The Keep of Fire by Mark Anthony

Author:Mark Anthony
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307795397
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-07T22:00:00+00:00

42.

The Gray Tower of the Runespeakers was seven centuries old—that much Travis knew from the stories Falken Blackhand had told him. If he shut his eyes, he could still hear the bard telling tales of the three towers that were raised after the fall of Malachor: bastions of learning founded to preserve the knowledge of the Runelords.

However, as he followed after Master Larad, Travis did not need Falken’s tales to remind him that this tower was ancient. The stones themselves bespoke an archaic and alien viewpoint. All around he saw triangular arches, twisted columns, and unsettling curves molded by a lost craft to please eyes long since dimmed with dust. The gray stone itself was smooth and without seam, ledge, or crack. Nothing he had seen on Eldh—certainly not the crude keeps and castles—looked like this place.

Except that wasn’t true, was it? It had been a ruin when Travis had set foot within it, but he had seen these same polished walls, these same queer lines and angles inside the White Tower of the Runebinders. Only the color of the walls had been different there—bone instead of fog. However, the White Tower had fallen centuries ago, its foundation corrupted by the folly of its builders, and the Black Tower had fallen as well. This tower was the last of the three.

Despite Travis’s recent illness, Master Larad set a swift pace. Travis followed down a wide flight of steps that spiraled through the heart of the tower. There was no railing on the inside edge, and in the center of the staircase was a hollow shaft about a dozen feet across. When Travis looked up, he saw twilight filtering through slits in the dome a hundred feet above, adding a tincture of violet to the gray walls.

Every few steps the two men passed a wooden door set into the outside wall. Travis guessed each led to a small, trapezoidal cell like the one he had awakened in, all of them arranged around the staircase like vertically offset wedges from a wheel of gray cheese.

As he descended, Travis’s foot caught the hem of his gray robe, and he stumbled toward the edge of the inner shaft. A hard hand clamped around his arm, pulling him back.

“I would not recommend falling, runelord. Not unless you know how to speak the rune of flying. It is a long way down.”

Travis swallowed hard, eyes round behind his spectacles, and gave the runespeaker a nod. Larad grinned. However, it was not an expression of humor. He turned to continue the descent; Travis frowned as he followed. That was at least the third time now that Larad had called him runelord. But why?

Travis wasn’t certain who the Runelords were or where they had come from. He did know they were the greatest wizards Eldh had ever known, and that they had guarded the Imsari after the three Great Stones were won in the war with the Pale King over a thousand years ago. Then, a few hundred

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