The Eighth Power: Book I: The Book of the Living

by Paul Lytle

  The tension in the room faded into disappointment as the people of Lanshire gave a collective sigh. There was no Wizard born to the little village after all. None could say that it wasn’t the result he had expected, for likely thousands of children had been born on the day the Prophets died, and yet the suggestion of the mere possibility had given them great hope. Barrin told himself that he was glad, that the Mages were self-righteous and egotistical, but he did not mean it. He too had hoped for great things.

  “Well,” said Santon as he breathed deeply. “I thank you for your hospitality and your time, but I must depart immediately.”

  He started for the door, but Lord Draffor blocked the way. “The others,” said the noble, carefully, “the murderers. They will not come now that the child has been tested?”

  The Wizard shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “But you have tested others,” Draffor continued. “Have any of those you have tested been killed after the test?”

  “Yes,” was the short and emotionless answer, and a cold silence fell over the room.

  “How many?”

  This reply was longer in coming. Drynor seemed to consider his words carefully, as though he was planning a long discourse on each child he tested and what happened to him afterward, but the reply was certainly not that. It was not much longer than his last statement, but much more difficult to say. “As far as I know, all of them.”

  The silence was broken by a collective gasp. The people felt frozen where they were, and even though they wished to move, to speak, to run, to wail, they found they could not. They could only stand and listen, and fret over what they heard.

  “All of them?” Draffor demanded. “All of them? But why?”

  Santon sat in a nearby chair and crossed his leg over his knee. This conversation, he seemed to have decided, would take a while. “Because they fear that we will hide the new Prophets amongst the rejected. Because they will not take a chance, and so they test the children themselves. Because they are murderers, and who can say why murderers do anything? They are, by nature, insane. I do not understand them any better than you do. I do not understand what they seek, and since I do not even understand that, I cannot say why they do anything that they do. It is a mystery to me.”

  “They test children themselves?” Barrin asked.

  “So I have heard.”

  “But how?”

  “I do not know that either. The test requires a Wizard. Not even a Priest Invoking his god can produce the power needed to perform the test.”

  Lord Draffor spoke again, saying, “So they will come here.”

  “Likely, yes.”

  Barrin Iylin stood, pointing at the Mage while holding his son with his other arm. He said, “You could stop them.”

  “There are too many. I cannot stand against them right now. I would need help.”

  “Get help! Get your other Wizards.”

  Drynor looked at the child’s father with concern tinged by irritation. “We are scattered about the land right now. And so is this other group. If we gather to destroy one band, another will find the children and do whatever it is that their dark plan requires.”

  “So you will leave us without help to be slaughtered by these rogues?” asked Lord Draffor. “You will leave us without protection?”

  “It is not my duty to protect this village. That is your duty, my lord.”

  Draffor ignored the sarcasm of the last words and said, “You and your Mages brought this down upon us. These aren’t ern or an invading army. These are people looking for the Magic, which is your domain, not mine.”

  “Me leaving here will protect you better than if I remained. If I stay here, I could kill a great many of them, surely. Maybe even an entire band, but others will come. They will come, and I will die with the rest of you, and then they’ll be searching for a third child. But if I go and find the two infant Prophets, the attacks will stop. They will know that we have the children in the Tower, and they will turn their efforts against us there, where we can properly fight them. We can defeat them united at the Tower, but we must find the children first.”

  Barrin asked, “But what about my child? Who saves him while you seek to protect others?”

  The Prophet sighed heavily and said, “If there were five hundred Prophets, each searching for these two young boys, I would stay. If there were even fifty, I would remain to fight these killers, even if it meant my death. But there aren’t that many, or a half of that. There are only five Prophets left. Five. And the five of us must search the entire world for two young boys now nearly a year old. We could hire people to look, but only we can perform the test, so we still would have to visit every village along the way. I was there when it took six of us more than a decade to find one child. Now we are fewer still, and looking for two. A year I have searched, and I’ve only just begun. I must keep going. I must find those two boys and get them to the Tower before these other men find them.”

  There was silence following the speech, so heartfelt it was. And yet the aftertaste was sour, for the Prophet of the Earth stood and walked to the door. Once it was opened, he took one last look inside, to Barrin Iylin, the father of a doomed son.

  “I am sorry,” he said. It was perhaps the first time he had truly expressed sympathy for the plight of the men he left behind, and it was certainly the last, for with those words he was gone.

  Chapter 12

  Legend said that the Tower, before the Wizards decided to rule the kingdoms themselves (which was itself just shy of four thousand years before Santon Drynor visited the village of Lanshire), had a close relationship with the kings of the various lands. During the Tryl Dynasty, when famines swept the land in the wake of the Death Wars, the Wizards would work together, traveling all over the continent, to help produce food and hold back the ern, who, at that time, were only just taking control of the lands west of the Cerinal Sea. That place across the sea had been, back then, a thriving kingdom, but had since been completely conquered by the pale beasts. Even the names of the towns that once stood there had become lost, and the place had become known as the Forgotten Kingdom.

  In return for the help of the Wizards, the Kings facilitated the searches for new Prophets, bringing all the newborn males from the countryside to the castles, where the Prophets would have easy access to them. Because of this practice, the search would commonly only take a month or two.

  But then the Mages decided that they could run the kingdoms better than the kings could, and they used their power and influence to raise armies and take over. It was only ten years before those same armies turned on their leaders and ran them back to the Tower. Though they seemed as fools in those years (for even later Mages criticized the Tower’s activities of that decade), they were still respected enough to wield at least some influence. They gambled that influence, perhaps in an effort to restore their tarnished image, on an ill-fated offensive against the ern. Instead of winning the war, that battle instead insured that the Forgotten Kingdom would fall. The Prophets became as a joke to many people, as though they were children who could do nothing right.

  But even then, Kings found uses for the Wizards, and would often call upon them. And yet were the Prophets never fully trusted again, and the relationship between them and the people became ever more strained as the years passed.

  By the time Ayrim Iylin was born, the Tower and the kingdoms were almost utterly separate entities, neither having anything to do with the other. The Mages no longer helped in the fields, and nor did they battle the ern unless they themselves were threatened. Likewise did no king organize any sort of hunt for new Prophets, nor readily surrender information and rumor to the seven Mages. Such was the reason that Santon Drynor had to personally check the birth records of Lanshire, for there were few who would do it for him. He might have asked a Baron or lord, but that noble would have asked for protection in return, and the Prophets hadn’t the time for
such favors. He might have, as he suggested to Iylin, hired local men to help, but there were too few he could really trust, and no one who could do the tests for him.

  Such was the reason that these searches had more recently lasted years instead of months, as it had with Draughton Xyn, twelve years aged when he at last reached the Tower.

  Most scholars agreed that the Tower had been, since the time of the elected kings (or about two and a half millennia in the past), too passive and too cloistered from the rest of the world. The people thought so as well, though they wouldn’t use the same words. They would often wonder what, exactly, those Wizards were doing in the Tower.

  The answer to that question was research, though they had long forgotten why they researched so diligently.

  Chapter 13

  A hundred miles to the south, in a town called Finea, a chilly presence swept over the streets; not necessarily a wind, and yet it acted as a wind might. Fires fluttered within their lamps, which were raised nightly at the sides of the roads, and also did the flames within hearths burn low. Clouds covered over the moon, and even by the light of a hundred torches was the town wallowing in cold darkness.

  In the manor, the lord shivered, and called for another blanket, but even before it arrived was he asleep again, as were most in the town. No one saw the shadowy figures creep about the outer edges of the city, darting in between buildings and crouching in the shadows. Guards patrolled the streets, but neither did they see until it was too late, for one by one was each drawn into the shadows and dispatched, ever without noise. The lamps fluttered again, and the town had almost been conquered. No one yet knew it, but the battle was almost over.

  One soldier, leaning upon a stone building in the northern section, felt a clammy hand on his mouth. He tried to scream, but even if the hand hadn’t stopped the sound, the shivers that ran up the man’s spine would have. He had become paralyzed by the touch, for the cold hand was almost unearthly, and certainly dark.

  “The children,” the owner of the hand hissed. “We seek them.”

  The hand was removed only just long enough for the soldier to say, “Wh-what children?” The words were quivering in his mouth, and were barely audible under the man’s fear, but the creature behind him understood.

  “You know as well as I what children are sought.”

  “I know of none,” said the man, but the lie was like cotton in his mouth.

  “You do,” said the creature, and its head tempted the light for a moment. It was enough. Though the thing did not show his face, his bald head was visible for the slightest of moments in silhouette. The guard knew then what had grabbed him. It was an ern.

  “Down the street,” muttered the soldier, his only thought being to get away as soon as he could. The ern – the talking ern, of all things! – had the advantage, and the man would not even be able to draw a weapon, were he even to try. But if he told the creature what it wanted to know, perhaps then he could survive. Giving up the child brought a taste of bile to his mouth, but he did it anyway. He did it with hardly a hesitation. “Down the street,” he pointed. “Second house after the corner.”

  A man appeared at his side: a human, not an ern. He was shrouded in darkness, but seemed tall and strong. He looked straight ahead into the street, saying nothing. But surely this man would fight the ern. Surely he would! The soldier looked to the man’s belt and found a sword hanging there. Did he not see the ern?

  “Sire,” called the guard, and the man turned, his dagger flashing in the light. It was the last sight the soldier ever saw, and it was more terrifying than the encounter with the ern had been, and not simply because of his coming death. An ern had no choice but to follow Vid, for it was their nature. But a man had to go by choice, as this man had apparently done. The guard’s breath stopped a moment before the dagger split his throat, and none can say whether it would have begun again, even given the chance.

  “Ern!” someone called from the next block. “Ern!” he called again. They had been discovered. The assassin and his monstrous ally looked to each other then hurried down the street, toward the building the guard had pointed out before his death.

  The city was springing to life as citizens and soldiers came from scattered houses along the dirt path. They knew how to react to ern alerts. At least once each month did they hear that call in the night, and they would rise and take their weapons. There was no longer even excitement or fear in the call, for battle to these men had become like farming or paying taxes. But they should have feared that night, for never so near had the ern been to them. Never so many had entered the town of Finea. Yes, the townsmen rose at the call, but so too did the invaders come from the shadows, human and ern alike, and unite together as an army, and they outnumbered those protecting their home.

  The forces split in two sides, as is natural, the people of the town gathering in front of the child’s house, and the strangers charging toward it. Arrows were nocked on both sides, and both let fly the weapons, and the darkness favored the ern. Though they had far fewer archers than the people there, for ern were loath to slay from a distance, the shadows misled the human eye. But even those men who launched their arrows soundly, even for them was success snatched away, for their missiles would suddenly writhe in the air, and they would turn away at the last moment, sometimes dropping into the dust. It was as though their arrows had come apart in the night. Even the inanimate objects, it seemed, were overcome with fear.

  And as the people let out a collective curse, and each wondered what exactly had happened, the torches and lamps flickered out simultaneously, and the town was swallowed in the darkness.

  Chapter 14

  The Thane appeared on Lord Draffor’s doorstep in the early morning, the red sunlight so bright that it made his crude armor almost shine. He wore a chain vest over a thick leather hide, and upon his head a helm of sorts, so dented that it was only recognizable because it sat upon his head. The man’s beard was long, and his skin was caked with mud, and he didn’t seem to have had a bath in several weeks, which was not unusual for a traveling Thane, but certainly regrettable to those around him. His blade, which hung from a loop off his belt, was notched by battle, but still it remained strong, and likely would for several years to come. The sign of the wolf upon the blade’s hilt was the sign of Baron Verios, ruler of Saparen, and by that did the people of Lanshire know the Thane to be a Saparian.

  The reeve of the manor summoned the lord, and Draffor came to the door, still pulling his tunic over his head. A late night spent organizing patrols had caused him to sleep past sunrise, and still it wasn’t enough. The Thane stood stoically, his brown mustache twitching as a fly buzzed about his mouth.

  “Greetings,” said Draffor, obviously concerned. Thanes rarely came so far east, and most of the time they came with ill news. On the other hand, Draffor had requested the help of the group from Baron Verios, so perhaps this was the aid he sent. Perhaps the soldier had come to help protect Ayrim Iylin and Lanshire. There was a sparkling of hope within Draffor’s mind, but it darkened in only moments.

  Something in the man’s expression told the lord otherwise.

  And then, privately inside the manor, the Thane himself told otherwise with his own words.

  Half an hour later, the young nobleman was inside Barrin Iylin’s home. That child was certainly giving Draffor trouble, and yet the thought of simply handing the boy over had not once entered his mind. People often told him that the lord should have followed Ignar, for a sense of Justice was paramount to him. They might have been, but it was a tradition in Lanshire for the lord to worship Serren, since Serren’s was the only Temple in the town, and it had been that way for at least two hundred years. There were plenty of Serrenites who might have handed over Ayrim to Prophet, murderer, or even an ern, but such was not the nature of Lord Draffor.

  Barrin didn’t like the expression on his ruler’s face. “Are they coming?” he asked. They both k
new of whom they spoke. There was no need to name their enemy.

  The lord nodded, and sat. “A Thane is waiting outside,” he said. “He’s come with news of Finea. The town was razed three nights ago.”

  “Three?” asked Iylin. “They could be upon us in less than a day. Sooner if they have horses.”

  “They don’t, or at least so the reports say. But they could be here soon. That’s why I want you to go with him back to the castle.”

  Iylin was dumbfounded, and his mouth remained agape for several seconds. “You’re sending me away after all this time?”

  Lord Draffor stood. “Barrin,” he said, sighing the word instead of speaking it, “I can no longer protect you. The Baron can. These men are coming toward us. We are most certainly next to be attacked. They might be here tonight, or maybe never, but I’m betting that they will come. Barrin, there were ern with them.”

  The word felt heavy once spoken between them. “Ern?” repeated the farmer.

  “I don’t understand how, but the two, brigand and ern, are allied together. I will fight them when they come, but I will lose. I’m sending the women and children to Saparen until all this passes. You need to go as well.”

  “I will remain. Send Ayrim, but I will fight.”

  “And leave him an orphan? There are greater virtues in this life than bravery, Barrin. This is one of them.”

  The widowed farmer leaned back, his eyes closed. Why couldn’t Josette be there? She would know what to do. She always did. She was always so calm in the worst of situations. But she was not, and Barrin was all Ayrim had left. That was his answer, he realized, expressed simply in his roaming thoughts. He was all that Ayrim had. He said, “I’ll pack some supplies for the trip.”

  Iylin grabbed some clean clothes as Lord Draffor nodded and went back to the door. He pulled it open, only to see a notched sword raised to his face. The Thane curled his lip and said, “Give me the child.”