“What’s that in the middle of the lake?” Ard asked.
Karigan could not make out the details for it was too distant, but some rock formation stood in the lake’s center. Its shape looked too regular to have been made by nature.
Ealdaen, whose Eletian sight was more keen, spoke angrily in his own tongue. All the Eletians looked incensed.
“What is it?” Karigan asked.
“It is the Evil One,” Lhean said. “A statue of Mornhavon.”
“He thought himself a god,” Ealdaen spat. “The god of all, and he would have known what it meant to our people to place a statue of himself in the pool.”
“What would it mean?” Yates asked, but the Eletians were already moving on, and Lynx took Yates’ arm to lead him away.
Karigan remembered sitting in the library of the Golden Guardian in Selium. Aaron Fiori had sung of Avrath, a Shining Land. He’d believed Avrath to be a spiritual place of the Eletians. Perhaps, if Avrath were like the heavens, the Eletians believed it was reflected in the pool. Whatever the significance of the lake, a statue of Mornhavon planted in its middle clearly wounded them.
She was quickly being left behind again, and not wishing to end up alone with Ard, she made her weary body take a step forward. Then she paused. The fog on the far shore thinned just enough to reveal tall spires rising among the trees. They gleamed dully. Before the clouds layered over them again, they flashed in crystalline brilliance as perhaps they had long, long ago beneath a silver moon. Then the light died, and the towers disappeared in the fog.
Karigan blinked, gooseflesh rising along her arms. Her imagination again? The poison? As she set off after the others, she was certain of one thing: Castle Argenthyne, the legend, lay on the other side of the lake.
Their trail descended in a series of switchbacks, which meant Karigan was never really far from the others even if she lagged behind. Ard had insinuated himself into the middle of the line, making conversation with Solan. There was no sign of the strange behavior he’d exhibited in the boulder field, and she shrugged. She should be more surprised that Blackveil wasn’t making them all behave in strange ways.
It was dark by the time they reached level ground, the wings of oversized bats flapping through the air above their heads.
“We shall camp here for the night,” Graelalea said. “Tomorrow we shall not stop until we reach the grove.”
Karigan sensed the elevated energy in Graelalea, her agitation as camp was set up. Karigan suspected the Eletian wouldn’t have stopped until she reached the grove if it had been just her, but she’d taken into consideration the condition of her companions. It would not do to face whatever awaited them at the grove when totally exhausted.
“What happens when we reach the grove?” Grant demanded. He did not help to set up camp, but just stood in the middle of everything rubbing his arm.
“We shall see what we find,” Graelalea replied.
Karigan knew she ought to be more worried about what the next day would bring, but she was too tired; almost too tired to eat her portion of gruel that Lynx spooned out. And when she finished, she crawled into her tent and fell instantly asleep.
The next morning the path became more level and they crossed the remains of broken roads; the ominous shapes of ruined structures protruded from moss and tangled vegetation. They were nearing the city of Argenthyne and its castle. The fog shifted above the treetops just enough to offer tantalizing views of the castle towers.
The towers remained dull, tarnished, as Karigan had first seen them the previous night. They were not made of silver moonbeams as in the songs and stories, unless silver moonbeams could die. Still, the towers were graceful and without the fog, Karigan imagined, they must have soared into the sky. Delicate arched bridges connected the towers at different levels, reminding her of interlacing tree limbs in a forest.
Argenthyne did not, in its current state, resemble what Karigan had always imagined, but she couldn’t believe she was here, walking into legend. What would her mother think? Perhaps that such a thing was not so far-fetched. After all, she’d possessed a moonstone.
She knew they’d entered the city proper when more ruins appeared around them. It smelled different, too. Not just of the decayed forest, but also of the mustiness of structures long emptied of life. Paving stones had ruptured with the growth of gnarled, sickly trees. Stairs rose to nothingness. A fountain stood in the center of a square fouled by black sludge, and above everything the leaden towers loomed.
Karigan had seen this before as a vision shown to her by Prince Jametari in the waters preserved from Indura Luin, the Mirror of the Moon. The vision had also revealed the contrast of Argenthyne in its glory before Mornhavon’s invasion, before the decay of Blackveil.
Sibilant murmurs made her shiver as though the Eletians who once lived here were just on the other side of a thin veil, as if her own time brushed against that past piece of time. Or maybe it was ghosts. Ghosts, she could handle.
“This place is haunted,” Grant muttered, echoing her thoughts.
“No,” Ealdaen said. “Eletians leave no shades behind. It is only your kind that is too restless in death.”
If that was so, Karigan thought, then she must just be sensing air currents weaving through the towers, the moans of broken buildings. Whatever it was, Argenthyne still had a voice.
Could a whole city be a ghost? They certainly walked its corpse.
They stopped by the fountain. A beautiful figure held a cracked bowl above her head. Or, she’d once been beautiful, but the light stone she’d been carved from was stained, black tears seeming to stream down her face.