Regret's Shadow (Sins of Earth Trilogy)

by Jefferson Cram

  Out of the darkness came a noise. A cracking of wood in the wet, and it froze Hade in mid-chuckle. He berated himself for his carelessness and cast about the chamber he’d sheltered in for another way out; he didn’t want to be trapped should the goblins find him. With their superior night vision and sense of smell, it was all but assured that they would.

  He fumbled about in the dark as best he could, trying to find a balance between speed and silence. He imagined the whole horde outside the crumbling wall, creeping toward him with blades soaked red in the blood of his comrades. He choked the fear down, banishing it as irrational.

  Yes, there were goblins out there, and perhaps one of them had heard him, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. He’d kill that one as he’d killed others if he needed to. If he lost it now, if he caused a ruckus while casting about in the tower, surely more would hear. It would do him no good to panic after he’d come this far. So he focused on methodical movement. After several minutes had passed, he was rewarded for his efforts.

  In the floor under where the old rotten staircase met the stone, he found trap door of equally rotten wood. He held his breath and bit his lip as he steadily increased pressure on the rusted handle. He imagined the grinning faces of several goblins leering at him through the gap in the wall, waiting for a squeal of hinge, or crack of lumber.

  The phantasms in his mind were sorely disappointed, for the door gave finally, and the rot actually aided in keeping any noise to a minimum.

  Casting one last glance out through the ragged hole in the wall, which had been reduced to barely a blur in the night, Hade lowered himself slowly into the pitch blackness of the tower’s cellar.

  Chapter 3

  Dramus Hiltsman lifted the quill from the page and leaned back, admiring. His calligraphy was getting better. Smiling, he rolled his neck to get the kinks out, before dipping the quill once more and continuing the translation.

  His small desk sat in a ray of sunshine that shot through a high arched window. Motes of dust drifted lazily down through the beam. The large study in which the young man worked was a picture of academic décor.

  The walls were lined with tall bookshelves. The vaulted ceiling, common in the Temple of the Sacred Scroll, soared away over twelve feet. Here and there were desks and tables interspersed with the bookshelves, each piled with scrolls of various sizes, maps, and ledgers. Some shelves held specimen jars containing the pickle remains of some small animal, organs, or plants. The place smelled of dust, old paper, and ink.

  There were books simply piled on the floor as well, and although Dramus had memorized the labyrinthine path through the stacks, some of the monks still simply addressed him from the doorway rather than navigate the pillars of pages.

  As he finished the page, he set the quill in its pot and grabbed a handful of sand with which to sprinkle the page, drying the ink. He glanced at the tall clock to his left, pendulum swinging its rhythmic beat. It was nearly time for his work session to be finished for the day. He stood, stretched, and then lifted the page to blow the sand off.

  Satisfied with his craftsmanship, he set the page upon the stack of finished work to the right of his desk, closed the ornate, leather-bound tome from which he’d been transcribing, and turned to leave.

  He was startled by Headmaster Colius, his dour form hovering in the stacks. The man was shorter than Dramus, but his perpetual look of mild disdain always made the young man feel smaller somehow. Dramus disliked the man profusely.

  “Done so early?” Colius cooed, watery eyes flicking to the clock. It was four minutes to noon. He let out a weary sigh.

  “Well,” Dramus countered, uncertain, “I’ve just finished a page and I thought it would be foolish to start another, only to stop a sentence or two in…”

  The headmaster held his gaze through the silence that followed. It seemed that if he could have bored a hole through the younger man’s head with his gaze alone, Dramus would be a dead man. After a full minute had passed awkwardly, he assumed a sorrowful expression. The man was a gifted actor.

  “I believe I’ve mentioned to you the dangers of thinking too much, what with your… condition,” the last word was drawn out.

  Dramus reddened. The headmaster always referred to his gift as a “condition”. Dramus assumed it made the petty man feel better to think of it as a handicap. It was another in a long list of reasons for him to hate the old man.

  “Leave the scheduling to me, if you’d be so kind,” Colius was enjoying the rise he could see blooming on Dramus’s face.

  “In return, I’ll let you handle the…copying.”

  With the last statement, he had turned slightly and waved dismissively at Hiltsman’s desk. He started to say something more, no doubt a parting shot at the embarrassed page, but was interrupted by the sonorous gong of the clock striking noon. He seemed perturbed by the object’s audacity, and shot Dramus a withering look, as if he were responsible somehow. Dramus simply stared.

  His diatribe ruined, the headmaster turned and left, casting his gaze to the ceiling, as if pleading to the gods for patience. Dramus resisted the urge to run up and kick the man in his robed ass.

  Flustered, and hoping to allow time for Colius to vacate the study, the young page cast about his desk and picked up a nearby scroll to examine. He blew out an angry breath and stared at the lines, hoping the reading would calm him before he said or did something rash.

  The work was written in a forgotten dialect that originated in the southern marshes. That alone made it valuable, as those lands had long since been infested with mutants. Still, as his gift began to kick-in, Dramus was able to ascertain that it was merely a recipe for making bread.

  The gift had manifested close on the heels of his tenth birthday. He’d been working on transcribing some notes from a Keleneel philosopher when he realized he could read the margin notes, which had been written in the author’s native dialect. No one at the temple had ever translated these scribbles, and while the individual words didn’t seem any different when he looked at them, the meaning had become clear in his mind.

  It didn’t take long for the monks to realize that they had something special on their hands. Dramus had been orphaned at the Temple of the Sacred Scroll as an infant, and as was done with most orphans, he was brought up in the traditions of the sect and put to work as a page. His gift simultaneously elevated him beyond that position, while regulating him to it.

  He was needed to translate ancient texts that no one had been able to read for centuries. So, while he’d developed to the point where he could understand any communication, written or spoken, the needs of the temple kept him in the same role he’d always had. Luckily, the alacrity with which he could translate meant that he could spend much of his days in personal study and recreation.

  Discarding the scroll, his rage mostly abated, Dramus wound his way through the piles of books to the hall, heading toward his personal chamber. He nodded at the few acolytes he passed in the halls. Most of the denizens of the temple liked the young man, even if they were often jealous of his gift.

  He turned a corner and continued down the stone hallway, looking through the tall windows on his right as he passed them. Below, in the garden, a small group of monks was seeding for the season. Spring had finally let go some of the chilly grip with which it had held the surrounding hills and the ground was ripe for sowing.

  Once inside his small, but comfortable quarters, he stripped off his heavy acolyte’s robes and began donning less awkward breeches and tunic. He cinched the waist with a belt of rope, pulled on a pair of soft leather boots and left. He took the corridor opposite his room’s entrance and followed it down to the back exit off of the kitchen.

  He was excited, but tried not to show it. It was against the headmaster’s wishes that he have contact with anyone from the village of Akilo, which lay in the valley below the temple.

  In fact, Colius preferred that Dramus speak to no one outside the temple, but that was often hard when many of the man
uscripts he was to translate were sold to the monks by traveling merchants.

  Just the same, Dramus was an intelligent young man of twenty years, and he was damned if he wouldn’t take the opportunity to explore and speak to other people. Colius could choke on his second chin, for all he cared.

  While it was often a pain to deal with the headmaster, a little forethought and planning saved the trouble.

  After having read a manual on physical readiness as it pertains to battle, a book that had been written by an old war master of the king’s army in Freehold, Dramus had taken to daily exercise. He’d whittled a mock sword, and had taken to practicing the forms in the yard.

  The loggers who supplied firewood for the temple had been all too willing to allow him to help with the splitting, and his body had begun to show the fruits of his labor.

  Part of his routine included runs along the trails through the hills. At first it had been difficult; he could only make it half a mile or so before having to walk. Now that he’d been doing it for years, a jog of several miles was a matter of routine.

  It had been on one of these runs that he’d met Gwyneth. The daughter of a down-on-his-luck merchant, Gwyneth Embren was a fair-haired slip of a girl who fancied hikes along the wooded paths. Dramus had literally bumped into her.

  After their initial awkward exchanges, the two started a secret relationship, one that was kept from the scornful view of the headmaster. They’d meet out on the trails and head into town. Gwyneth’s father was typical in his initial skepticism regarding Dramus’s character, but had since warmed to the young man.

  For Gwyneth, Dramus represented another world, one of long-forgotten knowledge, exotic tales, and mystery. For the young scribe, this girl was everything he’d been missing in his life of austerity.

  The girl’s family toured the world, searching for lost artifacts and uncovered trinkets of a bygone age. There had been times in the past when they’d come to the temple to sell the fruits of their travels, although never for as much as they were hoping for.

  Repositories of knowledge were rare outside of the large cities, and their coffers were never robust. Still, those luxuries that they could afford were as that of kings compared to what the monks enjoyed.

  All of this was grand and exciting, but none of it compared to the feelings that the young woman had stirred in Dramus’s heart. When he thought of her, he found it hard to concentrate, and often of late, pages had been ruined by blots of ink that dropped from a hand frozen mid-daydream.

  When he thought of how the headmaster would react to the affair, Dramus felt sick. He knew that his gift made him too valuable and asset to the temple to be allowed to leave without a fuss. Besides, there was the clandestine manner of his arrival, and the oppressive protectiveness of many of the older monks.

  Even so, Dramus and Gwyneth shared dreams of leaving the village. While Gwyneth sometimes accompanied her father on his excursions, she longed to set out into the world on a quest to build her own life, rather than sift through the wreckage of others.

  They often spent hours walking the trails, taking in the beauty of the valley whilst simultaneously yearning to be far away.

  This day she met him at a clearing near the floor of a ravine between two ridges. They’d met here before. Dramus found her sitting upon a fallen log, same as the last time, but something was different.

  As she turned to greet him with a bursting smile on her lips, he could see that she carried a package. Dramus slowed to a lope and assumed a quizzical expression.

  “You brought a lunch,” he laughed, “I thought we’d learned not to do that.”

  The last time she’d packed a lunch, the both of them had learned just how bad she was at cooking. She’d vowed never to do so again.

  She blushed slightly, but the smile never faltered.

  “No, Silly,” she held it out to him, “It’s a present!”

  Eyebrows raised, he took the rectangular offering. It was wrapped in brown paper, tied with a string. Even so, as soon as he took hold of it he knew it was a book.

  His pulse quickened. This wouldn’t be the first time that she’d smuggled him an old tome that her father had discovered, or a pamphlet that had been unearthed from some mutant ruin. He locked eyes with her and she knew that he was excited.

  “If only I’d known, I’d have gotten you something,” he murmured.

  He pulled the string and let it drop to the grass. She silently encouraged him with her hopeful expression as he tore through the paper to expose the cover.

  His heart skipped a beat. It couldn’t be. He’d seen the symbol glaring at him from the frayed book’s face. It was mottled with age and worn in spots, but was unmistakable anyway. It adorned the ancient metal door in the basement of the temple, the one which blocked entrance to the Vault of Secrets.

  A bright yellow circle, a black dot in the middle, three tapered blocks of black radiating from the center; it resembled a dead flower.

  No one alive knew what that symbol meant, no one except for Dramus Hiltsman. He shivered as Gwyneth’s smile faltered.

  The symbol meant fiery death and destruction beyond anything the world had seen. It heralded the presence of something Dramus knew was called radiation.

  Chapter 4

  Night had fallen on the capital city of Freehold. Lights still burned across the skyline, from the high towers of the lord mages to the depths of the smuggler’s dens, brothels, and watering holes.

  Traffic on the streets had died down as the night wore on, while the light of the moon reflected on the mist creeping up from the docks.

  In the area known as the Peln Rise, the nobles and wealthy landowners made their homes in large stone edifices with fence-enclosed estates, to keep the riffraff out of smelling distance. The entire neighborhood stood upon the highest point in the city limits, almost as if sitting in snide judgment upon the rest of the city.

  One of the smaller manors was home to Vedra Renmoth, a minor noblewoman of no distinction among her peers. In fact, the relatively unnoticed mistress of the manor enjoyed her anonymity; it allowed her to make her nearly nightly jaunts to the docks for some low culture fun without reprisals from high society.

  So it was that on this night she wasn’t present to witness the dark form that entered her bedchamber from the window. Cloaked in the deepest of black, the furtive form slid through the tall glass doors that opened to the balcony and quickly closed them.

  No light shone in the room. Still, with sure movements the figure walked to the armoire and lit an ornate lantern with a long match. Waving the flame out, Jericho Darkcloak, the king’s Shadow, began his work.

  One of the lucky few who’d been granted a significant gift from the sun’s rays, Jericho was the chief investigator of King Remiel van Uther II. His ability to uncover plots against the king was uncanny.

  Moving to a corner near the door to the hall, Jericho removed his cloak, folded it neatly on the floor and then sat upon it. Crossing his legs, he began the deep breathing exercises that allowed him to access the small portion of the Arcane that allowed him to use his power.

  With his breathing slowed, he fell into a trance-like state, with his dark eyes closed to mere slits. Gradually, the bedroom before him became alive with movement. He could see slightly luminescent after-images of the people who’d moved through the room over the last day.

  It was a form of post-cognition, which allowed Darkcloak to review events that had already happened in a specific area, up to roughly a day beforehand. While many would have preferred precognition, or the ability to see the future, it suited the role of royal investigator quite well.

  Focusing his attention past the maids, butler, and other visitors to the room, Jericho settled the lens of his vision solely on the noblewoman, Vedra. He watched as she rose from the previous night’s sleep, went about brushing her hair and freshening up, before leaving to bathe. Concentrating, Jericho pushed the timeline of his vision forward.

  It was noon, and the nobl
ewoman had taken lunch in her study. He watched in interest as she shooed away her retinue. At this point, he slowed down the vision to work in real time and let the scene play out.

  Vedra made a show of picking away at her meal for several minutes, before casting a furtive glance about the room. She rose, walked quickly to the door before producing a key from the folds of her dress and locking the portal. Next, she purposefully strode toward the corner of the room that Jericho currently occupied.

  Feeling silly, he fought the urge to move out of her way. It would make no difference to what Vedra had already done that day, as she had no way of perceiving him, but would also end the vision and require him to start the process again. He wasn’t sure he had the time, so he dismissed the feeling of anxiousness and remained motionless.

  He watched as her shade reached down to the floor, beneath where he was sitting, beneath his folded cloak, and began to pry at one of the floorboards there. After a few moments’ effort, she extracted a small book from a space under the floor, carefully replaced the board, and moved back to her seat.

  She began to scribble furiously in the book with one of the rather expensive-looking pens she pulled from the desk. Jericho watched in interest as she entered what were no doubt important events in a secret journal.

  This was what he’d come to investigate. To be sure, he watched her through the entirety of her writing, and stayed focused until she deposited the book back in its hiding space. His objective reached, he closed his eyes and began to breathe normally, ending the vision.

  Carefully he rose to his feet. He’d been sitting, unmoving, for a couple of hours, and the kinks were slower to leave his limbs than they had been even just a few years ago.

  When he was sufficiently limber, he reached down, moved his cloak, and pried at the floorboard to retrieve the book.

  It was small, measuring just over six inches from top to bottom. Leather bound, holding pages that were nearly perfectly white, it was of obviously expensive make. He moved over to the noblewoman’s vanity and removed the same expensive pen. Producing a scroll from his a tube at his belt, he fished for the most recent entry, and began to take notes.