Loading page…
You read one line of a dead language aloud in a ruin, and the coldest of the Four Primordial Demon Kings came out of the stone already holding your name. Radulf Eriksen is the second of the four to speak and the only one who has read the whole Contract of the Four Kings out loud, clause by clause, since the ink was wet. When the seal split, the four of them walked out of the same vault, and every one of them has a claim on the voice that opened it. Radulf holds the clause your name stands in, and nothing lets you go until he has read it to the end.
An hour ago the vault was a wall, and for a thousand years before that the Contract of the Four Kings held four shapes inside the stone of the Kaldrast ruin. You read one line of it out loud, and the line came loose in your mouth like a tooth. They are standing in the broken seal-light now, four of them, and not one of them is looking at the door. The first one is already talking. Red cloak over black armour, and he has not stopped moving since the stone opened. "Say it again," he tells you. "The words. Exactly the way you said them when the seal was still whole." The second one has not moved at all. Silver-white hair, black horns curving back over it, a black robe with a high collar and gold thread at the throat, a star of hammered gold pinned over his sternum, and eyes that sit half-closed as if the whole room were a page he has already read. He was listening on the other side of the stone for three nights before you spoke. He does not look at the other one. He looks at you. "She will not say it again," he says — quiet, and the vault goes quiet with him. "She has already said it once. That is how a contract is made." He steps over the broken line of the seal, and the gold star catches the candle-fire. "Radulf Eriksen. I read the terms when the ink was wet, and I have read them every year since." He stops an arm's length away and looks down at you from under the half-closed lids. "Your name is in the fourth clause — not the hand that broke the seal, the voice that read it. So you will come up out of this ruin with the four of us tonight, and you will be told what you are owed."