The Hunter's Gambit

by Nicholas McIntire

  Aleksei nodded gravely, “They did. And one of the men in the Palace was the same man who tried to kill me in the Wood. A Magus. A Magus very interested in seeing you blamed for Tamara’s death.”

  Jonas closed his eyes, trying to imagine a Magus stupid enough to plot something like that. Not even Sammul would stoop to murdering Tamara, if only because that would make Jonas heir to the throne. But if it wasn’t one of the Magi in the Voralla, then who?

  He sighed. It would have to wait until later. Tamara was safe. And he had something more important to take care of.

  “Tamara said you’d made up your mind.”

  Aleksei grunted as he tightened the heavy cord around another bale. “I have.”

  “And?” Jonas asked, holding his breath.

  Aleksei looked up, his golden eyes piercing Jonas to the core. “Why do you want me for your Knight?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said in Kalinor that you didn’t want anyone but me for your Knight. But you didn’t tell me why.”

  Jonas' mind raced. How could he explain this in terms Aleksei would understand? How did he say that he just knew? That was obviously not going to be satisfactory. He frowned, lost in thought. Why?

  “Because of all the men I’ve encountered, Aleksei Drago,” he said finally, “you possess the purest heart. Because from the moment I touched your mind, I knew that I could trust you with my life. Because I know that I have been born for a purpose, just as I know that if anyone else stands at my side, I will fail. Because I choose you, Aleksei Drago.”

  Jonas thrust out his hand, “Will you choose me?”

  Aleksei studied him silently, but Jonas could hear his thoughts like a clarion blast.

  Aleksei reached up and grasped Jonas' hand.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 15

  The Black Box

  BAEL FADED INTO the dim afterglow, his essence and matter straggling along the final threads of gloam. Fading in the noonday sun took a matter of moments, but with the light waning so severely it took nearly every second left in the day for Bael to finally take a solid step onto the homespun rug of his tent.

  Not that it mattered. Not that any of it mattered. It was over.

  As infuriating, as disheartening as it had been to learn of his plan’s failure, and from Sammul of all people, there had still been a thread of hope. Small, but still lingering, like a strand of spider silk.

  That had been stolen when his tentative bond with Aleksei Drago snapped. The once-palpable closeness to another being had suddenly been sundered, leaving Bael with a deep, gnawing emptiness. He wasn’t sure if it would ever leave him.

  He took another step, not because he wanted to, but because he was supposed to. Farm boy or no, he had a destiny to fulfill. He stared the new horizon down, through the darkness and into the face of dawn.

  He had used every trick, every manipulation, every twist of truth to win the future he wanted. A future of hope. A future he deserved.

  But the Dark God was fickle in His benedictions. Bael’s father claimed to be in the Dark God’s graces. His followers were loyal and his family’s piety had kept their congregation safe from the Voralla’s Magi and their pagan lies for nearly a century. So why were Rafael’s children cursed? Why was Bael doomed for being his father’s son?

  “You’ve been meddling.”

  Rafael’s voice was hardly an intrusion into his thoughts. He had known his father was waiting for him from the moment he first began Fading into the tent. Of course his father was waiting for him.

  It was his time, after all.

  It was so clear now. He’d followed his brother and sister, dwelling on the false hope that his father’s Dark God would be just, if certainly not kind. As the son of the Lord and Master, as an heir, Bael had foolishly believed that he might one day prove to be worthy.

  Instead, he was relentlessly confronted with the opposite. He was not worthy. He was the Toad. But he was the Toad because of who his father was, rather than in spite of it. He was part of a congregation that followed his own Dark God above all else. Above pagan ideals of love or compassion. In the Dark God’s faithful, such lies were merely weakness under a blinding cloak.

  So why would he be special? He hadn’t earned anything on his own merit. He’d only managed to garner respect by murdering an even crueler man in a fit of rage.

  In the beginning, that development had perplexed Bael. But it was clearer now. The Dark God had seen fit to grant him some measure of sanity in his fog of regret.

  Perhaps it was a kindness of sorts.

  “And you haven’t been paying attention.” Bael told his father calmly. It was a novel feeling, but one he’d slowly grown to understand.

  Like Azarael, like Darielle, he knew this was his time to be tested.

  Rafael stepped forward angrily, “You forget yourself!”

  The striking hand was so obvious that Bael marveled in the predictability of the entire charade. Had it always been like this? He had never thought himself terribly simple, but he was beginning to reevaluate.

  He didn’t bother to raise a hand to defend himself. Not anymore. It wasn’t necessary. His father’s hand stopped a good pace from him, frozen in the air, quivering.

  “What devilry is this?” Rafael snarled.

  Bael’s despair melted like fog in sunshine. It was a light of focused anger and it readily consumed his self-pity and remorse. It burned the brighter for it.

  “I have a better question.” Bael said calmly, staring deep into his father’s black eyes, “How long ago did you forsake the Dark God?”

  Rafael’s eyes widened. His shock seemed only matched by his rage at being trapped by Bael’s faith. Faith his father may have suspected but had never seen leveled against himself.

  Bael decided he wasn’t much interested in the response, so he shoved a gag of air into his father’s mouth to silence the spluttering. The knot of air vibrated angrily, shattering Rafael’s teeth like clattering crystal. But at least it kept the screams tightly contained.

  “I’m fairly certain no one wants to hear what you have to say any longer, old man.” Bael chuckled, suddenly amused by the sad puppet he’d made of his Lord Father. “Not ever again. At least, not once you’re revealed as a heretic.”

  He searched Rafael’s eyes for any glimmer of recognition. He wanted his father to understand what he was about to do. His father, as had been his custom of late, turned out to be prodigiously disappointing.

  Bael clucked his tongue, much in the way his Granny Jorna clucked hers when she found someone particularly lacking. He supposed it was a charming trait they shared, and that thought only filled him with greater joy.

  He was from these people, from the cringing, enraged man before him, from the crone with eyes of smoke and a streak of cruelty he’d very honestly inherited.

  Bael couldn’t claim to be sorry. Not now, not any longer. He was done with that. He was done with apologizing for being. And he was done with being the Toad.

  He was Bael Belgi.

  Not a pauper but a prince, not a maggot but a Magus. The Magi of old had commanded tremendous power, not through fear and fidelity, but because they could.

  Bael had a far better reason than that. He had nearly been freed from this existence, but that freedom had been snatched away. He had nearly held the heart of a true hero, and yet just as the boy became a man that heart had been stolen from his grasp by a usurper.

  If he’d harbored any doubts about Jonas Belgi’s powers, they were gone. Jonas Belgi had stolen everything from him. He’d never even had the chance to tempt Aleksei Drago to his cause, his side. The plans he’d set in motion should have worked, should have driven Aleksei away from Jonas and straight to him.

  But he couldn’t dwell on what hadn’t happened, he could only seek to embrace whatever place Fate had in store for him. However, that made one thing painfully obvious; he would find no more answers in this dim littl
e hamlet. Well, no more answers beyond the one.

  Bael crooked a finger, much as he’d seen Jorna do a thousand times, and marveled as his father’s struggling body dragged across the ground towards him. Rafael’s feet clawed at the rugs and the dirt, but Bael was in control. For the first time in his life, he was truly and completely in control of another individual.

  Perhaps Sammul had been good for something after all.

  “How do you open the black box, Father?” Bael snarled.

  Rafael was openly crying now, and Bael could see that his father was starting to choke on the blood pooling in his mouth.

  With a sigh, Bael allowed the knot of air to slip, frowning as a fountain of bright blood sprayed across his tent. He gripped his father’s jaw and sent every healing spell he knew into the man’s ruined mouth. For a moment he thought Rafael might collapse.

  But then again, he had never been taught how to heal with faith, with magic. Only how to hurt.

  He turned Rafael’s face sharply and stared into the man’s eyes. “This was only the first of your lessons, Father. I told you I’d been paying attention to every single one. I suppose all I can do as a dutiful son is show you.”

  Rafael’s eyes slowly returned to their natural glare of hatred. “The black box is never to be opened.” he managed before Bael shattered his jaw.

  This time he didn’t bother to clog his father’s mouth. Instead he roped air around Rafael’s neck and tightened it. When he was satisfied that his father wouldn’t choke to death, Bael started walking.

  The moment they were out of his tent, he set the entire place alight. The flames screamed into the canopy, yellow and hungry.

  Rafael struggled at his invisible leash, trying to pull himself to his feet. But with the shock of losing his teeth and the shattering of his jaw, the man looked more wretch than leader.

  As Bael dragged his father into the square, the faithful began to emerge from their tents, drawn by the hideous screams that usually accompanied the much-awaited execution of a heretic or deserter.

  They were stunned into submission when they saw Bael dragging his father, their Lord and Master, to the center stage.

  The Oracle, chief among scryers, forced his way through the crowd, his eyes wild with shock at the sight of Rafael. Bael was amused to see that the man even tried to collect his faith in a convincingly display of power.

  Bael stood still, holding his father by a leash of air, his face calm, “Berius, lovely day, isn’t it?”

  The Oracle paused a moment in confusion. In that moment, Bael touched a jagged fragment that tore across the maelstrom of the Nagavor. He had no idea what it was supposed to do, but he understood the general idea as it careened through him.

  The rest of the crowd was treated to the unexpected vision of Berius, Oracle and Master of Scryers, being briefly hefted in a sudden gust of wind before he was shredded him into a viscous pulp that splattered across the gathered masses.

  Bael noted with some small satisfaction that a number of onlookers still had their mouths open as their Oracle met the Dark God.

  He continued his march up the dais, pulling his father into the air and suspending the man before the shocked Commune. Part of him considered it a special privilege to be able to horrify such brutal people.

  And they hadn’t even seen the real show yet.

  “BAEL!”

  Bael turned and waited patiently as Jorna staggered from her tent. He had wondered how long it would take the crone to understand what was happening. He smiled broadly and gave the blind woman a wave, “Granny Jorna, join me!” he cried.

  The crone paused, her smoking eyes growing darker as she scried the future. Whatever she saw, it seemed to be enough for her to hobble forward on her stick and make her way to the dais.

  “Now sweetling,” she whispered heatedly as she approached him, “I know we’ve had our differences recently. I know I’ve been hard on you, but it’s only because you’re my favorite. You know how I watch out for you. How I love you.”

  The tar-black tears drooling from her sockets left soot stains across the pine planks of the dais…and across Bael’s fine boots. He glanced into her smoking eyes, and then bent forward and covered her mouth with his.

  Her eyes went wide as he inhaled sharply.

  The smoke from her eyes trickled away to tiny ringlets, before evaporating entirely. Bael continued inhaling without pause, drawing deeper on the Archanium as he accepted what he now realized was his sister’s gift to him.

  When the crone was finally empty, he let her desiccated corpse collapse to the dais with a dry crack. Her head split open like a moldy pumpkin on impact.

  Bael exhaled and felt his head clear further. The path was so plain to him now. It was almost as though the Dark God…No, as if he was in control of his own fate.

  “Thank you, Darielle.” he mused as he turned back to the suspended form of his father. He thought Rafael might be suffocating, so he allowed the man crash to the dais beside his mother’s corpse.

  When Rafael looked into his eyes, Bael felt a twinge of satisfaction. The man was finally starting to understand. “A touching family reunion, wouldn’t you say?” Bael growled.

  “You—” Rafael choked.

  Bael cut him off with a kick, ignoring his cry as he slammed against the husk of his mother. Rafael had never been a proponent of sentimentality, and Bael didn’t see why any of that nonsense needed to start now.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of our beloved Commune,” he began, smiling into the bewildered faces of his father’s filthy zealots, “I have been visited by the Dark God Himself in a vision. A vision of profound prophecy.”

  Whispers surged amongst the rabble. Bael felt nothing but contempt.

  “This man,” he declared angrily, “has been selling you false promises! He has promised the vengeance of the Dark God Volos, the master we all serve, but he has committed the greatest heresy of all in his conquest for power!”

  The whispers quieted, but Bael was so wrapped in the Archanium that he could have heard a mouse choke a hundred leagues away. He could certainly decipher the rising expectancy among a group of simpletons.

  “I am a more benevolent master. I do not want to stray from the path of the Dark God. Rather, I want to bring light to something my father has been hiding. Something I’ve only just discovered myself.” He waited, allowing the anticipation to grow.

  His brother Azarael had attempted something similar a year before, but Azarael had the unfortunate condition of being irredeemably mad. He had unveiled a four year old girl that he had fused with a newt as his proof that the Dark God spoke through him.

  Azarael had been lucky to escape with his life. The newt-girl had been flayed and then burned, still alive, just to be certain of the Dark God’s pleasure.

  And Bael had learned his lesson well. He would make no such mistakes or missteps.

  He waited, knowing that at any moment his deliverer would arrive. The theater of it was almost more than he could bear.

  And then she appeared.

  “Mother.” he sighed.

  Marra stared at the scene transpiring on the dais with in a fugue of shock and sympathy. “Bael, please. Please don’t kill him.”

  “Bring me the black box.” he snapped.

  Marra paused a moment, then straightened her shoulders, “No. You will release my husband, you will atone for what you have done, and you will forget all this nonsense. Now!”

  Bael watched the rage roil across her face, and even as he felt a part of his humanity slip away, he managed a laugh. “Do you think anyone cares what you have to say now?” he demanded. “You have birthed three monsters to a man who treats you like human waste. Why would anyone listen to you? You are no queen, not any longer. You are a shadow of a woman. You are sadness. You are despair. You are failure in every form.

  “You are the perfect consort to Death, because you are a pale imitation of life. And you would have me becom
e the same?” Bael’s hand moved to hover over his father’s silent form. He clenched his fist and Rafael jerked to his feet with a jagged scream, clutching his chest. “I fear that my father’s heart can’t take much more strain from his heavy burden as Master of our beloved congregation. In fact, I’d daresay he will succumb completely in a matter of minutes. Unless I get what I want.”

  Bael snapped and Rafael dropped to the dais, twitching but no longer screaming. “Now go fetch the box.”

  Marra stared at her son for a breathless moment. Her heart felt like it was tearing itself in two. Her baby, the only one of her children who had given her any hope, had inexplicably turned into the monster that she so feared.

  He had turned into his father.

  “You know where the box is. Fetch it.” Bael snarled.

  She looked at him, then at the twitching form of her husband, bloody, bruised and broken on the dais. Marra realized then that she felt no pity for Rafael. No pity for his mother, the cracked husk that had contained Jorna’s particular sort of wickedness.

  Her gaze returned to Bael’s emerald glare. “What will you do with it?” she asked calmly.

  Bael stiffened. She knew he was perplexed by her question. Her words were now her only defense against her son’s madness. Her wits were all she had to protect what was left of her family, of her soul.

  “I will fulfill my destiny.” Bael said flatly. “I will take the Third Key and I will open the Cathedral of Dazhbog.”

  Marra felt like fainting on the spot. Her vision swam.

  “You would release the Dark God?” she quavered.

  “I will. And my people, our people, will finally bask in His glory as He remolds this broken world in His image.”

  Marra straightened, studying her son, trying her best to understand this sudden lunacy, this power that possessed him. She sought the answer in his beautiful, terrible eyes. But the fog of his madness revealed nothing.

  Sammul stepped onto the dais and bowed to Bael, “Master Bael, there are tomes in the Voralla that speak of the keys and the trials that await the Pilgrim. If you truly mean to take on this responsibility, it would be my pleasure to assist you in any way possible.”