The Keeper says she's cured him. Idris is on his feet, sure, but he doesn't feel cured. The world spins, slow and heavy, sunlight prickling against his skin. His hands are trembling, and he keeps them at his side when he speaks to the Keeper, hoping she doesn't notice.
If she notices, she doesn't comment on it. Maybe she's uncomfortable thinking her enchantments failed, or maybe she really doesn't realize that he's about as cured as a leper after a nap, but it doesn't matter.
The hunters haven't found Tamlen.
Idris can't stay still. He veers from aravel to aravel, methodically rifling through crates and bushes. Health poultice: Tamlen may need this, leather gloves: Tamlen may like this, a scroll: Tamlen definitely likes those, he will want to read about the fall of Arlathan so he can bore Idris with it later. Idris will listen to all of his mind-numbing stories. Later.
He stops to pluck the leaves off a familiar herb. Elfroot: ground into a paste and mixed with deep mushrooms and the right agents, it will serve to heal his lethallin's injuries. Flasks tinkle together in his pack. He is carrying about twelve knives for no reason except that he wants to be extremely armed, and half again as many scrolls because Tamlen will like them, Tamlen will want to be read to when he is recovering, and Idris will not have it said that he slighted his lethallin's wishes in a time of need. Finally Idris straightens and goes to seek Merrill.
There is an indistinct humming in his ears, and through it, he hears about half of the words that are spoken to him — enough to know what he needs to know. The mirror, the cave, a shem. Get Tamlen. Got it. Somehow Fenarel has added himself to the expedition. If Merrill has a problem with it, Idris doesn't notice or care. Time to go. Must leave.
Like an arrow flying towards its target, his whole body thrums with the need to return to the cave — the source of the vague song that drums relentlessly in his skull.
His head wants to split apart. Idris presses a hand to his hair, and his hand comes away wet with sweat. He feels the look Fenarel and Merrill pass between them as he wipes his hand off on his armor.
When the twisted creatures charge them on the way to the cave, Idris for the first time since waking feels whole and hale. His longswords sing their way out of their sheaths, spill a whole shining swath of blood across the forest floor. The fight takes seconds, and Idris grins his way through it. Merrill looks sick and horrified, Fenarel little better, the tiny muscles of his face twitching beneath his vallaslin; through a wavering gaze, Idris observes this with interest, sheathing his swords.
Merrill murmurs something in a tone of concern that instantly wipes the grin off Idris's face. He waves her off through clenched teeth and plunges deeper into the forest. The ruins sprout around them, broken pillars like sagging daisy heads in a blighted field.
Merrill keeps talking as they descend underground, and Idris's head is throbbing to distraction. The only thing he hears is about Tamlen, and it is infuriating. Leave his body unburied? They aren't going to find his body. They are going to find him. Idris's furious glare stills the words in her blathering mouth. More twisted creatures spring from the sour song of the ruins, twisted notes Idris can almost see shimmering in the air. He catches their necks with his blades, wriggles one sword in the gristle of one's spine till it cracks.
He and Tamlen will toss the heads around and laugh. Later.
Idris kicks open the heavy door to the room with the mirror, one hand already in his pack for the health poultice in case his lethallin needs it after having slain everything with a pulse. He expects to see Tamlen turn to him with a smirk, you're getting slow in your old age, Idris, I could have vallaslined my balls in all the time you wasted dawdling , but instead there is a shemlen, tall and broad, glittering like six feet of silver tinsel.
The dull song in his head shrieks to a crescendo. Idris's hands fist at his sides with the effort of not staggering beneath its weight. The shem looks familiar, a bleary, nightmarish memory, a low deep voice, I am sorry through a wracking agony that burns in every single vein. Merrill is appalled by Idris's rudeness, and Fenarel radiates awkward discomfort, but Idris cannot care less, and the shem seems perfectly unruffled.
"We are looking for our brother Tamlen," Idris says firmly. The shem's lips move, but all Idris understands is that the mirror made Tamlen sick. The song surges in his head, and Idris keeps his back perfectly tall and straight, imagines his boots are roots keeping him firmly connected to the ground, resists the urge to sway with the haunting melody. Destroy, he hears faintly. "Then we should destroy it," he hears himself say, wedding the words to his will. Then we will destroy...
The shem turns, and with a flash of steel the mirror shatters. The clatter of falling glass hides Idris's choked inhalation, and bile rises in his throat, sharp and acrid at the back of his mouth. The shem turns back to the assembled party, and his bottomless eyes are serious on Idris as he explains that Idris is still sick. Idris isn't sure what he says, but he manages some semblance of a response that doesn't antagonize Merrill or offend the inscrutable human thing.
When the man suggests they leave, though, Idris comes close to drawing his blades.
Fenarel's hand on his shoulder keeps Idris from doing anything other than stepping forward as he shouts, "I'm not leaving until I find him!" Creators damn the bloody shemlen race, to whom hearth and home, kith and clan mean nothing . The song roars in his ears with a vengeance: Destroy. Destroy. It is magnificent.
The shem speaks slowly and clearly: "There is nothing... tainted for three days now, unaided..." But Idris can scarcely hear him. Brow furrowed, he shakes his head, as much to shake off the intrusive song as the human's words. He chokes out something through a tongue that seems thick in his mouth, and the sorrow in the human's eyes incenses him. He turns his back and leaves the room, stumbling over the body of one of the twisted creatures.
Fenarel catches his elbow without speaking, steadying him. Idris flinches at the touch. If Fenarel or Merrill say aught else, Idris cannot hear them at all. He pushes aside dirt and roots and rocks until his knees hurt and his hands are black with mud, sifts through skeletons of bandits and treasure-seekers long dead, coughs on the dust he raises. Kicks aside corpses. Lifts old carved tiles. He rips down vines and spider-webs, shoves statues to the floor where they crack or fall apart. Tamlen could be anywhere, hidden, hurt. Needing his lethallin. Idris will not give in to the shem's repulsive suggestion that he abandon his sick clanmate to his fate.
And the song is in every stone. The song is threaded through every strand of spider silk, vibrates in the rust on old chests, hums in warped wood, swirls with the dust motes. Fenarel and Merrill make noises behind him, doubtful noises the longer time passes without any sign of Tamlen, "we should go back," infuriating sounds. His strength is beginning to fail him as grief overtakes him the way moss overtakes a stone, the way the song has overtaken this fallen temple's mysteries.
There are wooden beams set into the floor of one large room, some forgotten traveler's attempt at reinforcing the structure's crumbling architecture. Idris falls to his knees and digs his fingers into one of the beams, intending to rip it out so that he can descend further in case Tamlen has been dragged there. But a cramp seizes his gut like a toy in an ogre's hand and Idris convulses there on the ground, retching until a wash of blood and bile comes pouring out of him, dripping between the beams into an endless, singing underground. He can scarcely take a breath without gagging, wrapping his arms around the cramps in his abdomen, his forehead pressed against the dirty floor.
Fenarel drags him to his feet once he has retched himself empty, supporting all his weight as Idris shivers. The song is mocking. Destroy. Tamlen is beyond his reach. Destroy. Tamlen is destroyed, and Idris's whole being longs to follow him. To follow him down. Down. The earth will embrace them. Later. Down.
When Idris raises his eyes, Merrill's staff is pointed at him. He falls into a sea of gray and floats there gently, knowing nothing for a merciful time.