Pancras waved his hands, dismissing Arnost's concern. "I was trying to make a protective fetish. It's been a long time since I've performed abjurations. I'm sure it's just backlash from a miscast, nothing more." It sounded reasonable to Pancras. He didn't recall ever forgetting the event of a miscast before, but he was older than the last time one occurred.
Arnost held up the golden lyre, the symbol of Apellon, from around his neck. He chanted in a low voice, waving the symbol over Pancras. The minotaur curled his lips and stood, but Arnost pushed him back down into the chair.
"I still sense darkness within you. It is most unnatural."
"I'm sure we all have things in our past which taint our souls." Pancras stood again. This time, Arnost allowed it. Delilah, Kali, and Edric were dining at the table. He sat down next to the dwarf and grabbed a hunk of bread. "How long did we live under old bonehead? We were surrounded by evil-doers and the wicked for most of our lives. It's bound to leave a mark, a stain, if you will." Pancras didn't need some addle-minded human mystic to tell him that the past can leave a scar.
"That is not what I am sensing. You would do well to allow yourself to be thoroughly examined. Something is not right."
Pancras poured himself a goblet of wine. "Very well. When I have the opportunity to venture into the city again, I will come see you. Yes?"
Arnost blinked, looking from the drak twins to Pancras and back. "I think this situation is more serious than that."
“Until my task here is complete, I have been confined to the palace under order of the princess.” Arnost’s assessment bothered Pancras. The dark dreams, the spontaneous appearances of undead in the catacombs, his inability to remember anything about the ritual he just performed, all pointed to some sinister interference. Pancras didn’t want the distraction. He was so close to completing his task and ensuring their freedom to depart Almeria on time.
“Then perhaps I should look you over now.” Arnost licked his lips as he wrung his hands.
Delilah threw a piece of bread across the table at her brother. “Do you really think something is wrong with him?”
Kale caught the bread in his mouth. Pancras frowned at them, snatching the next piece of bread out of the air. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Chasing his bread with a gulp of wine, Kale shook his head. “I don’t know. Forgetting stuff and necromancing in your sleep. It can’t hurt to check, Pancras.”
With Kali and Edric at the table, Pancras did not want to discuss the strange goings on that seemed to follow him from Drak-Anor. He pushed himself away from the table and shuffled toward his bedroom. “Fine. Come along, Human.”
Pancras didn’t wait to see if Arnost followed him. He half expected the human to sputter and leave. He knew his behavior was unreasonable but at the moment didn’t care. The more Kale and Delilah conjectured that something might be wrong, the more Pancras was certain that something indeed was.
Arnost shut the door behind him. He clutched the golden lyre around his neck. “Perhaps you could sit down?”
Pancras sat on the edge of his bed and prepared himself for what he expected to be a waste of time. The sort of magic the faithful practiced differed from the sort he practiced primarily in technique. Where the arcane energies Pancras harnessed were flashy and obvious, Arnost's divination would be subtle with few outward effects. Divinations and many healing charms were perfect for charlatans, and Pancras had encountered many such people during his life who professed to be people of faith.
The human held the golden lyre symbol above Pancras's head as he hummed a repetitive drone. The symbol flared, bathing the room in golden light. Pancras held up his hand to shield his eyes and felt the warmth of the light washing over him.
"The light of Apellon reveals much that is hidden."
Pancras felt something stir within him. The room dimmed, darkening at the edges of his vision. The darkness crept in around him, and he felt his chest tighten. The light from Arnost's symbol flared; yet, the darkness overtook Pancras. His muscles convulsed, and he flopped backward onto the bed, his mind spiraling into a void.
* * *
Delilah's head snapped around as a clatter arose from Pancras's room. Light flooded from the gap beneath the door as a moaning wail rattled the walls. She leapt out of her chair, snatching up her staff as she ran for Pancras's room. As she left, she heard Edric talking to Kali.
"Leave the wizarding problems to them, Lass. You don't want to crowd the room if things go bad."
Throwing open the door, she squinted against the blinding light. Rising from Pancras's prone form on the bed was a dark figure, a hole in the light. It loomed over Arnost with black, smoky wings and shadowy claws.
It snarled as Delilah entered the room. "This one is mine. You will all march in the Undying Legion before the end."
Delilah pointed her staff at the shadow demon. She gathered arcane energy while deciding what to throw at the creature. Pancras's room was small, and the potential for backsplash and collateral damage was great.
Kale bumped into her and grabbed her shoulder. "Deli! That's the… thing! The one we fought under Ironkrag!"
Arnost raised his symbol of Apellon higher. "Be gone, demon! Flee from the light, foul creature of darkness!"
The shadow threw back its head and laughed. "Your antiquated notions of power hold no sway over me." It reached forward and grabbed the golden lyre in its hand. It crushed it, extinguishing the light. Darkness engulfed the room.
Delilah heard the clatter of Arnost's symbol hitting the floor. "Dapane phlogone!" She directed a stream of fire toward the creature and hoped she aimed high enough to miss Pancras. The flame poured across the room, but was extinguished by the darkness surrounding them.
"No!" Pancras's voice cried out from in front of Delilah. She noticed a faint green glow through the shadow. He groaned, and Delilah heard the sounds of his hooves hitting the floor.
"Exoria! Apothoun tis daimonikees dynameis!" A burst of emerald light flooded the room. The shadow demon screeched and spun around, tendrils of greasy black smoke swirling around it.
The tendrils diminished the shadows. Kale ran over to help Arnost, who was down on one knee in front of Pancras's bed, to his feet. The dark tendrils whirled around the room, buffeting Pancras and sending papers and linens flying.
Darkness engulfed the room once more for a brief moment and then disappeared.
The green glow from Pancras's rod faded, and he grabbed one of his bedposts to steady himself.
Arnost plucked the crushed remains of his golden lyre from the floor. "You cannot tell me that was 'nothing'."
Delilah and her brother helped Pancras steady himself. His room was in shambles, and most of his laboratory equipment upended or smashed. He held his head as he sat on the edge of the bed. His cheeks were sunken, and his eyes stared ahead, unfocused. For the first time, Delilah noticed Pancras appeared haggard and aged.
"Do you know what that thing was, Pancras?" Delilah sat next to him on the bed.
"I think Kale is right. It was the shadow demon we encountered under Ironkrag."
"I thought we destroyed that thing." Kale pulled a chair over from the small table. "Did it follow us here?"
"I have never encountered a demon before." Arnost looked up from his ruined symbol. "It did not feel as foul as I expected."
For all the talk about Sarvesh being a demon of flame and fury and all her time spent under the various ill-tempered overlords of her people before Sarvesh took control, Delilah was sure she never encountered a true demon before, either.
Pancras confirmed her suspicions. "I do not believe it was a demon. Some sort of shadow creature, bound to a more powerful master, for certain. But a true demon? No, I don't think so."
"What was it then?" Arnost grunted as he failed to bend his golden lyre into its original shape.
Delilah looked at her brother and then at Pancras. "It’s that thing you fought under Ironkrag? How did it get here?"
Pancras stoo
d, shaking his head. "How it followed me here is a question I cannot answer right now."
"Is it gone?" Kale hopped off the bed, helping to steady Pancras as the minotaur exited his room and returned to the dining table. Edric was deep into his second helping, and Kali appeared to be willfully withholding her desire to get involved.
Pancras sat down at the table and poured himself a goblet of wine. "That is a question Arnost will have to answer."
"At some point, you should probably tell us non-magical folk what's going on." Edric tossed a bone across the table, missing the bowl appropriated for cast-away bones. He grabbed another one from the roasted rack in the center of the table.
A wave of guilt passed over Delilah. It hadn't occurred to her that Kali and Edric might have no clue about what just happened.
Pancras motioned for Arnost to join them at the table. "I think we should all take a moment to discuss it. Wouldn't you agree?"
* * *
Arnost sat next to Pancras and drank the proffered goblet of wine before he responded. "Yes. Yes, I think that is wise."
Pancras refilled Arnost's goblet and then topped off his own. "Before we left Drak-Anor, Kale, Edric, and I dealt with a mob of ghouls that had been bothering the good dwarves of Ironkrag. We found they were apparently being led by a shadowy creature, which I dubbed a 'shadow demon' for lack of a better descriptor. It seemed to draw its power from a nearby chaos rift and a bloodmaw."
"What's that?" Kali tossed a hunk of bread to Kale after taking one for herself. Arnost continued working to reshape his amulet while he listened.
"A creature of chaos. Mostly teeth." Pancras knew about such creatures from his studies at the Arcane University but never saw one before that encounter. "Otherworldly creatures aren't really my area of expertise. Unless I'm forgetting something, we never directly defeated the shadow-thing. I"—Pancras chewed on his lip as his eyes shifted to look down at the table—"I assumed it was destroyed when I closed the rift."
"I got thrown through the rift!" Kale spread his wings. "It made me grow wings and breathe fire. I felt sick for a long time before that, though."
Arnost looked up from his golden lyre. "You passed through a chaos rift?"
Delilah nudged her brother, spilling his wine. "It explains a lot about him."
"It was after that when my disturbing dreams began. Not mere nightmares, these were more vivid even than those. I can recall very little detail, but they all ended with me spell casting. I would awaken and learn of yet another outbreak of undead."
"Yeah, yeah! That zombie at the tower." Kale flicked wine off his fingers in the direction of his sister.
"And the undead in the catacombs." Delilah smacked her brother's hand.
"The dreams didn't come every night, and I don't remember dreaming at all when I slept without wearing my focus. I woke up with pounding headaches many mornings, after that." When Pancras listed the instances aloud, they seemed like more than just coincidence, even though the occurrences all happened over the course of several months.
"Did you see what happened to this shadow creature? Did it touch any of you? What happened when the rift closed?" Arnost gestured for Delilah to pass the bread.
Pancras rubbed the back of his neck. "The rift vanished in a flash of light. I felt something slam into me and was thrown to the ground. What did that thing say in my room? Something about the Undying Legion?"
Arnost shook his head and scoffed. "Idle threats, I'm sure. The Lich Queen's army was called the Undying Legion. Anyone who fell in battle against her army would rise again the next night and join them as they marched across the land. She was defeated long ago."
Pancras was a young minotaur when she met her final defeat at the Battle of Badon Hill. Her armies mostly rampaged in the plains north of the Celtan Forest, so they heard only exaggerated stories in Muncifer. He always fancied she had a personal vendetta against Vlorey and the kingdoms of the north.
"I heard she was called the Witch Queen until the humans and elves killed her once and she came back as the Lich Queen." Kali tore into a rib, smacking her lips as she wolfed down the meat.
Edric chuckled. "Leave it to the tall folk to muck up killin' somebody."
Pancras was familiar with that story, as well. "I heard that, too. I also heard she planned to be killed as the final part of her ritual to grant her immortality as a lich."
Retaining all the power they had in life, in decaying bodies that grew hardier and more difficult to destroy the more they decayed, liches were nasty undead. Pancras despised intelligent, self-aware undead. Automatons like skeletons and zombies were one thing, but anything beyond that required the destruction of life to sustain itself, and never was he able to reconcile his personal beliefs with that.
Kale drained his goblet of wine. "So this shadow-thing? It was a minion of the Lich Queen, maybe?"
Pancras glanced at Arnost. The human nodded. "It's possible. A remnant biding its time."
"It's gone now, right?" Kali talked around the meat she chewed.
"Without my amulet"—Arnost held up the twisted remains of his golden lyre—"I cannot say for certain, but it seems likely."
Pancras wasn't as certain. The whole affair seemed anti-climactic to him, and he suspected they merely drove away the shadow creature temporarily. He didn't want to push the issue, however. Pancras wanted to finish this business with the prince before taking on another challenge.
"Regardless, I hope the shadow demon stays away until my task here is done."
As they finished dinner but before he excused himself, Arnost promised to check in on Pancras in a few days. The shadow's words gnawed at Pancras's insides. The Lich Queen and all her minions had been silent for decades, and he feared if one caused trouble now, it wasn't just a remnant. The implications boded ill for the future.
* * *
After dinner, Kale sequestered himself in his bed chamber with the puzzle box and Kali. Pancras busied himself cleaning up the shattered remains of his laboratory, Delilah's snout was buried in her grimoire, and Edric went off to try to entice a few of the guards into throwing some dice with him.
"Maybe you can help me figure out the rest of this puzzle box." Kale set the box on the table and showed Kali how the sides he'd already figured out worked.
"What does this thing do?" Kali lowered herself to eye level and peered at the box.
"Clicks and whirrs? I don't know. There's probably something magic inside it, if I can figure out how to open it."
Kali sat up and narrowed her eyes. "How do you know there isn't something dangerous in there?"
Kale's wings fluttered. "Terrakaptis wouldn't give me something dangerous. He didn't say anything about it being dangerous."
"So, you have to figure out each side? How did you know where to start? Does it matter?"
Kale thought for a moment. "Well, I just picked a side." He scratched his head. "I don't know that it matters as long as I work on one side at a time."
"How long have you been trying to figure this out?"
"Since we left home…" Kale chewed his lip. "A few of months on and off."
Kali picked up the box and turned it over in her hands, looking at all the sides. "It would be terrible if you started in the wrong place."
The thought that he had chosen the wrong approach to solving it from the outset never occurred to Kale, but now that Kali mentioned it, he wondered if that was the reason everything the box did was underwhelming. The two draks spent hours examining every side of the puzzle box but were unable to determine if one side was more important than any of the other sides. They worked far into the night, only stopping when Delilah entered with the intention of sleeping. Kale sighed and shook his head as Delilah exaggerated her bed time preparations. He left his puzzle box on the table; it would be waiting for him in the morning.
Chapter 21
As Pancras yawned and stretched, he realized he slept all the way through the night without experiencing upsetting dreams or dark thoughts, and
no disturbances whatsoever. Hopping out of bed, he pulled on his robes and entered the veranda to look out over Almeria. For the first time since he left Drak-Anor, the minotaur felt refreshed and energized upon awakening.
Dark, puffy clouds glided on the wind at the edge of the horizon, but the skies over Almeria were blue and clear. The crisp, winter air carried the scent of burning hearths, and although the breeze made him shiver, the day seemed bright and cheery.
He hoped he could conclude his business soon. They couldn't leave, of course, until the snows started to melt away, and winter in Etrunia could be unpredictable. Still, the sooner he didn't have to worry about Prince Gavril's whims, the better. At the very least, he and the draks would be free to enjoy what Almeria had to offer, and perhaps, they could get to know Edric better. Pancras regretted they hadn't included the dwarf in any of their plans, but he seemed content to find his own entertainment.
The familiar sounds of Princess Valene's soft footsteps approached from the right. Pancras greeted the princess with a bow. "Good morning."
"It is so far. How goes your… research?" The princess sipped from her customary steaming goblet of mulled wine.
Pancras cleared his throat. So much for the good morning. "There's been a mishap."
Princess Valene narrowed her eyes and frowned. "How bad?"
"Catastrophic. I have to start over, including acquiring new equipment." Saying it aloud hammered home the extent and severity of damage the shadow demon caused.
Princess Valene's mouth became a thin line. She turned away from Pancras and looked out over Almeria. She stood in silence for a moment, steam wafting up from her goblet and mixing with the fog of her breath.
"I don't want to know what happened, and we do not have time for you to start over." The princess turned to face Pancras. "We have to confront Gavril today."
"Today?" Pancras's eyes widened. "Why? You've discovered something new?"
"My agents have informed me that they've waylaid one of Gavril’s spies. In addition, they’ve located the woman with whom Gavril has been involved. I’m told she’s quite eager to cooperate in exchange for leniency. Treason carries a serious penalty: death."
Malediction (Scars of the Sundering Book 1) Page 32