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I nodded.
“Damn thing is whispering in my head,” Jord muttered. He glared at the orange pulsing in the remains. A gruesome reminder of what the stone did to the body it possessed.
“Ignore it,” I advised.
“Easier said than done,” was the grumbled reply.
“We can’t just leave it there. I might ignore it, but what of the next idiot who gives it a body?” Daisy neared, her axe over her shoulder.
“Can we smash it?” Jord asked.
“I don’t know. I’m afraid to touch it.” No way would I give it a chance to get inside me.
“Let’s find out,” Daisy said before her hammer came down, breaking it into many pieces.
I tensed, waiting to see if something happened. Daisy and Jord froze too.
Jrijori broke our spell. “Ifrit stones can be broken and, while in pieces, are less dangerous.”
“How do you know?” Daksh asked.
“A really old book that obviously got missed in the purge your kingdom suffered after the cataclysm. It’s in the royal library of Weztroga. I found it by accident.”
“And you just thought to mention this now?”
“At the time, I didn’t know how much of it was true. After all, all knowledge of the Ifrit appears to have been excised from our histories. To me, it sounded more like a story told to children than the truth.”
“I’d like to see that book.” Daksh asked while making it sound also like an order.
“I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Daksh kept eyeing Jrijori. “All this time, you knew what we’d find when we left on our quest.”
The assassin shrugged. “I suspected but couldn’t be sure. Keep in mind, I’ve only ever come across small pieces in my travels, and not easily. The shards tend to discomfit most people.”
“And those fragments, were they dangerous?” Daksh asked. He’d moved close to me, offering me an incline of his head and an outstretched arm of invitation. With the adrenaline of the fight dying down, I welcomed the embrace. His arm, while heavy, held off the shivering.
“Not the ones I’ve encountered. You can sense something in them. But I’ve held those and never been affected nor heard them talking.”
“That you know of,” Qynn said before I could.
Jrijori inclined his head. “True. Perhaps the fact I was in contact with a few is the reason I was led here.”
“If their voice were subtle, we might not even recognize it as trying to influence us,” I added.
“These pieces? Can they be put back together?” Daksh still had questions.
“Maybe?” Jrijori shrugged. “I don’t know, but I would suggest definitely scattering them. So long as they are kept apart, they appear to be more or less harmless.”
“I know a good place for the first piece.” Jord snared a decent-sized chunk in a wet rag. Apparently not taking chances. He waded into the fountain, the water reaching his thighs but not spilling over the stone edge. Close to the middle, he bent over and dropped the shard of orange. It bobbed back up.
He frowned and grabbed it, kneeling down far enough to shove it into the well. It bobbed to the surface.
“It’s too light to sink. You need to force it down,” Keen’s sage advice. He waded to Jord and unslung his short bow. He had only two arrows left, one of them needing fletching. He bound the stone to the arrow before aiming down. A difficult shot since he had to pull hard enough to penetrate water and counter the pressure from below.
The arrow went down, and for a second, we held our breaths… It returned, and our elation was short-lived.
“Let me help.” Jrijori joined them in the fountain and lay his hand on the arrow then the string of the bow. They both held a faint glow after. Weapon magic. That explained a lot about my uncle the assassin.
