Lisa Smedman - Heirs of Prophecy

Goldheart nodded her head in agreement, then growled low in her throat as she sniffed the wind. Her tail fluffed to twice its size.

“Be watchful,” she hissed softly. “He comes.”

Larajin withdrew her hand in alarm. “Who? Is it Tal who…?”

Before she could complete her question, Goldheart launched herself into the air. She winged away through the night, following Leifander.

A chill breeze whispered through the treetops, making Larajin shiver. Above her, the cold orb of the moon beamed down, throwing a dark puddle of shadow at her feet. Feeling exposed, she wondered for a moment if she shouldn’t try to climb down inside the tower and find a more secluded place to pray. The tower was tall and thin, no more than a few paces wide. The decorative leaf pattern of its rusted railings hinted at elven construction, and Larajin wondered if the tower had been built back in the days when Gold elves ruled Cormanthor.

Remembering Goldheart’s warning to be watchful, she crossed to a darker patch of shadow that was an open trapdoor hanging from one rusted hinge. She kneeled beside it to peer down into the tower. As she’d expected, it was hollow, with a single metal staircase spiraling down the inner walls to ground level, more than a hundred paces below.

The inside of the tower was choked with spiderwebs that glinted silver-white in the moonlight. Larajin jerked back in alarm as a fist-sized spider scuttled across one of the strands of silk, a few paces below her. She forced herself to take another look, to make sure there weren’t larger spiders moving around down there. After a moment, she sighed with relief-there weren’t.

The staircase, she saw, was no longer whole. It ended at a distance of about five paces up from the floor. It was as if the bottom of it had been torn from its moorings by an invisible hand. Frayed bits of metal littered the stone floor.

There was no way Larajin could have descended that twisted mess, even if she’d wanted to brave the spiders. If it was indeed Tal whom Goldheart had said was coming to this lonely spot, she’d have to fly down to meet him.

Just as she was about to sit down and begin the prayer that would return her to tressym form, another movement in the tower below caught her eye. At first Larajin thought she was looking at a pair of spiders, but after a moment she realized they were dark hands, reaching out of a hole in the ground. With a growing sense of dread she watched as the hands grasped a piece of the broken staircase and pushed it aside, widening the hole.

Larajin watched, transfixed, as a woman with glossy black skin climbed from the hole. The woman’s slender build, pointed ears, and bone-white hair marked her as one of the dark elves-the drow. As she climbed from the hole, a spider dropped onto her shoulder from above. She reached up and stroked it like a pet.

As the drow glanced around, Larajin drew quickly back from the broken trapdoor. Heart pounding, she crouched against the rooftop of the tower, not daring to move. Listening, she could hear what sounded like more drow climbing out of the hole, then a flurry of conversation, spoken in a language that reminded her of the chittering of spiders.

How many drow were down there? Larajin didn’t want to risk a look. Two or twenty, it really didn’t matter. Larajin had no first-hand knowledge of the drow, but the books she’d read described the underworld elves as a cruel and cunning race, even deadlier than the poisonous spiders they worshiped. The drow were said to hate all races that walked in sunlight with equal vigor-humans and their elf cousins alike. Those they killed outright were the lucky ones. The rest were fed to the spiders. Bound tightly in their webs, these unfortunates faced a slow, gruesome death.

Touching the locket at her wrist, Larajin began the prayers that would allow her to skinwalk away from there. As the locket began to glow, she cupped it tightly in her hand, wary lest the glow give her away. As she prayed, she tried to make sense of why Goldheart had led her there. Was Tal indeed headed this way? Was Larajin expected to use her magic to protect him from the drow below?

The voices stopped abruptly, causing Larajin to halt her prayer in mid-whisper. Had she been heard? The answer came a moment later, when another voice-lower than the others, and male-sounded from below. He was speaking the chittering drow tongue, but between sentences there came a familiar wheeze.

Larajin didn’t dare look down into the tower. Not with the moon so bright overhead. Instead she channeled the energy Sune had just blessed her with into the spell that allowed her to comprehend other languages. Her ears tingled briefly, and the words below became as clear as Common.

The drow speaking was female, and Larajin’s spell revealed her words in mid-sentence. “… thank you for that, Drakkar.”

Larajin let out a strangled gasp of alarm. Drakkar! She’d gone through so much to flee the man, and now here he was, in the great forest! In her panic, she missed Drakkar’s reply.

The drow who had spoken a moment before continued, “How much longer, then?” she asked.

“The war builds momentum, even as we speak,” Drakkar answered. “My master has gained the elves’ confidence and will make a show of fighting beside them for a tenday or two-just long enough to drive the humans back. Then, when victory seems assured, there will be a falling out over an incident that will appear to be a deliberate act of betrayal by the elves. His forces will withdraw then. Left to their own devices, the elves will lose the war, and the Sembians, their desire for revenge sated, will return home. The few elves that survive can easily be slain, and the great forest will be ours.”

As a chorus of voices chattered below-some asking why it would take so long, others congratulating Drakkar for his cunning-Larajin seized on that last word. Not ‘yours’ but ‘ours.’ She realized the wizard’s dirty little secret. He might look as human as Larajin did, but despite the absence of pointed ears and glowing red eyes, drow blood flowed in his veins. Now that she thought about it, Drakkar’s ink-black hair seemed too dark for a man of his age. It should have at least been streaked with gray. Its natural shade was probably pure white-something he would be careful to disguise with dye, so none would suspect his true heritage.

She understood why Goldheart had led her to the tower with the cryptic message, “He comes.” It had been Hanali Celanil, speaking through her favored creature, who had wanted Larajin to overhear this exchange and realize what the ultimate end of the war would be: not just death for her dear brother Tal, but the destruction of the elves of the great wood, and the invasion of the forest by drow.

There was only one piece of the puzzle missing. Who was this ‘master’ Drakkar had just spoken of? Larajin listened intently to the voices below, but heard nothing that would answer that question. The drow spoke greedily of how they would turn the forest into a dark haven for their kind, once the other elves-whom they snarlingly referred to as “sun-spit”-were slain. And woe betide any human who dared venture within the tree-shaded wood.

With growing horror, Larajin realized the drow were describing the vision she’d had, back in the Tangled Trees. Dark hands reaching out of the earth, tearing open the flesh of human and elf alike, soaking the ground with blood.

All this would come to pass, if she and Leifander didn’t do something to prevent it, but once again, Leifander had gone off on his own-all over a stupid misunderstanding. Larajin had only wanted to warn Tal to turn back, before an elf archer killed him, but Leifander’s simmering hatred of humans-only partially suppressed and now reopened like a broken scab-had caused him to suspect the worst of her.