Book of Names (Casters of Syndrial 1)

by Rain Oxford

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem. I get the feeling we’ll be doing more business with each other.”

  Chapter 11

  “Can I borrow someone’s staff while mine is being made?” I asked as we walked back to the temple. I hated the idea of waiting a month or longer for it.

  “No. Every staff is designed for a specific caster. Children can sometimes use their parents’, but if you used the staff of a caster whose magic is very different from yours, it could explode in your face or backfire.”

  “Okay, that’s a pretty good reason not to.” I had to figure out another way to defeat someone who had more magic, more experience, and fewer limitations than me. I was considering everything I had seen, mentally flipping through my book of spells, when we reached the door to the courtyard.

  Keeper pulled on the door, but it wouldn’t open. “That’s strange,” he muttered. He waved his hand over the door and said, “Sekha.”

  A green, glowing, magic circle appeared on the door, only a foot in diameter. It had a pentagram enclosed in a single circle and the sigils were much simpler than those in the portal that had brought Luca and me to Syndrial. “Is that one of the Painter’s traps?” I asked.

  “It is a lock,” he corrected.

  “So he painted it thinking we were inside?”

  Instead of answering, he ran his hand through his hair with frustration.

  “Can’t you break it?”

  “Domatago cannot break getatago, so I need my staff, which concentrates my power and enables me to do certain getatago castings without preparation.”

  “Okay, cool. Grab your staff, then.”

  “It is my job to guard the pyramid, so I stay close to it. Thus, I always leave my staff in the garden.”

  “Maybe someone is in there, trying to get into the pyramid. I hate to be blunt, but your security sucks. Luca and I could have snuck out blind and drunk.”

  “This type of lock prevents anyone from getting in or out, and it is on the outside of the courtyard. Someone cast it to keep us in, not knowing we had left to prepare your staff.” As he explained this, Caretaker approached us, looking shell-shocked.

  “What’s going on?” I asked him. My muscles clenched automatically as the fear that the Painter took Luca crept into me.

  “Scribe is missing. He was supposed to meet me to discuss an agreement with the Voska, but he didn’t show. I can’t find him anywhere. I feel like something bad happened.”

  “Have you checked the prophecy chamber or the High Council?” Keeper asked.

  Caretaker nodded. “Of course.”

  “I will help you look for him, but first, I need your help to get this door open.”

  Caretaker frowned at the door as he pulled a handful of rings out of his pocket. “Why would anyone lock that door? You and Nathan are the only ones who use the courtyard.”

  “That’s what we want to know.”

  Caretaker shook his head as he selected a ring and put the others away. “Things are getting strange around here.” With the ring on his right ring finger, he pressed his hand flat on the pentagram. “Hestvakh.” Gray smoke shot out from his palm and like acid, it ate away the glowing spell, leaving a burn mark in the metal. Then he opened the door and gawked. “Very strange.”

  I nudged him out of the way to see what the problem was.

  The garden was burned to ashes. The pyramid itself was untarnished, but the colorful bushes were gone. Even the stone bench had crumbled. A wall of climbing roses had disappeared, revealing a gold door into the pyramid and Keeper’s untarnished staff leaning against it.

  “Who would be stupid enough to do this?” I asked. “We could have just flown over the roof to escape the fire, but---”

  “No, we couldn’t have,” Keeper interrupted. “The lock on the door would have prevented us from getting out of the courtyard by any means. This was a deliberate attempt on our lives.”

  “The Painter didn’t do this. He wants something from me, even if it’s just to jerk me around. Plus, if he was trying to kill you, it wouldn’t have been like this. Everything I’ve seen of the crazy bastard so far is that he’s powerful, egotistical, and straightforward.”

  “I agree; it wasn’t the Painter who did this and the apprentices don’t know getatago. It had to have been a priest who tried to kill us.”

  * * *

  By the third day, Ayden was regretting his decision. Akadema was a great place to live in a quiet village or alone in a cabin in the woods, but there wasn’t much else. There were a few castles, yet even those were small. Basically, they had an abundance of forests, dirt roads, flat fields, and hills.

  Although he passed plenty of travelers, few were interested in anything except trading. On the major roads, he normally encountered four or five villages a day. He would have liked a change of scenery.

  He was about to turn back and head home when he heard a commotion from the right. There was screaming and cries for help, so he decided to check it out. After all, there was always something a sorcerer could do to aggravate a problem.

  I jumped when a hand grabbed my shoulder. Suddenly, I was back in my room, I looked at the page I had written and my stomach turned sour. I hadn’t written it in English or even the Syndrial language.

  “When did you learn Old Norse?” Luca asked, frowning at my work.

  I didn’t bother to ask if he was sure that was what it was. “I don’t know.”

  “Can you read it now?”

  I studied it and tried to remember what I was writing. I couldn’t even begin to understand the runes. “No.”

  “You’ve always gotten lost in your stories, but this is weird.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you think it has something to do with your magic?”

  “I have no doubt.”

  “It’s not very good.”

  “What?”

  “It’s similar to Old Norse, but now that I’m really looking at it, it’s not right. It might be a derivative.”

  “Kind of like how this world’s language is related to Ancient Egyptian?”

  “Yeah. Maybe there’s another world that has Norse gods. Maybe you tapped into the wrong station by mistake.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Five bucks.”

  “You have a gambling addiction.”

  “You have a drinking problem. Ten bucks.”

  “Go away.”

  “I came to get some more paper. What are you doing back so early and why aren’t you reading the spell book?”

  I snorted. “You’re worse than Mom ever was about homework.”

  “She never harped on me about homework. It must be because I’m so much smarter than you.”

  “No, it was because she didn’t expect anything from you. She put all her hopes in me being successful. And I’m here because someone tried to kill me.”

  The humor in his expression vanished so fast it was disturbing. “What priest is going to die today?”

  “How do you know it wasn’t the Painter?” I asked.

  He frowned. “Because you’re alive. Besides, you would have said it was the Painter if it was him.”

  “Well, I don’t know who it was, but I don’t think it was the Painter.” I told him about going out to get fitted for my staff and what happened when we got back. He glowered when I told him about the decimated garden. After Keeper had left to help Caretaker find Scribe, I returned to my room. I’d figured writing some more of my book would have helped me relax, but I had clearly gone another direction.

  “This is going too far,” Luca said. “Three attempts on your life is three too many, and---”

  “Two,” I interrupted.

  He blinked “Huh?”

  “Meto and the garden makes two, not three attempts.”

  After a second, he laughed. “Oh, I was counting the Painter as one. Never mind then; you’re just being a wuss. Anyway, I’m going to get some more snooping in. Your kitty can keep you company.”


  “What?”

  He gestured to the jaguar sitting on my bed. “After the attempts on your life, I really like that she’s hanging around.”

  I studied the cat, who studied me right back. “I agree. I can’t help but to wonder why she keeps coming here, though.”

  * * *

  I felt Keira kissing me and knew I was having a dream again. I opened my eyes as she broke the kiss and saw her in perfect detail. “Why is it so vivid this time?” I asked.

  “You’re an imaginative guy,” she said with a smirk. Then she slipped out of bed, taking her warmth with her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Follow me and find out.”

  “Maybe that should be sexy, but I don’t have a good feeling about it.”

  She frowned. “You don’t trust me?”

  Do I have a reason to? “Where to?”

  She knelt on the bed. “You were supposed to return to the room of the tree.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The one the jaguar took you to. You have to see inside. The truth is in there.”

  “I don’t know what you’re---”

  The door burst open and Luca limped in, cursing up a storm that would make a truck driver blush. He stopped when he saw me. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize you’d be asleep already.”

  I was dressed, alone in my bed, and confused. “I need my own bedroom. What happened to you?”

  “Well, someone took his bitch pill today. I stubbed my foot when the lamp went out and I was left in pitch black for an hour.”

  My irritability drained because I knew how horrible it had been for him. His nyctophobia was only set off when he couldn’t see anything at all; a dark alley or basement was fine as long as there was moonlight or a small window. He couldn’t stand closets. We were underground, so I was surprised he was taking it as well as he was.

  “Where were you?”

  “I’ve found something and you’re not going to like it.”

  “Great. What is it?”

  “You really need to see it for yourself.” He grabbed the lamp from the desk.

  I stood and followed him out. It was late enough that the apprentices were all asleep and even the priests had stopped wandering the halls. I considered telling Luca what Keira said in my dream, but he would have wanted to know more details. Besides, it was all part of my subconscious, so it was really me that was bothered by it. Keira was just a gorgeous woman and I had gone too long without the company of one.

  “I saw the priests try to take a little girl away from her parents yesterday,” I said instead. “They said she had magic and that girls weren’t allowed to have magic.”

  “Of course they did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We see gender inequality every day, yet America is one of the most progressive countries in the world on the matter. It’s a power struggle. On a world of magic, the issue is going to be tenfold. No one likes to share power. We make jokes about it, like when you’d call me a girl, and that’s sexist right there. We don’t think it’s a big deal, though, because women are allowed to make sexist jokes right back. In some countries, they’re not allowed to. No country is perfect, but there will always be a worse place to be for a woman.”

  “Like here.”

  “Some people believe women are actually superior and could do the high-end jobs better, while some think they’re inferior. Women are just as likely to think this way as men. Whichever one men want to believe in, though, the results are the same; they don’t want women in power.”

  “There are goddesses, though. In fact, didn’t Ancient Egypt have queens?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t until the later dynasties. In fact, Cleopatra was the last pharaoh. Egypt was also a big supporter of marrying siblings.”

  “Gross.” We reached the dining hall and it occurred to me to ask where we were going.

  “That room you asked me to check out that the jaguar led you to.”

  I froze, wondering if my dream was more than a dream. “What did you find?”

  “It’s better to show you.”

  “This is how horror movies start.”

  “Well, I haven’t been in that many whore movies, so I wouldn’t know.”

  We reached the locked gate and Luca looked at me expectantly. “What?” I asked.

  “Don’t you know how to open it with magic?”

  “No.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I wrote it in the book.”

  “I haven’t had time to study the entire thing.” Then he pulled out a key, stuck it in the lock, and turned it. The door swung open. “Where did you get that?”

  “Duh, from Healer’s bedroom.”

  It didn’t take us long to get to the round room, where Luca’s lamp was on the floor, dark. I picked it up and lit it with magic so that we could both see what we were doing. I studied the wall of depictions, trying to figure out for myself what it was. Eventually, I gave up. “What am I looking at?”

  “I’m calling it the wall of fortunes. It’s all of the prophecies the seers have made.” He gestured to the scrolls and books on the shelves. “There are more, but they aren’t the important ones.”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here.”

  “I’m certain we’re not. Not even the normal priests are allowed in here. This is what you need to see.” He pointed out a section.

  The sacred language was written around two people. One of them was a woman with long red hair and deep blue eyes. In fact, her eyes were specks of Lapis Lazuli that had been set into the stone. She wore long white robes. Next to her was a man who looked a little too familiar. “That can’t be.” The man even wore a familiar silver robe.

  “I questioned it at first, but it was similar enough to you that I translated the prophecy, which wasn’t easy. It basically says that the vessel of Isis will become pregnant, and that her child would be important. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out yet how important. I believe it says that he would be lost on the day of his birth.”

  “You think that she’s my mother?”

  “I hope not, but we need to look into it.”

  “Why do you hope not?”

  “Because she’s a vessel.” When I gave him my best clueless stare, he frowned. “Nobody tells you anything, do they? There are different kingdoms that each worship a particular god and have a temple.”

  “I knew that part.”

  “Figures that the priests wouldn’t tell you more. In each of those temples, there is a vessel. He or she lives in the pyramid. Only one priest is allowed inside the pyramid to take care of the vessel. That person is kept completely pure and innocent. She isn’t even allowed to see her mother when she’s born; her eyes are immediately covered. She has never seen anyone except the one priest who takes care of her. They’re not taught anything, not even to speak. When the god comes, he or she possesses the vessel. The vessel is nothing more than a mortal body for them to use.”

  “Then Isis was possessing a person to talk to us?”

  “Yes. The High Kingdom is a little different, because it’s neutral ground. The different gods take their vessels and come here to talk to each other when they don’t want to meet in their own realm. Isis apparently wanted to meet you in person. There are only five accounts of a god leaving the pyramids before you came, and she’s left twice for you.”

  “Wait, back up. You think my mother was a vessel.”

  “The white robes are only worn by vessels.”

  “That means she was completely innocent?”

  Luca nodded.

  “And she got pregnant?”

  Again he nodded.

  “That fucking bastard. Which priest is going to die today?”

  “We don’t know for sure that it wasn’t consensual.”

  “It couldn’t be consensual!”

  “Anyone could have broken in.”

  “Then the priest wasn’t watching over her well enough! I want to know who the
fuck raped my mother!”

  “This doesn’t say. We need to go see the people who came up with this prophecy.”

  “One of the priests?”

  “No. We have to talk to the High Council.”

  * * *

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but Luca spent a lot more time exploring the temple than I had. He led me to the corner of the hallway, where it met the paralleled hallway. Instead of continuing through the other one, he stopped and pushed me to the right a few steps. “You should be careful where you walk here.” He pressed his hands on two symbols on the wall.

  The hallway floor split in a straight line and a ten-foot-wide section sunk down into steps. If he hadn’t moved me, I would have fallen. “How did you…”

  “Learn the language, dude. It’s not that hard. You should take this alone. If I’m there, it’ll confuse them.”

  Trusting him, I descended the steps. The lower room was well lit and, like all the particularly important rooms in the temple, round. It was around twenty feet in diameter. I stopped in front of an altar with a crystal goblet on it. Five torches surrounded three lavish, plush thrones made of royal blue fabric and gold.

  Each of the thrones was occupied by a female with long, white blond hair, light blue eyes, and silver robes. They wore silver jewelry around their necks, in their hair, and on their robes. The woman on the left was in her fifties, yet she had aged well. The woman in the middle was around my age, and while she was undeniably pretty, I didn’t find her particularly attractive. The one on the right was in her mid-teens.

  “If you wish to speak to the High Council, you must offer your blood in return,” the woman in the middle said.

  “But I need my blood to live,” I said. She gestured to the goblet. “Well, I guess I can spare a sip. Vampires never bothered me anyway.” I pulled the dagger out of my boot and cut my left index finger. “I really hope Roman sanitized this, because this could come back to bite me in the ass. Does Healer offer vaccinations?”