“Mama!”
Kari set the box on the porch and ascended the steps, and her son ran into her arms. She picked him up and cradled him tight, and then she rubbed the end of her snout against his, which made him giggle. Grakin junior—or Little Gray, as Aeligos had nicknamed him—was a spitting image of his parents, a handsome boy with solid ebon coloration. He had the black teeth and blood of a serilian-rir, but his wings were still a few years away from growing in.
When Little Gray was an infant, Kari and Grakin had been concerned that he might have the Dracon’s Bane disorder that both of them had. Since everyone knew Kari had died from it in her prior life, the couple had been able to voice their concern without revealing that Grakin, too, had the disorder. Thankfully, testing by Kyrie and the priests of Kaelariel had eliminated the possibility.
Little Gray snuggled close to his mother’s neck and she strode up the stairs to the porch to stand before her mate. Grakin hadn’t lost much weight in the previous few years, which Kari found somewhat comforting. He was handsome, with an aura of calm that surrounded him and gave strength to his mate and his siblings. There was no sign that Grakin had overcome Dracon’s Bane, but neither was it accelerating, despite his age. Dracon’s Bane normally killed its victims before puberty, but there were exceptions: Kari had lived to the age of twenty-seven in her previous life. Grakin, the third eldest of the Tesconis children, was thirty-six—two years Kari’s junior—but the disease’s effects made him look older. He was still handsome in a worn and rugged sense, but that only made Kari appreciate him more.
“Hello, my love,” he said to her in his soothing, quiet voice, though he didn’t rise from the rocking chair he occupied. “What brings you home so early?”
“We need to talk,” Kari said, and she took in a deep breath and let it forth in a long, subdued sigh. “The Order has something they want me to look into down in Barcon, but I’m not being ordered there; the choice is mine. But Barcon’s a few weeks away, so I’d be gone for at least a couple of months.”
“Could we accompany you?” Grakin queried.
Kari shook her head. “No.” She held her son high up over her head and smiled to keep him from worrying. “We’ll talk more about it later. For now, I have some of Jason’s things I need to go through and see if they might be connected with what’s going on in Barcon. If you want to go to the temple and work with Kyrie for a while, I’ll put Little Gray down for a nap and stay home the rest of the day.”
Grakin rose with a smile and kissed her, and they shared a tight embrace. He bid Kari and Little Gray farewell and began walking toward the temple.
Kari took her son upstairs and let him lie down for a nap. Fortunately, Little Gray wasn’t fussy for his age, and he went to sleep easily. Soon, Kari was seated at the family dining table, with bright sunlight streaming across the contents of the box she had laid out before her. With Grakin’s mother and siblings out, the house was calm and quiet. It smelled of spiced bread and the herb-baked chicken they’d had for supper the previous night, and the comforting scents put Kari at ease.
She started with the ledger again but noted that Jori-an and her companions’ names were almost always accompanied by the description ‘snakes.’ She put the ledger down and decided to see if it was, in fact, cross-referenced to the oddly-titled journal. She turned around as a creaking in the house drew her attention, but she pursed her lips and blew out a sigh. For months, Little Gray had been talking about an imaginary friend he called “the Fuzzy Man,” and Kari’s first instinct had been to believe something was following her after her mission on Tsalbrin. Kyrie had used several divinations to try to root out anything insidious but had detected nothing. Even still, she had put a ward around the house to keep out intrusive people or even spirits, and so far, nothing had attempted entry.
Kari turned back to her reading. The journal was worn and stained in all the appropriate places suggesting it had been re-read many, many times. She wondered if Bosimar had a hard time deciphering the things that happened during his tenure as Avatar. She casually flipped through the book and could see that there were notations in the margin of almost every page. Bosimar’s writing was clear and meticulous, written in rir, its symbols flowing top to bottom, left to right like many of the ancient human languages. Jason wasted little time getting to the point of the journal, and Kari read with great interest:
As I expected, the Beast was silent for a reason. Apparently, there were troubles spreading down into the jungle from the mountains, where the hill people were wrapped up in some altercation with dark elves. I sent Tormaar the gnoll and his companions to make an innocuous delivery to the Beast, and he in turn sent them to investigate the disturbance in the northern hills. What they came back with was completely unexpected.
I still have heard nothing from the Beast or the hill peoples as to what prompted the dark elves to attack them, but curiously, Tormaar and his group, upon killing a band of dark elven marauders, came upon a surprising hostage: a syrinthian woman named Ciceria. This is alarming; the invasion of Terrassia by the snake-people and their demigod priest-king during the Third Demon War was well-documented, and I imagine that was not the end of their interest in our world. They are well-known as servants of the demon king Sekassus the Calculating, but unlike many of their underworld ilk, they represent a multitude of possibilities when dealing with them. While some are priests and sorcerers and even assassins, when encountered in the past, many of them have simply been homemakers and laborers. The presence of this woman leads me to wonder: Are they trying to invade Citaria, or are they trying to escape Sekassus?
Her features are angular, and her eyes were unnerving when I met her gaze, but Ciceria is a fine-looking syrinthian woman who holds herself with a great deal of dignity and poise. She is soft-spoken yet curt; she answered my questions with little thought, which leads me to believe she was frank in her responses. Not surprisingly, she was unwilling to reveal the location of her people here on Citaria or disclose what they were doing, but she gave me her word that her people meant no harm
Naturally, I don’t believe her. I will set Tormaar and his group to watching her from a distance. I understand this is a great risk I am taking, but to kill her or hold her prisoner would reveal our hand too early. I believe setting her free and allowing whoever it is she works for to overbalance their own hand would serve the Order better.
I have ordered Ciceria’s release and even assigned two of my hunters to escort her safely to the mountains, where I assume her people are hiding, as a show of courtesy and to give her the impression that I have taken her at her word. In the meantime, I have assigned Tormaar and his group to investigating a local robbery of sorts. I must give Ciceria time to return to her people and get the impression she is not being watched before I send Tor and his people to find her. Until such time, I will work to find out if Ciceria is connected to the work of this “Emma” who keeps showing up in my hunters’ reports.
“Damnit,” Kari muttered. She closed the journal and tossed it onto the table. She had hoped the lack of activity from the mallasti—or hyena demon, as they were casually called—named Emma meant the issue on Tsalbrin was an isolated case, but as she saw that Emma was active even before the Apocalypse, Kari knew it all tied into something larger. From everything Kari and her companions had learned during their mission on Tsalbrin, Emma was searching for something—or rather someone—called Salvation’s Dawn, which related to opening the mystical Temple of Archons on the Isle of Morikk. No one knew what was inside the Temple, but a demon taking an interest in it after the death of the creator, Gori Sensullu, was alarming.