“He is darkness,” Asaran said.
She almost laughed at it, but she remembered the anger within Agnew when she had fought him and remembered how he had brought her to the cell beneath the outpost, how he had been so willing to assault her. Could Agnew be Dorian?
“I don’t understand. Why Nelar?” Jayna looked from the woman to Asaran, and tried again to see the others behind them, but still couldn’t. She had a distant sense of power, and it left her concerned. It seemed as if there were explosions nearby, vaguely behind her, and they continued to reverberate.
Could the activity up in the city be increasing?
“Because Nelar is home to one of the great enchantments: a powerful seal placed here, part of the prison that separates Sarenoth from the world.”
“I see,” Jayna said, though she didn’t. Not really. “And let me guess, when Gabranth was here on behalf of Asymorn, and when the Order of Norej was here, they were trying to reach that enchantment?”
“Destroy it,” the woman said.
“And now Agnew? Or Dorian—assuming they’re the same person?”
“Dorian,” she said. “And he has been searching for it.”
“I’m going to assume he found it?”
The woman nodded. “It’s never been hidden. It has been protected, but after the Order of Norej attacked the city, the great enchantment was damaged. Exposed. Now one with the strength to break it will allow the power of him to begin to infiltrate the world.”
“Attacked? Only a couple houses were burned.”
Jayna’s breath caught.
Houses had burned. Great houses had burned. Some of the first dular of the city. People who had been here from the very beginning, from the founding.
But that wasn’t it.
That couldn’t be it.
They wouldn’t be an enchantment.
There was something else that it could be though.
Jayna used the ring to fortify herself for a moment as she looked at the others around her. “It’s not the houses,” she said. “The courtyard. The fountain.”
“Very good,” the woman said. “And Dorian discovered the truth that night. He’s been trying to use his influence to cause even more havoc but has not managed to accomplish unleashing Sarenoth’s power.”
She’d seen the dark magic used on the dular and the Society’s willingness to attack them, but how did that connect to the Ashara enchantments? And to what Dorian wanted? “What does any of that have to do with the great enchantment?”
“It has everything to do with it. Dorian didn’t know how to find the great enchantment, and now that he has uncovered it, learning about its presence has taught him something he didn’t know before: how to destroy it.”
“How?” Even as she asked, Jayna thought she knew. “Bloodstone,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“It is but a part. In order to truly destroy the great enchantment, an item of power built by two ancient enemies, they would need something to interact with it.”
“The Ashara and the El’aras?”
The woman nodded.
“So let’s just say these attackers have the bloodstone,” she said, glancing over to Eva, “and it’s tied to the Ashara. What do they need of the El’aras?”
“They would need an El’aras to power it.”
Her heart started to flutter.
Raollet and the captured El’aras that she’d seen at his shop started to make a different sort of sense. She wouldn’t have expected he would have them for many other reasons, but who else could have captured them? She’d thought it was for the festival, but perhaps there had been a deeper purpose to them all along.
She’d not known the full extent of Gabranth’s plan.
“There aren’t any El’aras in the city.”
“Not yet, but with the enchantments used, they thought to draw them into the city.”
The Ashara. That was what these attackers intended, and it was the reason behind using those specific enchantments. If the Ashara hadn’t been seen in Nelar in generations, the sudden appearance of enchantments designed to look like Ashara might be enough to draw them in.
“I see,” Jayna said.
So not only were they dealing with a potential battle between the sorcerers and the dular, but now they were dealing with a possible battle between the Ashara and El’aras.
“We need to stop this,” she said.
“That has been our intention,” the woman said.
“Well, seeing as how you’re not doing that great of a job, I’m going to get—”
Jayna didn’t get the chance to finish. An explosion thundered. The woman darted toward the doorway and froze, power building from her.
She was a sorcerer. Powerful, too.
“Who are you?” Jayna asked.
“My name is of no significance.”
Jayna laughed softly. “It seems to me it’s quite significant. Who are you?”
“Rayna Qal.”
Jayna frowned. She’d heard that name before, but she wasn’t exactly sure where. Was it with Char? When she had been sorting through the books at the outpost, she had come across many different names, but she didn’t think that was why it was familiar to her.
No. Ceran.
It was an offhanded comment. A brief mention, nothing more than that.
“But you were—”
Another explosion struck, thundering. It radiated throughout the city overhead but shook even here.
“They are coming,” Rayna said.
Jayna looked over to Eva. “Are you willing to help?”
Eva looked to Asaran before turning her attention back to Jayna. She nodded. Normally that would be enough for Jayna, but there was a hint of a question that burned in Eva’s eyes that suggested she wasn’t quite certain, and that worried Jayna.
“If you aren’t able to—”
“I’m not going to stay and hide,” Eva said.
The Guild and the others with Rayna began to make their way out, hurrying head of them.
Jayna and Eva followed.
What did she know now?
Only that there was some dark sorcerer in the city, who had been in the city from the very beginning. If Agnew was actually Dorian, could he be one of the twelve followers of Sarenoth?
Her power might not be strong enough for defeating him, if that was the case.
She tried to activate the dragon stone ring, hoping Ceran would know she needed his help. She wasn’t sure if he did.
Jayna reached the top of the stairs and found that an explosion had ripped the building free. The tavern that had been here was now completely gone.
She looked over to Eva. “We need to finish this, then we need to figure out what we can about your true nature. Will you do this?”
Eva nodded slowly. “I’m with you.”
“Good. I don’t know if I can do it without you.”
Another explosion thundered. There was a certain regularity to them, and as they made their way around the city, she thought she understood why.
She had seen enchantments of a massive scale before and knew they existed. Rosal’s family home had one. If the intention was to destroy the great enchantment, then in order to do it, they would need to destroy parts of the city that formed an enchantment protecting it.