Milo blew against his palm, sending the fireball shooting toward the group. Garig curled against his seat. The girls yelped and twisted to get away. The other two Sargonauts tried to dodge by flinging themselves against the walls.
But the fireball never hit them. At the last second, Milo killed the spell, turning it into a harmless cloud of smoke.
“Are you crazy?” one of the girls yelled at him.
“Get away from us!” said the other.
Milo kept his eyes locked with Garig’s, though every neuron in his brain was shouting for him to get as far away as possible. He could be arrested for what he had just done. Would Garig tell on him?
“I’ll remember you did that,” Garig said.
“You’re going to rat me out?” Milo said, a challenge that also sounded desperate.
Garig shook his head, no, but his sudden smile told a different story. Feeling uneasy, Milo stepped off the train and jogged to catch up with his friends. He looked back only once, quickly, and saw a pale oval in the window. It lasted only a moment before the train shot away, but he felt Garig’s hateful glare wash over him as hot as the fireball had been.
CHAPTER 11
I n the red-tinged glow of his personal lab—the only color of lighting that didn’t bother his eyes—Kovax busied himself with Sightwielder’s controls. He initiated the complex series of programs he had created, full of algorithms and functions only he understood, and stepped back to watch a strip of indicator lights blink up to maximum power.
That was the easy part. Next came the needle. He gasped as it slid into his arm. In response, the central hub spit out a dark blue globe with the slightest hint of light in its core. It resembled a planet covered by ocean, untouched by the sun and therefore in a state of eternal night, but with a store of precious energy somewhere deep within. Kovax smiled at his creation. It was his own personal planet, and he was its god.
His pleasure didn’t last long. The power went out in the room, and the engine died with a diminishing hum. The globe disappeared.
“Curse the gods,” he said, sliding the needle back out and tossing it aside.
He felt his way through the darkness until he reached a small chest on a table in the corner. Undoing the ward spell, which would have killed anyone else attempting to open the box, he quickly flung it open. The scarlet light stung his eyes. A brilliant row of crystals lay tucked into grooves on a velvet surface, so radiant they made regular luminether crystals look like lumps of coal.
Kovax examined the treasure. Of the five grooves in the velvet, only one was empty. That crystal was now inside the machine, drained and in need of replacement. He lifted a charged one and rolled it in his fingers, studying the beautiful black veins branching out from its core.
God’s Head bloodstones.
They were almost impossible to find, let alone charge. Each held the life force of a thousand slaves his tower had reduced to ashes. Kovax could almost feel the weight of their trapped souls, hear their distant, tiny screams, though he received no pleasure from the thought. Only sadistic men like Iolus would enjoy such a thing. Kovax was more practical; all this death was only a means to an end. And a beginning.
Someday, his empire would stretch across the globe and last for ten thousand years, and he would be there to oversee the placement of every brick until it was finished. These crystals, combined with his new sightcasting device, were keys to achieving a power he had only ever dreamed of.
But first, he had to get through today. Guided by the crystal’s light, he made his way carefully around the machines to Sightwielder’s central hub. He replaced the empty bloodstone with the fresh one. When the lights came back on, he put the empty stone back in its proper place and ran back to his machine to get started.
The needle brought another pained gasp, and then the globe sprang to life once more. Sightwielder was ready to go, and so was its master.
“Show me your secrets,” he said soothingly.
The light inside the planet’s core intensified. Soon, the entire globe was flashing like an alarm signal as images flew through it. This was part of the casting process, in which the machine’s engine shot its reach across the realm to wherever its governing program told it to go.
There was only one destination.
“Show me Milo and Emma Banks,” he instructed the machine.
Minutes later, the vision arrived. There was movement, shivering flashes of color, and finally the artificial light of a man-made interior space. He watched a peculiar scene unfold.
Milo and Emma—and he sensed Emmanuel nearby—stood inside a train compartment within the grounds of Theus Academy. Kovax could tell by the texture of the mountains flashing past the windows where they were located. The academy had been his home once, though he didn’t miss it at all. No, he didn’t miss those elitist idiots with their stuffy lessons and traditions, and those girls who always turned their noses up at unusually smart cadets like him. He didn’t miss the bad food, the useless exams, or his idiot cousin, Corgos, always bullying him into writing his essays for him.
Back to the twins.
He was inside them now, inside Milo’s brain, anyway—watching through the boy’s eyes. He observed the brawl between the dark-skinned boy and another with orange hair in the uniform of a Dreadnought cadet. Emmanuel stopped the fight before it could get out of control.
Good old Emmanuel, always interfering with other people’s business.
The best part was when Milo threatened the bully and his friends with a fireball. He had been taught well and knew how to retract the spell at the very last second. Such power burned within him. Kovax found his mouth watering at the thought of how many bloodstones he could fill with Milo’s life energy. Not only was the boy a sorcerer, he was also a demigod, which meant he would live for decades despite the tower’s aggressive harvesting process. His sister was almost as valuable as her brother, thanks to those golden wings, which held their own incredible stores of power.
Milo and Emma Banks—perfect little tower batteries.
Exhausted after only an hour of watching Emmanuel guide the children through various formalities, Kovax powered down the machine and slid out of the chair in which he had seated himself halfway through the session. He landed against cold stone, breathing hard. He tried to lift himself off the floor, but an ache in his skull forced him back down.
“Soon,” he said between gasps. “Soon, I’ll break into your mind, you little brat. Then I won’t just be a bystander anymore.”
CHAPTER 12
I olus strolled into King’s Tavern, a woman laughing beneath the crook of each arm.
He wasn’t drunk, but he reeked of nectarwine. The women, however, were drunker than sailors in port for the night, and they cursed just as freely.
“Ragged tail of the goddess,” the woman under his left arm said. “I’ve had so much nectar I might as well be nectar. Call me nectar, Iolus. I want to hear you say it.”
“Shut your sweet, stupid mouth before I ravish it.” Iolus grinned.
“Oh, for the coward Sargos,” the other woman said.
She was lucky there were no Sargonauts in the tavern that night.
“Someone buy me a drink!”
The soldiers in the tavern, accustomed to this sort of display, barely glanced at them except to scowl momentarily before returning to their card games. They respected Iolus the commander, but none could relate to Iolus the drunk. When he was like this, he became a bully and a womanizer.
And yet, despite his endless laughter and crude jokes, Iolus thought the boredom might drive him out of his mind. Throughout the night, he ordered endless rounds of bitterbrew and nectarwine. A tube painfully inserted in his abdomen channeled it from his stomach to a pouch hidden against the small of his back, which made him itch as he sat against the wooden back of the booth. He passed the time by flirting loudly with the two women, and pretending not to notice the heated glances from the other soldiers.
Finally, one of them grew a p
air of stones and walked over.
“Hey, sorcerer,” the man said.
By then, Iolus had put on an expression of intoxicated numbness, head hanging only inches above his table. The two women had fallen asleep. They slumped against him like wilted flowers, snoring loudly.
The soldier snapped his fingers in front of Iolus’s distant expression. “Look at him. He’s so drunk he can barely open his eyes.”
Iolus had been about to leave. The boredom had become too much, and the women were uncomfortably warm against him, their breath sour from all the wine. But now, thanks to this ignorant bastard of a fool, he would have to conjure some sort of reaction. He would have to keep the illusion going.
“You wanna arm wrestle?” Iolus asked him, slurring. He held up one of his skinny arms, extended a pinkish hand with long yellow nails curving from the tips of his fingers. The soldier drew back from it in disgust.
“Fool of a blood-ether addict,” he said, nostrils expanding as if he had caught a pungent whiff of the sorcerer’s sickness. “How can you show yourself in public?”
Iolus let his arm drop hard against the table. In a sudden burst of motion, he swept it across the surface, knocking empty beer mugs all over the floor. The women jerked awake, blinking stupidly for a moment before tilting away to resume their drunken slumber on opposite ends of the booth.
“Nice,” the soldier said, nodding and placing his hands on his hips like a judgmental father. “Very commander-like of you. Why don’t you go home and sleep it off, sorcerer? Give the rest of us a break for one night.”
The man wasn’t afraid of Iolus. Not one bit.
Good.
“Leave him be, Joel,” another soldier shouted. “This is a tavern. Would you rather him be drunk at your side on the battlefield?”
Joel ignored the man and stood contemplating Iolus instead.
“You don’t know me,” Iolus told the man, head swaying. “You think you know me, but you don’t know a thing. I’m Cagnus, Mommander of—no, tha’s not right. Iolus Magner, Commandus of—wait a minute…”
The other soldiers laughed raucously and began to mimic him.
“Commandus Ioler!”
“Iolus Magmander!”
Joel wasn’t amused. “Spare us the titles, Oh Great One.” He extended a hand down to the apparently drunken sorcerer. “Come on. Let’s get you on your mount.”
Iolus slapped it away. Joel motioned for two of his friends to help him. They exchanged uneasy stares above their playing cards before getting up.
“Lift me away from these whores, you sons of peasants,” Iolus said in a loud, arrogant tone. “Your mothers were of the same ilk, making all of you bastards.”
The looks of amusement worn by the soldiers a moment ago vanished. Their faces turned to stone-cold masks of resentment. Any admiration or fear they felt for this once-respected sorcerer was fading quickly. He had become a loudmouthed fool of a drunk, more so than usual.
The bartender was a stringy, hawk-nosed man with darting eyes. He cleared his throat and motioned for the soldiers to do something. Joel and one other grabbed Iolus by the armpits and lifted him.
“You’re hurting the empire more than you know, you fool,” Joel whispered into his ear.
The comment filled Iolus with rage. This simpleminded idiot thought he knew how empires worked? Not a chance. Iolus wanted to roast the man with a fireball spell.
Instead, he pushed them away and tottered into the center of the tavern, where he lifted a finger into the air and opened his mouth.
“Oh, great,” one of the patrons said, “a speech. Think he’ll puke fire like last time?”
The others laughed. Iolus gave them a lopsided smile.
“No, no, no,” he said, patting his belly. “The old sack feels fine and dandy tonight, gents.” He looked down at his belt and shook his waist as if to indicate an entirely different organ. “It’s another that cries out for relief.”
He undid his belt, drawing uneasy mutters and frowns from his audience.
“He’s gonna piss right there,” one soldier said, jumping up from his chair in protest. A mug smashed against the floor as the bartender lost his grip, a look of horror on his comically withered face.
Iolus savored a feeling of release. His grin widened as he shot a solid stream of bright yellow fire into the room.
“He’s gone insane!”
“Everyone get out of here!”
“Grab the women!”
The soldiers jumped out of their chairs to flee the tavern. Two grabbed the slumbering women and hauled them out, avoiding Iolus and the flames bursting all around him as he spun, laughing like a madman, to drench the floor and the walls with flaming urine.
HE DID NOT GO DIRECTLY BACK to his chambers. Instead, Iolus flew across Lethargis to the black peaks a few miles outside the city.
It took two hours to get to his destination, which was a lair he kept beneath the Nardgrillax Mountains. He parked his levathon outside the broad entrance, lit a torch with a single, fiery breath, and whistled a cheerful tune as he descended flights of familiar stone steps.
Iolus crossed a narrow bridge that arched over a deadly pit and made his way through tunnels where the stench of undead hung thickly in the moist, cool air. He reached a tunnel with a metal gate at the other end and flung it open with a flick of his wrist. Anyone else trying to gain access would have died in the ensuing crash of dropping boulders that Iolus and Basher had suspended overhead.
The next cavern pulsed with a deadly sapphire glow. Blood crystals leaned against walls or sat in piles, many as tall and broad as a man. Most were partly charged thanks to the blood ether that flowed beneath these mountains.
Iolus opened a wound in his arm and drew the delicious energy into his body with a sigh of relief. His skin paled to a normal, human color, and the yellow in his eyes and fingernails faded. And yet, Iolus didn’t mind looking like a demon from a children’s bedtime story; he fed off the stuff because he was addicted to it, appearance be damned.
A crumpled note had been left on the wooden table in the center. He picked it up and saw smears across its surface, as if someone had recklessly spilled ink all over it and discarded the note as trash.
Iolus pointed his finger at the black splotch and flicked upward. The ink rose off the page in smoky wisps, leaving large, stilted words clearly scrawled by a Berserker’s clumsy mitt.
MASTER,
CRYSTAL DELIVERY NO. 6.
EMPEROR SUSPECTS UNDEAD. EVIDENCE PLANTED AT SCENE.
B.
“Basher, you big, wonderful brute,” Iolus said through a grin.
This was the largest shipment thus far. Basher had proven himself loyal and effective, and all Iolus had needed to do to enlist his services was promise the brute something the Emperor had not—revenge against Milo and his friends for wounding the Berserker’s pride back at the Battle of the Ranch.
He crumpled the note and tossed it among the crystals, where in the blink of an Orglot’s eye, it caught fire and fell to a scatter of ashes. Then, he fixed his gaze upon the object he had come for.
It was a wagon packed so full of charged blood crystals that only a Berserker would have been able to make it budge. To solve this, Basher had wrapped a web of sturdy black chains around the wagon’s bulk. Iolus drew Aikon out of its sheath and floated it toward the knot at the top of pile. The blade slid through the knot, and with a casual-seeming wave, Iolus easily lifted the entire thing.
He floated the wagon in front of him, the light guiding him deeper into the mountain’s recesses and across chasms where alien glows pulsed in the depths, emanating from unnamed species of mushrooms. The blind albino cousins of vultbats hung like rows of pale fruit from the ceiling. They shrieked occasionally as the heat from the crystals disrupted their sleep.
As Iolus neared his destination, the voice of his master hissed inside his skull.
Iolus, my loyal servant, you come bearing gifts?
“As always,” Iolus said.<
br />
The light from the crystals stretched his shadow across the tunnel walls. He was almost there. Just a bit farther.
Such a light load. Maybe I misjudged your devotion to me, sorcerer.
Iolus ran his hands through his tangled orange hair. He still reeked of booze and urine from his pyrotechnic display in the tavern. To think that in his youth, he had been the most popular, respected, and fashionable man in Lightonia. Now, he was a mule stinking of his own piss, carting medicine to a buried god who might betray him in the end.
“If you even are a god,” he said aloud.
You challenge my promise?
“No, Master. I challenge my sanity.”
The voice laughed, and the harsh vibration of it tickled the bones of his face, the hairs inside his nose. Iolus hated that sound, and his master knew it.
Do not despair, Sorcerer. I may sound like you, but in my purest form, I am vaster than your imagination—even in its wildest moments—could ever possibly envision. Once I am free of my prison, I will seek out my brother and sister gods and make them pay for what they did to me, leaving you, sorcerer, to assume power in my stead.
“So you’ve said many times,” Iolus muttered.
And I will continue to say it until you believe me. You know, I quite enjoy when you speak to me as an equal. It relieves my boredom.
“Will you be silent for once?”
More hair-raising laughter.
Do it again, Sorcerer. Please. Berate me.
Iolus rolled his eyes. The master received an odd sort of pleasure from being challenged.
Someday, you will learn the truth of what happened to me and my brothers and sisters. Someday, when you and I stand face to face, I will tell you of my past.
Though he had heard this promise many times before—and frankly, Iolus thought it sounded a bit needy at this point—curiosity nevertheless spurred him onward. Even if his master betrayed him once freed from his prison, at least Iolus stood a chance of learning the secret of what had happened to the father gods. He’d been obsessed with the topic since first invoking the master’s voice all those years ago, while trapped in the subterranean cell Maximus had stuck him in. His hunger for revenge had made him delirious, but the voice had saved his sanity. It promised a way out, a guarantee against ever being defeated like that again. It had given him hope.
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