Then, rounding a corner into a dead end, they found the body.
He was propped up against the wall of an alley with his head slumped to the side and his eyes staring at nothing. Blood had leaked from a couple of wounds in the man’s side, and the rain had washed it onto the cobblestones, turning the puddles around him a murky rust color. His skin was growing pallid with death and the cold, and his cloak lay open. D’Jenn moved closer to investigate.
The dead man wore no armor, though he carried a short sword on his belt. He had a fighter’s build, and so D’Jenn reached down and turned the man’s hands over, touching the inside of each index finger. Finding the calluses of a swordsman, D’Jenn grunted to himself and began to rummage through the man’s clothing. He found a few coins, but nothing of import. Examining the wounds in the man’s side, D’Jenn saw three narrow punctures. Looking around, he found a bloody dagger near the dead man. He moved to pick it up.
Allen moved over to the body and drew the short sword from its sheath. “This is no common bruiser’s weapon,” he said, showing the blade to D’Jenn, “The blade is good steel, you can tell by the color. Unless he was a very highly paid bruiser, I’d say this man was some sort of minor noble or rich merchant’s guard.”
“Aye,” D’Jenn replied, eyeing the dagger he’d picked up from the street, “and whoever killed him didn’t bother to retrieve their dagger. This doesn’t make sense. A man like this doesn’t get mugged by street urchins. There was a fight here, up close and personal. He never drew that short sword.”
“I wonder…,” Allen mused, and then he squatted next to the body and began to rip the man’s long sleeves open, widening the tear until the arms were visible. Standing out against the man’s pallid skin on his right shoulder was a single tattoo – a red sword hanging point down.
“Galanians,” D’Jenn spat, tucking the bloody dagger into his belt. “I knew they were going to show up again.”
“How did they arrive here so soon after you, though?” Allen asked, furrowing his brow, “You said that you’d crippled their ship on the Stormy Sea.”
“We crippled one ship. Who knows how many were dispatched after us? They could have made landing and bought passage on a river vessel here while we travelled overland through the mountains.”
“The Red Swords are supposed to be an elite military unit,” Allen said, “Why would Dargorin send them here, when his war is in Thardin?”
“I’m guessing he only sent a small squad. It suggests that they are his trusted right arm. It seems, after all, that they do a lot more for the Galanian Emperor than just fight wars,” D’Jenn said, gesturing at the dead body.
“My brother was here,” Allen growled.
“Yes.”
“We have to alert the Conclave, and the Guard,” Allen said, his weapons clinking as he turned to hurry out into the street.
“Wait,” D’Jenn said, holding out a hand to forestall his cousin. Allen raised an eyebrow at him, his face perplexed and his jaw muscles working as he ground his teeth with frustration. D’Jenn sighed. “There is something going on here. I think there are people within the Conclave working against us. I don’t have any concrete evidence yet, but if we move to alert the Guard and word gets out about this, it could cause the players to move early. Right now, they think they have the upper hand. We have to let them continue to think that. We have to do this on our own.”
“On our own?” Allen exclaimed, “You and I could tear this entire city apart looking for Dormael and never find him in time! Meanwhile, someone with the capability to capture a wizard, and to hide him from you, is holding him somewhere! He could be tortured, or could be dying! How in the Six Hells are you and I supposed to find him on our own?”
“We don’t have to tear the city apart,” D’Jenn assured his cousin, “There are only so many places in Ishamael where someone could go to work the kind of magic necessary to hide Dormael from me and not alert every wizard within a square league to their presence, not to mention keeping Dormael himself from breaking free. It takes quite a bit to suppress the power of a wizard of your brother’s strength.”
“Where, then?”
“They’d need a hidden place, somewhere safe from prying eyes and the senses of other wizards. Somewhere with enough space to construct a Greater Circle to contain your brother and strong enough walls to keep the energies contained. Magic on that scale is very hard to keep hidden.”
“The sewers…Indalvian’s Tunnels,” Allen said, coming to the realization at the same time that D’Jenn puzzled it out. The cousins nodded at each other, and set off at a jog to find the nearest entrance to Ishamael’s underground sewer systems.
****
Dormael awoke slowly, his mind hazy and a burning agony throbbing in the back of his head. He could feel cool, damp stone beneath his skin. He was naked. Someone was running a cold finger over his chest, tracing the bruise that had formed across it during his dream. He tried to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was a pitiful groan of pain.
“He’s awake,” he heard someone say, “Hoist him.”
There was a clinking, groaning noise, and his hands slowly began to rise from his stomach. He realized that he was shackled, could feel the cold metal beginning to bite into his wrists as his weight was slowly hoisted upwards by his arms. His torso left the cold ground, and the stretching of the sore, bruised muscles across his midsection and chest awakened a new fire of pain in them as he was pulled slowly to his feet, then a little higher, until only his toes could touch the ground. He tried in vain to put his weight on his legs, but he could only just reach far enough to stand stretched that way for a few seconds at a time, then the dizziness took over and he collapsed, the metal biting harder into his wrists as he hung from the manacles. It was very hard to breathe.
“Wake up, my love.” The voice was like silk sliding over his senses. He weakly pushed his eyelids open.
Inera stood before him, resting one diminutive, cold hand on his cheek. She had to rise up on her toes to reach him. She’d always been petite. That had been something he’d loved about her.
“Where…,” he began, but she shushed him with a finger to his dry, cracked lips.
“Don’t worry about that, love. It will all be clear soon enough.” The finger left his lips and Inera stepped away from him. Slowly, Dormael began to regain consciousness.
He hung from a chain suspended from a pulley system in the ceiling, some old relic of when Ishamael had been built, put to new use by his captors. There were three men in the room with him – big men with weapons and hard expressions and quiet demeanors, all seeming to defer to Inera in some way. So she was responsible for this…his head was wracked again with dismay. He couldn’t understand what was happening. Was revenge that important to her that she would hire muscle to apprehend him and hoist him like a pig for slaughter? Something was off here, something was very, very wrong.
He could hear water running, trickling, and dripping all around him, echoing off of stone as if he were in a cave of some sort, and the air felt heavy, wet, and cool. The stones under his feet were slick and moldy, but uniform and flat. He must be in the sewers under the city, then. He sighed inwardly at that, Ishamael had an incredibly extensive system of underground sewers, storage, and secret tunnels built by Indalvian and his wizards during the city’s founding. To this day, no one had bothered to map the entire system, and plans for the original construction had been lost long ago. If he was being held here in some obscure corner of the tunnels, then hope was thin that he would be rescued. Chances were that he would never be found until his body was cold and lifeless, if that is what Inera intended.
She stepped across something on the ground before turning to face him, and Dormael turned his eyes to the stones underfoot again on reflex. He froze. There were two curving lines of something, some sort of sand, laid out in a circle around him. The inside ring was bright, almost clear – perhaps glass beads or dust – and the outside ring was piled slightly high
er and seemed to consist of charcoal or some other burnt substance. There were runic symbols scrawled in chalk upon the ground both inside and outside the concentric rings of sand, and Dormael’s breath caught as he realized what they meant.
He was inside a Greater Circle. They were containing him.
“You begin to see,” Inera idly commented, turning to regard something laid out on a small wooden table behind her. Hope drained from him like water poured from a bottle, and a primal anger and fear replaced it. He could hear his heart beating in his ears as he felt the slight pressure of the magic around him, pressing inward against his senses and his skin. His body began to tremble involuntarily.
“What…what is happening here, Inera? Why have you done this?” he hissed, his voice a pained rumble in his dry throat.
“Oh, Dormael,” she replied, turning to face him once again, “It’s almost endearing, how little you know.” Her white hair was cascading down her small shoulders, now bare since she had discarded her cloak. Her skin was a grayish color, something between an attractive paleness and the pallor of a dead body. She was wearing some sort of leather girdle across her midsection, a mockery of something a serving wench would wear, and underneath it a simple dress of dark brown slashed with cream. The dress was tattered and ripped, and her shapely, pale legs were visible beneath it, almost to the point of indecency. She was barefoot, and seemed oblivious to the cold.
That strange, flowing scar stretched across her forehead, and was matched by another that snaked across her pale chest, dipping down between her modest breasts from one collarbone to the other. Her arms and shoulders were also covered by smaller scars, runes and glyphs and symbols he didn’t recognize. He was disgusted and aroused at the same time, looking at her. She seemed a pale ghost compared to the Inera that he’d known all those years ago. Her eyes locked onto his, and he could feel the weight of something alien and strange behind them.
“Things have…changed…since you left me to die,” she commented, looking his naked body up and down.
“I begged you to leave! I wanted you to come home with me, back to Ishamael,” he coughed, his spasms sending tendrils of pain over his chest.
“And what? Become your wife? Join the Conclave? Become a slave to their machinations? No, Dormael, that life was never meant for me. Truth be told, I could have ridden out the invasion and never have been bothered. But that is a discussion for another time, and not why I am here.”
“Then why?”
“You will find out soon enough. For now, I need some answers. If you tell me what I wish to know, then this will go considerably easier for you. It ends the same way no matter what happens, my love, so don’t hold on to any hope of escape.” Her dead eyes stared into his, unyielding.
“You mean to torture me.” It was a statement. He knew it to be true, and could feel the dread creeping coldly into his body.
“Torture is such a narrow word. It simply can’t contain the description of what will happen to you if you resist me, dear one. You will know pain, surely, but on a completely different level than you ever have, and in the end you will serve me regardless. I do not wish to cause you pain, love, so why don’t you just make this easier on the both of us? Join me. Pledge your allegiance to me. Things can go back to the way they used to be. Do you remember the time we spent together? The nights we laid under the stars making love and talking about the future? Do you remember how it felt to be together? It could be that way again.”
Dormael did remember. He remembered the way she used to be, he remembered her laugh and her carefree attitude. He remembered her determination and her independence. This creature standing before him was not that woman. She was a remnant, a ghost.
Inera was dead. He repeated that to himself over and over again.
“What happened to you?” he asked. His voice was sad and quiet; almost pleading with her, hoping that something would get through to whatever of the woman he had known and loved could be left inside that body. Her eyes twitched just for a second, and Dormael saw her pain in that instant. Then that alien coldness and hardened resolve was back. Her expression never wavered.
“Where is the armlet? Where is the girl?” she asked, her eyes dead and cold.
“Fuck yourself.”
Inera sighed dramatically, turning her back on him and reaching onto that small table behind her. She turned back to him, holding a small, jagged knife. She turned to one of the quiet men standing behind her and tossed it to him. He caught it, and hefted it lightly in his hand.
“Cut him. Do it slowly.”
****
D’Jenn placed the palm of his hand lightly on the stones of the sewer wall. He and Allen had come to an intersection of tunnels; a place where the water flowing in the deep trenches built into the center of the tunnel floors met and eddied before draining into the lower levels of the tunnels. He pushed his awareness into the stone, trying to sense something within the magic, anything to help the two of them find Dormael. There was nothing, just as there had been nothing since they’d entered the sewer system.
“Anything?” Allen asked, squinting into the dark tunnels around them.
“No.”
Allen cursed, pounding his hand against the wall in frustration. “There has to be a better way to seek him out. We’ve been running around blind down here,” he growled.
“Indeed. Let me think for a bit. I can’t do it with you stomping around and snarling at the stones.” Allen grew quiet, and stepped away from D’Jenn, inspecting the different intersections around them. His lamellar armor clinked a little as he moved, his weapons shifting and moving in their sheaths. D’Jenn wondered how he moved around with all those blades and such hanging off him.
Ishamael’s sewer system was a sprawling maze of tunnels cut from the earth and constructed with magic during the city’s founding. It was another of Indalvian’s wonders, providing a self-sustaining system of waste disposal and filtering that no other city, not even wondrous Tauravon, had. D’Jenn had studied it a little during his training at the Conclave.
It worked upon a basic filtering principle, though amplified by magic and powered by it. The top level of the sewers was a collection level, where the city’s waste water was collected and washed down into giant filtering reservoirs, where magical spells kept the water spinning at great speed, keeping the heavier (and nastier) things within it from settling. The water was then filtered through magical barriers that allowed only water to pass, where it was then washed lower and the process repeated. Eventually, the water reached the lowest level where it was boiled sterile, again through magic, and washed back upwards to fountains within the city where any citizen could come and obtain clean water for their home. The waste, moved through pipes to an area outside the city, was collected and given freely to outlying farmers to use as fertilizer for their fields. The entire system kept the citizens of Ishamael living healthy and cleanly for the most part, and was a true wonder of magical construction.
The problem for Allen and D’Jenn was that the system wound through more ground than the city itself covered, and the sewers weren’t the only tunnels down here. They’d never been fully explored, and the dangerous magic, still not completely understood by many wizards, that kept the system operational also kept many people from venturing into the tunnels. One could spend months down here, and never cross the same tunnel twice. D’Jenn cursed, trying desperately to think of their options.
“D’Jenn!” Allen called, his voice echoing in the underground passage, “There’s blood over here!”
D’Jenn rushed over to his cousin, crouching down beside him to see what he was looking at. Just as Allen had said, there were blood drops on the ground, red and beginning to dry at the edges, but new enough to still be wet. The humidity down here probably helped to preserve it as well. But whose blood was it? Could they take that chance?
“Prick your finger,” D’Jenn told Allen.
“What? Why?” Allen asked incredulously.
“Just d
o it! Quickly! Drop a little of your blood beside the blood on the floor.”
Allen cursed, but drew a dagger from his belt and slashed it lightly over his left forearm. Red blood welled up along the wound and pattered to the stones near the drops that he’d found. D’Jenn acted quickly, opening his Kai and feeding a tiny bit of magic into the suspect blood and creating a tenuous link to Allen’s. The drying blood drops began to glow brightly, leaking a rose-colored nimbus like fog rising from a swamp. Allen’s blood glowed as well, though less brightly.
“It’s Dormael’s!” D’Jenn exclaimed, rising to his feet and gazing intently down the corridor they were standing in. Sure enough, there were more glowing drops just further down the tunnel, leading off into the darkness.
“How do you know that?” Allen asked, rising to his feet as well.
“Your blood and Dormael’s are linked. You are brothers, so there is a slight difference between the blood that flows in your veins, but enough of a similarity to cause a reaction with my spell. He came this way, recently enough that this blood is still wet. He can’t be too far.”
“Then what in the Six Hells are we waiting on?” Allen asked. D’Jenn just smiled back at him. The two of them took off at a run down the tunnel, their steps echoing down the lonely corridors around them.
****
Dormael screamed.
He’d always heard stories of honorable men staying silent and strong through torture, never giving in to the pain of it. He’d thought that he could do it, that somehow he’d win out over the agony. He’d been wrong. Horribly, painfully wrong.
Inera would ask a question – ‘where is the girl’ or ‘where is the armlet’ and every now and then ‘how did you get that bruise, and what made it’. In the beginning, Dormael would curse at her, or threaten her, or tell her with absolute surety that someone would be looking for him. Then she’d gesture at the man standing beside her, and he would step inside the circle with that jagged little knife.
The Sentient Fire (The Seven Signs) Page 61