My face burned like the wounds had been doused with salt and acid. Blood poured out of me. Agony chased away my grogginess. Warded against all magic was she? I thought not – when was the last time a proper mind-fucker like me was around? Far beyond her lifetime. I opened my Gift and slammed into her mind, squeezing hard. I didn’t give a crap if the shadow cats found my scent here and killed her because of it.
One of her wardings had some small effect on my power but it was probably a half-remembered ancient structure passed down through the centuries, one nowhere near strong enough to defy me. It wasn’t like they could have tested it.
Angharad was tough, many centuries old from the stray thoughts flashing through her mind, and she resisted mightily.
She gasped and drew her dripping claws back, shaking her head. It gave me enough time to reach up and grab the front of her robes. I pulled her down as I sat up, my forehead ramming into her nose.
We both screamed in pain, mine from the gaping wounds in my face and neck, and her from a broken nose and my blood in her crystal eyes.
She tumbled to the floor and I rolled off the slab to fall atop her, elbow crunching deep into her stomach. I went mad, punching her in the face, over and over until she shoved me off with one hand. I flew backwards into a wall with bone-jarring impact.
I had been too enraged by pain and panic to notice this lesser pain and surged back to kick her in the side. As I went for a second blow she grabbed my foot and twisted, taking me down.
She came at me claws bared, then slowed as I found a crack in her mind, forced myself into the oozing darkness inside and ordered her to stop. Her mind was like sticking my hand up an angry badger’s arse – she fought me every step with feral rage like I had never felt before.
The door to the chamber ground back and two angry druí in robes stormed in, shouting about their spirits sensing blood spilled across their holy signs.
At my command, Angharad dropped in a daze while I faced the other two. One flung razor shards of ice at me. I dodged, then kicked him in the balls hard enough to kill his unborn children. I smashed the other’s face into the wall and sprinted past, clutching my ruined cheek in one hand as she fell back spitting blood and teeth. I would have killed Angharad if I’d had the time but I could hear others stirring in the tunnels and rooms nearby. I only knew that I had to get out of that subterranean pit of daemons and take my chances under an honest sky.
The rest of that week was all a blur of blood and panic and pain, of frantic, vicious fights for survival and scrabbling down slopes of scrubby scree by moonlight as I fled on foot through the slumbering valleys.
I had vowed to never again venture anywhere near Kil Noth unless it was to kill my grandmother.
Perhaps when all of this Scarrabus nonsense was over and done with I would see about fulfilling that old promise. For now, I was here and being marched into the depths of Kil North all over again on my grandmother’s orders, except this time I was the angry badger with sharpened claws and wicked teeth bared that they were letting into their home. I was sure they would end up regretting it.
CHAPTER 14
The interrogations began with Granville. A dozen druí took him to the far side of the stone hall we were confined in and sat him down in a plush chair. They asked him seemingly innocuous questions that he seemed happy enough to answer. As interrogations of prisoners went, it was strangely friendly, with no chains and sharpened knives or pliers for fingernails and teeth – instead there was roast pork and ale on the table and comfy chairs for all, but a prison it remained.
A dozen men and women in fine woollen robes sporting ornate bronze arm rings and golden torcs stood scrutinising every single thing we did, and a handful of armed warriors with wary eyes stood ready at their side. All of the druí bore black and blue tattoos, some that proudly proclaimed their original clan from before they became druí, and others with more esoteric meanings. A few were just there for plain old vanity.
At least Angharad was elsewhere; I wasn’t sure I could bite my tongue and stay my hands much longer otherwise.
Bryant and Secca reached for mugs of ale. “I wouldn’t if I were you,” I said. “We are prisoners, which means no guest right prevents them lacing your drink with alchemics to make you spill your guts. Or poison come to that.” They swiftly withdrew their hands.
I watched carefully, wondering what their goal was here. This was no way to treat allies on the eve of war. Clansfolk druí were nothing like Arcanum-trained magi and with a few notable exceptions, relatively unaccustomed to using their Gift for direct offensive purposes. At least they had no idea what I was now capable of. I had thought myself so strong last time I was here, so very cunning. Hah! I’d been naught but a whelp then, and rudely disabused of those notions.
Despite their dire warnings, I eased open my Gift and sent out careful feelers. There was a reason this was happening, and I was certain my grandmother stood to gain something from it.
It did not take long for me to uncover the stain of Scarrabus in the room, quietly watching from inside the bearded man busy interrogating Granville. I was careful not to let it detect me as I scanned the rest of the Clansfolk. The others were clean.
The Setharii magi were interrogated and released one by one, granted guest right and leave to enter the hold. I was the last, and it was difficult to keep the anger and disgust from my face as I met the gaze of the infested druí. I pondered killing him as I answered questions on who I was, why I was here and stated that I had no intentions of harming Kil Noth or any of its inhabitants. Some druí had ways to detect lies, but there is truth and then there is the whole truth, and I was a tyrant – if I didn’t want to know something for a short time then I didn’t and walled it away in the back of my mind. If I didn’t know, I couldn’t lie. Nope, I had absolutely no intention at all of sticking my grandmother’s severed head on a spike after I’d forced her to heal my hand.
He studied my eyes and face for a long moment, then nodded to the guards. There was no offer of guest right. The druí and warriors exited, barring the door after them to keep me prisoner. They let me stew there for hours while all the others were free to enjoy the hospitality and entertainments of Kil Noth’s great hall. It was just like the vindictive creature that was my grandmother.
Eventually I dozed off, unknown hours passing until Angharad arrived to wake me. At least she now wore an ice-blue dress, thin and teasing though it was. I kept my Gift open and ready to kill, but she was a blank slate that offered no hint of what she was thinking or feeling.
“Well?” she demanded.
I shrugged. “Do not play the idiot with me, boy,” she hissed. “Do ye honestly believe I would not know ye searched their minds? Doubly so if I told ye not to. What did you find?”
“The bearded one you had doing the interrogations,” I said. “Are we done here?”
She winced. “As I suspected. Murdoc was useful as a human, but will prove more useful still as a receptacle for disinformation before his end. Do ye ken what is wrong with him?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I know everything. Do you?” “Everything is it?” She chuckled. “Ye have grown so arrogant, my boy. So ignorant. I am Angharad Walker and I have seen sights that would blast and burn your little mind. I know the true nature o’ the Scarrabus.” Her amethyst eyes swivelled to look at my gloved right hand. “I also know that ye have come to be healed.”
My hand clenched into a fist. “I am here because you held every innocent in Kaladon hostage to your mad whims.”
“And to have your hand healed,” she reiterated.
I ground my teeth. “And to have it healed. How did you know?” She blinked, lids slowly slicking across crystal. “The Queen o’ Winter told me so. She could feel the change in ye as soon as ye entered her domain and pressed your blackening hand to frozen flesh and walls o’ ice.”
Damned spirits, and this was the biggest, meanest, oldest spirit in all the Clanholds, the one all clans sacrificed and prayed to, and gav
e power to. This was the god-spirit that she had always intended me to be a priest of, the one she tried to force upon me years ago. The scars marring my face burned, remembering that damned ritual and her burning rage when it had failed.
“I am no gullible, fawning druí,” I said. “The only spirits I give a crap about are the ones I can toss down my throat. The rest can all go fuck themselves.”
Her fingers twitched into claws and her eyes flared with light. Then she stiffened and looked at the wall opposite me. Something was happening; I could feel a whisper, a magical vibration in the realm of the mind. It was gone before I could locate the source.
My grandmother’s anger drained. “A new morning has dawned and the Eldest wishes to see ye. If ye want your hand healed ye must come with me.”
“I thought you were the eldest of the druí?” My eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Or do you mean a spirit?”
“I swear on the Queen o’ Winter’s name, the Eldest is neither druí nor spirit. Come.” She led me from the interrogation room, down a hallway, and through a circular stone doorway guarded by two mailed warriors who stepped aside to admit her. After we entered, the massive stone disc rolled back into position behind us, sealing us off from the rest of Kil Noth.
I stamped down my welling panic. Enclosed spaces and I did not get on well, especially underground. I leaned heavily on my hatred of her as I grabbed a lantern from the wall and followed her slight form down a tightly spiralling staircase. Down and down and down for an age. She did not seem to need any light, her bare feet following a familiar foot-worn path down those ancient stone steps.
My back and pits were slick with cold sweat the time the stairs opened up into a long vaulted hall, more from claustrophobic fear and stress than physical exertion. I took deep calming breaths, glad to be in a more open space, and studied the bones laying on granite slabs in long rows down the sides of the hall, great heroes arrayed in all their finery. This was Kil Noth’s Hall of Ancestors, the second most sacred room in any Clansfolk hold, a place where no outsider had ever been allowed to venture. Until me, six years ago, and then only because it was on the way to the chamber where they held their most sacred of rites. On the walls behind each tomb hung weapons and prizes they had taken in battle, or great works of artistry and exquisite musical instruments. I had been too dazed from shock to examine them on my last visit.
Behind a dusty skeleton clutching a bejewelled crown and spear sat another skull on an iron spike, a heavily warded and ridiculously expensive Arcanum robe hung on a wicker frame around it. A sigil was emblazed on the front of the robes, one that I recognised from Setharii history books. Huh. I guess we now knew what happened to Elder Rannikus and his army that had attempted to invade the Clansholds. Ending up as a prize on a wall was not how I intended to go.
This great hall was not what Angharad was interested in. She led me through at a swift pace to stop before two heavily warded doorways. She placed her hand on a gold plate on the wall to the left and the stone door slid noiselessly back to reveal a strange, angular room beyond. The floor was square but the ceiling rose from the sides up into a higher point in the centre, almost like we had entered the heart of a pyramid. The walls were slick and black.
Unstoppable terror flooded through me. It was identical to the room in the Boneyards of Setharis that I had been buried alive in as an initiate, the room I thought I would die in with only a magically reanimated corpse for company. The place I went a little mad in.
My grandmother noticed my reaction, and foresaw exactly what I was about to do. Her Gift opened and her eyes flared bright with power.
My magic roared towards her mind, frantic to tear it to shreds and escape this cursed place before I was trapped all over again. Help! I screamed. Somebody blocked me from ripping into Angharad, sheltering her mind from the torrent ripping at it. It was not human. This was a trap. I was a fool to think the Scarrabus would not try to infest me again.
Not me. I drew deep, and deeper still on the sea of magic as I resisted the inhuman power trying to influence me. My right hand burned with the desire to wrap around Angharad’s throat and rip it out. I would die before giving in to the Scarrabus.
Apologies, Edrin Edge Walker. I am not Scarrabus.
What the f–?
The back wall rippled and something stepped through what moments ago had been solid stone. It was huge, larger even than the great silver apes of the Thousand Kingdoms to the south that it somewhat resembled, looming head and shoulders taller than me and twice as broad. It was covered in shaggy grey fur decorated with carved bone and gemstone beads. Its large sloping forehead boasted a third eye that glimmered with human intelligence.
Heart hammering, I backed away and fumbled at my belt for a knife I didn’t have.
Angharad bowed in its presence, reeking of respect and admiration. “I greet ye, Eldest. I have brought the spawn o’ my spawn as ye have requested.” If this was the Eldest then the creature was ancient beyond belief. Its race had vanished from history and human ken long ago, or so the Arcanum had believed.
It was a beast of legend that our corrupted Setharii myths had called ogres and depicted as mindless raging beasts. “Ogarim,” I said, remembering what Shadea had called that ancient desiccated corpse in the Boneyards below Setharis, the one that had once been slain by my spirit-bound blade, Dissever.
You know of my race, broken one? it said, the words brushing against my mind like a soft breeze. Despite the mental magic involved it did not feel threatening. How?
A gentle urging to tell all lapped against my defences, a subtle but strong invitation. I ignored the urge and kept my Gift wide open, trickling magic into my muscles and mind ready to fight for my life. The ogarim felt almost-human, which probably meant I could kill it. “What do you want with me?”
Human words are crude, it said, and I felt its frustration with humans, or ‘broken ones’ as it knew us. May I… There was a meaning there I did not understand, some sort of linkage that felt like a lesser version of the Gift-bond I had once shared with my old friend Lynas.
“Do not dare show the Eldest disrespect,” my grandmother hissed. “Do as it wishes.”
The ogarim felt my fear and my hatred of her, and in response it thumped its big hairy arse down on the floor, knowingly appearing less threatening. I would show you.
“Show me what?” I asked, suspicious.
Origin. Scarrabus. War. Future. All were accompanied by an incredibly complex interplay of emotion.
“And the Eldest will also reveal to me how ye may heal your hand,” Angharad said, grinning like a cat.
I took a deep breath and pondered it. It was a risk, certainly, but the Scarrabus were ancient creatures and if we wanted more information then what better source than another ancient monster? I eased open my mental defences and probed the ogarim’s mind. It was a formidable fortress, but its gate was open, allowing me to enter the inner courtyard and communicate mind-to-mind. There was no feeling of danger, only patient tolerance.
It was pleased as I touched it, and then a river of thought and emotion flowed into me. For a moment the deluge threatened to drown me, but I quickly found my balance and pushed back. Our thoughts flowed into one another, swirling and mixing, sharing…
All was peace and joy. The ogarim dwelled in small family groups within pyramids of living black stone and danced to the music of magic in vast stone temples grown from the bones of the earth itself. There was no want, no starvation or disease, no war or hatred, and no death from age, only accident. All ogarim knew all others on an intimate level that only a human tyrant like me could truly understand. If you hurt one you hurt all. What they needed they made from the elements around them, every member of their race wielding innate magic as potent as an elder magus but without the need for centuries of training or the restrictions of the Gift. They did no
t have pyromancers, geomancers, aeromancers or aquamacers, seers or knights, or tyrants or anything else – they had all Gifts in one.
Broken ones…
The ogarim looked up from their temples as the music faltered and the currents of magic changed. In the night sky a star guttered and went out. A few years later, another died, and in its place a sucking pit of nothingness. They felt fear, and although not a new concept, it was an uncommon thing only experienced by individuals in unforeseen peril. The eight eldest among them set out across the daemon-infested Far Realms to uncover the fate of the missing stars…
Daemons… The ogarim thought my opinion and information on the inhabitants of the Far Realms insulting and ignorant. They were alien animals and greater intelligences to match our own, and all worthy of existing as much as we did. Other realms hosted vicious predators however, and after the first death the ogarim learned to defend themselves. Which they did with unexpected and terrifying magical ferocity, though also without anger.
Eventually they travelled to a new realm close to the missing stars and discovered an intelligent species, shaped something like bears, that were tearing their own civilisation to pieces. The ogarim watched, confused and horrified as unbear slaughtered unbear. The ogarim did not understand how war was possible, not then, thinking the violence caused by disease or poison. When portals from other realms opened and unknown daemons entered this new realm to side with one faction of unbears, the ogarim thought that peacekeepers had arrived to stop the madness and heal the suffering.
Naive… The sense of regret and loss almost drove me to tears. How could they have possibly known that the armies of the Scarrabus had arrived to aid their already-infested allies in conquering that realm?
The first taking… Its deep anger was more human than anything I had yet felt from it.
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