“Whales,” Oscar said, scanning the water for a visual. “That’s what you meant by broadbacks.”
Ruk walked out into the sea until the water lapped at his chest.
“Tonight, we ride as our ancestors once did,” he shouted over the crashing of waves against rock. “But you, Speaker, must call them first.”
“I’ll try, Ruk.”
Oscar’s hand went to his Araband, fearing it might break if he got it wet. An idea came to him. He slipped it out and asked his Ara to find Jason, son of Rether Ford and brother of Laramon. The device presented him with a small image of Jason’s face and the option to record a video message.
“Jason, if you get this, I want you to know that Larry didn’t die in vain. I’m sending this message in case I don’t get out of this alive. The Orglots are on our side now.” Oscar turned the Araband to film his companions. “I’m taking them with me to Valestaryn.”
As he recorded the message, explaining what had happened to his father and how he had used the Araband to convince Ruk to change sides, he thought about his friends back at the academy and finished with a request.
“It might take a lot of gold,” Oscar said, “but it’s what Larry would have wanted. You can help us save lives.”
He ended the message, then slipped the Araband into his pocket.
With the Orglots watching, Oscar climbed a tall rock jutting from the waves. He shut his eyes against the salty spray and tried to forge a connection. He visualized enormous bodies coursing beneath the surface, like the massive whale shapes he had seen from Emmanuel’s shuttle during the ride to Theus.
Where are you? he called to them. If you can hear me, I need your help.
Minutes passed. It was like trying to grab mosquitoes in a dark room.
“Use your spirit,” Ruk told him. “They are your brothers, as are all beasts. They will heed your call, Speaker, but you must become one with them.”
The Orglot warriors barked in support. They had all waded out into the sea to surround Oscar. Their presence was encouraging, but Oscar would have to tune them out if he was to throw his so-called spirit into the black void ahead of him—dive through it, actually, as a whale might do.
That was it. He had to dive.
“I know what to do,” he shouted at Ruk.
Without waiting for a response, he shot himself arrow-like into the tumultuous froth. The crashing of waves became a low murmur as the stinging cold liquid engulfed him. Oscar seized, his muscles hardening at the sudden drop in temperature.
Help!
If he died in these depths, would he join his father in the next life?
Hopefully. The thought of entering that afterlife alone terrified him more than drowning. He thrashed.
Please, help!
No reply at all. Dense, restless waves slapped overhead. The impacts drove him ever deeper as the current trapped Oscar in a downward spiral.
His legs kicked and his arms thrashed about. He swallowed a mouthful of burning saltwater. His lungs convulsed as the cold picked at him like a thousand tiny daggers.
I don’t want to die. Papa…
The lack of oxygen made him lightheaded. He felt a sense of peace creep over him, and his arms and legs stopped moving, reaching, struggling. At least he had tried. Would his father have been proud?
Then, a voice spoke to him from the depths. It came from a place of light down below, which he hadn’t seen before. The light drew him near, even as it promised death.
We are here, the voice said.
We?
We, the many.
Dark shapes swam across the light, making it flicker. They pushed the current in the other direction, swimming past Oscar, causing him to rise.
We are here, said the voice. We are yours to command, brother.
No, it wasn’t one voice— it was voices.
They were carrying him to safety.
CHAPTER 21
Emma was standing over a half-naked corpse with its chest cavity open to expose ladder-like ribs over a mass of stony organs, when her latest vision took hold of her. She dropped the bone saw, momentarily aware that her anatomy professor and the other students in her class had taken notice. That ceased to matter as Emma found herself transported to another place.
She became a disembodied presence in a stone chamber lit by the blood-tinged glow of crystals she had come to despise as well as brilliant blue light from a floating sphere in the center. The whole chamber looked weirdly purple as the combined lights washed across the black-robed man who was twisting his clawed hands at the sphere like a destroyer god trying to wrench a planet apart. The man, she quickly realized, was the low mage who had killed her father.
Kovax.
“I no longer have to convince you to do it,” he was saying into the sphere. In the orb, Emma could see someone approaching a Fountain of Joy, but from their viewpoint. “My power is such that I can command you like a puppet.”
Using only pushing and grabbing motions, he forced the person whose sight he had inhabited to drop a pair of hands much younger than his own into the fountain’s frothing mist.
Milo.
Somehow, she knew the hands belonged to her brother.
It all made sense. The person who had been hijacking Milo’s mind was Kovax. Who else could it have been?
The sphere flashed, and the low mage flew backward as if from a grenade’s blast just as the vision in the sphere disappeared.
Emma watched the low mage pick himself up with a tremendous amount of effort. He seemed oddly excited as he began to talk to himself.
“…The rebel hideouts, the circles on the map, the coordinates—they’re clear as day. Kofi, we did it.”
Kofi?
The man was insane. He was talking to an imaginary person who must have been much shorter than himself. Emma could tell by the way the man kept glancing down at his listener.
Kovax hurried to one of his consoles and pulled up a miniaturized hologram of a Tower of Dusk.
“Watch and learn, boy. This is how wars are won.”
Kofi? Boy? Who in the gods was he talking to?
He activated the weapon, then pulled up a map of Taradyn, all the while explaining himself to the imaginary boy at his side. The hologram was a real-time view of the weapon. He was arming it, apparently to attack a rebel base.
“Wipe it off the face of the realm,” he ordered.
The fireball tore a crater into the land. Instead of blasted stone and dirt, Emma saw the twisted, smoking remains of a large, underground dwelling made of metal.
Her Sight had not let her off easy. A moment before the impact, it showed Emma the faces of the men and women inside, their eyes widening as they quickly comprehended the nature of the attack and what was to come, the blast that would—and did—erase them from the earth like a boot stamping out the flame of a dropped match.
When Emma awoke on the floor of the classroom, she discovered the corpse’s arms had slipped off the table and were dangling above her face, gray fingers pointing almost accusingly at her. She immediately rolled away and jumped to her feet.
“Emma, what’s the meaning of this?” her professor said, crossing her arms, wings giving an impatient twitch. “Are you ill?”
Emma ignored the woman. Failing her autopsy exam was the last thing on her mind. She had to find Milo. Digging her Araband out of her pocket, she began to jog toward the exit.
“Cadet,” her professor called after her. “What about your exam?”
“Now’s not a good time,” Emma shouted, tapping the crystal. “Milo, where are you?” she asked once she was in the hallway. “Milo, are you there?”
His eye-patched face swept into view as if he’d run to answer her call. He was breathing hard.
“Emma, it happened. I didn’t mean to. He made me do it.”
“It’s okay. I think I understand. Meet me at Levathon Pond.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Emma raced across campus to meet her
brother, wishing more than ever that her wings would allow her to fly.
CHAPTER 22
C alista watched the dining room with the intensity of a hawk scouting its prey.
It was a disgusting sight. Two low mages sat lounging around a table swollen with food, nibbling at pastries despite having already consumed at least three platefuls of food apiece. Calista had watched the entire meal from a darkened stairwell in which the shadows conveniently draped her crouching form.
“What do you suppose is keeping Walthos?” one low mage asked the other.
Smiles crept across both their faces. They already knew the answer—or thought they did.
“Whatever it is,” the other low mage said, lifting a goblet of wine. “I’m sure he’ll have a tail or two to tell us later.”
The men roared with laughter, then slurped down wine from their goblets. Calista imagined herself bursting in and slashing their throats with her dagger, blood and wine spilling down their robes as they rocked in their chairs and tried helplessly to call the guards.
Soon. They would both meet their maker very soon, and so would the others like them.
She studied their features. One was stocky, with a full head of black hair and a beard to match. Calista thought of him as “Brawny.” The other was a narrow old man with a pug nose and thinning gray hair he combed over a bald spot. Calista marked him as “Oldie.”
“Dwynlyle’s shift is almost over,” Brawny said, stabbing his knife and fork into a hunk of meat and carving off a dripping chunk. How was he still hungry? “You’re up next, old man.”
“Over my risen corpse I am,” Oldie said. He sat back and burped, then crossed his arms over his chest. They both wore the black robes of their priesthood. “It’s Walthos’s shift, remember? He was complaining about it earlier, saying he might burn out if he keeps going like this.”
“Right, right,” Brawny said, lips smacking as he chewed. “That hellspawn bastard and his time off. Doesn’t he know Xanthus isn’t sending backup for another week? We’re all laboring like the undead here.”
Calista shook her head. Such pointless small talk. These men never spoke about anything that mattered.
With a silent sigh, she continued to wait as she’d been doing for the past hour. On her way down here, she had carefully avoided the Feral slave carrying platters of food and jugs of wine into the dining room. This had required a bit of silent maneuvering on her part, as she never knew when the old man would decide to reappear from the kitchen in the back. Thankfully, he mostly kept his eyes on the ground when he walked, allowing her to slip by.
If necessary, Calista would kill the slave to accomplish her mission. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that.
She started as a door banged open across the room. A third low mage came in who was at least fifteen years younger than the others. This one had long, brown hair that was almost girlish, and wore an expression of vulnerability that made him seem like a student approaching a pair of teachers he desperately wished to please.
“Dwynlyle,” Brawny said, “I hear your last shift went well. You only messed up the calibration twice.”
“Congratulations, child,” said Oldie. “Mediocrity suits you better than abject failure.”
“I’ll take what the gods give me,” Dwynlyle said with a sigh. “I need a slave girl and a goblet of wine right about now. My lungs are tired from all that chanting. If one of you gentle brothers would be so kind as to take over…”
“Fine, so be it. One more glass of wine for the stairs up,” Brawny said, leaning over the table to check the wine jugs as Dwynlyle sank into a chair. “Hey. Servant. More wine!”
This was the moment Calista had been waiting for. She flew up the stairs like a ghost and caught the servant while he was still in the kitchen area.
“They sent me for relief,” she told the man, frightening him. Relief settled his features when he saw that it was just a slave girl like any other, barefoot and wearing a collar. “I’ll take that wine, good sir.”
The man cleared his throat—a wet, tumbling sound. “They like to step on tails, young one. And a pretty one like yourself…” He blinked crusted eyes at her. “They might do a lot more than that.”
Calista cast her gaze at the floor. “None of us have it easy here.”
“Truer words Valcyona never spoke,” the servant said. He handed her a jug of wine full to the brim. Its bittersweet, faintly metallic fragrance rose to tickle the inside of her nose, making her mouth water. She hadn’t eaten since before being arrested.
The servant shuffled out of the room, humming an old tune Calista recognized as a folk song from the region where she’d grown up. Hot rage quickened inside of her. The poor man must have been eighty years old, and yet he was down here alone with these men instead of back home with his family. Couldn’t they have spared the weak ones like him?
Pulling her thoughts back to the present moment, Calista poured out a bit of wine to make room inside the jug, then set it aside and got to work drawing out the stitches in her tail.
“Blast the gods,” Brawny shouted. “The wine! Ser-vaaaaaant!”
She gave her tail a single shake and out came the vial of Death’s Head Serum, coated in her blood. She uncapped it, dumped the contents into the wine—for some reason the serum was no longer sparkling as before—and tossed the empty vial behind a pile of flour sacks in the corner.
Then she grabbed a loaf of bread and tore off a piece. She dipped it into an open jar of molasses and shoved it into her mouth. Despite her hunger, she made sure not swallow the delicious morsel.
She saved it for the challenge ahead.
CHAPTER 23
Emma found her brother sitting on the sloping hillside, his arms hanging limply over his knees. Nearby, his levathon sipped water from the lake’s edge with the same solemn demeanor as his master.
“Milo.” Emma ran to him. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t respond. His good eye was closed, and he was breathing slowly and deeply, which probably meant he was meditating.
“Milo.” She shook him lightly. “Wake up.”
He startled her by jumping to his feet. “I’m more awake than I’ve ever been, Emma. But earlier…” He sighed roughly. “I was under. No control, just like last time. Except this time, he made me…” Milo lifted his hands and curled his fingers like he wanted to scratch his own eyes out. “He made me do something I promised Uncle Manny I would never do.”
“I know. I saw what happened.”
“With your Sight?”
She rubbed her face and plopped down onto the grass. “I don’t understand most of it. Kovax was using some sort of magical sphere to see through your eyes, and—and I guess, control your hands.”
“My entire body.”
“Like what happened in the cafeteria?”
Milo gave a tight nod, clearly ashamed. He approached the lake’s edge, and Emma noticed his hands were balled into fists. Zander hobbled over to him. Milo ignored the levathon and stared at the water, to which Zander responded with a sad snort.
“Milo, we can’t just do nothing. I saw something else in that vision. Something I’m afraid to tell you.”
Milo whipped around to face her, suddenly intrigued. “What did you see?”
“Kovax, inside a room in his castle, I think. He was surrounded by machines, and they had blood crystals sticking out of them. He was looking at a floating orb that showed him the world through your eyes. I saw you stick your hands into one of those fountains.”
“I know about that. What else?”
Emma’s voice caught several times in her throat. “Then—then he attacked a rebel base. A fireball that came from a Tower of Dusk. It—it crashed into a forest, and there was a base underground that he knew about because—”
“No.” Milo stomped his boot against the ground, startling Zander. “Goddamn it! That bastard!”
“Milo, calm down.” Emma stood. She had never seen him throw a tantrum like this. “We need to think
clearly.”
Milo gave her a desperate look. His one eye seemed to sag.
“Which one did he attack?”
Emma shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. But it was on Taradyn. A rebel hideout, is all he said. He destroyed it. I mean, erased it with that thing.”
“It’s because I dipped my hands,” Milo said, staring again at his clawed fingers. “He stole it from my memories.”
“I don’t understand. How is that possible?”
“The fountains, Emma. Kovax tapped into their stream of energy somehow—or maybe he’s working with the Archon. It’s starting to make sense. The healing energy takes things from people. I met a mathematician who healed himself using a fountain, and it took away his genius ability. That’s what it does. It steals information that Kovax needs. It’s how the Archon managed to get so smart since Uncle Manny was his professor.”
“Are you sure they’re working together?”
Milo spread his arms like the answer was obvious. “What else would it be? Kovax gets the memories in my head, and the Archon gets clever enough to win another election.”
“I can’t believe that,” Emma said, hugging herself. “Not here…”
Milo was pacing back and forth now, wrapped in his own thoughts. “Back in the vault, Uncle Manny told me to memorize the location of the Forge hideouts. He told me a couple of times. I’m sure I did—I always did what he told me to do—but I can’t remember it. I have no memory of learning any maps.” He froze. “Oh no,” he said ominously.
“What? Milo, what is it?”
“I have an eidetic memory, Emma.”
“I know. Ever since you were a kid. A photographic memory—”
“But it’s not just images. Names, dates, coordinates, anything I’ve ever had to turn around in my head. I never forget that stuff, and you don’t know how much I learned about the Forge in Emmanuel’s vault, how much secret information I studied. If he can just dip into my head whenever he wants…” Milo beat his fists against his forehead. “It was me. It was all my fault. They died because of me.”
Savant & Feral (Digital Boxed Set): Books 1 and 2 of the Epic Luminether Fantasy Series Page 92