by Alec Hutson
Even if her senses had not been heightened by her grasp upon the Nothing, Cho Lin would have known that this was one of the most dangerous men she had ever stood before.
Hroi studied Jan with an enigmatic expression, then turned his gaze to the wall. “That thing was what put me on the path to this.” He reached up to touch the black circlet upon his brow.
“Ten years past, the old king of the Frostlands, the thane of the Raven, descended into madness. His dreams were haunted by images of this city as it once was, before the ice came down. Somehow he knew that these visions were seeping up from this place, and so he cut into the stone beneath his bedchamber and found the tunnel that led here. He discovered the child hanging in the ice and worshipped it. He tried to turn the Skein from the old gods to join him, and so the clans came together to cast him down.” Hroi paused, his eyes traveling around the great space, as if he was reliving that moment. “I slew the champion of the Raven upon these steps, but it was Agmandur the Young Bear who claimed the blackbone crown then. And the priest who had guided us here cut the child from the ice, commanding us never to speak of what had happened in this cursed place.”
“This priest,” Jan said softly, “who was he?”
Hroi grinned mirthlessly. “I tire of your questions, skald. And I have some of my own.” He stepped closer, his eyes narrowing. “Who are you?”
“A traveler from the south. I heard of the treasures of Nes Vaneth and came to explore –”
“Liar.”
The voice was soft, barely more than a whisper.
“The Skin Thief has told me what you are,” murmured the shaman as he came to stand before Jan. “A sorcerer.”
Cho Lin had never seen anyone as emaciated as the White Worm shaman—his cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken deep in their sockets. If it were not for his thatch of pale hair and pale blue eyes, it truly would seem like there was a skull perched atop his brown robes.
“A sorcerer?” Jan repeated, followed by an uneasy laugh. “Then where is my magic?”
The shaman did not answer, but he reached up to touch the iron torc around Jan’s neck. Cho Lin saw Jan stiffen and his sword hand twitch, and she knew he badly wanted to draw his blade. But he restrained himself as the shaman’s skeletal fingers stroked the dark metal.
She remembered what Jan had told her on the road outside of Herath:
‘There are only two ways it can be removed—with its key, which is probably somewhere back in Saltstone, or if a sorcerer stronger than the one who placed it on me attempts to unclasp it. And since that sorcerer was Cein d’Kara, I’ll likely be wearing it for quite a while.’
The boy-shaman pursed his bloodless lips, his brow furrowing as if he was straining hard to lift something.
The collar snapped open.
For a moment, no one moved. Cho Lin could see the surprise etched in Jan’s face, and then motes of light began to swirl around his head… only to wink out of existence as suddenly as they had appeared.
“What –” Jan gasped, falling to his knees before the Skein king. He looked to be struggling, trying to rise, yet some invisible force was holding him down.
Cho Lin grasped the Nothing, the strength deep within her Self flooding her muscles as she prepared to leap at the shaman. Lask was distracted, his face contorted with the strain of keeping Jan from rising.
She couldn’t move.
It was as if impossibly heavy chains were wrapped around her limbs—even her throat seemed frozen, and when she tried to scream only a thin mewling escaped her lips.
Jan managed to put one foot on the stone and rise slightly, trembling with the effort, but then the shaman’s face darkened, a vein in his temple throbbing, and Jan cried out in pain and could go no further.
Cho Lin strained against the bonds binding her, but they would not give in the least. The strength granted by the Nothing was helpless before this sorcery.
“The Skin Thief’s servants told me about you,” Hroi said to Jan, apparently unconcerned by the struggle being played out before him. “And they knew you as well,” he added, turning to Cho Lin.
What was he talking about?
Movement behind the king, in a shadow cast by one of the cowering statues. A pale child in tattered gray rags stepped into the wan blue light, its face veiled by tangled black hair.
No.
Terror sluiced through Cho Lin, and she fought frantically against what held her.
The Betrayer approached them, and the shaman moved back so that it could stand in front of Jan. It looked past the struggling sorcerer and smiled at Cho Lin, black lips curling back from yellowed fangs.
daughter of cho xin, it whispered in the ragged voices of many children. you are far from home
On his knees, Jan was the same height as the demon child, and the Betrayer reached out to cup his chin.
we are not alone here. another watches
Viper-quick the Betrayer released Jan’s face and raked its clawed fingers across his eyes. Strips of flesh were torn away, although a single long shred still clung to the Betrayer’s curving talons, and Cho Lin watched in horror as it brought it to its mouth. A dark lump rolled out of the creature’s palm and fell to the stone.
The keening that rose up from Jan did not sound human.
Cho Lin tried to scream as a wash of black blood flowed down Jan’s face, but an invisible hand was crushing her throat, driving the breath from her body, and she felt herself falling into darkness…
A crash like thunder, but the flash was black instead of white.
Blinded, Vhelan was lifted from his feet and thrown backwards; his head struck stone, his spine cracking as the force of the explosion sent him rolling across the floor.
Groaning in pain, he struggled to his hands and knees, trying to blink away the darkness clotting his vision.
“Your Majesty,” he said, fearing the worst. “Are you all right?”
“I am.”
Vhelan sagged in relief. Thank the gods. The room slowly came into focus—the scrying bowl had been shattered, golden fragments strewn about the small chamber. Cein d’Kara was already on her feet, crouched among the detritus, examining one of the larger pieces of the basin that remained.
The Crimson Queen slowly rose, surveying the mess. Then she turned to Vhelan.
“Summon every sword in and around Herath. Every ranger, every soldier, every Scarlet Guardsman. We are riding north.”
In the cold and black she waited.
Once, she had been alone, a sliver of a soul drifting in this abyss. Lost. Confused. Uncertain about everything… everything except for the need to keep the thing in the darkness asleep. That was all she knew—it must not wake. So when it twitched, she stroked the tiny segment of its vastness that intruded into where she floated, soothing it until it sank into a deeper slumber. In the darkness, she crooned lullabies that had once been sung to her, long ago.
For a time, that was her purpose.
But change had come. Now others were here—she had never touched them, but she could sense their souls out there, elsewhere in the dark. They were not of her blood, but they had become her brothers and sisters with the kiss of a knife.
Sometimes she strained to reach them, but always they receded as she grew closer. Her desperate cries for them to join her returned to her like an echo, unanswered.
But then everything changed.
A new brother had entered this place. He was different. Stronger. When he was approached, he did not pull away.
And, most importantly, he remembered.
Keilan returned to himself. He was sitting on a wooden plank in a small boat, his chin resting on his chest. He raised his head, grimacing in the harsh light. Had he fallen asleep? He didn’t feel groggy, but for a moment there it had been like he was somewhere else. A dark and cold place. It reminded him of when he used to slip be
neath the waves to hunt for fish – his dowsing trick, as his father had called it. Floating in an endless blackness, with presences lurking deep below.
Keilan shook himself. Just a daydream. The horror of what had happened back on the island was weighing on him, that was all.
He rolled his neck, trying to get rid of the stiffness. Across from him Sella sat cross-legged, intent on the doll she was holding. Its painted eyes returned her attentions blankly. That must have been the doll Senacus had spoken of when he’d burst into Niara’s sanctum. It certainly didn’t look like there was a spirit bound up in it. Maybe when Niara had died the soul had finally been released… or perhaps Sella had imagined it all. Beside her on the floor of the boat was the red lacquered box they had taken from Niara’s sanctuary. Had the dagger been worth what it had cost?
Keilan twisted around, to where Nel and Senacus strained at the oars. The paladin’s face was ghost white and covered with a sheen of sweat, and it looked to Keilan like the wound in his shoulder was bothering him. Good. He deserved to suffer after the madness he’d brought down on all of them. If it wasn’t for Senacus his grandmother would be alive, and there would still be hope that she would help them in hunting down the demon children. Senacus might have doomed the world with his rashness.
Keilan blinked. Where was this anger coming from?
He tried to push it aside. What had happened wasn’t Senacus’s fault, as he had only been trying to protect them.
His hand itched, and Keilan scratched at the cut below his knuckles. Strange—the flesh around the wound had lightened, turning almost as white as milk. There must have been some kind of infection, too, as the veins close to where the dagger had cut had started to darken.
Keilan shook himself – he was exhausted, because it almost looked for a moment there like one of his veins had moved, ever so slightly.
Great black worms writhed in the crimson sky.
At first glance, Alyanna had thought the slowly drifting shapes were storm clouds. Then one of the creatures had lowered its head towards the dark plains below, questing blindly. A herd of striped deer with horns like scimitars had scattered as the monster moved closer, bounding through the long grass with panicked bleating. Somehow she could hear them even though she was many leagues distant.
Alyanna paused in her ascent of the barren hillock, watching the impossibly long worm as it slowly swung in her direction. Could it sense her? It certainly seemed so. A great ripple passed along its length, and then it retracted back to where its brethren formed the living lattice that obscured the sun and clouds. Lightning flashed even higher up, illuminating the moving coils in stark relief against the red heavens.
Almost no one else would have dared climb a hill like this in the middle of a great flat expanse with such monsters filling the sky. Perhaps not even her, if she hadn’t known that this was all her dream.
She truly did have a strange imagination.
Sighing, Alyanna continued to trudge upwards, her boots sinking into the soft black earth. Green shoots speckled with bright colors were emerging in the indentations she left in the ground behind her. Alyanna wondered absently if this place would cease to exist when she woke, or if by dreaming it into being it would in fact persist after she departed. Of course, if that was true, it would raise the possibility that her own reality was nothing more than the abandoned sediment of another’s sleeping mind. An interesting thought. Perhaps they were all just fragments spun from the dreams of drowsing gods.
Alyanna reached the top of the small hill and found it sheared flat, as if cleanly sliced by a giant’s sword. A small stone table had been placed in the middle of this empty space, along with two high-backed chairs of black wood. She slipped into the closest chair, reaching deep within herself to grasp her roiling sorcery.
It had surprised her how quickly her mastery over her Talent had returned to her, but right now would be a test. She had learned how to dreamsend fairly recently, and only once before had she successfully pulled another into her own dreams.
Alyanna concentrated, braiding her sorcery into an intricate pattern. Far above her the black worms twisting in the sky mimicked what she was doing. She finished the spell and sent it hurtling away from this place, towards the sleeping mind of her far-away target. With Demian, she had known him so well that it had been relatively simple to find and draw him to her. This time it was far more difficult, as she did not have the same familiarity to rely upon. Just one brief encounter, though it had been inscribed deeply into her memories.
A pang of sadness rose up as she thought of the swordsinger. She shook herself, trying to put him out of her mind. He was gone, and she was restored. Now she needed new allies.
New allies, or – at the very least – fewer enemies.
A vague shadow gathered in the chair across from Alyanna, and within the span of a few heartbeats it had sharpened into the form of a young woman with pale skin and curls of bright red hair. A moment of confusion passed across the woman’s face, and then her eyes narrowed as she realized who else was sitting at the table.
“Welcome, Your Majesty,” Alyanna said to Cein d’Kara, allowing herself a crooked smile. “I believe it is time we talked.”
The second book is harder than the first, it turns out.
Thank you to Phil Tucker, Joe DiZazzo, Kareem Mayan, Pacific Smiley, Scott Smiley, Patrick Lechner, James O’Neal, and Jeffrey Hall, for helping me to bring this book together.Thank you to Andrew Rowat, for being one of my first big supporters. The fuel for writers is confidence, and your kind words were much appreciated in the early days. Thank you to the Terrible Ten and Sigil Independent, for bringing comradery into the lonely life of a writer.And thank you, of course, to Will Wight, for doing me an incredible act of kindness I never could have expected.
Alec Hutson grew up in a geodesic dome and a bookstore and currently lives in Shanghai, China. If you would like to keep current with his writing, please stop by:
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