James Huckaby…

Pride came to him on the evening of the sixth day. Ravel had awoke on the foresting bed of his southern refuge. Like his hiding place to the north he had chosen a well wooded outcropping on the western side of a foothill of the mountains. In reality it was a smaller mountain itself but compared to the Sabanes’ treacherous crags it was miniscule.

“You will not be dissuaded then.” Pride’s musical voice was a tenor now, a sign Ravel took to mean he had not been resting these past days.

“You have known my mind since I set out. I’m surprised you didn’t know prior to our arrival in Swardlock.”

“It was closed to us. You know we can not delve you. We can only listen to what you say to us. Only your initial lack of control allowed us to know so well in the beginning.” There was a touch of sadness in that.

“I knew this. Da’ros would have tried to prevent my return if you had told him of my plans. Either that or tried to come with me. He has wandered too long. The others, the others needed the succor of Swardlock. They had suffered too much to lay yet another burden on them.”

“What of their minds? They are able to decide whether they are able to aid you. Birnar served you as well as Da’ros on the passage west. Surely his knowledge of the keep would have aided you.”

“I would preserve them from this. Sarnon’s jackals may take me before I even reach him. For all my preparations I may not be able to elude them before I can kill him.”

“And after that? I assume you have plans for some sort of escape?”

“That may or may not come. Only Sarnon’s death matters. That is enough.”

“We can aid you, Ravel. We have revisited this area, knowing you were intent on it. The loss of the brethren here made us avoid it for a season.” Ravel know that season had spanned a decade, or longer, but he was acutely aware of the vagueness with which the Elil’yos conceive time. Their ability to hold knowledge of past still astounded him, but the placement of events past recent days seemed to placed in a few catgories. “A season” could span from months to a century. “The past” stretched into millennia. A punctuation mark in their memory was “The Bleeding” preceded by the “Lonely Time” and the halcyon days they dreamed of as only “The Beginning”. Those were the eons they spend in companionship to the beings human named the Co’atil. When they spoke of themselves it was always “The Brethren” and of the Co’atil “Out People”.

“We are not united against your goals but we are united in one thing: preserving your life. At risk to ourselves, some of us have scoured the outside of the keep and the mountain it inhabits. Knowledge that this sorcerer and his spawn could detect and harm us prevented the exploration of the interior, but you have a more than basic familiarity with the insides of the keep from the consumption of our enemies. Without your experience with Sarnon we would have no knowledge of the ease with which he and his Jackals could detect us. For this we thank you.

“As I said I am among those who wish to aid you. I offer you the knowledge we have gleaned in recent days, but there is a price this once for this knowledge: You must make an Oath of the Mark, a laying of a geas.”

The last word was in a language he did not recognize. “A laying of a what? What nonsense are you speaking of now?”

“In your people’s stories of their Beginning, a shaman was able to bind a warrior to an obligation by laying a geas upon them. The warrior would be unable to sway from his obligation without suffering dire consequences. This Oath of the Mark is comparable to this geas of old.” Ravel knew Pride spoke of traditions older than the world he stood on. The Elil’yos had gleaned as much diverse knowledge as they possibly could from their human companions during the Bleeding. He was unsure if The Lonely Time had left them voracious for knowledge or if they had been as curious in their Beginning as well. It was easy to recall their scouring of knowledge from him as well for they had been unable to hear the voices of the humans of this quarantined world until him. It was like watching a play from the back of the Highfalls squares and not catching the players’ lines.

“We require that you attempt to leave the Keep alive if is within your power. Da’ros, Birnar and the others you opened to us are unable to pass on the opening to others. Without you our ability to commune with Your People will be short-lived. We desire this to be otherwise. We have longed for companionship for eons, we have longed to be useful since the Bleeding. Your life must take precedent.”

“Surely you could find the trigger in them the way you taught me the triggers of night sight, the way you sussed out the trigger for healing from… from Adjar.” He stumbled over that last. He had almost called Adjar “my demon”, it was a possessive that came to his mind uncomfortably often since the exodus to Swardlock.

“We were able to observe the operation of those triggers. Those were on the surface. Those were intentions of the Mark. This change is deeper. We must study it more.”

Impatiently Ravel decided to agree. “Very well. I shall attempt to preserve my life. Now show me what more you know of the keep. Show me what you have found.”

“No. We must have the geas. This too is a trigger. A method of ensuring a Markholder will remain steadfast. It will only hold sway for a matter of weeks, but it is binding.”

“How binding? Surely it will not steal my will away from me? You can not be serious that such a thing is possible!”

“You have seen the sorcerer’s Jackals. He is not the first to bind such to his will. Their use is coerced though and much more extreme. In the Bleeding when the Mark was shaped it was shaped for a purpose. You have had some idea of this. I am surprised you have not realized this. In this case the purpose was to hold a person faithful beyond his normal strength of will. If a person was to keep a secret under duress, that secret would be kept. It forces focus, a kind of mania when the will weakens.”

Mist settled on the Sabanes mountains when Ravel reached the area he had chosen to begin his preparations. His journey had taken half the time to return as it had to reach Swardlock and his supplies had dwindled to a mere few days rations. His pace across the plains had left no time to supplement his meals with game, resting only for short bursts and trusting the stamina of his body and the Mark. It was simpler though as the scarcity of their supplies during his exodus with those he freed had demanded more foraging and hunting. On his departure from the city though, he had raided a goodly store of victuals.

Adjar had been relentless in his thrusts against his cage that held him in Ravel’s mind, at times forcing his rest earlier than he would wish, but he would not submit to the being and he was aware that weariness would weaken his mental defenses as well as his physical ones.

The demon lay silent though except for those assaults against the bonds Ravel wished he knew how break. No pleading or bargaining for favors came from the being that had been his hallmark of their early entanglement. Ravel realized that the demon had been silent since the debacle with Jorsec in the sorcerer’s pens.

Ravel worried that the consumption of those demons in the bowels of the sorcerer’s fortress had strengthened his own prisoner. It occurred to him as well that Adjar might consider him to be the prisoner, but it mattered little to his current goals. Dealing with him could wait. Sarnon was the only thing that mattered him now and recompense for the wrongs done.

The Elilyos were silent now, too. Well for the most part. They had argued with him the first few days of into his escape. That is how he thought of it. The priests of Swardlock would not have permitted him to leave willingly. He was an anomaly they would not permit to evade study. But his path was already set, set the moment his walked into the daylight not a day’s walk from this very wood. The sorcerer would pay: Pay for his actions and Ravel’s actions in escaping him.

Pride took the longest to drift off. The Elil had led him for the first weeks on the correct path, attempting to dissuade him the entire way while navigating to the point which he could pick out the landmarks he had noted on his departure from the Sabanes range. Finally it seemed the others had convinced Pride to leave him be and that he was not one worthy of conversation anymore.

He could still see the glow of the spirits circling the trees behind and around him and hear them whispering just out of earshot. Every now and then he caught a scrap of conversation but the words “foolish” and “stubborn” seemed to dominate those exchanges. The slight whisper continued through his entire journey, not the compelling beckoning that brought him to them in the desert. It was a conspiratorial whispering that left worrying about the loss of his allies. It was not as though they could aid him where he was going anyway, not with the sorcerer’s Jackal warriors of the ability to sense and destroy them.

The tricks of his Mark had given him the stamina to travel night and day for the past weeks to reach the mountain he had marked so assiduously in his memory during his departure. The nearly vertical north face with the indention one hundred paces from the top and the south face the showed a descending stair of rock ending in a graceful slope was as clear to him when it came into sight as it was when he had begun to set it in his mind. He referred to it as the Keep Peak despite hearing its real name given by the Warden of the Lock. He hadn’t need the other landmarks he had marked at all. The Triplets to the south he had named them rose twice as tall as the Keep Peak, but they were diminished in his mind to mere insect mounds next to it.

The northern peaks were taller then Sarnon’s mountain as well. It was once the guardian of the only pass within six hundred kilometers to the north and the south, a safe-house for those heading west from the dangers of the passes and launching point for the journey into the east, but now the malice it held seemed to pervert the once welcoming hostel.

Despite the haze and fog he immediately began to scout the area for a suitable refuge should things go awry. By his third night in the area he had established a second refuge an equal distance from the passage to the south, taking care to avoid the Jackal scouts. He rested during daylight and used the Mark’s night sight to reconnoiter the in and out of his camps. He refused to set up food snares out of wariness for the patrols as well, but his slower pace and growing familiarity with this area allowed him to gather victuals and game. On the evening of his fifth day he felt his preparations were sufficient for any needed escape. On the morrow, he would find his way to Sarnon’s heart. Only then could he rest.