The Starry Skies of Darkaan (Realm of Arkon Book 6)

by G. Akella

  "Might we peek inside the sarcophagus?" Raena's sardonic voice broke through my pensive memories. The young woman nodded at the corpse lying at my feet, adding: "At least to find out what this one had died for?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  I walked up the steps, and approached Erast's place of rest. That's odd, I thought, stopping at the sarcophagus and inspecting the cover, which was shifted approximately one third of the way. Could the intruder have done this? Maybe the pouch he had on him was what he came here for?

  After creating a magic lantern—the askew lamplight was insufficient to illuminate the inside of the sarcophagus—I took a look into the stone coffin... And whistled with surprise. It was empty! Only a small silver flask rested on the bottom, the kind the alkies of Earth constantly carried on their person. Apparently, Myrt had taken Erast's body as well, and not only his soul. I picked up the flask and examined it. It certainly didn't seem special, with typical ornamental patterns on the surface, no lid, and nothing inside... Suddenly I felt the floor move, and I felt as if I were falling...

  ***

  "You are my son no more! Leave at once! I never want to see you again!"

  His mother's voice betrayed great pain, but it was resolute. His sister's eyes were full of tears, and his little nieces clung to her sides with frightened faces and screwed-shut eyes. No longer her son... Rynec closed his eyes and breathed in the Helstaad air, crisp and scented with overripe leaves. How could she.... Those holier-than-thou hypocrites always claimed that there was no force in the world stronger than a mother's life, and yet... The young necromancer leaned back against the trunk of a young pussy-willow, and turned toward his bonehound, embracing the beast around the neck.

  "It's all right, Myrna," he whispered, patting the animal gently on the nape. "Soon, real soon now..."

  The youth drew a sigh, then made himself comfortable on the ground, and allowed himself to slip back into those unhappy memories.

  Soon, real soon now he would return to that damned city and have his revenge. Sure, Baron Isaec had croaked, but seven others who had lied that day under oath were still living...

  That spring seven years ago, the streets of Vaedarr were overflowing with lilacs in bloom. On the day Prince Daar's eldest son was wedded, a crowd of buzzed nobles stumbled into his father's inn. Nobles... Yeah, right! When the baron pulled his sister Rickie—who worked as a barmaid—into his lap and started groping her, and her husband Ekim along with their father tried to stick up for her, Baron Isaec cut them down in cold blood. A simple groom, Ekim had been armed with nothing but a short club... The guards arrived on the scene shortly after, but it was too late—his father and brother-in-law were beyond help. During the trial, the baron lied under oath that father and the groom had gravely insulted him, leaving him no choice but to defend his honor! And his seven buddies had parroted his account word for word. In the end, the baron got off scot-free, but that was OK. Rynec hadn't forgotten. He hadn't been at the inn that fateful today, but he had attended the trial, and committed every one of them to memory. Perhaps it was then, as he gazed upon those sleek arrogant mugs with a seething hatred, that the Gift had awakened in him?

  As if sensing the master's thoughts, the bonehound stirred and nuzzled him in the stomach. It's almost like she's really alive, thought the necromancer. Then again, why "almost"? The creature contained a part of his soul...

  "What's wrong?" caressing the spiked snout with his palm, he peered into those eyes burning bright crimson. "We'll be going soon. Just a little longer..."

  His mother had taken their loss the hardest, growing old and feeble before his eyes. She sold the inn and moved the family to the northern outskirts of town. His sister spent all her time tending to his ailing nieces—he would often hear their hushed weeping at night. And he... What could he do? A boy left without a father, nursing a kind of bestial rage that seemed to burn brighter with each passing day. He hated everything. This whole city with its gardens and alleys. The people, unwilling or unable to understand his pain. But most of all, he hated the nobles. The vile scum whose word in court trumped reason and common sense. The bastards who had taken his father from him. Some nights he would sneak onto Baron Isaec's estate, climb a tree growing by the fence, and watch those lit windows, picturing the day he would get to kill that loathsome monster, and how amazing it would feel. And the more clearly he realized that he had no chance in hell against a professional soldier, the brighter the flame of his hatred burned.

  Ingvar and Lata hadn't been generous to him at birth. He was short and frail, only five-foot-tall, with colorless eyes set too close together, a hooked nose and an upturned upper lip. He never had any friends. His peers teased and bullied him, calling him a rat. He fought back, sometimes punishing the bullies, but more often getting beat up. And nothing ever changed in his life. Perhaps this was why Rynec had taken the death of his father and Ekim so hard. The only two men who saw past his ugly appearance for the human being that he was were dead... But if the Warrior God and the Goddess of Love had laughed and mocked him, Syrat had given him strength to spare. "I will have my revenge! At any cost!" whispered the lips of the boy sitting up in the tree, as if in a mad delirium.

  A sudden gust of wind blew some raindrops into his face. It was about to come down. Rynec started, shook his head, and took a quick look around. Seeing nothing but a few skeletons wandering a few hundred yards away, he gave a bitter chuckle. Alone. He was alone again... It was sad to admit that the bonehound he'd summoned six hours prior was the only creature in the world he felt close to. But he was used to it by now. His emotional pain had long abated, but not his hatred. Syrat and Vill were brothers. When the Light Gods turned away from him, one of their dark counterparts had given him willpower and hatred. And the second would give him strength and a weapon! And Rynec didn't give a damn that their armies had trampled to dust nearly forty thousand legionnaires in Fertan, of which three and a half centuries were Ahn Kulad graduates. As far as he was concerned, the more noble scum died, the better! Just as long as those seven survived—so that he could personally see to their deaths!

  The necromancer rose, stretched his aching back, and nodded to the hound lying on the ground.

  "Come, Myrna! Let's have a look around for anything interesting. The one we're waiting for will find us if he wants to."

  Immersed in his thoughts, he hadn't noticed the evening set in. The trees and the gravestones jutting out of the ground were being slowly consumed by twilight, assuming hazy, ethereal shapes. It never did rain—the northern wind had scattered the storm clouds bunched up over the cemetery, paving way for the moon, a dirty yellow stump in the sky. Rynec opened his hood, its cover no longer needed, and started east with his hound, carefully to skirt the graves as they went.

  The spring had come early this year. All around the trees were covered with supple leaves, and the ground with young grass. Here in the south, winters were warm. Snowfall was a rarity, happening maybe two-three times a year. Time in Helstaad appeared to be standing still. Somewhere in the north the Netherworld's army was advancing on Vaedarr, but here in the cemetery, it was quiet. Here, it was always peaceful and quiet.

  When the darkness grew virtually impenetrable, Rynec stopped and turned on his Night Vision. It was close to midnight. Helstaad would soon change, and things would get very interesting. The elders of Ahn Kulad claimed that these lands still held many undiscovered graves of the ancients—those buried here by their kin before King Erast's momentous decree. Many of the artifacts from the university had been recovered from precisely such graves. Could tonight be the night fortune smiled at him?

  The bonehound's snout was nearly level to his head. Truly, he had made a wonderful pet. And after only a few days' travel and without any meditating. Master Urgam had endowed him with sufficient power to make do without it. Bolo would have been proud of his pupil. Except Bolo wasn't around anymore. And the bonehound he had named after that girl from The Maple Leaf that had been so kind to him. He'd even hoped
that something might happen between them at some point... Before she was murdered while Rynec was swinging a pickaxe in Shanama. Who could have done it to her? A drunken customer whose advances she had rebuffed? A burglar? The innkeeper hadn't a clue, and he never returned to the establishment afterward. Maybe his mother was right to have cast him out? Death had long been on his heels, and had even followed him here. Except now he was the one leading it here...

  Rynec shut his eyes and let the gusts of cool breeze caress his face. Why? Why was his memory so insistent on painting these pictures from his past? Was it to justify all that he had already done, or was about to do? But he didn't doubt his chosen path for a second! People had never brought him anything but pain, with only the rarest exceptions. A sequence of faces flashed before his eyes: his father's, Ekim's, Myrna's, Bolo's...

  His growing body demanded a woman. But women demanded money, and he didn't want to ask his mother for it. What kind of man would he be if he did? He hadn't been able to find any work—all the regular employers shunned him just as his peers did—and his poor health precluded him from working at the port or enlisting in the army. He started coming home in the wee hours of morning, lying to his mother that he'd gotten work as a lamplighter, while in reality... He landed in Shanama—a correctional mine the locals referred to as the Saucepan—for half a year. For thievery. The day after his twentieth spring. It was there that he met Bolo.

  Bolo was a lone wolf, a thief that even the mine's hardened killers gave a wide berth to. Why risk messing with a madman? Of course, Bolo wasn't mad—at least not fully, and not all the time. Some of the convicts said that the Goddess of Justice had left her mark on him—why else would he land in the penal colony every five years, like clockwork, as if he were his own judge and jury? But he never expounded on the topic to Rynec.

  They found each other. A balding old man, barely able to speak without slurring, and a youth who hated the whole world around him. If there anyone he could thank for dulling the aching pain that had been gnawing at him all his life, it was Bolo.

  They were given their freedom on the same day.

  "You know where t-t-t-o f-f-find me," the old man said when they reached the city gates. Then he grabbed the youth's hand, gave an understanding smile, and disappeared in the crowd of people going about their day.

  And then came the memorable exchange with his mother. Rynec heard her out, saying nothing in response, then turned around and left, barely managing to hold back tears. That was the last day he had ever cried.

  The next two years he spent living with Bolo.

  In terms of space, the catacombs were nearly as large as Vaedarr itself. A veritable city, only underground. True, it was home to many unsavory types, but if you knew their habits and dwelling places, you could lead a relatively normal life. And by then he had become quite capable of fending for himself.

  Once a week they would head into the city for work. Rynec would spend exactly half his earnings on whores—the catacombs and the slums abounded with them. But the other half he would meticulously put away. In his heart of hearts he still hoped that his mother would understand and forgive him. But he would never see his mother, his sister or his nieces ever again. As for Bolo, he wasn't trying to teach Rynec how to live. He simply taught him. How to move soundlessly, cover his tracks, to break into any lock.

  They communicated primarily with gestures. When the old man would fall into one of his infrequent fits, Rynec wouldn't leave his bedside, wiping the yellow froth from his lips and listening to his feverish ravings. It would take his friend and mentor a full week to recover from a fit, whereupon everything would go back to normal. The old man had become like a father to him, allowing Rynec to feel almost normal for those two years. No, his hatred hadn't gone anywhere—simply, the pain that followed him everywhere had somewhat dulled.

  They never killed anyone, and nobody bothered them in return. The infrequent raids carried out in the catacombs by the city guards never seemed to reach them. And everything would have continued as always if not for that day. The day when his Gift fully awakened.

  Rynec awoke from his reminiscing, looked around himself out of habit, then touched his pet on the neck and set out in silence. The bonehound followed just as silently. What's the point of all these inscriptions, anyway? he thought, squinting at the letters on the lopsided gravestones. What did it matter who lay underneath? The corpses were delivered to sanctuaries, then sent to the cemetery by portal, never to be seen again. Was it the adepts' way of justifying the cost of burial? Nonsense! Nobody could verify the adepts' work, even if they wanted to. Why, you could wander this cemetery for a hundred years and still not find the grave you were looking for!

  Suddenly, an image on one of the stones drew the necromancer's attention. He came closer, stopped and proceeded to carefully inspect the gravestone. The coffin had been crudely and unevenly wedged into the ground, the lid's surface crisscrossed. This was the grave of a disavowed. One day they would bury him in a grave much like this one. Rynec shrugged and waved to his dog, then kept moving, eyes forward. What difference did it make what stone he was buried under? As Bolo used to say, it was your accomplishments in life that counted, and not the ditch in which your bones would rot. And Rynec had no intention of dying just yet—he had way too many scores to settle before letting the true darkness claim him.

  The Gift had begun awakening in him during his time with Bolo. On occasion, Rynec would note inexplicable surges of power while killing rats that would occasionally visit their place of dwelling. Of course, he had no idea what those were at the time, but only that they would brighten his mood, help him wounds convalesce with unnatural speed, and eliminate all night terrors. Soon, exterminating rodents became his favorite pastime. Bolo would simply smile and shake his head. Perhaps he knew all along? But the Gift hadn't awakened fully until the day of his death...

  The small silver medallion with three sapphires and a discolored engraving that they had lifted from the appraiser's stand in the eastern square had belonged to the wife of the captain of the city guard. They extracted the stones and offloaded it to a fence, and smelted the silver, thereby signing their own death warrants. So precious was the seemingly worthless trinket to the fat cow that her husband declared an unofficial bounty on their heads.

  They were ratted out by Hesse, one of their regular fences. When six soldiers blocked off the narrow alley leading from the inn to the pier, followed by steel boots trampling the ground behind them, Rynec recalled the copper mine and the pickaxe he so vehemently detested. He didn't know that they were about to be killed, and missed the moment when three crossbowmen stepped forward and synchronously threw up their weapons.

  "Run, s-s-son, run!" Bolo mumbled, and heaved his body in front of him.

  Metal thumped and screeched against wood as three steel arrowheads emerged from the old man's back. The thief's body, thrashing in agony, was thrown at Rynec, who caught it mechanically, his world constricting to the size of a pin hole. As the realization of what was happening came to him the next second, something truly dark and alien surged from the very bowels of his soul.

  "There's nowhere to run now, rat," one of the soldiers gave a gap-toothed smirk, tossing his crossbow aside, then drawing his sword and taking a step toward Rynec.

  And then he struck! All of his hatred, all of the pain and fury he had accumulated over his life, he now unleashed on these steel-clad scumbags. A black vortex engulfed the soldiers blocking the alley, pulverizing their bodies, turning them into a mash of rusted armor and bones, while crashing into the wall of a house on the right, the structure groaning as it came apart at the seams. Oceans of Power flowed into Rynec. He staggered, as if drunk on it, then gently laid the lifeless body of his friend down on the ground, and turned toward the soldiers that were closing in on him from behind. An arrow plunged into his hip, but he felt not a hint of pain. He felt hatred, and only hatred! Another strike, and the soldiers' desiccated bodies crumpled to the pavement like rags dolls. Mor
e Power streamed into him! Rynec felt the tip of a crossbow sticking out of his back, and ripped it out of his flesh in one jerking motion, along with the shaft and tail. How am I still alive? he thought absently, leaning over the old man's corpse.

  The wall finally came crashing down, raising billows of dust. He heard cries of alarm, and saw a feeble bearded fellow dart out of the crumbling house. He man stopped dead in his tracks, a hand over his gaping mouth, then gunned in the direction of the pier, yelling and waving his hands frantically.

  "Goodbye, father," Rynec whispered through clenched teeth, and carefully closed the old man's blank eyelids.

  Then he rose to his feet and started toward the inn, reeling as he went. He would have his revenge... Hesse squealed like a pig as he died, his screams music to the ears of the newly minted necromancer. Rynec was death incarnate, sparing only Hesse's daughter Larra and her two tots. Something about her had always reminded him of his sister. Once done with the slaughter, he went down to the catacombs, sealed the entrance behind him with a rockslide, and continued on to his now-solitary home...

  Did he regret the deaths of all those people? Not in the slightest. Back when his father's and Ekim's bodies were taken away, one of the priests had said that a violent death may grant the victims a more fortunate rebirth. So, he had done these people a service. The soldiers, and the rest of them. Let them have their better rebirth—it's no skin of my back.

  With a shrug, the necromancer resumed his sally across the cemetery. He wasn't sleepy at all, and so he decided to continue his night walk. Truth be told, he wasn't expecting to find anything of interest here. Common graves were empty, hardly ever worth the effort, and the Ancients' graves were concealed from the eyes of strangers. He was hopelessly inexperienced in this kind of search, and all the myths and legends spouted by his elder classmates were hardly helpful to him. He had three days remaining for his quest, three days to roam amid the graves and wait. Earl Lloeso, Ahn Kulad's foremost summoner, had advised him not to rush the summoning, but prepare for it with all due diligence. Thankfully, to Master Urgam's credit, Rynec didn't need to bother with all that "consciousness cleaning" nonsense.