Secret of the Giants' Staircase (17 page)

“I make a motion that we go to war against these three Riders, for the safety of our people,” Tomas said. As soon as he finished speaking, he too sat.

“I am the fourth generation from Nolan, son of Hyram,” the elder between Tomas and Barnaby said, his old bones creaking as he stood. “I second the motion. All elders in attendance who support this, stand.”

At first, no one moved. Then one elder stood, reaching to help the man beside him to his feet. Another elder, looking up at them, got a determined look on his face and stood. Soon, all but one of the elders were standing.

“It is enough,” Tomas said, triumph in his voice. “The motion is passed.”

“Tonight, we fight, as our ancestors would not,” Barnaby called. “Tonight, we fight for Lidia!” A cheer rose from the gathered Kin, and the men drew their swords, holding them up in salute.

“We wait for nightfall,” Parvel called, once the noise had died down. “Come back here when the sun sets.”

The assembled men were quick to disperse, leaving the courtyard in different directions. Jesse knew the excitement of exploring the ruins, but he couldn't imagine how excited he would be if he knew his people would be rebuilding them soon.

Only Tomas and Barnaby did not move to join their countrymen.

“Well, I see you haven't lost your gift for moving a crowd,” Tomas said dryly, arms folded as he faced his brother.

“And you're just as set on order and regulations,” Barnaby countered. “What are you doing here, Tomas? Father said—”

“I left after the others,” Tomas said, cutting him off. “I felt it was my duty to join them.” A small smile appeared on his face. “Besides, I missed the bird.”

“Well, you can have her,” Owen piped up. “I certainly don't want her around.” In response, Zora screeched at him.

“Well, what are we going to do for the next few hours?” Jesse asked Owen. “I've had quite enough of exploring this city. I practically know it better than my own hometown.”

Owen started jumping down the steps two at a time. “Let's go to the treasure tree,” he said. “We can try to find something the giants missed.”

Jesse just shook his head. He should have known Owen would suggest something like that. “We'll be back,” he called to Parvel, Silas and Rae. Parvel smiled and waved him on.

“Maybe we'll find the other two silver keys,” Jesse said, following Owen down the steps at a much slower pace.

“Didn't you check your pocket?” Owen asked.

“No,” Jesse said, but his hand immediately went to it. He pulled out his silver key, wrapped in a piece of paper.

“Castor got them out,” Owen said. “In a room full of treasure, burning to the ground, he took time to take three keys out of a lock.”

Jesse unfolded the paper. It was a picture of a compass. The printing at the bottom read, “C is for Compass.” Jesse grinned.
I bet
there's now a page missing from Castor's primary reader
.

Above the drawing, written in Castor's neat writing, was a single word: “Promise.” Jesse turned it over. On the back, Castor had written, “You are not a son of Lidia, but you are a brother.”

Jesse held it out to Owen. “Did you see this?”

He nodded. “I helped him with spelling. We had a lesson on the alphabet. The Westlundish version is a little different than ours.”

Jesse took another look at the compass in the drawing. “Look,” he said, his voice rising in excitement, pointing to its center.

“It's a needle,” Owen said without enthusiasm. “Most compasses have them.”

“No, it's Parvel's golden dial, the one that pointed us to the palace,” Jesse said. “I recognize it. The Lidians must have had a large compass made of gold, and the broken dial was the needle that pointed north.”

“And the compass probably burnt down with the rest of the treasures,” Owen said, pointing. “Right there.”

They had reached the tree, or what was left of the tree. It had fallen into one of the nearby buildings, crushing its roof.
Another rebuilding project for the Kin
, Jesse thought.

Owen scrambled up the fallen trunk, not seeming to care that he was getting ash all over his shirt. “Come on, Jesse,” he called.

Jesse shook his head. “I've had enough climbing, thank you.”

He missed Castor being there to add, “You're welcome.”

Owen emerged a few minutes later, empty handed. “Not even a coin,” he said dismally. “Those giants did a good job.”

“Maybe when the Kin move the tree, they'll find something,” Jesse said.

“But I won't be here then,” Owen pointed out.

“Maybe you will be,” Jesse said. He had been giving it a lot of thought. Now he just had to explain to Owen. “You could stay here, you know—you, Nero and Talia. It would be safer than anywhere else in Amarias. Once you join the Youth Guard, you're a marked man for the rest of your life.”

“But I don't think the Kin, or the Lidians, or whatever I'm supposed to call them really want us here,” Owen said. “They don't seem to like outsiders.”

Jesse shrugged. “Some do, some don't, just like any other group of people. But Barnaby could convince them, I'm sure. It would be a nice place to live.”

Owen just shrugged. “But what about my family?” Suddenly, he looked small again, and Jesse wondered what would make an eleven-year-old boy leave home to join the Youth Guard.

Jesse sighed. “That's the question all of us asked when we found out the truth.” With the king trying to kill them, no place was safe, not even home—not when they could be bringing danger to others. Youth Guard members, the ones who survived, were destined to be wanderers like the Kin.

But now the Kin have found a place to call home
, Jesse thought.
Maybe we can someday too
.

“And you're not going to stay here, are you?” Owen asked.

“I don't think so,” Jesse said. He had seen Silas looking through the Forbidden Book, probably deciding where they would go next. As long as there were Guard members still alive, still in need of help, they would be on the move.

“Can I come with you?” Owen asked.

“No,” Jesse said. For some reason, he was sure that was the right answer. He and his squad had faced death several times in the past month, and they would again. Once, he had been confident they could survive anything. Now, he realized that overconfidence was just another form of pride. They were playing a dangerous game, defying the Riders. He wanted to protect Owen from that.

“Will you ever come back?” Owen pressed.

How could Jesse answer that? The paper in his hand reminded him that promises, even ones made to give hope to an eleven-year-old, were not to be made lightly.

“I don't know,” he finally said. “I don't know where I'll be tomorrow, or what will happen to me. But if I can, I'll find a way to get you back home to your family, even if I have to fight the entire kingdom to do it.”

He didn't know where the words came from. From God, maybe, because all Jesse had been concerned about for the past month was living another day. He hadn't the time to think about what might happen next, what they would do after they had exhausted the list of names in the Forbidden Book.

Could we really ignore all the injustice we've seen and go back to a normal life?
Jesse knew the answer was no. He and his squad would not quietly disappear into the pages of history, like the Lidians, never to be heard of again. They would not be among the Vanished. For as long as they could, they would fight.

Owen was still looking up at him, waiting. “And I'll never forget you,” Jesse added. “I promise.”

“Because we're brothers, right?” Owen asked, scrambling down from the tree to stand beside him. “Castor said so.”

Jesse nodded. “Yes. Because we're brothers.”

The nightmares had come back.

Demetri was running, running toward the camp.
Too late, too late, too late
, his pulse shouted with every step. He could see the soldiers moving in the dark. They would kill Desma, Uric and Benjamin in their sleep. And it was his fault.

He stumbled down the hill into the tents. There were shouts, torches, the smell of smoke, chaos and noise and the clang of metal against metal. Everything was a blur.

“Stop!” his hoarse voice shouted. “I didn't mean to do it! Stop!” He stumbled forward blindly, panic numbing him. “For God's sake, stop!”

But God, if He were listening, did nothing to stop the attack.

“Run!” someone shouted. A woman's voice. Desma?

Again, “Run, Demetri!”

Demetri? Desma would have called him Justis. Even in his dreamy haze, Demetri was sure of that. Then, slowly, he realized he was no longer asleep. A boot kicked his side. “Get up! We're being attacked.”

Lillen's voice—Demetri recognized it now. He jerked upright, threw off his blanket. The noises of attack were real and close.
But how had the Four mustered an army?

There was no time to wonder—only to run. Lillen was gone. He took his sword, nothing else. The crossbow would be no good in the close quarters of a surprise attack.

Once he was outside the tent, Ward ran past him. “Do not fight,” he ordered. “Run.”

Demetri was not used to running. It was cowardly.

But one look at the force descending on the camp changed his mind. There were dozens of them, at least, rushing toward them with torches and swords. Somewhere, a horn sounded, calling the army of the Four into battle.

He ran.

It was still dark, and therefore hard for Demetri to find solid footing. Lillen, however, didn't seem concerned about falling into a pit. She ran hard and strong, and Demetri and Ward tried to follow in her footsteps.

The noise behind them told Demetri they were being followed. He tightened his grip on his sword and scanned the area for a good defensive position. There was none.

“They have the two Youth Guard hostages,” Lillen called back, between gasps of breaths. “They will not follow us far.”

Lillen was right. Once they had gone a distance into the swamps, their pursuers pulled back, letting them go.
A wise choice
. It would be foolish to chase them into the swamps. Three might avoid the tar pits and quicksand; an entire army would not.

Still, they kept running until Demetri was sure his side would split open. “Far enough,” Lillen said, leaning against a tree. “They will not come here.”

“Three Riders running from their victims,” Ward said, sounding disgusted. Of all of them, he seemed the least tired, barely breathing heavily. He clutched his arm, and Demetri noticed for the first time a red stain seeping through his shirt.

For such a slight man
, Demetri realized,
he is strong in his own way
.

Demetri asked the question that had been on his mind all the time they ran. “Who was on watch? Who guarded the hostages at the time of the attack?” He knew there was an accusation in his tone, and he didn't bother to hide it.

“I was coming to relieve Lillen,” Ward said. “They picked the perfect moment, when our guard was down. Somehow, they knew our schedule exactly.” Ward shook his head. “I don't understand it.”

He ripped off a piece of cloth from the bottom of his cloak and began to tie it around his wound.

“I tell you, there was someone watching us last night,” Lillen insisted, steel in her voice. “A spy. We should have killed the hostages then as I suggested, instead of waiting to be attacked.”

Demetri had been the one to block her order to kill the two hostages. It was too soon, he'd said. They could fight off the Four when they came to rescue the hostages.

He had been wrong…again.

“But you didn't fight?” Demetri demanded. Lillen, at least, seemed eager to shed blood.

“I fight to win,” Lillen said. “We could not win, not against so many.”

It was true, Demetri knew, but, all the same, he was not eager to hear the verdict. “I would have taken at least one.”

“You were dead asleep in your tent when they attacked,” Ward shot back. “If not for us, you would have been slaughtered.”

“Peace,” Lillen said. “No one is to blame. The Four are even stronger than we thought. They have awakened the Kin of Lidia, who have long been passive wanderers. It is not good for us—for Amarias—that they have been united again.”

“The Four will leave the swamps,” Ward said. “We will as well.” He began to walk, and though Demetri had lost his own sense of direction days before, he followed him.

“And where will they go?” Demetri demanded of Lillen this time. When it came to things that had not yet happened, the priestess was the one to ask.

She hesitated. Demetri did not like that hesitation. Lillen was always confident, often too confident. “One of two places.”

“And those places are?”

“The ports of District One, outside the capital,” she said, “or the battlegrounds of the War of the Northern Waste. Those are the last-known locations of the only surviving Youth Guard squads.”

Demetri groaned, a map of the kingdom appearing in his mind, every detail in place just as he had memorized it. “Those are on opposite sides of the kingdom!”

“I will ask for a vision of where they are going,” Lillen said. “We travel quickly. We will get there before them.”

“And what if there is no vision?” Demetri challenged. “Tell me, Lillen, did you see a vision of our attack tonight? Did you foresee losing our two hostages and fleeing from the Four we were sent to destroy?”

“I can only see what the Great One wishes me to see,” Lillen snapped. Her eyes seemed to stab at him like daggers, and Demetri felt the medallion grow cold against his chest, a cold that somehow burned him. He remembered suddenly why he had been afraid of the slender, pale woman.

“In a way he is right, Lillen,” Ward said smoothly. “For whatever reason, the Great One seems to have left this mission largely to us, without his supernatural insights. As you have said before, they are protected.”

“Yes,” Lillen said, though it came out more as a hiss. “The Enemy is strong in them, and getting stronger every day. Soon, they will all be His.”

“Not if we destroy them first,” Ward said, and his tone seemed to soothe her somehow.

“But we don't know where we're going,” Demetri reminded them. “What if we pick one location and are wrong? It would take weeks to find them again, if we ever did.”

“We only have to be in one place, right or wrong,” Ward said, a smug smile appearing on his face. “We travel to District One. There we can report to the Rider Council and wait for the Four.”

“And if they go instead to the Northern Waste?” Demetri challenged.

“Never fear, Captain,” Ward said lightly. “If they go to rescue the squad on the front, I know exactly where they will be and to whom they will go. The Riders have many contacts, including several on the battlefields. I will send a message at once. If they arrive at the Northern Waste, they will not be among friends.”

“Yes,” Lillen said, nodding. “I know of whom you speak. One man in particular will know how to bring down the Four.”

“The way we've been trying to bring them down?” Demetri asked. “We have not gotten good results, if you recall, Lillen.”

She turned her merciless eyes on him again, and he couldn't meet them. “If these are the Four of the prophecy, they will not be destroyed with mighty force or cunning traps,” Lillen said. “Long have I known this.”

That was too much for Demetri. “Then why are we here? If you're right, there is nothing more we can do.”

Lillen didn't appear to be disturbed in the least by his outburst. “But there is,” she said. “They can bring
each other
down. I, or the Rider of whom Ward speaks, can force them to do this.”

“Yes,” Ward said, nodding thoughtfully. “It will be more difficult, of course, but far more rewarding. No matter which way they go, they go to their deaths—by the hands of their own squad members.”

The plan didn't seem plausible to Demetri. He had seen nothing but the deepest loyalty from the Four. They seemed willing to give their lives for each other. Their actions were foolish, of course, but he could remember a time when he would have done the same for the few he loved. He doubted Lillen and Ward had such a memory.
And so they underestimate the loyalty of the Four
.

He opened his mouth to say so, then stopped.
They would not listen to me anyway. If we fail, so be it. We fail by their hands, not mine.

“How will we do it?” was all he asked.

“We promise each one of them what they want most,” Lillen said. The smile on her face might have been deeply peaceful, if not for the glint of evil in her eyes. “The price? A betrayal of the other three.”

“Most often, what a person wants most is something that can't be given to him,” Demetri said, feeling a familiar pang deep inside. He briefly saw his mother, then young Parvel, then Desma. Her face lingered longer than the others, and Demetri was sure she was looking straight at him from beyond the grave.

Then her face turned into Lillen's, looking at him with those searching blue eyes. “Perhaps not. But it can be promised to them.”

“A lie, then.”

“I am a daughter of lies,” Lillen said, shrugging. “Promises mean nothing to me.”

“And what would you promise them?” Ward asked. “What could possibly be important enough that they would betray their friends?”

In answer, Lillen began to sing, starting quietly and rising in volume, the eerie notes seeming to hang in the night air before fading away. “Not all who vanish are truly lost. Not all that is missing is gone. Some melt away like the morning frost. Some will return come the dawn.”

Demetri let out a breath and was surprised to realize he hadn't been breathing. There was something about those words…. They seemed to promise him everything he had ever wanted but missed, everyone he had ever loved and lost.

“It is an old, old song,” Lillen said, “sung in different forms by our own since the dawn of time. There are other verses, unknown to the Lidians. We taught them the one that would appeal to them, and I believe it will appeal to our Four as well.”

She continued humming the tune, and Demetri felt everything in him leaning in closer to hear every ancient, beautiful note.

When he looked up again, he was staring at the dead moss of the swamp, alone. He saw movement ahead and hurried to catch up with Lillen and Ward.
Do I really want to travel with them?

He reached inside his shirt and took his Rider medallion off. Even though it was fairly light, Demetri felt like a pressing weight had been taken from his chest. He stared at the surface: the symbol of Amarias inside the broken circle, and around the border, the dragon. The Great One. A wave of doubt swept over him.
What have I done? Who have I become?

Demetri knew he was not as upset as he should be that the Four had escaped. In a way, he was beginning to respect them, but he would not pity them. He had sworn to destroy them, and he would fulfill his vow.

Looking back into the swamp one last time, he thought,
it will be interesting to see what they do next
. He was beginning to realize that he did not want to kill the Four. Perhaps he never had.

The realization startled him so much he put the medallion back on, quickly. Aleric had hinted that the medallion had some kind of power—that much Demetri knew. At times it seemed to cloud his mind, at other times it gave him great strength. Now Demetri wondered if it could sense betrayal.

He shivered and told himself it was because of the wet cold, but he couldn't deny that here in the swamps, he felt more dead than alive. Even the medallion around his neck couldn't distract him from the dull longing that still beat hollowly in his chest.

No, he was not sure if God—who Lillen, Doran and Aleric called “the Enemy”—existed. But, for the first time, he was sure the Great One was real, that there was a power of darkness he had aligned himself with.

If Lillen was to be trusted—in spiritual matters, and Demetri believed she was—this power, this darkness, was angry with him. With his failure. That was why the medallion no longer gave him strength. He was sure of it. Now, every movement was like a struggle against an oppressive fog, thicker than the mist of the swamp. He was already one of the Vanished.

Not all who vanish are truly lost.

The thought came without warning, only this time not in Lillen's soft, chilling alto. Instead, it sounded like a simple straightforward message, like something true—a light through the darkness of the swamp.

He pushed the thought away. He had chosen to be lost when he joined the Riders. Something had been stolen from him then: his soul, perhaps, if he were willing to believe such a thing existed.

And, if his soul was
lost, he despaired of ever getting it back.