The Bell Should Have Taken You

Aelion goes up at eight in the morning and finds Lavius in a night terror, already heading for the door. He holds on and asks what he hears. Half awake, Lavius repeats what a voice told him out of the fog, a voice he knew like a friend's: "You were here. Stop running." In the dream he was running from Mourningfall in the rain with the bell ringing behind him, steady and constant, and he did not stop. Aelion promises they will work through it one small step at a time, and that Lavius will take back his name. Lavius is not sure that will be a good thing. He cleans the bed and himself with a little magic, as if nothing happened.

At breakfast, Tüül works out what has changed in thirty years. The mounted head over the bar was not there in his day, and the bowls used to be pottery, not wood. He remembers a younger Mother Vee, and he used to play cards with her husband Mehmet, who made the head. He does not remember Tamsin at all. Then the party has its longest argument yet about the forgetting. Aelion will not ring the bell, and will fight anyone who does: "There is life, and there is life worth living." Lavius and Tüül call the forgetting a tea to keep down the fever: stop it too soon and the fever comes back. On the walk to the church, Lavius shows Tüül the parish register. People die there twice, a woman "recovered by grace," Mehmet dies nearly two weeks after the others, and Ilara Vance is written down, crossed out, and marked a mistake beside Jasmine Vance. Tüül feels he should remember them, and cannot.

At the ruined church, Tüül notices the great stones of the bell tower lying twenty or thirty feet out, all in one direction, each one dug into the earth where it landed. Something blasted the top off the tower, and the line of stones points straight up the mountain to the mine. La Maestra launches off Aelion's back to the third floor of the tower. Owlin walks through the church door and vanishes. The others follow him into a church that is whole again, warm and candlelit, its pews empty. At the altar two priestesses stand over an open reliquary, and four men in dark mail and Lathander's colors stand in the way. The taller priestess knows Tüül on sight: "You should be in the mines with the rest of them... The bell should have taken you."

The bell starts to ring, and the first real fight in weeks begins. Owlin rolls a natural twenty and lands a sneak attack for forty-six. A priestess drops Aelion, and Tüül brings him back. La Maestra comes down the tower stairs, blows a hole through the wall with thunder that catches both priestesses, and walks through it: "Honey, I'm home." She goes down in the rubble, and Tüül's Guiding Bolt and Aelion's hammer bring the false paladins down. The vision snaps like a broken string. The church is a ruin again: a sun symbol with a long line scratched through it, an open and empty reliquary, and beside it a handprint in ash the size of a child's. The bell is silent, as if it is listening. Then, in the cellar below, something heavy shifts against wood, and the ground moves under their feet.