“Coordinates,” Iolus said. The soldiers in the other carriage stared at the blood smears on the sorcerer’s face. Basher could sense their fear. He could sense their overwhelming desire to be out of this place.
But not Basher. He loved it here. He could feel the eyes of his brothers, watching them.
The low mage, Ezzrax, recited a string of numbers. Iolus nodded.
The other carriage wasted no time in taking off. Basher watched it creep upward until it disappeared into the night sky.
Iolus hopped out of the carriage and began the walk toward the center of the clearing. He was whistling, completely in his own world and oblivious to all else. Coscoros and Leticia remained seated. Basher smacked Coscoros in the shoulder.
“Pass me Smasher,” he said.
“Get it yourself,” Coscoros said. “I don’t see why I had to tag along. This place is cursed.”
Leticia looked out at the naked, black trees. “Don’t be such a child.”
“I don’t see you getting up.”
Basher interrupted. “With me here, you don’t have to worry. Once I make the call, they’ll listen to me and no one else.”
Coscoros sighed. “We don’t need help from monsters.”
Basher smacked his shoulder again, harder this time. Coscoros glared at him.
“Get a grip,” Basher said. “I don’t see chicken feathers on your wings.”
Coscoros took a deep breath, stood, and leaped into the air. His wings produced a steady beat as he flew in a circle above the carriage.
“Come on, then,” he said.
Leticia got up, put one foot on the top edge of the door, and propelled herself forward. Wind encircled her body as she phased into the form of a giant gray wasp with a stinger as long as a sword. A high-pitched buzzing filled the clearing as her wings blurred.
“A grayjacket wasp,” Coscoros said. “Well, aren’t you full of surprises?”
Basher jumped. There was a loud thump as he landed next to the carriage.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They found Iolus in the center of the clearing, looking up at the stars through gashes in the clouds. Aikon danced around him, starlight flashing along its blade. Basher found himself wondering what vile thoughts spun in the man’s head. Surely, they were as sharp as Aikon—and just as cruel.
“Look at us,” Iolus said. “We’re nothing compared to those stars. Just little bits of cosmic powders being blown this way and that along the surface of a giant rock. But to be a god—one of the ancients—now that’s something…”
His voice trailed away into silence. The stars hung, eternal and blind, beyond the scattered clouds. Basher hated looking up at them. He wished the cloud cover was complete so he could go about his business in the dark.
But that wouldn’t happen. Iolus raised his right arm, hand balled into a fist. Then, closing his eyes, he let his fingers burst outward, exposing his palm to the sky.
Like sheets whipped off a bed, the clouds spread outward until they were gone, leaving the entire dome of night sky exposed. A naked, glittering expanse—just like that. And it was immense, so much bigger than Basher had thought it could be, riddled with bright, twinkling stars, billions of them, so many that he felt dizzy just looking up. Their silvery light poured into the clearing, illuminating the betrayeus weed at their feet.
“It makes you feel like an insect,” Iolus said, baring his teeth, his voice rising into a growl. “The grandeur of it all—dimensions stacked atop one another like coins, entire galaxies rolling through infinity like marbles, and we are so small and meaningless that we could be said not to exist at all.” He closed his eyes as if pain had spiked in his head. “The gods are dead. Now, there’s just me.”
Basher hesitated before stepping forward. He’d never seen another soldier behave this way. He looked up at Coscoros, who hung flapping in the air, and Leticia, still in wasp form and making that dirty buzzing sound. Coscoros nodded for him to continue.
“Sir,” Basher said. “Should I make the call?”
“Yes.” Iolus tore his gaze away from the stars and peered at him. “Call your pets. Tell them that tonight they drink the blood of children.”
CHAPTER 61
T hey emerged from the black wall of trees at the northern edge of the clearing, like sick dogs woken from a deep sleep. Skinny and hairless from a lack of nutrition; they had not fed properly in a long time, and needed the flesh of those who walked on two feet instead of four.
Glowing red slits opened in the dark, the eyes of these demonic creatures. Basher had woken them up, and they were as angry as they were hungry. He could hear them growling low in their throats.
As his brothers walked into the moonlit clearing, Basher heard Coscoros’s breathing quicken. The Dark Acolyte had never seen an Elki up close. The creatures resembled a breed of dog common in the human world—those long-limbed ones, used in races—but in Basher’s opinion, Elki were far more beautiful. The alpha, bigger and meaner than the rest, came close enough for him to reach down and touch it. He ran his fingers along the boneflakes sticking out of its spine. Sharp as flint knives. The creature opened its mouth and yawned, exposing double rows of razor-sharp teeth.
It wagged its tail at Basher, widened its ruby-red eyes.
“Aroooooo,” the creature said.
Basher petted its hairless scalp. “Roooo,” he said. “Roooo-aroooo…”
The creature turned and howled at its pack.
“Roooooooo-arooo-aroooo…”
The night stillness broke as a chorus of excited yelps filled the clearing. There were easily a hundred and fifty Elki surrounding them now, all howling and yipping at once, their toothy heads turned up to the stars.
“My pets,” Basher said. “My brothers!”
He tipped his head back and howled with them.
Iolus stood behind the Berserker, watching the gathered Elki and laughing quietly to himself. One Elki came up to him and sniffed his boot. Iolus looked down at the creature.
Their eyes met.
With a whimper, the Elki backed away.
CHAPTER 62
M ilo aged three months.
He was a half-inch taller than he’d been upon first entering his uncle’s underground vault. He would be the same height as Emma when he got back. Finally.
He missed her. And he missed Ascher and Coral, and his friends Owen, Gunner, Oscar, and Barrel.
And Lily. Lily Breezewater.
There were nights when he couldn’t sleep. He would lie in bed thinking of the good times they’d had at the ranch during his short stay, like when they had stayed up late reading comic books and drinking Bara-cola. He wondered what his friends would think if they knew he was here, in a secret, technologically advanced underground vault with Emmanuel Banks, the mysterious magician they had known only as “Emmanuel, Savant Son of Sargos” in the comic books. He pictured their admiring faces.
More often than not, Milo fell asleep the instant he dropped into his bed. His days were repetitive and hard. His training consisted of long hours of meditation, exercise, and intellectual study. In the evenings after dinner, which Milo usually ate alone while reading the books his uncle kept assigning, he would practice drawing luminether from within. The spell was always the same—the one Lily had shown him on the pond.
He would recite the words of her poem (“Oh, elegant strings that tremble in time…”) and stare at his hands until the light gathered. He was getting better and better at it. He would show her when he got back.
Once, to show Milo what luminether was like, Emmanuel used a special machine to illuminate the currents all around them. They had been in the Eternal Gardens, a leafy, earthy place that was kept at tropical temperatures year-round. The ceiling was a huge dome made to resemble a sky with clouds and a sun, and a moon and stars at night. Exotic birds darted from tree to tree, calling out to each other. Lions and monkeys walked and swung about, harmless yet convincing holograms. There wasn’t a single mosquito, and t
he air always smelled like fresh rain.
Milo loved the gardens. He had never been in a jungle, but he imagined this was better. It was here that he and his uncle spent most of their meditation time. The buzzing of insects and squawking of birds made it easier to descend into the peace and quiet of his own mind. And the place reminded him of Lily for some reason. Sometimes he’d spend an hour or more just lying on the grass, imagining Lily by his side.
The machine Emmanuel used to reveal the luminether was a big, bulky device with a handle and a trigger. It had a fat metal head with a scanner in front. When he turned it on, it made a low, robotic whine, much like a sound effect in a 1970s science-fiction film.
Emmanuel used the machine to illuminate the harmless white fog hanging all around them.
“Put your hand in the mist,” his uncle said.
Milo did, slowly at first, feeling like a child about to touch a pot on a stove that might be burning hot. He had never been one to just dive right in, and so his uncle had to wait as Milo took his time. He slid his hand into the mist and yanked it back when he saw the luminether change course and seep into his fingers.
“It’s going into me,” Milo said, pulling his hand away. The mist went back to normal.
“Yes. Your body’s collecting it.”
He put his hand back into the mist and once more began to draw it in through his pores.
“And it happens all the time? Even when I’m asleep?”
Emmanuel nodded, making his glasses flicker with light. Behind him, a red monkey with a purple face watched, dangling from a branch.
“Especially when you’re asleep.”
Some of Milo’s training involved direct stimulation of nerve endings to create pain. Emmanuel used magic to shock, burn, and freeze Milo’s skin in an effort to condition him into responding in certain ways. Of course, he wasn’t really shocking, burning, and freezing his own nephew, only creating those sensations. If Milo wanted to use his body as a tool for spellcasting, he would first have to learn its limits.
On one occasion, Emmanuel made him sit fully clothed in a tub of water in the Eternal Gardens. Then he hypnotized Milo into believing that the water was coming to a boil. Milo’s eyes were closed, and he was listening to the birds whooping in the trees. The sounds should have relaxed him, but his heart hammered in his chest.
“It’s getting hotter and hotter. You can feel the bubbles rising, burning your skin with their heat. It’s like they’re screaming at you, biting you.”
Milo was sweating and his teeth were clenched tight. The water was boiling his skin, loosening great red-and-white sheets of it, ripping it off his bones. At least, that was how it felt.
“It hurts. Gods, it hurts!”
Steam rose up and burned his face. He opened his eyes and saw his uncle nodding in approval.
“You can make it stop, Milo. Send the water out of the bucket. It’s the only way.”
But Milo was paralyzed. It was part of the spell. He was a prisoner in his own body, and he was slowly being turned into soup.
“Please! Turn it off!”
“Cast it out, Milo. Empty it.”
Chaos reigned in Milo’s head. His thoughts were blurred fragments thrown every which way, like leaves in a tornado.
“Focus, Milo, like I taught you.”
When he thought the pain would take over and wipe him out of existence, Milo heard a loud, watery burst. It felt like a dozen people had splashed him all at once. The water burned his nose and seeped into his eyes. But the pain was fading. Air cooled his skin. He opened his eyes.
There was water all around him, everywhere but inside the bucket. It dripped off leaves and ran down the hanging vines. His uncle was soaked. The man took off his sunglasses, wincing in the artificial light. He spoke in a soothing voice as he shook the lenses dry.
“You emptied the bucket,” he said. “How did it feel?”
Milo could move again. He looked at his hands and saw that they were not red and scalded. Astoundingly, his entire body and his clothes were perfectly dry.
“It felt pretty good,” he said. “Except the part where I was being boiled alive.”
Emmanuel put his glasses back on. He got up and joined his hands behind his back. Still dripping, he watched Milo as he spoke.
“At some point, you’ll learn how to control these automatic responses so you can reproduce them at will. The training sessions will be painful. I hope you’re okay with that.”
Milo’s voice’s wavered. “Pain is a signal, nothing more. Right?”
“I would never hurt you. You know that.”
“I know.”
AT NIGHT, Milo slept alone in his tiny room, which was no more than a bed, a closet, and a desk. There was no window, only a vent that let in a steady current of air. Sometimes he heard sounds coming from the vent that made him dream of huge machines chugging away inside the earth.
Every morning a bell would sound to wake him up, and a little metal door would slide open in the wall, revealing a tray of breakfast fit for a monk: a bowl of oatmeal with a glass of milk and a few wedges of fruit, as well as a multivitamin. He was to have no entertainment or pleasure during his training, apart from reading and lounging in the gardens during his short breaks.
“Comfort is a mind-killer.” His uncle’s words. “It makes you lazy, self-satisfied. When it comes to spellcasting, you must always be striving.”
Another three months went by. Milo mastered the basics of what his uncle was trying to teach him (and he grew another half inch). He learned how to channel large amounts of luminether from his body into small, blue-white crystals, like icicles. He could hold one in his hand and stare at it for several seconds until it brightened into something resembling pure light, solidified. It was one way of practicing the most fundamental aspect of spellcasting.
“Be careful,” Emmanuel said once, after Milo had managed to fill one of the crystals to its maximum capacity. “Throw that, and it’ll blow up like a grenade. Go ahead. Try it on that wall over there.”
Milo threw one as hard as he could against the wall at the other end of the room. It shattered in a burst of violent white light.
“It can knock a person unconscious,” Emmanuel said. “But it’s more useful against machines. It creates an electromagnetic pulse that disarms them.”
“What are they called?”
“Good question. I never gave them a formal name. Always just called them stunners.”
“Works for me.”
He also learned how to expel harmless bursts of energy that would shoot out of his hands and roll across the floor for several seconds before disappearing. Emmanuel called them “bursts,” and explained that despite being harmless in battle, they could be used to amplify an already existing spell or increase the power of a spell cast by an ally.
His uncle demonstrated.
“I’m going to cast a freeze spell on that statue over there.” He pointed at a marble statue of a woman swaddled in robes holding a water pitcher. They were in one of the training rooms. “Now, I’m a magician, not a sorcerer, which means elemental spells aren’t my specialty. But that’s okay, because I have you.”
Milo couldn’t help but smile. He liked the fact that his uncle might need his help. He also liked elemental spells, because they were his specialty—though he hadn’t learned any fun ones just yet.
“Ready?”
His uncle pulled a blue crystal out of his pocket, charged it, and took aim at the statue. A crackling sound came from across the room. The statue began to take on a glassy texture as ice formed over its surface. It was not a very impressive spell, and was too slow to be used as a weapon. That was where Milo came in.
“Fire one of your bursts.”
Milo made a claw with his right hand, imagining the weight and heft of a bowling ball, then channeled energy into his palm and ran forward. He cast the ball of light directly at the statue.
It made a soft sizzling sound as it rolled across the floor. When it h
it the statue, Milo heard a sound like tin foil being crushed into a ball.
The effect was instantaneous.
Heavy spikes shot out of the statue, giving the woman a monstrous appearance. By the time the spell sputtered out, the woman was covered in a variety of sharp icicles that ranged from the size of a finger to the length of a sword.
“Now what?”
Emmanuel smiled at him. He held out a hand, palm up. A flame fizzled to life, turning his glasses into flat orange circles.
“Now we’re going to melt it.”
THE NIGHT of the ice statue, Milo awoke in his room in the dark and was unable to fall back asleep.
He’d been dreaming about his family, and in the dreams he and his mother, father, and sister were in the family minivan, driving toward the edge of a cliff, and he could see in the mirrors that his mother and father were smiling, despite the fact that they were headed toward certain death.
He got out of bed and turned on the overhead light. His books sat in a pile on his desk, next to a stack of notebooks in which he’d been taking notes on the subjects that interested him most. If there was anything his uncle gave him in large amounts, it was paper, pens, and books.
Milo swiped his arm across the desk. His books and notebooks made loud papery bursts against the floor.
“Fire!” he shouted, lifting his right arm and pointing it at the pile.
Nothing happened. He felt stupid. He wanted that feeling of something violent and dangerous shooting out of him—like the fireball that had failed to save his father’s life.
“Ignite!” he shouted, and this time he stabbed his arm toward the pile like he wanted to give it a good smack.
Again, nothing. He could feel the fire inside him. He was sweating and his face was hot. If only he could just let it out…
He closed his eyes and made fists with his hands. Clenching his teeth, he let out a groan of frustration.
“Why can’t you just burn!”
Something hissed in front of him. When he opened his eyes he saw a gray band of smoke rise and curl in the air, a tiny flame dancing at its base. He took a step back. Soon, the sputtering flame became a pillar of fire that threatened to destroy his book collection. It hissed and crackled. Smoke filled the room and his nose burned. He covered the lower half of his face and made for the door.
Savant & Feral (Digital Boxed Set): Books 1 and 2 of the Epic Luminether Fantasy Series Page 36