It was a sound; a single sound, wordless. And yet it held in it such agony, and such release, as shook the very foundations of Darkhaven. On and on it went, and there was no place in the world to hide from it. The earth shuddered, the floor of the passage grinding and heaving. Tanaros crouched beneath the onslaught of the sound, covering his ears, weeping without knowing why. Stray rocks and pebbles, loosened by the reverberations, showered down upon him.

Although it seemed as though the cry would never end, at last it did.

Tanaros found himself on his feet with no recollection of having risen. Drawing his black sword, he began running.

WITHIN TEN PACES, IT HAPPENED.

There was no warning, no sound; only a sudden dim coolness as the veins of marrow-fire that lit the passages dwindled in brightness and the temperature in the stifling passages plummeted. Elsewhere in the passageways, he could hear his distant madlings uttering sounds of dismay and fear. Somewhere, the horns of the Rivenlost were calling out in wild triumph. Above Darkhaven, the ravens wheeled in sudden terror. Ushahin shivered and pressed onward.

He was halfway to the Chamber of the Font when he heard the cry. It struck him like a blow, piercing him to the core. It was like no sound ever heard before on the face of Urulat, and he knew, with a horrible certainty, what it must portend. Ushahin stood, head bowed as rubble pelted him from above, his branded heart an agony within his hunched torso, arms wrapped around the useless case, and waited it out as another might outwait a storm.

Too late, always too late. The enemy was at the gate. The little weavers had completed their pattern. Haomane’s Prophecy hovered on the verge of fulfillment.

Everything he feared had come full circle.

Almost …

In the silence that followed, Ushahin Dreamspinner stirred his ill-set, aching limbs. Step by painful step, gaining speed as he went, he began to follow the faint echoes of his Lordship’s cry to their source.

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FOUR

ENTERING THE CHAMBER OF THE Font at a dead run, Tanaros halted, brought up short by the sight before him. “No,” he said, uttering the word without thinking, willing it to be true, willing his denial to change what had happened and render it undone. “Ah, my Lord, no!”

It didn’t change. Nothing changed.

Where the Font had burned for century upon century, there was nothing save a ring of scorched stone blocks surrounding an aperture in the floor of the Chamber. It seemed a small opening to have admitted such a gout of marrow-fire. Without the Font, the Chamber was dim-lit, the fading veins of marrow-fire that laced its walls filling it with a vague, subterranean twilight.