The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1)

by Brad Magnarella

  But as a second wave of attacks commenced, my vision began to waver. I was still suffering from the blood loss. How much longer before Thelonious came swooping in?

  “The Banebrand was meant to prevent the ruination of the Order,” Lich said from behind his horde. “It’s ironic, then, that you and the others intended to use the weapon to bring that ruination about. To destroy the only member of the original Order strong enough to still be standing.” He was no longer the father figure, but the gloating youngest child.

  I grunted as I swung my sword through a fish-man’s neck.

  “Your grandfather found the Banebrand, yes. But he did a poor job concealing it. The weapon remained in the vault after his death. I acquired it—a handsome stiletto, I’m sure you’ve been wondering—and cast it into the pit. The Banebrand is no more. I cannot be destroyed.”

  I refused to let his words bury my will.

  Flinging the last of the dragon sand at him, I used what strength remained in me to ignite it. Red-orange fire swallowed him, but Lich stepped through the burst a moment later, unscathed. He strode from the flames and his army of creatures. I backed from his glowing eyes and writhing tentacles. Tripping over the glass pendant, I fell against the back wall.

  “I cannot be killed,” Lich said, “As far as you are concerned, I am the Death Mage.”

  The tentacles seized me and wrapped me around. A smell of rot and death came off them. When Lich’s withered face clenched, muscles inside the black appendages bulged. I grunted as my ribs crushed around my heart and lungs. With the pain, red lights slashed over my vision.

  A blast from the sword repelled him once, I thought weakly. If I can just summon enough power…

  My sword arm was pinned to my side, but my hand and wrist were free. I cocked them up until the blade was aimed at Lich. With the breath of air I had left, I prepared to utter the invocation … and then stopped.

  The stiletto Lich had recovered in the vault.

  The symbols Grandpa had written on the wall and made permanent through magic.

  A gift he had left me long ago.

  In an instant of insight, the pieces snapped together. I wanted to laugh at the obviousness of it. Instead, I grunted as the ribs down my right side cracked in a goring line.

  I know what they mean, I thought through the pain. I know what the symbols mean.

  And with that knowledge, my sword stiffened in my grasp and began to sing in a high and powerful note. Lich’s eyes canted downward. His tentacles softened and writhed, as though in distress.

  I drew a choked breath and uttered, “Vigore.”

  Rose-colored fire exploded from the blade and plumed against Lich’s chest. He screamed as the force sent him into a backward roll, tar-black blood spilling in his wake. I fell to the floor at the same moment he landed against the far wall. The tentacles that had been torn from his body twitched and slapped over the burning floor between us. The sword was still in my grasp, still glowing.

  The creatures fled, while Lich moaned and tried to push himself upright.

  “There’s an ancient Hittite story,” I grunted through my jagged breaths. I staggered in a circle in search of the glass pendant I’d kicked with my heel moments before. “Known mostly to scholars … mythologists. Goes like this. Poor farmer raises prize ram. Greedy king wants ram for himself. Farmer coats prize ram in mud, then cleans and festoons common ram from his stock. King’s soldiers come and take common ram. Farmer gives prize ram to son.”

  Lich sat against the far wall, a tarry pool spreading around him. I spotted the glass pendant behind a table and used a foot to drag it out by its chain.

  “King never knows the difference,” I finished.

  I’d been wrong in the vault. The symbols Grandpa had etched were Akkadian syllables, yes, but when that script had been adopted by the Hittites, the symbols became logograms: entire words. In this case, gug lugal-i meant “ram to king.” Grandpa had encoded his actions in the Hittite story. A story that, as scholars of mythology, we both knew.

  I held the sword up. Fresh rose-colored light bloomed along the blade’s glinting edge. It had taken a few moments, but across the room, understanding finally dawned in Lich’s eyes. The king in this case was him; the prize ram was the Banebrand weapon. Which meant the stiletto in the vault had been a fake. The blade Grandpa had passed to me was the real item.

  “N-no,” Lich stammered. “No!”

  He threw his hands forward, fingers writhing. Inky black magic spewed from them and coursed across the room. But upon reaching me, the magic broke apart, killed by the Banebrand.

  I positioned the glass pendant between my feet and, gripping my sword in both hands, squared my body to Lich’s. “For your crimes against the Order of Magi and Magical Beings, including the murder of my mother, Eve Croft, I sentence you to the ultimate penalty.”

  “I can give you eternal life, infinite power,” he babbled. “Anything and everything you’ve ever—”

  “Disfare!” I shouted and drove the blade down. The tip crunched through the glass face, and, in a blinding flash, the glass pendant blew apart. I fell against the back wall and landed hard.

  I looked up in a daze as slivers of light streamed from the glass pendant in a celestial show. They were the souls Lich had entrapped. Their beauty stole my breath. In them, I saw the wrongness—the absolute wrongness—of what Lich had done. Such things were never meant to be imprisoned.

  The souls encircled me on their way from the keep, healing me. And in them I felt the wisdom and power of those who had come before, all the way to Lich’s siblings: the original Order.

  One soul lingered.

  “Lazlo,” I whispered.

  You found me, he said. Now see that it is ended.

  The final light, Lazlo’s light, streamed off, and the ruined room dimmed. The glass pendant lay in pieces beyond my outstretched legs. Beyond it, against the far wall, slumped a rotting corpse, black toadstools and mold already growing over it, consuming it. The only thing streaming from Lich’s body was a dark, putrid liquid. He had no soul of his own, after all. He’d pledged it to Dhuul long ago.

  The earth shook.

  I pushed myself to my feet and made my way to the narrow window beside Lich’s body. The pit yawned in the middle of the nightmare landscape below, but the matrix of souls that had held it open was no more. The sides were shuddering and sliding down, taking the shadow creatures with them. What remained of the Front backed from the far side of the pit, carrying the fallen.

  The magic-users were too far away for me to distinguish the living from the dead.

  Marlow? I called into the collective. Father?

  28

  Father? I tried again, but something seemed to have disrupted my connection to the collective. The keep shuddered and rumbled around me. I spun to find cracks spreading in the walls, chunks of stone falling from the ceiling. Without Lich to sustain them, his creations were falling apart.

  I fled down the stairs as a wall collapsed behind me.

  “Protezione!” I called. More stones broke over the spherical shield that took shape around me. I darted and leapt my way down, bursting from the keep moments before the entire structure collapsed.

  Without breaking stride, I aimed my sword behind me and shouted, “Forza dura!”

  The force launched me like a cannon ball. I cleared the leech-infested moat, landing in the toadstools beyond. I rolled for several yards, sprang up, and stumbled into a fresh run. By the time I reached the other magic-users, I was out of breath, heart hammering. I removed the robe of John the Baptist.

  Only half of those I’d arrived with remained. The bodies of the deceased lay in a solemn line.

  “What happened to—?” I started to say, but several of the magic-users silenced me with fingers to their lips. They stepped apart, and I saw Marlow kneeling, facing the pit, power warping the air around him.

  Joy and relief flooded through me.

  “He’s forming the Word,” a woman whisp
ered to me.

  It took a moment for the message to register. “But I destroyed the glass pendant,” I insisted. “The pit is collapsing.” I looked beyond my father to where the hole in the earth rumbled and coughed.

  “Dhuul is emerging faster than the pit is failing,” she said.

  I stopped to listen. I could hear him, the ancient being’s whispers climbing like an ungodly force of nature, growing louder, more terrible. We had no choice now but to speak the Word, to repel Dhuul and collapse the hole to his realm. My father, the rest of the magic-users, me…

  We would all perish.

  But the world will be spared, I reminded myself. That’s what matters.

  I thought about Vega and her son and all of the good and decent people I had known. Then I thought about my mother, who had died in service to them. I thought about my grandfather, who had sacrificed himself so Lich wouldn’t find the Banebrand. I watched my father, the vast pit rumbling and fuming before him, and the love I felt for him became enormous.

  At last Marlow stood and walked over to us. “The Word is ready.” His eyes glowed with magic. When our gazes met, he smiled and nodded. Well done, he was saying. I’m proud of you.

  I nodded back, fighting to contain my emotions.

  “You’ll only have a moment,” he said to us. “When you feel the membrane failing, Arianna will pull from the other side, but you must push. With everything you have. Do you understand?”

  I looked around as the others voiced their understanding.

  “Are you saying we can destroy the pit and return?” I asked.

  “You will return,” my father answered.

  “You’re not coming?”

  His sober look told me everything. As the most powerful magic-user, he alone would speak the Word. He would unleash the impossible force that would repel Dhuul. The hope that had been swelling inside me ruptured and deflated. He held up a hand before I could say anything.

  “It’s the only way, Everson.”

  “Let me help,” I said. “Maybe together we can channel the force, contain it…”

  But he was already shaking his head. The hand he had raised came to a rest behind my neck. He pulled me against him. “I feel your willingness, Everson,” he whispered, “but you wouldn’t survive, and the sacrifice would be pointless. Arianna and the new Order will need you.”

  I squeezed him back, a huge knot of grief closing my throat.

  After another moment he stood back, held me by the shoulders, and looked intently into my eyes. “I have to go. But I go with the joy that I finally got to see you, to know you.”

  His imaged blurred as I blinked back tears.

  He smiled, then peered past me. “Be ready, everyone.” Then to me, “Be ready.”

  “I … I love you,” I said.

  “I love you too, Everson.”

  With a final squeeze, he turned and strode toward the pit. It was spouting up giant gouts of green bile now. The horrible whisper continued to climb as Dhuul stormed toward the surface to claim our world. My father stopped at the pit’s edge and peered down. He looked back at us, nodded once, and before I could raise a hand in farewell, dropped from sight.

  I stood stunned, then ran toward the pit. I couldn’t bear the thought of him descending alone, no one to watch him. The magic-users shouted behind me. I arrived at the edge of the pit in time to see my father’s flapping robes consumed by the vast darkness. The horrid whispers continued to swell, but now something was meeting it: a Word, more potent and resonant than anything I had ever heard.

  Far below, a light flashed like an exploding star and Dhuul’s whisper became a scream.

  A blinding force rushed up and threw me back. In the next moment, the scream was buried by a roar. The pit was imploding. A new force pulled me from the pit’s edge. I was back among the magic-users. They were leaning toward me, trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t hear them. As the roaring grew, they began to disappear, popping from existence. I looked around. The entire realm was sliding toward the pit. Even the nightmare sky stretched and tore.

  When you feel the membrane failing, Arianna will pull from the other side, my father had said, but you must push. With everything you have.

  I glanced back at the pit where the Word continued to echo in my father’s voice.

  And I pushed.

  29

  Two weeks later

  “Your grandfather hid the blade’s power well,” Arianna said, looking up and down the length of my sword. “But it’s just as you say. He removed the blade from the Banebrand, smelted it, and from the metal fashioned this.”

  “And set up his own double bluff,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, a double what?”

  I had spent two days in the Refuge before returning home to grieve my father’s death. I lived and relived our scant time together: his revelation about Lich, our walk together across the plain, our final embrace beside the pit. I was fortunate to have had those fleeting moments, I decided. But the fact was hard to reconcile with the pain of only having had those moments. Of never really having gotten to know the man behind the figurative mask. I spent the two weeks in a tearful fugue of thankfulness and regret until, at last, I woke up one morning—this morning, in fact—and decided to recommit myself to magic-using.

  Naturally, Arianna knocked on my door shortly after.

  Now sunlight streamed through her white hair as she turned from a bay window in my apartment. Though she’d adapted her attire to blend in with the modern world—a long skirt and peasant blouse with a plum-colored shawl—she still looked strange to me outside the Refuge. A place the Front no longer had to hide inside. The Front was no longer a resistance group, after all. They were no longer even “the Front.” They were the Order.

  “A double bluff,” I repeated. “It’s a concept I learned from James. My grandfather hid an enchantment inside the blade, one that cleaves magic, but beneath that enchantment he’d hidden the true design of the blade.”

  “Which could only be released by the story he’d bound it to,” Arianna said.

  I nodded, thinking about my staff and sword in pieces across the table at the safe house. I suspected now that Lich had disassembled it to make extra certain there was nothing inside that could harm him. All he’d found was the magic-cleaving enchantment—one he tried to warp to his own purposes, using me as his unwitting agent.

  “I didn’t know my grandfather was a mythologist until Marlow told me,” I said. “Grandpa passed the sword on to me after I’d begun my own studies in mythology. Bound it to me.” I remembered how, during our final conversation, he’d asked me to unsheathe the sword. I hadn’t been watching his face, but he’d no doubt been incanting to ensure that, if lost, the blade would find me again. It had already tasted my blood. “I must have been his fail-safe.”

  “Your grandfather bound the blade to you, yes,” Arianna said. “But through you, it was also bound to Marlow. That was how you were able to reunite and end Lich’s reign.”

  I nodded in growing understanding: my father and I had shared the same blood. And then something even more startling occurred to me. “So … Lich was the unwitting agent?”

  Arianna smiled. “Even though he believed he had all the contingencies covered, Lich took a great risk in sending you to the Refuge alone. He should never have done so. But the bond between you, the Banebrand, and your father was too strong. It compelled him. And in the end, it improved the likelihood of his demise. Just as the weapon was designed to do.”

  I marveled at the power of the blade, but something continued to bother me. “I hate to second-guess my grandfather, but it seems like he took a huge risk, too. I mean, counting on me to find the symbols he’d left?”

  “You have to remember, he was dealing with incomplete information. He assumed we were receiving his messages through his familiar, such as the location of the vault in which he’d stored the artifacts. Once he had determined which artifact was the Banebrand and made the switch, he wouldn�
��t have told anyone, the information being far too sensitive. His focus turned to finding the glass pendant. Clearly, he never did or he would have destroyed it himself. When he felt Lich was too close, your grandfather left the clue in the vault, passed the blade to you, and ended his life. He trusted that, with the power of the blade, and enough time, you would connect with the Front and correctly interpret his message.”

  “Still,” I said, “there were no guarantees.”

  “There were never any guarantees,” she agreed. “Just better chances.”

  “I mean, I barely made the connection between the words and the myth before it was too late,” I went on, remembering the pain of Lich’s crushing tentacles, his eyes burning inches from mine.

  “Your grandfather saw something else in you besides your schooling.”

  I pushed away the memory. “What was that?”

  “Your luck quotient.”

  “Luck quotient?” I repeated. “I thought there was no such thing. I thought all those last-second solutions were the result of Whisperer magic.”

  “We told you that because a luck quotient is not a thing you want to count on. Experience is more important. However, in this situation, it was something Marlow and I and the rest of the Front were very much counting on. With time running out, it was all we had.”

  That explained why they had sent me into the keep alone despite my relative inexperience.

  “So … it’s rare?” I asked.

  “To the extent it exists in you, it is. But like I said, it can’t be counted on. I’d prefer you—and us, for that matter—never to have to resort to it again. We’ll start you on a new course of training once we’re able to locate the remaining magic-users. That may take some time, however. Lich’s segregation of the community was thorough, and he covered his tracks. Not everyone has a demonic companion.” She cut her eyes to where Tabitha was snoring on her favorite divan.