When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set

by K. Scott Lewis

  She opened her jaws wide and thrust the imp into her mouth. She bit down upon him, rending him to shreds and swallowing the chunks of demon flesh even as it dissolved into oily smoke in her throat.

  Oriand and Arda gazed upon her with horror. Bryona’s face held a note of serene ecstasy at seeing Belham’s demise. A small thought flashed through Anuit’s mind—she is the last demon; she has survived the game against the others—and then was gone.

  Belham’s essence returned to her being. The competing bond from Dis fell away and dissipated, and Anuit’s soul shard returned to her. Her skin turned indigo blue as Belham’s had been, and she sprouted long, smooth wings reminiscent of Bryona’s. She floated several inches off the ground, surrounded in a halo of dark energy. Her wings remained still, just as the imp’s had when he hovered.

  She saw clearly now. She had the gift of the imp’s sight. She could see the temporal fabric around them, and the holes where the records had been ripped away into Dis to preserve their secrets. It was as if God Spire had no history from that time, as if that part of its past—its construction—never existed. The center of the tear rested here in these halls, and it formed a gaping hole in reality directly into the Void, from which a black miasma seeped.

  Dark joy filled her as she became aware of all the secret knowledge Belham had accumulated. He had indeed read the books before he’d destroyed them, just as she had caught him reading Desdemona’s journal before he had a chance to destroy it too. She saw the whole formula in one piece, the secret pattern that could be drawn with the Dark to open a pathway to Dis itself.

  And then she would carry out Leera’s legacy. She would recover the secrets of Artalon, and she would use the power of the gods to destroy the Demon City once and for all.

  She stretched out her hands and channeled. The forms weren’t enough. She needed raw power. But she was the last necromancer, the most powerful sorceress Ahmbren had seen since Artalon’s destruction, and perhaps the most powerful in history.

  She pulled in the Dark through the souls of Ahmbren’s dead. She touched each mote, each dead speck of soul dust, each with its own link to the Dark.

  She opened all of them.

  A hole in reality appeared, and a dark pathway extended into the heavens, to the outermost periphery between Ahmbren’s light and the greater Void beyond.

  Without another thought, she stepped into the fissure to be snatched up into the Demon City.

  * * *

  Arda watched with horror at Anuit’s transformation and subsequent opening of a dark rift in front of them. From the conversation with Belham, she figured Anuit had just opened the gate to Dis itself. Anuit jumped into the tear in reality before the paladin could stop her.

  Well, Arda would be damned if she was going to let Anuit go in and face the darkness alone. Kaldor made her promise to stick with the sorceress.

  Arda jumped through the fissure just as it closed.

  * * *

  The fissure snapped shut behind the paladin, and Oriand was left standing alone in the dark hall. A thunderclap of energy shot from where the fissure had been, knocking her to the ground. She regained her feet but struggled to keep her balance as the entire hall shook with dark power, the disruption tearing apart the strands of shadow that had concealed this place from the wizards outside.

  Suddenly, six sidhe appeared in front of her, translocated from outside by their spells. They held their wands high, magic light dispelling the darkness.

  She stood and came face to face with a wand pointed three inches from her nose. She thought it appropriate to borrow one of Arda’s phrases.

  “Fuck me.”

  24 - The Phylactery

  Seredith closed the book. It was simple, in the end, but she would never have discovered it on her own. Athaym had gifted her with a technique innovative beyond her insight, but she saw it clearly now.

  She placed her dead hand on the leather binding and leaned back in the chair. If she had breathed, she would have sighed. If she had a beating heart, she might have felt a surge of excitement and wonder. Instead, she felt only the memory of excitement and nothing close to wonder.

  What she did feel was cold observation… the observation that to make such a thing—even to conceive such a thing—would have never occurred to her. She was the greatest wizard in Windbowl, but she had missed this thing, this little thing that would secure her ability to study and research magic for lifetimes to come.

  Her mother’s dark magic had bound her soul to her dead body. Marta had intended to possess Seredith’s shell using the essence of the Green Dragon in Aradma’s blood many years ago, and had the crone been successful, Seredith’s soul would have dissolved and rotted into the ether just as if she had died.

  Cursed by Marta’s magic, her body no longer accepted her soul as its own. For all intents and purposes, it was now dead. Only the lingering residue of Aradma’s blood kept it unnaturally animated, and only that blood kept her soul from departing and wasting away. The magic imprisoned her spirit, even as her body rejected it.

  At first, she had been bitter over her fate. She abandoned sorcery and threw herself into the study of wizardry in order to find a cure for her undead condition. Twenty years later, she no longer cared about a cure. As time passed, her mind had grown more active, but her emotions had dulled over the years into an almost forgotten background.

  Now all she wanted was magic, but not as a means for a cure or even for power. It was its own end, magic for its own sake. And she was good at it. In twenty years, she had become the most powerful wizard in Windbowl, though she was not sure they knew it. She had the advantage of time on all of them. Aiella, the wizard queen and head of the Academy, achieved mastery after sixty years of study. However, she was one of the living. She had to eat, sleep, attend to the affairs of ruling a small country, and take a break every once in a while. Seredith never grew tired, never became bored, and never lost focus. Other than a conversation now and again—and there was that business eleven years back where they had asked her to negotiate with Count Markus outside of Kriegsholm—she had done nothing for two decades but study and experiment. And unlike vampires, sunlight gave her no pause, and she continued her studies night and day.

  Aiella hated her, but she left her alone out of respect for her late husband, Duke Montevin. She didn’t notice when Seredith surpassed the queen’s magical ability, and Seredith didn’t make it a point to reveal the depths of her arcane knowledge. Rumors, however, had begun to spread at the Academy, and Seredith wasn’t so blindly focused on her studying that she went unaware of the growing whispers in its halls… and in the halls of Windbowl Castle as well.

  Aiella was old and sick with something the runewardens couldn’t cure. Once she was gone, the lords and ladies of the court of Windbowl would want Seredith’s tower back. She would be forced out of the castle, and Windbowl too if the jealous academics of the Academy had their way.

  She doubted such an ousting would be peaceful. It was a good thing she had indulged the fantasies of a young man a few years ago. The little circle of devotees he had gathered to her would prove their worth yet again.

  She touched the tiny garnet that hung from her neck by a slender golden chain and said the words that would translocate her to the secret cave in the foothills at the northern edge of the tiny kingdom.

  Four years ago, Seredith had gone to the Academy late at night in search of a particular book and some distilled quicksilver from the alchemical laboratory…

  …Seredith bypassed the wards with ease. There still remained magical knowledge to be plundered from the Academy library, for those who were clever enough to synthesize inferences from the texts. The College of Wizards was simply not skilled enough to rise to the library’s full potential. It saddened her that this was the last real concentration of human academic study of magic, due to the God-King having stamped out the practice of wizardry from the rest of the Nine Realms.

  The wards the Academy had set to keep out intrud
ers were pathetically easy for her to retune so they didn’t register her presence. Rather than dispelling them, she walked past with none the wiser. The book was easy enough to procure. It was a small volume, shoved between two thicker tomes in the back of the library. She took it in her cold hands and dropped it into an inner pocket in her traditional blood-red wizard’s robe.

  She made her way silently through the empty halls of the darkest hours of the morning. Had someone been there to witness her, they might have just made out the shadow of her quietly shifting gait. If they were attentive, they would have noticed the dull luminescence from her milk-hazed eyes. But there was no one in the halls at this hour. They relied too much on those magical alarm sentry wards.

  Seredith slowly opened the door to the alchemy lab. It slid quietly on well-oiled hinges. Wizards were keen on attention to detail; there was nothing out of place or unkempt here. Not even a spot of dust collected in the corners of the gray stone floor.

  She closed the door behind her and made her way to a dark-stained oak cabinet, engraved with long slender geometric lines of silver that formed more sigils of warding. She held up her pale gray hand and touched her fingertips to the sigils. With a single word—she didn’t even require her wand for this—she commanded the magic of the wards to release and open for her. She was struck for a brief moment at how dark her gray fingernails had aged over the years in contrast with the silver-engraved lines in the cabinet’s surface.

  Even in the dark, her luminous eyes cast just enough light for her to see her reflection clearly in the surface of the polished wood. She used to hate seeing herself in mirrors, at the visible reminder she was an unnatural, dead thing. Now it fascinated her, and the reason she didn’t like mirrors in her tower was that they distracted her from her studies.

  The magic that preserved her prevented her from rotting. She still had enough vanity that it mattered to her. Her skin had dried through the ages and become almost leathery hard on her limbs and trunk. The flesh around her joints, however, had grown strangely soft, almost like flexed putty or overused suede. Only her face remained as soft as the day she had died. Something about the life force of the collapsed magic concentrated there—the same energy she imagined illumined her eyes—and kept her cheeks and lips almost fresh. She had been beautiful once, and in a strange way her face still held that memory of beauty, like a day-old rose out of water with the promise of wilt that never quite came. Nevertheless, her visage still had lost all color of life, and was as pale gray as the rest of her. And, as supple as her cheeks and lips might remain, they were as cold as raw fish left too long in the nighttime air.

  She broke herself from her reverie. This was why she disliked mirrors—they forced too much introspection. She didn’t know how long she had tarried there. No matter, all she had to do was take the quicksilver, and she would translocate back to her castle tower.

  She opened the cabinet and immediately saw the flask. They would be concerned when they found it missing, but that wasn’t her problem. They would never trace it back to her, and even if they suspected, they would never dare disturb her. She knew the College of Wizards feared what they didn’t know and that they were well aware of the fact they didn’t know how far she had advanced.

  Taking the flask and closing the cabinet, she turned for one last look at the room before she spoke the words to translocate back to her tower. The words died on her lips, and for a moment she felt a brief surge of a forgotten emotion: surprise.

  A boy stood there, and when she turned to see him, he sucked a quick intake of breath. They both stared in silence at one another for a moment. Her surprise changed to curiosity as to how he would react.

  It was not as she might have expected.

  Instead of running in fear, he stayed and stared at her in wonder. He had crept into the lab when students—he was obviously a student, he was too young for anything else—were supposed to be asleep in bed. Orange hair fell unkempt around his ears and brushed against freckled cheeks beneath widened blue eyes.

  When she said nothing, he finally stammered, “I’m s-s-s-sorry.” He collected himself and spoke more firmly. “I’m Chambry, ma’am,” he told her. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I had to have a closer look.”

  She raised an eyebrow, securing the flask of quicksilver beneath her robe. “Well?” she asked, her voice raspy and stretched. “Have you come to mock the dead girl?” She had only been seventeen when she died.

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am,” he stated earnestly. “I just… we’ve heard stories.”

  “How old are you, boy?” she asked.

  “Fourteen,” he said.

  “And what stories have you heard?”

  “That you haunt the castle!” he quickly answered. “And that you know more about magic than all our professors combined!”

  She chuckled dryly. “That I may,” she agreed. “Do I not frighten you?”

  He breathed quickly. He was obviously excited. “Yes,” he said quietly. “But you interest me even more.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have magic,” he breathed. “You could teach us things…”

  Now there was an interesting proposal. She had never considered taking apprentices before.

  “The Academy would never allow it,” she replied. “Tell me, why shouldn’t I make you forget you ever saw me?”

  He shook his head. “No! Don’t do that.” He actually rushed forward and took her hands in his. He looked down at her fingers; she imagined he was surprised at how cold they were. Yet he didn’t let go. He squeezed her hands and insisted, “Please don’t make me forget you. I’ve always wanted to see you, and I would die if I forgot you.”

  She actually felt amusement, and for that alone he was worth indulging. “I doubt that,” she chuckled. “I know a thing or two about death.”

  And in that moment, she saw another glint in his eyes, one that she hadn’t noticed before.

  Adoration.

  “I don’t think you care about what the College thinks,” he breathed quietly. He looked up at her. He was a few inches shorter than she was, and he now stood close to her. He didn’t shrink away from her glowing, unfocused eyes. “There’s a number of us,” he told her. “We meet in secret—we want to learn things they won’t teach us. If you would teach us, we would do whatever you ask.”

  “For the magic,” she stated as softly as he’d spoken.

  “For the magic!” he agreed.

  Finally, she nodded. “Keep quiet and wait for me,” she told him. “I will send for you when the time is right, when I have found a secret place for us to meet. You do not wish this to be known to the College, and neither do I.”

  His cheeks flushed and spread into a giddy grin. “We won’t disappoint you!” he told her. “We’ll do whatever you ask! Just teach us your magic!”

  He was young, but she thought that when she had been alive he was the sort of boy she would have wanted to kiss. Now all desire for kissing had passed; her only interest was knowledge. Those parts of her that had once yearned for boys had dried up long ago. Still, it was nice to think of a boy that might like magic as she did. More importantly, he might prove useful.

  Very deliberately, she took his face in her cold hands and kissed her cold lips to his brow.

  “I will teach you magic,” she said. “But if you disappoint me, if you lose your dedication, I will kill you.”

  Oddly enough, his face flushed with pleasure. “I won’t disappoint you!” he promised. Hunger consumed his eyes, but it wasn’t the lust of a young boy. It was a lust for knowledge, and power.

  She stood back and nodded. She completed the translocation spell and, in an instant, returned once more to her tower in Windbowl Castle…

  …Seredith still wore that same blood-red wizard’s robe today when she appeared in the cavern to meet Chambry. In the intervening four years he had grown taller than her, and he had shaved his previously unruly curls to a tight, short cut. It made him look severe, a
nd she appreciated that.

  He had promised he wouldn’t disappoint her, and he hadn’t. He had delivered to her a circle of five devoted students. She had been surprised when she first met them in the secret cave that she had prepared for their meetings. There were two human boys, counting Chambry, and a seelie boy, a gnomish girl, and a human girl.

  Now they all waited for her in the cave. They had made it their home over the years, with a hodgepodge of books and supplies to provide for a makeshift laboratory and classroom. She realized in this moment that they were the closest thing she could come to love. They valued knowledge above everything else, and like Seredith, they didn’t see knowledge as a means to power. Power was a means to more knowledge. They would sacrifice everything for understanding, even morality itself. She delighted in this, for it meant she was not alone in the world.

  Four years ago, I wouldn’t have cared for such things as companionship.

  Yet, in her own way, she did now. Athaym had hinted at the promise of eternal companionship in the quest for knowledge.

  As she appeared to them, they all looked at her with adoring eyes, awaiting their next lesson. She took a seat in the chair set out for her. She didn’t need to sit, for she never tired. Yet she found such human appearances comforted them, and as it comforted them, it made her feel connected as well.

  “I have something to share with you,” she said.

  They waited, hands folded calmly across their laps as they had been taught in the Academy.

  “I’ve been given a great secret of magic,” she told them. “I cannot reveal it to you yet, but in time I might. But for me to uncover this secret, I have need of your help again, to acquire certain… things…”

  She had used them for this before, and they had proven quite useful when it came to acquiring spell components or alchemical ingredients that she didn’t want the Academy to know she needed. They were able to feed her supplies without anyone tracing it to the revenant in the back tower of Windbowl’s castle.