"The Hausolis Playhouse."
"A major public building," said Olmaat. "Surely you could have found something a little more obvious? The lawn of the temple piazza perhaps."
Hithuur"s face darkened a shade. "It has significant benefits. Not least that it is closed during the grieving period for Jilad Kantur. And from the rear, no one overlooks those arriving or leaving. It is secure."
"I"ll be the judge of that," said Olmaat. "Tai. A hundred paces ahead. Left and right. Quick and silent."
Olmaat"s Tai turned north. At the corners of a side street, they swarmed up the sides of houses as fast as most elves could run. Scaling tiled roofs designed to channel the heaviest of rainfall into gully, gutter and storm drain as if they were climbing an easy flight of stairs. Jarinn watched them go, a smile on his lips despite the situation, the rain and the pain in his joints.
"They are something to behold," he said to Hithuur, looking across at the adept. Hithuur turned to him, his expression one Jarinn could easily mistake for worry. "Something wrong?"
Hithuur tried a smile. "No, no. Just regret that I am not good enough to be one of them."
"But you will make a fine addition to another order," said Jarinn. "You are meant for great things."
Olmaat gestured his charges before him and followed along behind. The front of the playhouse bordered an area of gardens. They were a popular gathering place where people ate, drank and watched entertainment provided by a legion of jugglers, singers and minstrels before the main event.
With the theatre dark while they grieved for their princ.i.p.al actor, the lawns were empty of the revellers who would shelter under leathers when the heaviest rains fell. Jarinn approached at a half-trot; it was as much as his arthritis would allow. He saw Olmaat"s Tai emerge from the shadows on either flank and disappear to the left and right of the playhouse. Olmaat held up a hand. Jarinn, Lorius and Hithuur stopped.
"What"s wrong?" asked Jarinn.
"Nothing," said Olmaat. "I need to be sure we aren"t observed."
He moved on at some signal Jarinn did not see, heading to the left of the main doors, whose great double latches were carved in the shape of masked dancers. The shadows were deep here. Behind the playhouse were its workshops and stores. Timber stacks rose against high wooden walls beyond which was cleared waste ground, ear-marked for warehousing and a new marketplace for fine wooden and stone goods.
Hithuur was right: the rear access was secure. But you had to get there unseen too. Olmaat stopped in the yard, in the lee of the playhouse and spoke to his Tai. One of them scaled the gates and headed into the waste ground. The other pulled open the rear door and vanished inside. Olmaat gestured the others to him. The rain battered against the playhouse and drummed high from the stone flags that paved the yard.
Jarinn wiped his face. A pointless reflex. More rain ran down his face. He shifted his bare feet to keep them warm in the puddles in which he stood.
"Hithuur," said Olmaat. "What will my Tai find inside? What will I see?"
Hithuur nodded. "The staging area is behind this door. It is clear and empty. Directly ahead is the auditorium. The curtains are drawn, and beyond them steps up to the stage. We"ll be safe here. There is food and others are coming to ensure we get to Aryndeneth safely."
"High Priest Jarinn does not need greater numbers," said Olmaat. "He has the TaiGethen."
The door to the playhouse edged open. Olmaat"s Tai emerged.
"It is empty," she said. "The auditorium is silent."
Olmaat nodded and led them inside. Jarinn had never been back-stage at the Hausolis Playhouse though he had been on the stage a number of times, normally called from the audience to take prayers or speak from the Aryn Hiil. Here, the s.p.a.ce echoed. Parts of sets were leant against walls and there were a few chairs and a couple of tables looking lost in the middle of the floor.
Directly ahead, the curtains were closed and still. Beyond them, the oval stage was surrounded by benches on the ground floor and two tiers of balcony seating above. It was a wonderful place. Warm and light and full of emotion. Much of the emotion hung in the air even now. But that wasn"t what Olmaat was sensing. The TaiGethen was sniffing at the air. He gestured his Tai towards the curtains.
"Olmaat?"
Olmaat raised a hand. "A moment, my priest. Something smells wrong."
"What do you mean?"
"There is something in here not of the rainforest."
"Hithuur?" Jarinn turned to his adept.
Hithuur spread his hands. "I"ve no idea what he"s talking about."
"Olmaat?"
"Something is not right."
Jarinn felt suddenly tired. "Do what you must. I"m going to sit down. Lorius?"
"I thought you"d never ask."
The two priests walked towards chairs and a table a few yards to the right of the curtains.
"Hithuur?" Jarinn beckoned his adept.
"It"s more comfortable in the auditorium."
He moved towards the curtains. Olmaat tensed. Jarinn felt suddenly vulnerable and frightened but still couldn"t place why.
"Olmaat?" he said a third time.
Olmaat"s Tai stepped back through the curtains.
"The floor of the playhouse is empty," she said, moving back to Olmaat.
Hithuur broke into a run. There was noise behind the curtains. Slapping impacts like people landing after a jump. Olmaat"s head snapped round. The curtains were dragged aside. Six figures stood in the s.p.a.ce. Not elves. Strangers. Blink-lives. Jarinn stopped, halfway to his seat. The blink-lives had no weapons but spread their hands, palms up. He could hear murmuring.
"Takaar betrayed us!" yelled Hithuur, standing by the strangers. "He killed my family. The harmony is dead."
Olmaat"s Tai launched herself at the blink-lives. A jaqrui throwing crescent whispered out and chopped deep into the neck of one,who toppled back grabbing at his ruined throat as his life bled away. She took a sword from her back and thrashed it through the waist of another. An arrow from the depths of the auditorium took her through the throat.
Olmaat did not attack. Instead he turned and began sprinting towards Jarinn.
"Run!" he shouted. "Get out, get out!"
Jarinn gaped. More figures were rushing up behind the line of strangers. There was a tightness in the air. Hithuur"s words hung in his mind, a blade to the heart.
"The new order will sweep Takaar"s law away," shouted Hithuur. "You are the old way, Jarinn. And Lorius will be the first martyr of the Tuali."
Jarinn backed away. Olmaat was nearly on him, still shouting at him to go. There was a whine in his ears and his body felt as if it had been plunged into hot water. There was a rush of energy, like his soul flaring. He felt confused. He stared at the strangers. The four remaining moved their hands together.
Heat. And soul-scourging light.
Chapter 10.
Respect those you kill in battle for we are all brothers in the eyes of Shorth.
Takaar couldn"t control the nausea. He twisted out of his hammock, flopped onto the ground four feet below and vomited. Green and brown flecked with red. His head pounded and his stomach twisted. He vomited again, helpless as the constriction in his gut intensified. He hauled himself up onto his hands and knees, his whole body convulsing.
He was aware of a roaring sound. He a.s.sumed it was the blood rushing around his head but it was more distant than that. As his body calmed a little, and the breaths he gasped ceased to bring more convulsions, he found he could focus outside himself.
The roaring and growling was a panther. More than one. The guttural sounds echoed his own pain and were a mirror for the confusion he was beginning to experience. He rolled away from the stinking pool and lay on his back, grabbing air in grateful gulps. The rainforest was quiet. Unnaturally so.
Takaar sat up. He plucked a leech from his right arm and walked a little shakily to the edge of his bivouac, where he rested against the bole of a fig tree. He took a few deep breaths and tried to replay the instants before he was sick. He didn"t like what his body told him.
You"re scared. Should be a familiar feeling but you seem to believe otherwise.
"These are unusual times." Takaar refused to turn to his tormentor, who sat behind him underneath the shelter. "They are unpicking everything I have ever lived for."
All the more reason to jump when I tell you to.
Takaar shook his head and walked away from the shelter. He had experienced a trio of events. Events? It seemed the only way to describe them. Far more complex than any emotion and far more overwhelming than mere feelings. They dipped into the core of him, of his race, and toyed with it.
It had begun with a sickness that was way beyond physical. And, in quick succession, two revolting grabs at the souls of the forest, the G.o.ds and every elf. They were what had caused him to vomit. And now he was left with an ache in his head not unlike the aftermath of the taipan venom.
What scared him was that he knew from where each of these events emanated. The grabbing of his soul had been triggered from Aryndeneth and Ysundeneth while the sickness came from everywhere. It would unsettle every elf, though many would barely register it. But he, Takaar, champion of the harmony, the ula who once walked with G.o.ds, felt it for all of them.
He"d been feeling the unsettling nausea on and off for some time. The events at Aryndeneth and Ysundeneth were something altogether more violent, brutal. Sudden and brief a.s.saults that had fed back through the energy lines that latticed the world.
He"d a.s.sumed the power they represented to be benign, latent. Yet the suddenness of his sickness and its violence told of a rippling in those energy lines and a filling of the air with something new that he could neither taste nor touch but could sense with his body and mind.
The energy was not something he could use. Not yet. But it was reminiscent of that he had felt on Hausolis, way back before the beginning of the harmony, when he had discovered the gateway and managed, somehow, to link himself to it. What had awakened the earth? And what did it have to do with the harmony and the anxiety of the elves?
He shouldn"t care. Couldn"t afford to.
Didn"t.
Yes, best you take another edulis leaf, nicely boiled down with a little simarou and crushed beetle wing. Forget it. Forget it.
Takaar nodded. It was not often his tormentor adopted a sympathetic tone. Even rarer that he was right. Takaar returned to his shelter. A movement in the brush to his left caught his eye. He had faced every danger the rainforest could throw at a lone ula. There was nothing within it that could unnerve him now.
He stopped and stared hard into the undergrowth. A sleek form eased from within it, moving towards him. And it was not alone. He counted three. He should have been scared. He was easy prey. But they were not interested in his flesh.
Takaar crouched and held out a hand. One of them came forward. He felt the panther nuzzle his hand. Her tongue explored his palm and the head withdrew.
"What is it?" asked Takaar. "What is it that we feel?"
His tears stung the burns on his face. He moved forward on his belly, every excruciating moment punctuated by the feeling of his clothes dragging where they were fused to his body. The skin had blackened on his hands and raw flesh was all that remained of the soles of his feet. Yniss had spared him. Spared his eyes. He did not know why. The last thing he wanted was to live and see what filled his gaze.
He dragged himself the last yard. The stench of burned flesh filled his seared nose. In front of him lay the smoking corpses of Lorius and Jarinn. Olmaat"s tears were for them, for the fact he had failed them.
Where the men had gone he had no idea. Olmaat had been forced to suck in his agony, reach down within himself to still his shrieking body. Play dead while they made sure the enemy had killed their targets. They and Hithuur had left then. The cascarg and the blink-lives. The poison at the centre of faith.
Killed. That was the word they used. This was not a mere killing. This was destruction visited upon great elves. Inflicted with a hatred that defied understanding and using a power terrifying and incomprehensible. One that had left Olmaat with a lingering taste in his mouth he could not identify. More than that though, whatever it was the men had done, Olmaat had felt through his body.
Even when he had dived across Jarinn, trying to shield him, and been cast aside like a doll by the power of the fire column, he had felt a moment that he could only describe as elevating. Now the pain in every fibre made that a confusing memory.
Olmaat raised himself up on his blistered hands. His palms weren"t too awful but the backs were beginning to weep and blackened skin hung off in uneven strips. He gasped, the air over his mouth and down his throat like dragging flesh over broken gla.s.s.
What remained of the two bodies was melted together. Neither was recognisable. Parts of limbs had simply been obliterated. One skull had been crushed. No flesh whatever remained. No clothing and no distinguishing marks. It was like some b.a.s.t.a.r.d creation, immolated at birth. Something hideous and pitiful, one mouth open in final agony, praying for the end.
And at least that end had been swift. Olmaat prayed to Shorth to comfort the souls of both elves. He prayed to Tual to keep him alive until he warned Katyett and found those responsible. He prayed to Yniss to help him seek them, face them and kill them.
"Olmaat?"
Relief took the strength from Olmaat and he collapsed back onto his stomach.
"Help me, Pakiir."
Olmaat heard a gasp and the choking back of a sudden sob.
"Tell me that is not our Jarinn."
"I cannot. All that remains now is reparation and retribution."
"Yniss preserve us, is there no honour left?" Pakiir knelt in Olmaat"s eye line and touched the charred hulk of Jarinn and Lorius to whisper a halting prayer. "What must I do, Olmaat?"
"Find a temple healer. Find Katyett. The TaiGethen can trust no one. Our own people have turned against us. We must hunt and she must know what men have brought with them." Olmaat coughed. "No one else should see this place like it is."
Olmaat felt a hand on his back. He sucked in the comfort of touch.
"Rest if you can. Don"t try and move any more. I"ll bring people to you. You"ll be all right."
"How did you escape it?"
"I am shamed, Olmaat. I ran back outside and hid until they were gone."
Olmaat would have smiled but his lips were too charred for that. "No shame in common sense. Yniss guides your mind, Pakiir. Go."
Pakiir"s footsteps faded quickly. Olmaat tried to lie absolutely still. The adrenaline was draining from him and the pain was becoming ever more intense. But he lifted his head one more time.
"I am sorry, my priests, I have failed you. I have failed Yniss."