Rellen jerked the falchion free, twisting Javyk’s body around. He leaned in. “I told you I’d cut your heart out.” He drove his falchion into the center of Javyk’s back. The point sprang out through his chest as blood spurted along the bright steel. Rellen twisted the blade as hard as he could and jerked it free.

  Javyk shuddered and coughed with a sickly wet sound as blood sprayed out onto the grass.

  Rellen wound up one last time and cleaved Javyk’s head from his shoulders.

  Javyk’s knees folded beneath him, and his lifeless body dropped, toppling sideways. His head tumbled across the grass to roll up against a tree.

  Rellen spat once on the ground and turned back. Jaquinn lay on the ground, motionless. His chest had been split from shoulder to groin. The Second Guardian of Pelinon was dead. Pain and regret filled Rellen’s heart. Off to the side, Miranda had fallen to her hands and knees, her head sagging toward the ground.

  “Miranda!” He raced to her side.

  She lifted her head, breathing heavily. Her forehead was bathed in sweat, and her eyes were bloodshot, her skin flushed.

  “I’m alright,” she said, gasping. She met his gaze. “But you got him just in time.” Rellen helped her to her feet. “That nasty bastard was strong.”

  “Not anymore,” he said grimly.

  Miranda turned to where Xilly’s limp form still lay.

  “See to her,” Rellen sheathed his falchion. “I’m going to cut Tavyn free.”

  “Do you see my saddlebags?” she asked.

  Rellen peered inside the wagon. “Yes.”

  “Then open the right one and pull out a kara root.”

  Rellen obliged and set the tuber on the back of the wagon within Miranda’s reach. He then grabbed the saw.

  “What about those other guards, the ones that went in with Javyk?” She gently placed her hand on Xilly’s chest. “And what happened in there?”

  “He wouldn’t have come out alone. Maybe Mygal got them before they got him?”

  “He was in pretty bad shape.” She looked dubious. “Him against Javyk and three guards? And did you notice Javyk had been bloodied?”

  “Yes, badly,” Rellen said. “But he fought like a vellish. I don’t get it.”

  “Do you think Mygal’s dead?”

  Rellen fought off a wave of guilt. It had happened again. He was supposed to mentor Mygal, not get him killed. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

  “So, we’re going in,” Miranda said. She closed her eyes and focused her mind on Xilly.

  “We have to.” He pulled out his bandoleer and slipped it over his head. He drew forth a small crystal, gestured, and muttered the incantation. A soft white glow flashed over his body, and the subsequent tingle quickly subsided.

  He let out a resigned breath and stepped out to eye Tavyn. “That includes you.” He stepped up, carefully moving over Jaquinn’s body, and stared into Tavyn’s pained, fearful eyes.

  The informant’s face was pale, his hair damp with sweat.

  “You’re going to help us get Toreth. When he’s dead, you’re going to answer every question I ask you. If I like what I hear, you might—might—just have a way out of this. I’ve sentenced you to death. Only I can commute it, and only if you do exactly as I say. That’s the bargain. Take it, or die here, and if you so much as touch me with your magic, I’ll spill your guts around your boots. Understood?”

  “I don’t know how much good I’ll be to you in a fight,” Tavyn said weakly.

  “I guess you’ll just have to dig deep, then, won’t you?” He held up the saw and drew one of his falchions. “Which is it going to be?”

  Tavyn nodded towards the saw, his mouth pressed into a thin line.

  “This is going to hurt.” Rellen sheathed his blade. “And I’m going to enjoy every moment of it.”

  “Just do it,” Tavyn clenched his teeth.

  Rellen placed the saw as close to Tavyn’s body as he could and started cutting. The informant flinched with every stroke. It didn’t take long before the shaft came free. Tavyn stood up straight and tried to lift his arm. He yelped in pain again and looked at Rellen.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of that.”

  “Miranda,” Rellen called out, “how is Xilly?”

  “She’s unconscious and breathing shallowly. I couldn’t sense any damage inside her, but I have no idea how long it will be before she wakes up, assuming she even does. I don’t even know what kind of magic did this.”

  Rellen’s guts churned. “I need you to tend Tavyn’s wound. There’s still a hell of a fight ahead of us, and he’s coming with.”

  She leaned out, a stern expression on her face. “You sure about that?”

  “No choice,” Rellen replied. “And hurry.”

  “I can at least stop the bleeding and give him some mobility in that arm.”

  “It’s the erkurios in him that I want.”

  “If you say so.” She didn’t look convinced as Rellen helped his prisoner around to the back of the wagon. “Let’s get that bolt out, and then I’ll see what I can do.”

  Rellen met Tavyn’s gaze. “Slow or fast?”

  “Yank it.”

  Rellen looked at Miranda. “You ready?” He wrapped his fingers around the bolt.

  Holding a kara root tightly, she closed her eyes, drew in a long breath, and let it out slowly. When she opened her eyes again, she raised her hand to hover near Tavyn’s shoulder, and then nodded.

  Rellen jerked the bolt out with a spatter of blood.

  Tavyn screamed as Miranda placed her hand on the wound and closed her eyes.

  They waited for a dozen heartbeats as Miranda concentrated on the wound. Finally, she opened her eyes and pulled her hand back. The kara root was now shriveled, desiccated, as if it had been set under the sun in a desert.

  Tavyn breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s a little better.” He lifted his arm, wincing with pain.

  “Like I said, dig deep.” Rellen pulled the canvas back a bit more, pulled out their gear, and handed Miranda’s to her. Locking eyes with Tavyn, he said, “Do I need to warn you again?”

  “No,” came the immediate reply. “Helping you is the only way out for me. I get it.”

  “Good.” Rellen handed Tavyn his weapons, and they all secured their belongings. “Now help me lift Jaquinn into the wagon. If anything comes sniffing around, I don’t want anything feeding on him.”

  Tavyn nodded.

  With a good deal of effort, and a few pained groans from Tavyn, they managed to lift Jaquinn’s heavy, bloodied body into the wagon, laying him out along the side.

  “For the Honor of Pelinon,” Rellen whispered, and then he peered through whatever barrier hid Stukelladios from view.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Stukelladios

  Rellen didn’t feel a thing as he passed through the invisible barrier.

  One moment, he was striding toward a long stretch of dense jungle. The next, the scene changed to something very different. He froze in his tracks as a gasp escaped his lips. A shiver ran down his spine. Miranda and Tavyn had halted beside him, their eyes wide.

  A large, circular dome of gray stone, a hundred yards across and twenty high, rose before them a stone’s throw away. It was windowless, with a single, arched doorway twenty feet high and at least ten wide. It looked like the top of the structure had been cleaved off and open to the sky. Sunlight shined down into the interior, and Rellen could see several bodies lying around a large, stone platform. Mygal’s bare-chested body lay upon it, off to one side, and it looked like something was sticking out of his belly.

  Rellen wanted to rush forward, but he restrained himself. They were hunting Toreth, and anything could be a trap.

  Two horrifying statues supported an intricately carved keystone at the top of the portal. They were monstrous, demonic, with deeply honed muscles, fierce faces, and twisting horns sprouting from their foreheads and jaws. Extremely weathered, the statues and the dome looked like they’d been there for millennia, yet everything was devoid of vines or moss.

  Thick jungle lay in every direction, but the edge of the vegetation maintained that same stones-throw distance from the entire structure. Only grass grew in the space between, and it looked as if it had been trimmed or made to grow only a couple inches to a perfectly uniform height. Beyond the dome was a truly massive keep of the same, gray stone.

  The architecture was similar to the other nuraghi Rellen had seen, but there were differences in the details. The towers and walls of the keep were decorated with a wide variety of strange symbols, some large, some small, and all of them in a language he had only seen once before… on the plunnokum.

  “Stukelladios,” Rellen said, almost to himself. “I really didn’t want to have to go into a nuraghi again.” He turned to Miranda. “Stay behind me and to the left.” She nodded. They’d done this many times before. He led, she followed, and they ran interference for each. He eyed Tavyn. “You stay ahead of me and to the right.”

  “I go first?”

  “You go first.”

  Tavyn sighed with resignation but said nothing as he drew his blade and strode forward.

  Rellen drew a falchion, pulled one of the poison vials from his bandoleer, and followed. The group fell into an easy, automatic cadence.

  They approached the towering demonic statues, and a strange sense of familiarity struck him. The recollection smacked into him. Jabono. They resembled the stone demons that filled the city. It seemed an impossible coincidence. There was some sort of connection between Jabono and this place. It didn’t make any sense, but he was staring straight at it. He vowed to return to the city and speak with Chancellor Jassym.

  He paused at the threshold of the dome, searching the interior for any sign of danger. The chamber was empty except for the bodies and the platform. On the far side, a section of the curved wall, twenty feet wide and high, had opened up, exposing a dark, gigantic hallway beyond. Torches set along the wall burned with bright green flame, spaced every thirty feet or so on both sides.

  A large, scorched patch of black earth lay between him and the platform. The ground throughout was covered with footprints, and as his eyes passed over the area, he spotted animal tracks mixed in with the boot prints. A variety of creatures had passed through, but none of the tracks looked recent.

  The platform reminded him of a stone pillar that had been cut cleanly about three or four feet off the ground. It was ten feet across, with the severed sections of rope lying on top, not far from where Mygal lay.

  Hope suddenly blossomed in Rellen’s heart. Mygal’s chest rose and fell, just barely, in a slow, steady rhythm, despite a slim dagger sticking out of his belly, just below the ribs. Two guards lay off to the side of the pillar, their swords driven into each other’s bodies. The third body, laying at Mygal’s feet, was completely desiccated, as if he’d been mummified.

  “He’s alive,” Miranda blurted, looking to Rellen. “How?”

  “Let’s see if we can find out. Tavyn, move up, but stay away from Mygal and keep an eye on that hallway.” They moved forward, Tavyn giving Mygal a wide berth as Rellen and Miranda stopped near the young Guardian. Mygal’s face was one big, purple bruise. The gashes on his face were crusty with dried blood, and his body was a latticework of bruises. “See what you can do for him.”

  As she worked, Rellen inspected the scene, amazed that Mygal was alive and Javyk had left him that way. The rope that bound one of Mygal’s wrists had been cut. Rellen played back those moments in his head. Mygal had screamed—maybe at the first touch of Javyk’s magic. Then Javyk had screamed in terror. Why? Maybe the young Guardian had used the shock to send a bolt of terror into Javyk. Rage can increase a kurioi’s potency, even range, at least briefly. Perhaps Mygal turned one of the guards as they walked in, maybe even two if he was capable of it. It was a lot of maybes.

  Rellen glanced at the two guards clutching each other in a death embrace.

  Once Mygal had driven Javyk off, the fight ensued, and he got free—with the help of the third guard. That’s why it took Javyk so long to come after us and why he came alone. He’d been wounded in the fight and had to drain the last guard to heal himself. But why not drain Mygal?

  There was only one answer Rellen could think of. Mygal had already been stabbed as the last guard tried to kill Javyk. Or maybe Javyk stabbed Mygal but didn’t want to kill him—wanted to savor his pain later on. And by that time, Jaquinn had engaged the guards out front. If Mygal was out of the fight with a blade in his belly, Javyk had to choose between cutting Mygal’s life short and stopping the rest of us from escaping.

  Rellen had to admit, it was pretty thin, but it made sense.

  Mygal’s groan filled the dome.

  Rellen turned to see Miranda drop the dagger onto the stone platform beside Mygal.

  “Don’t move,” she said gently. “You’re in bad shape.”

  “You’re telling me?” He opened his eyes. “I guess I can assume I’m not dead.”

  “Thankfully, no,” Rellen said. “And I intend to keep it that way.”

  Mygal shifted and cried out in pain. “Gods, that hurts!”

  “I told you not to move,” Miranda scolded.

  “You’re not laying on cold stone.”

  “Point taken.” Miranda turned to Rellen. “I don’t want to move him.”

  Rellen hesitated, struggling against what he knew he had to do. His heart—the pain of old memories tearing at him—told him to help Mygal, but the Guardian in him said otherwise. “We have to leave him here.”

  “Toreth?” Mygal asked weakly.

  Rellen nodded.

  “Go get him… and don’t worry about me.” He met Rellen’s eyes. “For the Honor of Pelinon.”

  “For the Honor of Pelinon,” Rellen said, placing his hand gently on Mygal’s leg. “Just stay alive.” His eyes flicked to Tavyn and back. “I have much to tell you.” He pulled off his cloak, draped it over Mygal and turned away from him. “Get going, Tavyn.” Without another word, the three of them marched straight toward the opening on the far side of the dome.

  The passage they entered was enormous, with the torches set eight or nine feet off the ground. As Rellen moved forward, he once again got a strange sense of scale, like he was a toddler walking through someone else’s home. The other three nuraghi he’d been in seemed to have been built on a grand scale, but those had been mostly ruins—tumbled stone and broken rubble. Things seemed larger, but he hadn’t truly gotten a sense that the ruins were anything other than ancient keeps lost to the mysteries of time.

  This felt very different. There was the sense of an immeasurable passage of time, and yet, this fortress still stood tall. Like the invisible curtain that hid it, tremendous magics must have also held it together. Either that, or someone still lived here and maintained it… but he didn’t get that sense either. There was a profound emptiness to the place, as if it had lain dormant for millennia, and now, with the help of Toreth, it was being brought back to life.

  They’d gone about twenty feet in when he knelt to examine the floor. The soil in the dome and along the hallway had slowly diminished, until he realized he was walking on closely cut stone covered by a thick layer of dust. In the dust, he’d thought he would find only Toreth’s tracks.

  He did find signs of the man’s passage. However, there was much more than that. He found the tracks of quite a few different creatures, and they were all heading out. That didn’t make any sense. As he moved, he identified vellish tracks, koodoo buck or some other cloven-hoofed creature, a large slithering beast with a tail that cut a swath in the dust behind it.

  “Why would there be animal tracks coming out of this place, but none going in?” Miranda asked, perplexed.

  “I don’t know.” Rellen’s voice carried a good deal of concern, and then he stopped. Mixed in with the other tracks was a set of prints that had to come from one of the largest vellish in history. “Look at this.”

  The paws were massive, as large as a bear’s, but there was no mistaking what they came from. And then he remembered the vellish pack that had attacked them. He couldn’t be sure, but the tracks looked identical. Could it be? The odds that the same vellish that walked out of this nuraghi had attacked them along the King’s Highway north of Sylverwynd was beyond reason. Rellen shook his head.

  “I’ve never seen one that big,” Miranda said, awed.

  “Yes, you have.” Rellen met her gaze. “These look an awful lot like that big vellish that attacked us.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I’m not sure that word applies anymore,” Rellen said. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

  About a hundred feet in, spaced between the torches, they started to see pairs of identical bas relief sculptures on each side of the hallway. The images depicted the same demonic figure. It was clearly a female, if demons had such things, with all the appropriate bumps and curves. In the first one, the demon wore strange armor of some kind, with flanges and spikes. A pair of spiraling horns rose up from her temples, not unlike a Kapren or Kapron, save that these were thicker and spread out a little wider before smoothing out and coming back into sharp, dagger-like points. She stood atop a bastion, pointing out and away from a keep of some kind. Rellen suspected it was Nuraghi Stukelladios, but he couldn’t be certain.

  The next image showed the same demon standing near a beachhead, watching the construction of a fortress. The laborers were human. The humans looked like they only came up to the demon’s thighs, as if she were twelve or fifteen feet tall.

  There were plenty of legends and childhood stories about an ancient race of Giants that once ruled the world, but they were just tales—told to frighten children and inspire bards. Giants were a myth, like the mystical lands across the oceans where ancient heroes once fought. They weren’t true… were they?

  They continued down the long passage. Each new sculpture showed the same demon doing something different. In some, humans were present and always working on some great structure. In others, the demon stood alone. There didn’t seem to be any story being told, and the more Rellen saw, the more he got a sense that the sculptures were more about a noble’s ego than anything else. He’d seen the same thing in a few ducal palaces, where the duke—or duchess—chose to have images of themselves in as many places as they could.