“The Dead Region…” Kan shivered and asked no more questions.
The grey sky above the Dead Region slowly turned blue, a dark, evening blue where the first stars already twinkled.
Chapter 4. Meeting place
The ruins kept dragging on to the north. The land around them was flat and bare, so the only thing that stood between the travellers and a horizon here was a thin veil of dust raised by the chargas’ paws from the ground.
Kangassk noticed that at some point the ground began to slope in the direction of the Region’s centre. He soon understood why: the ground they walked on was in fact a bottom of a huge crater. The ruins there no longer looked like broken teeth sticking out of the ground, they were just piles of crushed stone and dust scattered along the way and formed a circular rampart by the crater’s centre. To climb it, Vlada and Kan had to dismount from their chargas and go on foot. The view from the top of the rampart was so alien it sent shivers down Kan’s back. In the former centre of the ancient catastrophic explosion stood a huge black cube, perfectly smooth, undamaged, and free from dust. A lonely man sat on the cube, his cloaked head bowed, his shoulders slouched. He leaned his heavily worn staff against one of the cube’s polished black walls. Silvered by the young moon, the staff shone through the night like a fantasy mage’s weapon would.
Vlada approached the man.
“Hello, Sereg,” she sighed. The sadness in her voice was so deep that even Kangassk who had no idea what it was about could feel it too.
“Hello, Vlada,” replied the man. He didn’t sound happy as well.
The man named Sereg removed his hood and stood up. He was so tall he towered above Vlada and Kan like a mountain but his physique didn’t match his height: Sereg was so thin he looked starved. Kan could not guess his age. The stranger’s hair was grey, either with age or with dust, there were dark shadows under his eyes as if he had been running or fighting for a long time. One moment his face seemed young yet but the next moment it didn’t, not after your eyes met his.
Now, when Vlada stood beside this strange man, she looked way older than her young face suggested as well.
Sereg had no sword on him, just the steel bound staff, no doubt as heavy as a solid rock. Kangassk, a smith’s apprentice, knew the very moment he saw that thing that it was no mere walking stick but a weapon as deadly as a sword in the right hands.
“I came through the Chasm,” said Sereg in a hollow voice.
“Why?!” exclaimed Vlada.
“I was in a hurry.” He bowed his head slightly. “Didn’t want to be late.”
Sereg and Vlada sat at the edge of the cube. They paid no attention to Kangassk at all, he just stood there, as still as a statue, his hands resting on the chargas’ necks.
Sereg took a deep breath.
“Vlada,” he said in a grave voice, “it’s not easy for me to say this… At first, after my journal had disappeared I didn’t think much of it. Yes, I put an incineration spell on the journal no thief would survive. But I remembered showing it to Orion and thought that maybe after I had removed the spell back then I just forgot to restore it…”
“What happened, Sereg?” asked Vlada quietly.
Sereg didn’t answer, not with words, at least. Instead, he removed something from his neck and showed it to Vlada. Kangassk could see it too. It was a silver pendant on a long chain, once beautiful, now brutally vandalized as if someone had torn a big jewel out of its delicate pattern.
“No one besides us could have survived touching this,” stated Sereg. “You know why.”
Before Sereg said this, Kangassk had been just angry. Now, he was furious. He didn’t care for the unimportant details, like the fact that those two both were mages, obviously, but he did care about that man bluntly accusing Vlada of theft… His strength boosted by anger, Kan covered the distance between Sereg and himself in one jump.
“How dare you!” he shouted. “I know her! Vlada is honest and brave! She’d never fall so low as to steal some stupid bauble!” The grim silence that followed was like oil poured on the flames to Kan’s anger. “Apologise to her! Now!” he demanded.
Sereg gave the Kuldaganian boy a long, grim look. An expression of subtle mocking cruelty crossed the mage’s young face. The next moment Kan thought that he probably should have ran while he still could. The mage grabbed his staff and, leaning on it, slowly drew himself up to his full height. Kangassk had to crane his head to keep the eye contact, just like little Zanna had to recently. Sereg’s eyes were no longer grey, there were eerie blue fires lurking in them now.
“Be silent, soothsayer,” said Sereg with a distant, cold threat in his voice and a bit of the recent cruel mockery now put into words, “In my North, carrying a soothstone is worth from five to ten years of prison and all that time you’ll be busy felling trees in the bitter cold. Just saying.”
Kangassk flinched away from the mage, grasping at Zanna’s stone. He no longer felt brave or heroic, suddenly very much aware of what being an ordinary guy in a fairy tale feels like.
“Whoa, Sereg, take it easy,” Vlada stepped in. “His bride gave him that stone, he had no idea what it was.”
Sereg threw a suspicious glance and Kan, sniffed contemptuously, flicked the dust off his cloak, and seated himself on the stone beside Vlada again.
“Where did you find this little fool?” he asked with a sneer, his voice still ringing with distant anger.
“In Kuldagan. He insisted on coming with me, didn’t want to let me go into the Burnt Region alone. He is my valiant protector, sort of.”
Sereg glanced again at the startled boy who still stood there grasping at his stone, and gave a little choke of laughter.
“It’s not funny,” said Vlada reproachfully. “Way too many people had mistaken me for a mortal girl and gave their lives trying to save me. Kan had nearly lost his head too.”
“…No, it couldn’t have been you!” said Sereg out of blue and jerked his head up like a man awakened from a bad dream. “You were with him, crossing Kuldagan, when I discovered the theft of Hora Lunaris. This boy would confirm it, I’m sure. And he is right: you would never fall so low. It’s not your style, it’s not you… You know what, I forgive him. I’ll even give him a licence for his soothstone if you want. Just one more thing, Vlada… I know you can’t lie. Tell me, tell me now, looking me right into the eyes, that you didn’t take Lunaris and don’t know where it is.”
“I didn’t take Lunaris and don’t know where it is,” Vlada nodded.
A sudden realization struck Kangassk then, the moment of truth when all the pieces of the puzzle – little oddities, hints, suspicions – suddenly made sense.
Hora Lunaris! The stone that Kan called “stupid bauble” was one of the legendary magic stabilizers. The worldholders made it. Protecting it with a deadly spell was also their doing. “You can’t lie…” Here you go: Vlada the Warrior Who Can’t Lie. “In my North…” – a threat thrown by Sereg the Grey Inquisitor, the northern lord, no one else.
The wonderful world that had always seemed to be so far from everlasting Kuldaganian boredom, now was as close as it could be.
Kan felt dizzy upon realizing who were the two mages in front of him; who was the pretty girl he’d wished to stay with that night in Tammar; who was the morose guy he’d yelled at not a long time ago…
“What now, Sereg?” Kan heard.
The conversation had been going without him for some