Sorcerers' Isle

by D. P. Prior

  THE SHADOW CYCLE

  BOOK ONE

  SORCERERS’ ISLE

  D.P. PRIOR

  Copyright © 2017 D.P. Prior. All rights reserved.

  The right of D.P. Prior to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be, by way of trade or otherwise, lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed upon the subsequent purchaser.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  SORCERERS' ISLE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY D.P. PRIOR

  BRANIKDÜR

  OROPAN PENINSULA WEST

  OROPAN PENINSULA EAST

  PART 1 THE WILL OF THE WEYD

  THE WYVERN OF NECRAS

  THE SHEDIM

  EVE OF THE PROVING

  A GATHERING OF CLANS

  THE BEAR

  ONE FOOT IN THE NETHERS

  TINKERER OF LOST THEURGY

  COLDMAN’S COPSE

  NIGHT WITH THE DEAD

  THE HAND OF VILCHUS

  A PATH WALKED ALONE

  PART 2 THE SORCERER AND THE WITCH

  SLYNDON GRUN

  THEURIG’S APPRENTICE

  THE CELLAR

  SLEEPLESS

  THE WITCH OF THE VALKS

  THE LONG WALK WEST

  A GRISLY REMINDER

  THE SCARS OF EMPIRE

  THE VISITOR

  NIGHT HAUNTINGS

  PHEKLUS THE CLINCHERMAN

  LAKE PLEROMA

  THE CHAMBER OF DARK MIRRORS

  THE WAKEFUL ISLE

  HIRSIGA

  THE ARCHMAGE

  THE HORROR BENEATH

  THE CONCLAVE

  UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

  A WARRIOR’S ADVANTAGE

  PART 3 THE COMING OF HÉLUM

  LITTLE SISTER

  A WITCH ALONE

  A SON’S JUSTICE

  THE HÉLUM DELEGATION

  THE FIFTH INVASION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my editor Betsy Mitchell (betsymitchelleditorial.com);

  My agent Laurie McLean (www.fuseliterary.com);

  Greg Shipp (www.lostinmaps.co.uk) for the maps of Branikdür and The Oropan Peninsula;

  Alisha at (www.damonza.com) for the cover design;

  Valmore Daniels (www.valmoredaniels.com) for formatting and additional cover work;

  And my test readers: Ray Nicholson, Frederick Holbrook, Jared Johnson, Scott Morrison, and Paula Prior.

  ALSO BY D.P. PRIOR

  LEGENDS OF THE NAMELESS DWARF:

  1. CARNIFEX: A PORTENT OF BLOOD

  2. GEAS OF THE BLACK AXE

  3. REVENGE OF THE LICH

  4. RETURN OF THE DWARF LORDS

  SHADER ORIGINS:

  1. WARD OF THE PHILOSOPHER

  2. THE SEVENTH HORSE

  SHADER SERIES:

  1. SWORD OF THE ARCHON

  2. BEST LAID PLANS

  3. THE UNWEAVING

  4. THE ARCHON’S ASSASSIN

  PLAGUE DEMON CHRONICLES:

  1. HUSK

  www.dpprior.com

  PART 1

  THE WILL OF THE WEYD

  THE WYVERN OF NECRAS

  The stone slab he lay on was unforgiving to Snaith Harrow’s back. He tried to shift position, but two of the sorcerer’s crones held him down with surprising strength.

  One of them leaned in till he could smell her mutton breath. “Didn’t you hear what Theurig said? You ain’t to look, he says.”

  Cold streaked across Snaith’s chest as Theurig added a last touch to his painted outline then set down the brush with a wince.

  The crook of the sorcerer’s torso was more pronounced than usual. Even head-on, he looked as though he were twisting aside, evading a direct confrontation. There was nothing he could do about it; it’s how he was made, or rather how he’d become since he was gored and trampled by a bull when a boy.

  Theurig raked paint-stained fingers through the greasy wisps of hair that skirted the base of his scalp. Everything above it was bald and wrinkled and way too large for a normal man’s skull. Folk said his head hadn’t always been so big, that it had expanded over the years to contain the mysteries of the Weyd.

  “It’s for your own good,” the sorcerer said. “The Weyd demands it. I’ve no desire to see you cursed with the rot. You’re too valuable for that.”

  “As a warrior,” Snaith muttered. You’re delusional if you think I’m going to succeed you. Nothing in the world could entice him to become Theurig’s apprentice. Even if he were among the blind and crippled, those no good for anything else, he’d still refuse. The sorcerer was right about many things, but in this he had misinterpreted the will of the Weyd.

  Theurig sighed, a long-suffering parent nagging a child incapable of learning. “Have I not been clear?”

  Persistent. Manipulative, even. But clear? That would be new. Any words that came from Theurig’s lips were hooks and lures for fishing. His conversation was a tangled net of misdirection, his actions a smokescreen for whatever he was really up to.

  But the sorcerer wasn’t renewing the war of persuasion he had waged for the last couple of years. Instead, he ran his eyes over the design he’d painted on Snaith’s chest. “It would be an offense against the Weyd were you to see your totem mark before it is rendered permanent.”

  Something crawled beneath Snaith’s skin. The last thing he wanted was to draw the wrath of the Weyd, which gave life and took it back at the merest slight. He’d done everything he was supposed to, hadn’t he? The Weyd had willed that he be a warrior when he reached the age of twenty-one, that he dedicate his life to the defense of the clan, and in return receive food and drink and a place to live that reflected his prowess on the battlefield. At least that’s what Snaith had thought, and as a result he’d given his all to sparring in the fight circles. You didn’t become a warrior just because you wanted to; you had to earn the right at the Festival of Proving, along with every other like-minded twenty-one-year-old on the Isle of Branikdür. But he couldn’t deny the doubt Theurig had sewn. Who but a sorcerer could truly know what the Weyd decreed? Some were fated to be farmers, others carpenters, weavers, shepherds. But there was no higher honor than to fight for the Malogoi Clan, to serve, to protect, and to slaughter its enemies.

  Before he realized he was doing it, Snaith had already counted to nine. Good things came in threes, they said, and nine was three times three. He continued to count, ignoring the thoughts that clashed and clattered against his numbers. But pressure closed in on them from every side, squeezed them, interrupted their sequence, burst them apart.

  He had to look! See the design for himself. Was it a hawk? A wolf? A bear like his father’s? It was his skin. His status in the clan. His life. He should be the one doing the inking, the one to decide the patterns. Just the thought of someone else exercising control over him, marking his flesh, stole the heart of a warrior from Snaith’s chest, left him with one that pitter-pattered like drizzle on a dung pile.

  He should have felt privileged; it wasn’t everyone that had Theurig ink their totem mark. In most cases, the sorcerer merely revealed what design the Weyd had chosen, and it was up to the individual to find someone willing and skilled enough to tattoo it. Theurig, it was well known, had his favorites.

  Snaith turned his head to one side, looking anywhere but down at his exposed tors
o. He glimpsed his knapsack dumped on the ground beneath an alder. Someone had slung his shirt on top of it, and for an instant the irritation of seeing his clothing creased and flecked with dirt overrode his agitation about Theurig’s design.

  He briefly squeezed shut his eyes then turned his face up, so that when he opened them again he was staring at the drooping branches of the willows flanking the sorcerer’s yard, and through them the dismal skies. Smoke from the brazier wafted over him, brought on stinging tears. It was pungent with oak leaf and dried fungus. A bird fluttered overhead—a rook, banking against the breeze. He followed it till it was lost amid the twisted trunks of the forest.

  Theurig stooped over him, showed him the carved tapping stick and the tattoo rod; a serpent’s fang had been slotted through one end, fixed in place with twine.

  “A warrior like you won’t mind a little pain.” Theurig aligned the fang’s point with the painting on Snaith’s chest. “Although I’m told little pains, one heaped atop another, may bloom into unrelenting agony.” He tapped on the tattoo rod with the stick, and Snaith flinched as the fang pierced his skin.

  “Keep your eyes on the sky,” Theurig said. “And inhale the smoke. Trust me, you don’t want to see the inking before it’s done, rot or no rot. These things are sacred, Snaith. The mark you receive today will define you for the rest of your life. A week from now, when the redness abates, you will unveil it at the Festival of Proving, and it will strike fear in the hearts of your opponents.” He sounded genuine. Maybe he’d relented, realized nothing he could do or say would break Snaith’s will and keep him from greater acts of valor than even his father and grandfather.

  Theurig tapped on the rod again, and this time it smarted.

  “What colors?” Snaith said through gritted teeth. His father’s bear tattoo was red and blue, the hues of life and death. The warthog that graced his mother’s flesh was mostly green.

  “Just the one,” Theurig said.

  “But—”

  “Quiet now.”

  But the ink is black. In the ceramic dish Theurig had shown him, that’s all there was. A warrior isn’t marked with black. No warrior I’ve seen.

  The sorcerer’s taps on the rod grew regular, rhythmic. The accompanying burn was akin to the sting of the fire ants that built their mounds all around the village. As a boy, Snaith had seen a transgressor staked out over one, and he could still hear the screams. Within hours, the man’s head was just a skull. Two days later, he was bones all over.

  Snaith caught himself counting the taps, the number of punctures in his flesh for the ink to seep into and brand him forever. Markings weren’t just for this life; they would follow him into the Nethers, grant him protection from the malecs and other evil spirits that stalked the realm of the dead.

  He winced as acid seeped in the wake of the fang, pooled beneath his skin. He tripped over his numbers, muddled them up, and they lost their power to calm him. His lips trembled with the urge to cry out, but he refused to let them. That would have been all Theurig needed to prove his point: that Snaith was not called to be a warrior, that he was destined to be a servant of the Weyd.

  Each tiny wound to his torso increased the compulsion to look, see for himself the mark the sorcerer had chosen. Theurig saw him tense, nodded to one of the crones, who put a palm on Snaith’s forehead and pressed him down.

  “Even one peek,” Theurig said, “and your skin will fester, your gums will bleed, your bones will crumble.”

  And he wasn’t lying. The image of poor Vrom Mowry surfaced in Snaith’s mind. They said Vrom had offended the Weyd when he raised a hand to his father. His flesh had turned putrid as it prepared to slough from his bones. Snaith tried to banish the specter with numbers, but Vrom stood his ground, as stubborn and willful as he’d been in life. And so Snaith switched his attention to an image of his own making, the mental picture he had painstakingly constructed over many months, if not years: Tey Moonshine. His Tey. The woman he was going to marry.

  Tey wasn’t beautiful in any conventional sense, but she was compelling. He held her likeness in place with the ruthless subjection of his will, made it move, made it breathe—a simulacrum so real it could have stepped from his mind and smothered him with scalding kisses. If he permitted it. Hair glistening and lank, the color of crows’ wings. Ivory skin never touched by the sun—not that there was much sun to touch anyone on the Isle of Branikdür. Thin lips that framed teeth perfectly imperfect. He imagined touching those lips with his own. Knew he shouldn’t have. Instantly, the familiar crawl of insects on his skin. In all their years of friendship, he’d not so much as held her hand—nor anyone else’s: just the thought of it brought bile to his throat. But he’d burned for her often, and he knew from the way she watched him bathe in the stream after fight practice that she burned for him, too.

  Vrom’s ghost broke up against the diamond-hard image of Tey. Everything else retreated—the counting, the smells, the tap, tap, tap of stick on rod. Snaith often summoned the surf-sound of Tey’s breathing to lull himself to sleep, the scent of the musk she daubed herself with, made with petals and oils that Theurig had schooled her in as a child.

  Even with his eyes wide, Tey still hovered before him, swathed neck to ankle in her black dress and shawl, not an inch of her exposed save her gaunt face and hands so thin and spindly, the bones stood out in ridges. When he turned his head to the side, she was still there, immaculate, and not for the first time he wondered if his construct was better than the real thing.

  Behind Tey, the mud huts and tents of the workers and untested warriors were hazy, out of focus. Snaith had lived there once, before his father was honored for his exploits in the clan wars. Over on the far side of the Malogoi village, amid the cabins of oak and the wattle-and-daub cottages, life was a little less grim, and a lot less grimy.

  “Starting to hurt?” Theurig asked, not looking up from his work.

  Snaith grunted.

  “Give him a taste of the rag.”

  A crone pressed a sodden cloth to Snaith’s lips. He sucked on it, tasted something bitter and sweet at the same time. When the woman removed the rag, Snaith’s head began to swim.

  Out of sight, Theurig’s cooped-up chickens clucked and cackled. A dark smear undulated across the sky, twisting and looping. In his eagerness to see what it was, Snaith dropped the image of Tey. At first he thought it was a low cloud, but clouds didn’t move like that, against the wind, expanding and retracting.

  “Just my bees swarming,” Theurig said, straightening up and popping his back. “They’ll not be gone for long.” He nodded to the painted wooden boxes he kept on the fringes of his herb garden. “Got a fresh hive primed to lure them in, thanks be to the Weyd.”

  The sorcerer gave a wistful look toward the vanishing swarm then stooped over Snaith once more and got back to work with fang and ink.

  Each tap felt distant, an echo. Where before there had been smarting, now there was only numbness. Snaith licked his lips, numb too, and still tasting of whatever had been on the rag. He caught blurry glimpses of a third crone bustling around the yard, snipping sage and rosemary, making her way toward the quieted chickens, no doubt intent on their eggs. He became aware of the snort and grunt of the pigs penned a way back from the house, blubbery, hairy, and caked with filth. They would eat anything, Theurig once said. Anything at all.

  He re-summoned the image of Tey, lost himself in the details. Imagined again the sound of her breathing, matched his own to it. Drifted into the dark cavities surrounding her eyes.

  Hot wetness spattered his chest.

  He gasped. Sat up. Had to see.

  Red.

  So much red.

  Before he could check himself, he cried out, “Blood!”

  “Seals in the power of the inking,” Theurig said.

  The sorcerer came swiftly into focus, clutching a chicken by its legs, crimson gushing from its opened throat, gore-stained knife in his other hand. All three crones were gathered around him in attit
udes of prayer, dark woolen shawls covering their heads.

  “Right,” Theurig said, handing bird and blade to one old woman, accepting a drenched washcloth from another. He proceeded to clean the blood from Snaith’s torso. “Give me a second, then you can look.”

  He exchanged the washcloth for a towel and dabbed Snaith dry. A crone stepped forward, holding a square of glass backed with wood.

  “Stand up,” Theurig said, lending a hand.

  The crone positioned the glass in front of Snaith. He gasped. First because he could see himself, clearer than in the stillest of stream waters; but even more so because of what the sorcerer had inked indelibly on his chest.

  Black markings followed the lines of his ribs, the bony frame for tattered bat’s wings. Snaking from sternum to navel, a sinuous body, the curved tail of a scorpion, vicious talons. The horror was topped with a ram’s skull, horns curling back from the temples, empty pits for eyes.

  “The Wyvern of Necras,” Theurig said, voice pitched low and solemn. “The Death Lord of Hélum.”

  “No,” Snaith whispered. Then louder, “No.”

  That wasn’t the mark of a warrior; it was the sign of a sorcerer, and a turncoat one at that. The Death Lord? What was Theurig thinking? Of Hélum—the Empire, the ancient foe of Branikdür. What has he done to me? What has he made—

  “The Weyd has spoken.” Theurig clasped his hands over his chest.

  “No,” Snaith said. “Not the Weyd. You did this. You!”

  Theurig’s eyes flashed fire. “I am a vessel, a channel. I do not decide men’s fates. I merely listen and obey.”

  Snaith stiffened. Bunched his hands into fists. Theurig’s eyes flicked to them. Back to Snaith’s face.

  He knows, the smug bastard. Knows I won’t strike him.

  It was taboo. No one would dare.

  Numbness drained from Snaith’s body, leaving his chest raw and aflame.

  “I have no infirmity,” Snaith said. He didn’t need to say more. Only the maimed, the deformed, the useless were apprenticed to sorcerers, and then only if they showed aptitude.

  “Infirmity is not just of the flesh.” Theurig tapped the side of his head. “Tey is no different.”