought out food. Later, under an uneasy sky, they settled into their watches. Jandar slept more deeply than he expected.

He dreamed of a village burning.

The houses stood close together beneath a sky the color of hot iron. Fire had climbed the roofs and leapt between them, bright enough to bleach the street below. People ran from doorways with their clothes aflame. Their screams crossed one another until he could distinguish neither words nor voices. He tried to move toward them, but the distance would not close.

He knew the smell of burning timber. He knew the particular panic of a fire aboard a ship, the knowledge that there was nowhere far enough away from it to be safe. This was worse. Here there were streets and open ground, and still no one could escape.

A child stumbled from a doorway. Jandar moved. His legs obeyed him, yet the child remained just beyond his reach. Flames folded across the lane between them.

He woke with a hand outstretched and the taste of smoke in his throat.

Deacon sat awake across the remains of the fire. His face was pale in the moonlight.

“Bad dream?” Jandar asked.

Deacon looked at him. “Burning village.”

Jandar stopped breathing for a moment.

Vegon rose from his bedroll behind them. “You saw it too?”

Xil was already awake. Zook pushed himself upright, blinking toward the voices. Mills stared at them from the other side of the camp, his book forgotten in his lap.

They described what they remembered. The details differed: where they stood, how the flames appeared, which figures they had been trying to reach. But the village was the same, the fire the same, the screams the same.

“Someone put that in our heads,” Deacon said.

“Or something,” Xil answered.

Vegon rubbed his face. “Dreams can be influenced by magic. Shared dreams require a connection. I don’t know what kind.”

“You have been saying that often,” Jandar observed.

“I would prefer not to be reminded.”

No one went easily back to sleep.

They took the right branch when the path divided the following morning. It curled along the base of the mountains, sometimes opening onto broad views of empty forest and sometimes narrowing where the rock leaned overhead. Jandar walked near the front, alternately watching the ground ahead and the cliffs above. Zook led them through broken sections where the old route had slipped away.

The way was longer than it appeared. By afternoon their packs had grown heavy and the mountains no closer. The forest gradually thinned. Mills tried to find a cheerful tune and abandoned two before Jandar told him that a third attempt would constitute a personal attack.

When evening came they camped again.

Jandar lay awake wondering whether he would see the burning village. He heard the last scraps of conversation fade, the soft scrape of Deacon checking his weapon and the wind moving through grass beyond the fire.

This dream had no village.

Dark earth stretched to the horizon. He could not make out buildings, trees or stars. The ground shifted beneath his boots. Far away, indistinct shapes moved upward through the soil, one after another. No faces emerged. No words reached him. Yet he felt with complete certainty that something dead was rising.

The dread arrived before he understood why. It was cold and immense, spreading through him like water through a hull split below the surface. He could not name the shapes, only that the earth had ceased keeping them.

He woke to the sound of Zook cursing under his breath.

Again they had dreamed the same thing.

By daylight no one could agree on what the shapes had been. Deacon called them bodies. Vegon refused the word until there was evidence. Xil stood over the dead fire, looking toward the mountains, and said only that the dreams had begun after Chul’ Tor’s instructions.

“Then we should be particularly careful about what we accept as a sign,” Vegon said.

Jandar studied the road. “The sign I would most like to see is one directing us out of these mountains.”

They continued.

Thunder followed them into the gorge that afternoon. No rain fell, but dark banks of cloud came rolling over the peaks. Lightning flashed above the ridges, outlining the broken rock in white for an instant before the world went gray again. The path turned inward between narrowing walls. Whatever road had once led this way had been scraped thin by centuries of falling stone.

Zook slowed at a bend. Jandar joined him, then stopped.

Two figures rose against the cliff ahead.

At first they seemed like columns of darker rock. Then the lines resolved into shoulders, massive heads and arms held close to bodies that merged with the mountain behind them. Each statue stood perhaps fifty feet tall. Time had eroded their features, but the workmanship remained. The stone figures looked less built against the mountain than coaxed out of it.

Vegon approached without bothering to hide his fascination. Xil stood before the nearer statue, head tilted. Mills craned back until the brim of his hat fell off. Deacon stayed where he could see the approach behind them.

“An entrance?” Zook asked.

Jandar looked between the statues. There was nothing there but sheer stone.

“If so, its hospitality is consistent with the rest of the island.”

Vegon traced the surface with his eyes. “The proportions suggest a deliberate monument. Something this large would have required extraordinary work.”

“Can it open?” Deacon asked.

“That would be the question.”

They spread out to inspect the figures and the rock between them. Xil searched along the lower stone. Zook tested the ground for tracks, then looked upward for a route. Vegon moved closer, his attention fixed on the weathered face above him.

Jandar drew the decanter from his pack, weighed it in his hand and reconsidered. Their last experiments with forcing water into dark places had produced too many creatures with unpleasant habits.

Above him, Vegon began to rise.

The wizard’s boots lifted him gently from the ground, taking him up beside the statue to examine its face and the stone around it. He reached the height of the great shoulders and leaned closer, searching the weathered contours for seams or markings hidden from below.

A sound came from behind him.

Not thunder. Jandar knew thunder.

This was a hard, abrupt crack from the upper rock, like the release of a taut mechanism. Another followed, farther along the rim.

Vegon turned in the air. Below, Xil’s head snapped toward the same place.

“Something above us,” Xil said.

Deacon’s crossbow rose. Zook backed away from the foot of the statue, trying to see the ledge through the storm-dark sky. Jandar took one step toward the narrowest part of the passage, then stopped. There were too many blind angles, too little room and a wizard suspended high above them with nowhere to hide.

A flash of lightning cut across the cloudbank.

For an instant Jandar saw the ridge clearly.

He understood then why the two stone guardians stood where they did. The statues drew the eye upward, but not far enough. Above their heads, behind the broken edge of the cliff, something had been waiting.

Jandar drew his rapier.

“Of course,” he said quietly. “It was never going to be just a pair of statues.”