Chapter Thirteen #2
Before long, he turned north on the road Alenia had directed him to take, an unpaved, hard-beaten track heading upward in the direction of Mount Karcheus’s distant snowcap.
Low stone walls lined sections of the road, fencing off unkempt farms and cottages.
Olive groves grew thick and gnarled, with some of the most ancient trees appearing centuries and even thousands of years old.
Rows of grapevines rippled over the surrounding slopes and terraces, but many appeared withered and barren.
Donan met few Askari along the way, and those he did encounter avoided meeting his gaze, friendly as he tried to make himself appear.
A few of them even stepped off the road a fair distance from him, waiting until he had passed before resuming their own journey.
At such times, Donan recalled what Adreona had told him about the people of Skovos and chose not to take offense.
Toward midday, he spotted a large cedar tree and decided to seek shelter from the sun beneath it, where the air felt heavy with the wood’s fragrance. He ate a little of the food he had purchased in Temis the day before, then he pulled out the journal.
He had determined that the author of the book wrote it using coded text, rather than a known language, which meant the journal required deciphering instead of translation.
Donan had read coded volumes in a Horadric library utilizing their accompanying ciphers, but he had never broken a novel code himself.
The process would take time, and although the journal still felt like an object of importance, he was aware that it might not end up containing anything of interest. It was the challenge that excited him, more than anything else.
He had thus far been looking only for patterns, letting his eyes roam the pages while keeping his thoughts pliable, simply letting the arrangement of symbols suggest possibilities.
If it was written according to a code where each single symbol corresponded to one he knew, then word length would be consistent, and frequently used words would appear more regularly.
Of course, that rested on the assumption that he knew the author’s original language to begin with, which was not guaranteed.
He wished there had been time for Tyrael to examine it more closely, since he possessed a vastly greater knowledge of such things than Donan.
Perhaps when they had accomplished their purpose in Skovos, they could look at it together.
With a sigh, Donan put the book away and resumed his trek.
The road rose and fell with the rolling foothills surrounding Mount Karcheus, and there in the hinterlands he noticed more overt signs of previous violence and destruction.
The doors of some cottages hung in splinters from their rusted hinges, and the scorched remains of farm buildings moldered.
In the pastures and pens, the scattered bones of sheep, goats, and other animals lay stripped and sunbaked.
Donan had run out of water by the time evening approached, and the back of his neck felt broiled.
The mountain appeared nearer than at the beginning of his climb, but its steepest slopes still lay several leagues away.
He had begun to scan his immediate surroundings for a sheltered place to stop for the night, preferably out of sight from the road, when he noticed a stone structure peeking over the next rise.
Upon reaching it, he discovered what could only have been the shrine the innkeeper had mentioned.
The building was a towering rotunda set against the base of a solid rock escarpment, its domed roof clad in slate shingles cut in the shape of reptilian scales.
The outer stonework had been chiseled to resemble the stacked coils of a serpent, with its head and gaping mouth forming the entrance to the shrine’s interior.
Donan approached the doorway but stopped himself before going inside, feeling vaguely apprehensive.
He almost turned away, but suddenly a bent old woman stood before him, draped in layers of fine muslin robes.
Beneath her headdress, a veil covered most of her face, but the skin around her eyes appeared wrinkled and ancient.
She seemed to emanate an uncanny presence that Donan found both frightening and intriguing.
She fit the description he had read of the seers, which claimed that to gain the gift of foresight, initiates sacrificed parts of their own bodies.
He wondered what kind of disfigurement lay concealed beneath the woman’s shroud.
“I am the Keeper of the Fang,” she said, her voice creaking like aged leather and somewhat muffled by her veil. “I bid you welcome.”
Donan bowed his head. “Thank you.”
“You have come seeking your path?”
“I seek the seers,” Donan said.
“You have found one. Come.” She waved him toward her and went back inside the rotunda.
Donan took one last look at his surroundings. From somewhere nearby, he heard the evening churring of a nightjar, but he detected no sign of any other person near the shrine.
Inside the rotunda, he found a clean dwelling lit by oil lamps.
Heavy chairs of olive wood surrounded an altar hewn from marble, on which sat a stack of bowls and a mortar and pestle.
A wooden screen offered privacy for a part of the chamber, around which Donan could see the corner of a bed.
Bundles of dried flowers, herbs, and mushrooms festooned the rim where the walls met the dome overhead.
Ghostly images could be seen across the ceiling, but the paint had flaked and faded away until little remained but faint vestiges.
A spring-fed fountain gurgled into a pool on the far side of the chamber, set into the wall below a mosaic depicting the all-seeing eye.
Next to it, an iron door appeared to lead deeper into the mountain.
The woman grunted as she eased herself into one of the chairs. “Would you like to begin?” she asked.
Donan stood where he was. “Begin what?”
“Your path. Every soul has one. If you would know the future, you must first understand your past.”
“Forgive me,” he said, “I didn’t actually come here seeking divination.”
She tipped her head a little. “Then why have you come?”
“I am…a scholar,” he said. “I’m searching for a group of my colleagues. They came to Skovos some years ago.”
“Scholars, you say?”
“Yes. It is possible they made contact with the seers. They may have even spoken with your queen.”
“If you wish to stand before our queen and speak with her, you need only walk the path before you.”
Donan sat down in the chair opposite her. “Perhaps my associates came to this shrine. They would have been led by a woman named Sho-Ren. She was a mage from Xiansai. Do you remember her?”
“Alas, I do not,” she said. “But I am young, and I have not been serving as the Keeper of the Fang for very long.”
“Young?” Donan said before checking his surprise. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“I take no offense,” the seer said. “I would guess I am not much older than you.”
“But—”
“Our gift of foresight is received by exchange of our own vitality. Our lives and our bodies become sacred offerings.”
Despite Donan’s desire to be respectful of her, he now felt a powerful curiosity to see beneath her shroud, which he did his best to suppress. “Would I be able to speak with the Keeper who served before you?”
“I am afraid her eyes are shut.”
Donan assumed that phrase to mean the previous seer had died. “Then I suppose I must speak with your queen, if I may. And that means I must walk a path?”
She inclined her head in agreement.
“Your journey begins here, at the mouth of the serpent, and it ends in the belly. It will not be easy for you.”
Donan assumed the path involved more than simply walking a road like the one that had brought him to the shrine. “What must I do?” he asked.
She folded her hands in her lap. “You must be bitten and swallowed by the serpent.”
“That sounds…uncomfortable.”
“For many,” she said, “the process is unbearable.”
“Then what happens?”
“The serpent will show you your past.” Donan had always preferred to leave the ground behind him undisturbed; he could do nothing to change the past, and therefore it served no purpose to revisit and dwell on it.
“Have you walked this path?” he asked.
“I have not. Initiate seers make a different pilgrimage.”
Donan looked toward the exit, out into the twilight, and contemplated leaving the shrine.
After all, he had no evidence the previous Horadrim had come this way.
He had no confirmation they had even set foot on Philios.
He wondered if time wasted on this mysterious path would be better spent searching elsewhere, but even as he considered that notion, he recognized it as an expression of his fear, not his intuition.
Tyrael had agreed with this course, which meant that Donan would be wise to see it through.
“Let us begin,” he said.