Dormael reached out and slammed a Splinter into Jureus’s power, puncturing the man’s magic and scattering the energy. Jureus reeled away, his hands going to his head as the magic numbed his senses in reaction. Karv, freed from Jureus’s magical grip, dropped into the flames. He cried in wild agony as he scrambled out of the bonfire. Jureus shouted something through a swollen tongue, but Dormael couldn’t tell what it had been. The boy was reacting as if he’d never been Splintered before, and Dormael was struck by how young he was.
He felt an attack coming just before thumping boots sounded off to his right. Dormael reacted with instinct, turning his attention away from Jureus and erecting a magical barrier. A man carrying an axe slammed into the invisible wall, and knocked himself to the dirt. Dormael grimaced and swatted him aside with his power, sending the fool tumbling away into the shadows. The only sound the man made was a surprised grunt.
Dormael’s magic rang out in alarm, and it was the only thing that saved his life.
Another instinctive gesture brought the invisible barrier back up around him. Dormael almost fell from his feet as a boulder the size of a horse-cart smashed into it, shattering into a hundred pieces with a clamor like nothing he had ever heard. The force of the blow drained Dormael’s magic, and his head began to throb with the effort of holding to his Kai. The kid had recovered quickly from the Splintering.
Dormael went on the attack and threw lightning at Jureus—one, two, three bright bolts of light—but the lightning met his hand and was reflected away in all directions, starting fires wherever it struck. Jureus countered him with fire, pulling a puff of flame from the bonfire and sending it toward him with a cry of desperation. The boy had messed up, though, and panicked. The fire fluttered out before Dormael had to do anything to counter it.
Something burned a hot line across Dormael’s left thigh, and he turned to see three men standing at the edge of the clearing, ratcheting flatbows back into the armed position. He grimaced and erected a barrier behind him, turning his attention back to Jureus just in time to catch another large boulder. Bolts thumped into his shield from behind.
He thought to pick up a boulder of his own and toss it in Jureus’s direction, but the boy beat him to it. First a large stone, then another, then another all flew at him in quick succession, pounding against the shield he’d erected. Dormael clenched his jaw harder with each successive blow as the force was absorbed by his magic. He knew that blocking the flying rocks with a stationary shield wasn’t the most effective way to defeat them, but he was thinking fast and dividing his attention. Dormael grimaced and split his consciousness a third time, seizing on another thread of magic.
A sharp pain went through his skull like a lance of ice, but Dormael powered through it.
Turning his eyes to the archers behind him, he whipped out with a tendril of power, and set their clothes on fire. They went up all at once with a whooshing noise, and began to scream in frantic peals. They stumbled until their bodies gave in, and the fire consumed their cries.
Jureus tested his barrier, pushing hard with his Kai to test his strength against Dormael’s magic.
Dormael turned his full attention on Jureus, bringing his own considerable strength to bear against the Nelekan youngster. Jureus looked desperate, and his Kai sang in frantic tones. Anything lying close enough was sucked toward the confrontation, and soon a line of shuddering, crumpled objects hovered in the air between them. Dormael could feel the boy’s Kai starting to bleed as he summoned more power, the magic starting to go unfocused.
For all his inexperience, the boy was strong. His mind was undisciplined, but his magic had enough depth to resist a gift of Dormael’s caliber. Dormael saw his face, then—sunken eyes, sallow cheeks, and a wild expression of fear. He wondered if there was a mother somewhere that would cry for the boy.
Jureus screamed, and pushed against Dormael’s magic with renewed fervor. Dormael grunted in effort and held the boy back, but his feet slid backwards through the gravel. The objects hanging between them vibrated like they’d been struck. Dormael shook his head, partitioned his mind again, and shoved another Splinter into the boy’s magic.
Jureus wailed.
When a spell was Splintered, odd things tended to happen. Magic was a formless energy, and needed the direction of a wizard’s mind to shape its purpose. Once it was summoned and put to use, magic was like an avalanche—stopping it was next to impossible. When a spell was Splintered, the remaining energy that had been under the wizard’s control was still there, still working, just without direction. That magic had to go somewhere, do something. Jureus had been pulling on every bit of power he could summon, and tossing it at Dormael in a blind fury.
When the Splinter shattered Jureus’s power, the whole hillside gave a shudder. Dormael heard gravel and scree tumbling from the hillside like dust from a struck bell. The arrows, boulders, limbs and detritus that had been hovering in the air between Dormael and Jureus caught fire all at once, and Dormael had to shy away from the sudden rush of heat.
Dormael’s own power began to be sucked into the maelstrom of Jureus’s writhing magic, and he tried to wrench it free. It leaked through his mental fingers like water in a flood. Another sharp lance of pain through his head brought Dormael to his knees, and his own control over his Kai started to falter. He took a moment to observe in horror how things had gone to shit, and then mustered his strength. With a jaw-clenching effort, he pulled harder on his magic, trying to rein it in.
Blinding pain spread behind his eyes.
He had time to look up at the sound of Jureus’s panicked wails as the magic took him. He rose from the ground, writhing as iridescent foxfire crawled over his skin. The boy’s screams cut off as his body was crushed, pounded into a globe by the weight of all the power rushing back into it. Everything—the flaming detritus, the dirt, even the bonfire—was sucked toward the hovering remains of the Nelekan wizard.
The last thing Dormael remembered was the taste of blood.
A River of Shadow
Haunted, Maarkov thought, that’s what it’s called.
No, that wasn’t it, either. Paralyzed? Petrified?
Stunned, shocked, he thought to himself, trying to find the right word. Resigned.
The man—the father of this charming little family—stared at the altar with that look in his eyes, the one that Maarkov couldn’t place. It was all of those things he’d named and more. It was deeper. None of the words he could think of—horrified, terrified, awestruck—could quite convey the depth of emotion he saw in the man’s gaze. It burned like a fire had been kindled inside of him, and his eyes were the only place it could escape. The veins stood out on his forehead, and he’d ceased making noises against the gag in his mouth hours ago, but he hadn’t taken those eyes from the table since Maaz had begun.
And those eyes—that look.
Despair, he thought, that’s it. Despair.
His daughters—three girls with flaxen hair and narrow shoulders—all huddled together, staring at the ground. Their shoulders bobbed in time with their sobs. Unlike their father, they refused to look.
It was the boy that got to Maarkov. The boy had fought, had punched the strega over and over again, until he realized it was useless. He had screamed, he had kicked, he had snarled and spat. Not anymore, though. Now, the boy only stared, refusing to look away from what was happening. Maarkov didn’t know if the kid was trying to prove something, to honor something, or if he just didn’t know where else to look.
Maarkov wished the boy would just close his damned eyes.
The woman on the table lay spread-eagle, her arms and legs tied to stakes that had been driven into the ground with his brother’s magic. Maaz worked over her like a baker in a pastry shop, humming as if he were patting flour into dough, instead of cutting away the woman’s homespun dress. Maaz moved like a specter, running a long, thin blade from her hip to her armpit, and pulling the fabric aside as he went. When he was done, he yanked her clothing aside and
discarded it into the wind. Before it hit the ground, it was burned away by some trick of Maaz’s magic. The woman whimpered into her gag, and jerked against the ropes that held her limbs apart. Her body showed the scars of motherhood, a record of the lives she had brought screaming into the world. Her nudity seemed a profane thing, the night air caressing her like an unwanted lover.
The father made a noise somewhere between a scream of rage, and a howl of pain.
Close your eyes, kid. Close your bloody eyes!
But the boy was transfixed, and Maarkov didn’t dare to speak.
Maaz began to cut into the woman’s skin. She spasmed and tried to move, but Maaz must have been holding her down with his power, like a scribe holding a piece of parchment to the writing desk. She whimpered and mouthed jumbled words into the gag, but Maaz paid her protestations little attention. Tiny trickles of blood ran down her sides and soaked into the table, and Maaz was soon bloody to the elbows from his work.
The father was screaming into his own gag, the same word over and over. It was lost in the folds of the rag shoved between his teeth, but Maarkov thought that it might have been her name. Mara, Meera, or Myra, perhaps—at least, it sounded like that.
Maarkov’s eyes shot to the woman’s face as Maaz opened her torso. The father wailed, Maaz’s arms worked, and the woman just lay silent, tears streaming from her eyes. She made retching noises every once in a while, but her eyes started to roll back from the pain. Maaz, one hand inside the woman’s belly, began chanting in his guttural language.
The boy saw everything.
Screams and banging issued up from the barn, where the rest of the homesteaders had been barricaded. Maarkov turned to look—mostly to avert his eyes from the ritual—and saw the double doors shaking back and forth in their sockets. Maaz had twisted a piece of steel around the doors to hold them closed, using his magic to see the job done. Maarkov wouldn’t move to stop them if they won free, but he doubted the country villagers could get out. Maaz was too thorough when it came to killing.
“Brother,” Maaz hissed. Maarkov turned. “You must eat.”
“Must I?” Maarkov asked. He knew the answer to the question, of course. He knew that without taking part in the ritual, his flesh would begin to rot away. Whatever eldritch energies that kept the ravages of time at bay would flee his body, and it would ripen like a melon left in the sun.
He would, of course, experience every agonizing second.
“You know the answer to that question,” Maaz said in an all-suffering tone. “Eat.”
He held out something pink, wriggly, and wet.
Maarkov took it, cupping his hands in order to keep the thing—whatever it was—from slipping into the dirt. He would chew on the rubbery meat, he would let the blood dribble down his chin, even suck the fibers from between his teeth afterward—but a little dirt would ruin everything. The thought almost made him laugh.
Then, he saw the boy’s eyes on him.
He paused, mouth poised to bite into the bloody piece of the boy’s mother. Maaz gave him an insistent look, indicating the woman’s labored breathing. The meal had to be finished before the woman died, otherwise the magic wouldn’t work—at least, that’s the way Maaz explained it to him. He grimaced at the boy and shoved the warm, soft flesh into his mouth.
He’d told the boy to look away, gods damn him—or at least, he’d prayed for it. For that matter, where were the fucking gods when the boy had needed them? If ever there was a day that the gods should intervene in a young boy’s life, it was when a pair of travelers such as Maarkov and his brother came calling. Maarkov had watched the strega run the boy down, chasing him through the fields lying bare in the winter twilight. Where were the gods when the boy had been yanked from the dirt by his hair and hauled before this makeshift altar? Had the gods cared when Maaz had rounded up all the homesteaders—men, women, and children from infants to lanky adolescents—and barricaded them in the barn? Were they watching this mother being carved up and nibbled at like a festival roast, even as she struggled to heave out her last breaths?
Maarkov swallowed, his stomach giving the familiar, reflexive heave. He fought it down. The woman’s struggles ceased, and her life fled the altar.
“Now,” Maaz sighed, turning toward the family and wiping blood away from his chin. “Let’s see to the rest of you.”
He gestured, and the barn suddenly went up in a roaring conflagration. Screams warbled out of the blaze as the flames cracked the wood and split the darkness of the night, but the family only stared in horror at the woman on the table. Except for the boy—the boy was staring right at Maarkov, his eyes empty.
Maarkov scowled at the kid. He wanted to yell at him, to scream that there was no reason for that look on his face, that the gods didn’t give two golden shits about what happened to him, or his family. He wanted to rail about how the world was cruel, and it would crush the weak under the heels of the strong. Before the anger made him open his mouth, though, he stopped.
By the look in the boy’s eyes, he already knew.
**
The Conclave was packed, just as the Administrator had warned.
Political tension brought wizards back to Ishamael like flies to old meat, though the proper analogy might have been one involving a beehive—that’s the way it felt to D’Jenn. All the hallways in the Conclave Proper were full of bustling wizards, conversing with old friends they hadn’t seen since their days as Initiates. Out on the Green, beside the white stone colonnade that led to the front entrance, a group of Hedge Wizards were having a meeting entirely for the purposes of discussing the best methods for brewing ale.
The Conclave had two sprawling campuses, each located to either side of the river Ishamael. The main compound, located on the eastern side of the river, was full of marble, white stone, and manicured parks. There were various buildings on the grounds, each with their own purpose, and each displaying a simple, severe sort of beauty. There was the Conclave Proper, which was the main tower where wizards lived and worked, and where the majority of classes were held for those in their First Four. There were two large greenhouses, which had been given the affectionate monikers Plantings One and Two, plus a paved section of yard where students were instructed in the basic use of chosen weapons. It was called the Bruising Stretch—this term more often used in a not-so-affectionate tone of voice.
Most of the wizards were strolling through the Conclave’s wide expanse of lawns and parks, which was referred to on the whole as the Green. Most of it was open to the public, and there was a minority of people who came to enjoy the Conclave’s quiet beauty. There were always troops of children in the parks, as Hedge Wizards were wont to give out free classes on subjects ranging from reading to history for any child willing to listen—it was good practice for their future profession. Parents were known to send their children down to the Conclave for the day, to see what sort of knowledge they could soak up. It was also one of the safest places for children in the entire city. Criminals didn’t dare risk the ire of Conclave wizards, and stayed away out of their own self-interest.
D’Jenn allowed his senses to flit about the Conclave grounds, taking in the various pockets of conversation, argument, or laughter. Despite the tense atmosphere, wizards were using this excuse to spend time socializing. Dormael would have smiled to see it.
Dormael, though, had been unconscious for days.
They had taken a mule-cart from the bandits’ campsite, and used it to haul his inert body down the mountain. Shawna, though she pretended disinterest, had spent every free moment hovering over him. She tried to say that it was because Dormael had done the same for her, and maybe there was some truth to that, but D’Jenn could see the fear in the woman’s eyes when she looked at him. Bethany had been silent since the night of the attack.
The Death Sleep was a real danger for wizards who drew too much of their power. The depth of any wizard’s strength was tied to their Kai, and the Kai was somehow tied to the body. Spend too much powe
r, draw in too much magic, and it could be harmful. Take it further—the way his idiot cousin sometimes did—and it could be fatal.
Sometimes D’Jenn wanted to punch Dormael for his carelessness.
It had been days since he’d gone under, and not a peep had come from him since. Every day he didn’t wake was a day that he risked falling into the darkness. D’Jenn had always known how strong his cousin could be—how damned stubborn—but it was no comfort. Everyone was just waiting for Dormael to wake.
D’Jenn had finally taken the afternoon to spend some time to himself. Shawna hadn’t left Dormael’s side, and Bethany had disappeared into the halls somewhere. Dormael’s rooms at the Conclave were pleasant, but the presence of an inert body made any room feel oppressive. D’Jenn had needed to get out of there.
His own rooms were tidy, with artistic choices that lent themselves to his subdued tastes. There was no reason to decorate everything in sight with garish tapestries full of people stabbing each other, or a painting that held a depiction of the gods. Form and function were much more favorable.
D’Jenn sat with his eyes closed, his magic reaching out to a stand sitting a few links away from him. The two pieces of armor he had taken from the Aeglar Cultists—a greave and bracer—sat next to each other, humming their discordant notes through the ether. They were steel, decorated with swirling patterns in brass. D’Jenn’s eyes traced the knotted patterns, which turned in on themselves and seemed to twist away into nothingness—though observation revealed that to be a trick of the eye. There was a mathematical function to the pattern, a solution that he just wasn’t seeing. D’Jenn could feel it, knew it by examining the thing, but he wasn’t sure how yet to go about deconstructing the formula.
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