enough of its mass to render it useless. But I know nothing about the magic that animates them and bends them to Rhovann’s will. My own arts simply do not deal in necromancy or shadowstuff, and that is precisely what powers the helmed guardians.”
“I don’t suppose we know any necromancers?” Hamil remarked. No one answered, and he gave a small shrug. “Well, in the absence of a magical counter, I’d wager that you could immobilize one of Rhovann’s creatures if you cut it apart. Zombies ignore pain and don’t bleed, but it’s simple enough, if a little messy, to make sure their limbs don’t work anymore. These helmed guardians must have the same sort of mechanical connection of muscle to bone—or whatever they use in place of muscle and bone—that living creatures would have, or they couldn’t move. It’s not like they’re specters or ghosts.”
Ghosts and necromancers … Geran stared into the wine in his goblet, thinking. He found himself remembering the desperate night when Sergen Hulmaster had summoned an army of spectral warriors—servants of the lich Aesperus, the King in Copper—to attack Griffonwatch in a bid to wipe out the rest of the family and seize power. An undead mage of dreadful power, Aesperus had claimed dominion over the barrowfields of the Highfells between Thentia and Hulburg for centuries. Geran had met the lich once on a cold night out in the barrowfields, and Aesperus had recognized him as a Hulmaster. And later on, the lich had used the slain crewmen of the luckless Moonshark to deliver a cryptic warning to Geran about the doom approaching the House of the harmach.
Harmach Grigor said something about Aesperus before he died, he recalled. “An oath to be kept in Rivan’s crypt,” he murmured aloud, frowning into his wine. What had Grigor meant by that?
The others looked at him strangely. “What did you say?” Kara asked.
He looked up, and spoke more clearly. “I think we do know a necromancer. The question is whether or not he’d help us … and at what price.”
ELEVEN
1 Alturiak, the Year of Deep Water Drifting (1480 DR)
For the next few days, Geran worried at the mystery of Grigor Hulmaster’s final words. He’d all but forgotten them in those confusing days as the family had struggled with the questions of how to carry on after Grigor’s death. Immediately after the funeral he’d fixed his mind on his need to avenge the harmach’s murder, focusing all his attention on the deadly dangerous game of threading his way through Hulburg’s streets and shadows without making some error or blundering into his enemies’ hands. And finally he’d been more than a little distracted by his interlude with Nimessa Sokol and the indecipherable yearnings in his own heart as he made his way back home. Now, for the first time in half a month, he found himself looking past the exigencies of the moment toward the confrontation looming ahead … and every time he closed his eyes and tried to envision the reckoning that drew closer each day, he couldn’t shake the nagging sense that Grigor’s words about the King in Copper were important.
Part of the riddle was fairly obvious to Geran; Rivan was the first lord of the Hulmaster line. He’d come to power in Hulburg almost four hundred years earlier, right around the time that Aesperus had ruled over his short-lived kingdom of Thentur. Unfortunately, he had little idea what Grigor had meant about an oath, or any idea of where Rivan’s crypt might lie. Much of old Hulburg had been destroyed by the sackings early in the fourteenth century, and further damaged by the catastrophic emergence of changeland in the form of the Arches or the Spires later in that century. There was an excellent chance that Rivan Hulmaster’s burial place simply didn’t exist anymore, which would seem to be an insuperable obstacle to keeping any oath there, unless it was a clue not intended to be taken literally.
Geran prowled the warm hallways of Lasparhall, he rode over the snow-covered hills that surrounded the manor, he sparred with Kara and Hamil, he debated with Sarth a dozen magical theories about the powers of Rhovann’s construct army and ways the things might be defeated. He even spent a few hours with Sarth at the tower of the mage’s guild in Thentia, paying a handsome fee for the privilege of poring through musty old spellbooks and tomes of arcane lore in the hope of learning more about their foe’s defenses. He