The two men and the dog crept ahead, keeping to the shadows of the tunnel wall, edging their way toward the light until Haplo deemed they were close enough to see without being seen, hear without being heard. He raised a warding hand and Alfred bobbed up close beside him, hovering silently in the air. The dog flopped down on the rock floor, keeping one eye on its master and the other on Alfred.
The cavern was filled with people, all of them Sartan. Sartan appear to be human at first glance, with the exception that their hair rarely varies in color. Even among children, the hair is almost always white, shading toward brown at the bottom. Patryn hair coloration is exactly the opposite. Haplo’s hair was brown on top, shading to white at the bottom. Alfred had almost no hair (perhaps the balding was another unconscious attempt at disguise) and was thus not easily recognizable.
Sartan also tended to be taller in height than those of the lesser races. Their magical power and the knowledge of that power gave them extraordinarily beautiful and radiant countenances (Alfred being the exception).
These people were Sartan, beyond doubt. Haplo’s eyes darted swiftly over the crowd. He saw only Sartan, none of the lesser races, no elves, no humans, no dwarves.
But there was something odd about these Sartan, something wrong. The Patryn had met one living Sartan—Alfred. Haplo had seen visions of the Sartan on Pryan. He’d looked on them with scorn, but he was forced to admit that they were a beautiful, radiant people. These Sartan seemed aged, faded; their radiance dimmed. Some of them were, in fact, hideous to look on. Haplo was repelled by the sight of them and saw his own revulsion reflected strongly in Alfred’s eyes.
“They’re holding a ceremony of some sort,” Alfred whispered.
Haplo was about to tell him to shut up when it occurred to the Patryn that he might learn something to his advantage. He swallowed his words and counseled patience, a hard lesson he’d learned in the Labyrinth.
“A funeral,” said Alfred in a pitying tone. “They’re holding a funeral for the dead.”
“If so, they’ve waited long enough to entomb them,” Haplo muttered.
Twenty corpses of varying ages, from that of a small child to the body of a very old man, lay on the rock floor of the cavern. The crowd stood at a respectful distance, giving Haplo and Alfred— unobserved watchers—an excellent view. The corpses were composed, hands folded across the chest, eyes closed in eternal sleep. But some had obviously been dead a long time. The air was foul with the odor of decay, although—probably by their magic—the Sartan had succeeded in keeping the flesh from rotting away.
The skin of the dead was white and waxy, the cheeks and eyes sunken, the lips blue. On some, the nails had grown abnormally long, the hair was wild and uncombed. Haplo thought there was something familiar about the sight of the dead, but he didn’t know what. He was about to mention his notion to Alfred, when the Sartan signaled him to be quiet and watch.
A man stepped forward, stood before the dead. Prior to the man’s appearance, the crowd had been whispering and murmuring among themselves. Now, they all fell silent, all eyes turned to him, Haplo could almost feel their love and respect reach out to the unknown man.
Haplo was not surprised to hear Alfred whisper, ‘A Sartan prince.” The Patryn knew a leader when he saw one.
The prince raised his hands to draw their attention, an unnecessary gesture, because it seemed everyone in the cave had their eyes fixed on him.
“My people”—and it seemed that the man was speaking as much to the dead as to the living—”we have traveled far from our homeland, our beloved homeland.. . .”
His voice choked, and he had to pause a moment to regain his composure. It seemed his people loved him the more for his weakness. Several put hands to their eyes, wiped away tears.
He drew a deep breath, continued. “But that is behind us now. What is done is done. It is up to us to continue on, to build new lives on the wreckage of the old.