Krawg was hysterical, tearing at the wisps of hair behind his ears and then turning to pound on the gate and call for Auralia.

Tabor Jan drew the knife he'd used for clearing the path in Fraughtenwood and sliced quickly through the arrow at the base of its feathered shaft. "Forgive me," he was saying. "I thought it was Deathweed. I ... oh, forgive me, forgive me."

"For following my orders?" Cal-raven rasped. "Told you ... not to hesitate. You see now ... how worthless I am ... as a king."

The captain reached around to Cal-raven's back and jerked the arrow through. The king choked and blood spewed from his wounds.

"I'm sorry for what I said." Tabor Jan's face was a river of tears. "You're my friend. My king."

"King? No. That's what the world expected me to be. I was born to be something ... else. Forgive me. For all I've cost you."

"Go for Say-ressa!" Tabor Jan shouted at Krawg.

"Will she put all that blood back in him?" Krawg replied in a squeak, and then he collapsed, unconscious.

"I can't leave you," the captain moaned.

"I can leave you," said the king. "And I will if you don't bring Say-ressa." Trembling, Tabor Jan stood. "I wish I'd missed."

"You never do," said Cal-raven. "It's why I trust you." He smiled, resting his cheek on the bloody ground. "Probably ... why Cyndere ... wanted you to stay. Now go."

Tabor Jan obeyed.

Cal-raven, snarling like a wolf full of arrows, crawled toward the black gate. It almost looked like he was swimming. "Krawg," he hissed, shaking the old man.

Krawg, blinking as he awoke, saw the king point toward the goblet that still rested on the abandoned raft. So he rushed to retrieve it. Cal-raven drank it down, then poured some over his wound. "Probably ... too late." He pulled himself to his feet.

"Master," said Krawg, "you won't get far."

"Far ... as I can."

"Command me to go with you."

"Something ... more important," said the king. "If I don't return, do this." With a bloodied hand, he drew a small circle from his pocket. "For Margi and Luci. They'll know what to do." He pressed the Ring of Trust into Krawg's hand. "And this ... this is a gift for Scharr ben Fray." He pulled from his pocket a small grey stone etched with the outline of a footprint.

"What is it?"

"It was sculpted by a child. Long ago, down on the banks of the Throanscall. The beginning ... of a journey."

The king drew the puzzle keys from his pocket, fit them together, and shoved them into the lock.

"Shall I keep the keys?" Krawg asked. "Shall I shut the gate behind you?"

"No. So long as Auralia is on the other side of this gate ... it stays open."

He turned the keys. The gate opened.

30.

THE GREAT ANCESTOR.

ersistent as a bad memory, a beastman leapt from one stone outcropping to another, then dove into the current and paddled along in pursuit of the ale boy's raft.

The creature's roar had startled the boy out of half sleep to find that his white, winged guardian had left him. All he had was his water flask and his green glowstone, which was wedged between two panels of the raft.

The current carried him swiftly, slamming his float against turns he recognized, and eventually pushing him back into the great bowl, the crossing, where they had enjoyed the meal.

He leaned over the edge to visit his reflection. The water was so turbulent, the figure's edges blurred as if forces were streaming through him. It seemed as true a reflection as any.

With no way to steer the raft shoreward and no strength to swim, he watched the stalactites' colorful glow fade as the flow poured him into a different tunnel than he'd traveled through before.

The chase began to feel like a dream outside of time. He clung to the raft's edge with one hand and to the water flask with the other, listening for the wet slap of his pursuer's progress.

He sang to calm himself, to fill himself with breath and release his fears. The voice that echoed back was strange, changed by the journey. The quiet tones he'd sung into the Underkeep's dark were replaced by something bolder, more determined, and tinged with desperation.

How he wished he could surrender his upstream striving through time, float back to those days with Auralia on Deep Lake's pebbled shore. To whisper with her underneath the stars. His loneliness ached more noticeably than any bodily pains, which were constant now.

He let himself drift back even farther to Obsidia Dram, his guardian in the Abascar breweries and the closest thing to a mother he'd known. He'd practice pouring a perfect glass of Har-baron's dark brew and then watch her pour another. As the thick head of foam at the top of the glass thinned, Obsidia held the glass with both hands, her eyes sparkling.

Such strange eyes, Obsidia's. Quick to delight. Slow to darken in anger. And they peered out of a face that was almost masklike, darkly marked, like wood grain.

"Remember," he murmured now, "when you taught me the best routes for rolling barrels out to the harvesters? I liked those days. I liked it when you'd roll me slowly in the barrel. I'd tumble about, knowing you were there outside the barrel and laughing, keeping me from rolling off a cliff. Steering me around a tree. When I laughed, it echoed, laughs like bright leaves tumbling around inside the barrel with me."

There was no reply, of course.

"I thought of that when Jordam hid me inside that old, cold stove. I wished I could hear you through the wall. And I sure wish I could hear you now. I've been underground too long. You told me it wasn't healthy. I need to see the sky." He closed his eyes and tried to imagine it.

He heard the splat of his pursuer landing awkwardly nearby.

"Jordam might help this hungry creature." The raft rocked as the river grew agitated. The water flask sloshed. "Half-full," he said. Battered, scarred, it had not yet broken. "I'd give it to him if I thought he could restrain himself. But I'd best keep it with me. You told me not to give away good stuff to folks who would just gulp it down."

Nevertheless, it hurt to withhold healing from this wretch with its wide, milky eyes and its sagging jaws.

The water surged fast enough to keep him ahead of his pursuer. "If only it were flowing in the opposite direction." The distance he and the others had gained over days of hard rowing he now covered in very little time at all. "Don't suppose I'll ever see them again. I'll be moving through the Core soon. If you can hear me, would you send someone to help me, like you sent that duty officer when I got lost and stuck in the berries?"

A sound rose over the rush of the stream. He had heard it before. A moan from the Cent Regus abyss. An inexplicable misery.

He knew, then, that he was close. Close to the dark lake that had broken his fall.

The long, unspooling groan diminished. The boy lay still. Something had changed. He no longer heard someone following him. He sat up, looked back, and saw the beastman watching him, unwilling to follow him farther.

The raft struck rock. He heard a crack. A piece of it broke loose and spun away, while the old door remained caught on something beneath the surface.

He lay flat, holding on. Then in the green light of the glowstone, he saw a strand of black, muddy shore and a stairway running up through a break in the wall. The stairs were chaotic, as if the ground beneath them had sought to shake them off, bending each stair to a different slant.

He heard a splash and saw the flask begin to sink. He lunged and caught the strap with one finger before the raft dumped him off. He crawled and kicked until his hands and feet felt loose ground and he could drag himself to the shore.

He forced himself onto the stairs. "Climb out of sight. Just a few steps. Then, rest." He could swear that the stairs beneath him shifted, the earth underneath them writhing in discomfort. "That will give you more time to send help."

The stairs were cold, the air oppressive, and the glowstone seemed reluctant to highlight details of the walls. He found himself longing for fire, for the voices he sometimes heard in the flames-his father and mother calling his name, reminding him of their love.

There were no flames. But there were voices. They sounded stale, like age-old cries that had fallen unheard, seeping through the ground, slipping into the earth's own throat where they went on and on and on. Voices in the grotesque Cent Regus speech, distorted and spiteful. Cries of people calling for help until their voices weakened and turned to gasps.

The walls fell away, and he stumbled forward. As he did, the voices were cut short as if a dagger had severed the earth's throat. He had disrupted something. He felt suddenly visible, as if he'd stepped into the circle of a silent vigil.

Slowly he raised the glowstone.

He knew a seat of power when he saw it.

This was a chair made of blackstone, outlined in spikes, and set in a circle of cauldrons like the ornament of a ring. A staff rested against it, and the silver ferrule at its tip glinted in the crystal's glow.

A Seer's been here.

The gurgling cauldrons smoked and steamed. Ladles large as boat oars rested inside them. Bones were strewn all about-large as the ribs of seabulls, small as the frames of hummingbirds, and familiar as those of men and women. Intricate hands. Empty skulls. And the crumpled spirals of children too small to have been born.

A massive stalactite of clay, clad in a nest of intricate fibers, hung from the distant ceiling into the center of the cauldron circle. A pulse like the earth's own heartbeat thrummed from within.

One of the cauldrons erupted, a wave of ooze curling over the lip and splashing on the floor, and a foul stench singed the boy's nostrils. He knew at once that he had found what all the beastmen sought-the materials that mixed to make Essence. It was still a stew, not yet the distillation of pitch that beastmen craved.

He backed away from the circle, too troubled to look. His gaze was drawn to more familiar sights. The chamber was surrounded with gaudy boxes of bones and pillage from the world's richest kingdoms-armor, sculptures, relics, scrolls, game pieces, farglasses, saddles, racks of enormous antlers, chairs, a broken rain canopy. He could see that the debris overrunning the cart positioned to contain it had fallen from a chute that descended through the wall.

There, amid the treasure, he saw the long and pale fingers of an adult's open hand, reaching up through rubble.

He could not move at first. Then he leapt toward the cart and began to pull the treasures away. It was Jaralaine.

"I have the secret water," he whispered. "I can bring you back."

As he studied her, he felt something break open within him, and what resolve he had left began to spill away like sand from a broken hourglass. He began to shake and to weep. They had labored so long together to free the prisoners, to help the beastmen, to keep each other hopeful in the dark.

He took her cold, stiff hand in both of his own, forcing himself past the fear. "I will be your son," he said. "Just like you asked me. Remember? Before you started calling me Raven, you said you'd make me your own, make me heir to Abascar. I don't want to be a prince. But you ... you'd make a good mother. I won't complain."

As he scrabbled at the flask's crumbling cork, Jaralaine moved. At first he thought she might be waking. But no, a Deathweed tendril was coiled about her leg, pulling her away.

A groan shocked him as if the chamber were a drum that had been struck. He looked up at the strange pillar of tangled cords and misshapen clay that hung from the ceiling. What he saw this time brought him to his feet.

Sculpted in the clay he saw a face. A face once human. Distorted, swollen, stretched-two dark cavities where the eyes had been, nostrils like deep cuts, and then the cave of an open mouth.

He looked again, interpreting what he had seen before a different way. This column, this descending mass was not made of stone at all. It was a pulsing, living thing imprisoned in a bundle of Deathweed. No, it was the source of Deathweed. This man, suspended upside down, had evolved beyond the boundaries of human definition, his legs becoming roots thick as tree trunks that ascended, divided, and spread across the ceiling.

And those two feeble roots that reached down to almost touch the floor, those were the limp, elongated remnants of the man's arms, ending in tiny stubs that had once been fingers.

The creature was gasping long, deep lungfuls of air.

"Strength," it said.

"What ...," the boy whispered. "Who are you?" The creature closed and opened his lips like a fish.

The boy's eyes traced the suspended creature's body up to where it frayed into a multitude of limbs that spread and disappeared into the earth. Mosses hanging from those limbs bled the black rain that pooled and sank into cracks in the floor.

"The Curse. It's from you. The feelers, your limbs. The Essence, your blood."

The creature did not respond. It faced him, eyeless.

"The Seers ... they fed you, didn't they? For a long, long time." He looked about at the carts along the wall, loaded with carcasses, bones, faces.

Then he said boldly, with the certainty of solving the riddle, "You're Tammos Raak."

The name echoed in empty space.

The creature's lips closed and opened. Closed and opened.

The ale boy looked at Jaralaine's broken body. "I want you to let her go," he said weakly. "Give her back to me. Please."

The creature's tongue emerged from between its lips, a stump, pale as a piece of ancient firewood.

"You're thirsty. The Seers have been gone for a while."

The boy felt something within him fail. His hope, perhaps. For what he now must do seemed inevitable, as if it had been written down and he could only fulfill it.

And so he made the most laborious journey of his short and troubled life, putting one foot before the other across the poison floor, passing between two cauldrons. He stumbled and nearly dropped the flask.

The creature's lips closed, then unglued from one another again.

The boy reached up.

Tammos Raak's nostrils flared. A wheeze of air rushed up into that wretched body. Then the creature unleashed a storm of sound-a lament, a longing, a thirst.

The boy cowered, ears ringing. He clutched the flask to his chest as if it were the last scrap of his raft floating on a turbulent river. He smells the water. He recognizes it. When silence returned, he stood, reaching up to set the mouth of the flask on the creature's upper lip.

Tammos Raak convulsed and turned, and the flask fell aside.

The room brightened. The boy watched, bewildered, as five blue phantoms swam through the air, curling around the suspended prisoner as if to protect him.

A thick tendril of Deathweed from the shadows above lashed out like a whip, flinging the boy across the chamber. He hit the wall and fell in a heap. The flask dropped, spilling water across the ground.

The boy crawled forward, tipped it upright. "Go ahead," he shouted at the imprisoned giant. "You don't deserve it anyway." Then he crawled back to Jaralaine. Her right arm was still cast out, her left folded across a bundle against her body. He lifted the flask and put the spout to her lips.

Accompanied by a wrathful roar, the Deathweed tendril lashed out again, snatching the flask from the ale boy and casting it like a stone toward the prisoner's own head. It flew deep into Tammos Raak's throat. His lips sealed shut, and his misshapen face crumpled in discomfort as he fought to swallow the flask.

The lips opened and closed. It was gone.

The ale boy collapsed against the treasure pile, his head resting against Jaralaine's cold breast. "That's it then," he whispered. "Served my last drink, and I've got nothing left." His hands gripped the folds of cloth beneath Jaralaine's arm. Something inside him felt broken, sharp-edged, crooked.