“It’s like an underground building,” Milo said.
“A vault, to be exact. We get our energy from splitting luminether atoms and our water from an underground river that flows alongside us.”
Emmanuel led Milo through the corridor. It was quiet down here, but Milo could sense the hum of activity behind the walls.
His uncle spoke to him as they walked.
“There are vaults like this one scattered all over the continent, home to a large portion of the rebel forces. They went underground to hide when your mother and father disappeared. Most of them chose to flee Taradyn, though, which is why this vault is practically empty. Good for me. It allows me to do my work in peace.”
“An underground vault,” Milo said. “This is incredible.”
Emmanuel let out a hiss of laughter. He seemed unsuited to it.
“You remind me of your father,” he said.
Milo’s mood flipped, and suddenly he felt a pang of sadness strike him right through the chest. He stopped walking.
“I’m sorry,” Emmanuel said, stopping a few paces ahead but not turning. “I know the wound is still fresh.”
Milo shrugged. “It’s OK. I just—it’s just that you remind me of him. A lot.”
Emmanuel turned and studied him, head slightly tilted. He took off his glasses and winced under the bright lights. He winced so strongly that Milo thought he would cry, but no, his eyes were just photosensitive. The light seemed to cause him pain—or maybe it was the memory of his younger brother.
“There’s a reason your father never spoke of me, Milo. Since the Forge was defeated, everyone I ever loved was under the impression that I was dead. It became necessary for me to disappear so I could continue my work in peace. You’ll understand why in a few minutes. But I just want you to know that I can’t replace your father. And I don’t expect you to be my son”—he put his glasses back on and sighed—“I only hope I can help you become what you were meant to be.”
“And what am I supposed to be?” Milo said.
“A battlemage, my boy. Like your mother’s father.”
Milo scratched the side of his head. “My mother didn’t tell me much about him.”
Emmanuel continued down the corridor. Milo followed, his rubber boots squeaking against the floor.
“His name was Laramon. He was a great warrior, a defender of the people, and a high priest in the Kenatosian Church. Then he disowned your mother, which cost him a lot of his popularity.”
“Disowned her,” Milo said. “Why?”
“Because she married your father. Laramon wanted to marry her off to a Savant from one of the high houses of Theus. But anyway, that’s ancient history.”
Emmanuel stopped and stood slightly hunched over as if deep in thought. Then he spun on his heels and studied Milo’s hands. “Can you levitate objects using magic?”
“A little,” Milo said, and his cheeks warmed. “Baraltimus—he’s a friend of mine from the ranch—sort of told me I have a talent. But so far I’ve only been able to levitate small objects. I tried a chair once, but it made me so tired I almost fainted.”
“Hmm.” Emmanuel nodded, stroking his chin with two fingers. The motion made him look like a scientist, which reminded Milo of something he’d read in one of his books on magic, mainly that all magicians were scientists, even those like Lily who believed that magic comes from spiritual energies.
After a long pause, Emmanuel spoke. “Show me. Levitate my glasses.”
Milo lifted his right hand, stared hard at the black lenses on his uncle’s face and used the technique Barrel had taught him. He imagined a tiny disc hovering above the metallic bridge of the glasses and concentrated on tethering them using magical energy.
It wasn’t easy; in order to pull it off, he had to ignore everything outside himself—everything except his hand and the glasses and the imaginary disc.
But it worked. The glasses hovered off Emmanuel’s face and hung there, spinning and wavering in the air like a tiny helicopter manned by a drunken pilot.
“Very good,” Emmanuel said. “Concentration is a big part of spellcasting, and you definitely have a talent in that area. But why are you making it so hard on yourself?”
There were a dozen questions Milo wanted to ask, but the only thing that came out of his mouth was, “Huh?”
The glasses stopped spinning. Emmanuel plucked them out of the air before they could fall and slid them back on.
“Why were you concentrating so hard on something so simple? All I asked you to do was lift the glasses off my face, not cast a tether spell. That’s something a magician would have done.”
Milo raised his eyebrows. “I just cast a tether spell?”
“Tier One,” his uncle said, and shrugged. “So you never actually learned levitation. What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Milo sighed. “That’s just how I was taught.”
“Understandable. Baraltimus is a good teacher, but he is not a spellcaster. He doesn’t have the physical stamina for it.”
“You know Barrel? How?”
“I know all of the orphans.” Emmanuel crossed his arms. “It’s my job to protect them. Why do you think the emperor’s low mages haven’t been able to find you and your sister using their sightstones?”
“Because of the beacon crystal.”
Emmanuel uncrossed his arms and made a no-no-no motion with his index finger. “That’s not why. I had you and Ascher find the beacon crystal so I would have a way of locating you and Emma at all times. The reason the emperor’s low mages haven’t found the ranch is because I’ve kept a shrouding spell going on the generators. You see, the king’s low mages now have sightstones powerful enough to bypass a beacon crystal’s reflective capabilities. It’s how they were able to pinpoint your location behind the school that day when you were being bullied and your father showed up. Your father wasn’t aware of how limited and obsolete his beacon crystal had become. ”
Milo breathed out in relief. “In that case, on behalf of Ascher and all my friends—thanks.”
His uncle smiled. “Not necessary.” He spun on his heels again, hands clasped behind his back, and continued down the hall.
“Follow me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Deeper they went, into the bowels of the vault. They passed windows through which Milo saw figures moving inside well-lit rooms, computer terminals blinking all around them. He thought they were people, but then he took a closer look and was shocked.
“Is that—are they—robots?”
“Yes,” his uncle said, glancing through the window. “Automatons. Go ahead and say hi.”
They waved at the machines through the window. The robots waved back, eyes and mouths little more than flashing panels above skeletal bodies made of metal. Milo wondered if he was dreaming. Maybe he had drunk a little too much Bara-cola the night before. If that was the case, he wanted this dream to last forever.
They came to a metal door that slid upward to reveal an immense white room. The ceiling stretched up and up, easily a hundred feet above the floor.
“What is this place?”
“You’ll see,” his uncle said.
The room was empty except for a collection of black, pole-like devices about eight feet high. They were scattered all over the place. At the tip of each pole sat a box with four round lenses as black as onyx. They could have been projectors or cameras.
“This place is big,” Milo said.
“It’s as big as it needs to be.”
Emmanuel walked up to one of the camera-pole-box things and pressed a button on its top. A red light turned on and blinked above the lens.
“We’re about to watch something, Milo. I would offer you a drink or a snack, but I get the feeling you’d rather know what’s going on first.”
“Yeah—sure,” Milo said, watching the red light blink. “I mean, yes, sir. I’d like that very much.”
A low chuckle from his uncle. “No need to be so formal,
kid. As you may have gathered, this is a screening room. I used to meet here with the other Champions, including your mother and father. We don’t use it much anymore, which explains why there aren’t any seats. But for what I’m about to show you, seats aren’t necessary.”
“Why not?” Milo noticed red lights on all of the poles now. “Are they projectors or something?”
“Smart boy. They’re holographic projectors.”
He pulled a remote control out of a pocket on his coat and held it up. Sleek and flashy, it seemed to have no buttons.
“I’m going to show you as much as I think you’re ready to see. Some of it will be disturbing, but it’s the truth. Are you ready?”
Milo’s hands were clammy. He put them into his pockets and then, on second thought, took them out and let them hang by his sides. He had to be tough if he was going to get through this.
“I’m ready.”
Emmanuel took off his sunglasses and slipped them into one of his many coat pockets. He pressed a button on the remote control. A mechanical beep sounded and the room went black.
Milo froze. The darkness was so thick it was like he’d gone blind. He could hear his own heart thumping in his chest. He saw a swarm of red dots from the projectors, but that was it.
Then the lenses began to glow bright white, so bright they lit up the lower half of the room like flood lamps illuminating a parking lot at night.
Hills of light rose from the floor, took shape inside the viewing area, and filled with color. The angles sharpened, and the shapes became more complex and harder, forming a castle wall, a balcony, a cluster of men in fancy robes standing on it, awash in natural light. Long purple banners hung on the walls to either side of the balcony, and there was a symbol on each of the banners that looked like a white tower seen from below, its base tapering upward into a white flame at its peak.
The man standing at the forefront of the balcony, so lifelike that Milo felt he could reach out and touch him, was King Corgos, Emperor of Taradyn and Valestaryn. He stood frozen in mid-sentence. Milo had seen many pictures of the man and had heard stories about him from the other orphans. In this rendition, he was a fat man in a purple cloak with a face as broad as a dinner plate. He had the twinkly eyes of a bothersome but loveable uncle, though the rest of his face was not so pleasant: his mouth was wide and wet looking, as if he were someone who licked his lips constantly. His silky beard failed to hide the enormous jowls hanging off his face.
A small boy stood next to the emperor. Milo was at eye level with him, and this intensified the emotional effect the image was beginning to have on him. He felt like bugs were crawling on his skin.
Something about the boy’s skin and hair was terribly wrong. There was absolutely no color anywhere on his body. He looked like a black-and-white statue that had been inserted artificially into the otherwise colorful hologram. A tail hung behind him, its tip resting on the floor.
Milo’s attention was drawn away from the boy when he saw the hard, lined face of the man who had killed his father. Kovax stood behind Corgos, eyes closed, stuck in mid-chant with his hands bent into claws by his chest.
“The man in front is Corgos Leonaryx,” Emmanuel said. “He and his cousin Kovax were once students at a military academy in Theus, where I was a professor for many years. I knew them when they were younger—a pair of bad apples if I ever saw one. Their rise to power began with an idea that has since resulted in war, economic depression, and slavery—and the colorless boy you see standing in front of you.”
Emmanuel tapped the remote control. The hologram came to life with a dull flash. Corgos had been in the middle of a speech, addressing a large crowd that was not present in the hologram. But Milo could tell there were a lot of people from the epic-sized roar of approval. The noise died down as the emperor spoke.
“Do not only think of these towers as weapons. They can be used to store the blood ether taken from each and every beastblood we put inside. We will use this power for the war effort, to finally rid Astros of those scientist-magician traitors to the west, as well as all the others who have kept us down.” He clamped his hand on the colorless boy’s shoulder. The boy looked up at the emperor, wincing beneath the day’s gray light. “His sacrifice will be our victory!”
Emmanuel pressed another button, and the hologram morphed into a gray stone tower in the middle of a barren field, seen from a distance. The top of the tower was still being constructed and was a mess of wooden planks. Milo walked forward until he was inches away from the tiny men working inside.
“What you see now is a tower of blood ether extraction, also known as a ‘Tower of Light.’ It combines magic and technology to extract small amounts of blood ether from Humankin and Godkin populations—and enormous amounts from all exposed Feralkin. It is then gathered and stored in dangerously unstable blood crystals in the midsection of each tower.” He zoomed into the tower until a section of it was cut away, revealing bright, throbbing red crystals held suspended by machines. Their collective hum made Milo’s eardrums itch. “A low mage can use this energy for spellcasting on a grand scale. Or, in the case of a Tower of Dusk, it can focus all of its energy into a crystal at its tip and shoot a blast strong enough to tear apart a mountain.”
“To attack Theus,” Milo said.
“Exactly. Corgos has been waging war against The High Republic of Theus ever since he became emperor, and he’s been using Ferals as slaves. Now, he intends to use them as batteries for his weapons.”
Milo studied the inside of the tower. There were people shuffling back and forth on a walkway surrounding the blood crystals, adjusting dials and levers on the machines. Something about them looked unnatural, though it was difficult to tell as they were little more than silhouettes against all that red energy.
“Who are those people?”
Emmanuel pressed a button on the remote control. Milo stepped back in horror as the view was dominated by the ruined body of one of the workers.
“Gods.” Milo brought a hand to his mouth. “What’s—what’s wrong with him?”
The man looked somewhat normal except for the bits of gray bone showing through patches of rotten skin. He had no lips, and his teeth were stained yellow. His bulging eyes looked ready to roll out of his skull. One of his legs had rotted away completely, showing the long thickness of his femur bone. His posture was bent like that of a sickly old man.
“A Risen One,” Emmanuel said. “I’m sure you’re aware of what a necromancer does.”
Milo nodded, unable to take his eyes off the laboring zombie. The creature’s bones creaked as he stalked about on the metal walkway.
“I remember reading about it,” Milo said. “Necromancers infuse the lifeless tissue of a dead creature with blood ether. It’s similar to what Acolytes do with their healing magic, except they do it on living creatures using luminether. When a necromancer uses blood ether, it brings the dead back to life and makes them strong, but leaves them in a decayed state, unable to heal. It’s considered a sacrilege in every Astrican society.”
“Very good.” The view pulled away from the Risen One and flew upward until the tower was just a small toy against a wider landscape. “Necromancers used to be part of an ancient and secretive brotherhood known as the Tenefraterni, or the Dark Brotherhood. They were disbanded about thirty-five years ago by the Paladins, a group of Acolyte warriors. But now, with Kovax’s rise to power and his return to the low arts, the dark brothers have shown signs of resurgence—of coming back from the dead, so to speak.”
The next hologram caused Milo to look away in disgust, but the image had already been seared into his mind. He knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life.
A simple hospital bed had appeared in the center of the viewing area, awash in light even though the area around it was dark. There was a boy on it. He lay on his side, arms and legs tucked against his body as if to conserve heat. His skin was as gray as granite. His eyes were closed and his cheeks were so sunken that it looked a
s if sections of his face had caved in. His tail lay beside him, as pink as the tail of a hairless monkey.
And yet the boy’s emaciated condition was not the worst part of the hologram.
It was his skin. His body was riddled with open sores that would have looked like third-degree burns were it not for their uniform, circular shapes. Though the rest of him was a dull gray, the sores themselves were as red as blood and covered entire sections of his face, chest, arms and legs—and even his fingers.
Milo gagged at the smell. He brought his hand up to his nose and had to turn away to keep from vomiting. The smell reminded him of rotten food festering in a hot place—maybe a dumpster or a trash bin no one has emptied in weeks.
The boy’s stomach rose and fell. He was still breathing—barely.
“What’s wrong with him?” Milo said, his voice muffled by his hand.
Emmanuel spoke in his usual scientific manner, but his voice sounded darker somehow. “They’re called blightsores—a side effect of the extraction process.
“The boy in this hologram is a Feral. They get it the worst of all. The other four races also show symptoms, to varying degrees, though they can be treated with medicine only King Corgos will be able to provide. You can see how that works. My guess is the emperor will blame Feralkin for spreading it like a virus. He’ll gain millions of supporters and make billions of sorols while he’s at it.”
“But why Ferals?” Milo spun to face his uncle. “He can’t enslave them if they all die.”
“That’s the thing. Kovax doesn’t want slaves. His cousin does, which I see as a source of conflict between the two. My guess is Kovax and Corgos won’t be seeing eye to eye anymore once the towers are finished.”
“What does Kovax want, then?”
“Disposable batteries for his towers. But not everyone qualifies. Acolytes, Sargonauts, and Savants use up their luminether reserves in order to express their abilities. That leaves them with very little to be harvested. Sargonauts use it for superhuman strength and rapid healing; Acolytes use it to grow wings and maintain flight; Savants typically draw it from their surroundings; and Humankin don’t have very much to begin with. But Ferals—they store luminether in their bodies to be used during phasing. Now does it make sense?”
Savant (The Luminether Series) Page 30