“You can never help yourself, Edrin, not even once,” Cillian said. “Always with the brash words, always about you and what you think. You have no idea of the issues we must contend with.” She shook her head, a sour twist to her mouth, and then turned her back on me. “You must think me a fool if you expect me to believe your drinking and gambling ever helped anybody.”
I chuckled low and hard. How little she knew, how low her opinion of me. Not that I expected anything else, after all had I not expertly crafted my own wastrel image so that they wouldn’t think me a threat? Still, it stung. So maybe I hadn’t improved everybody’s lot in life, but I had damn well stopped things from getting a whole lot worse. My mentor Byzant had known that, and Shadea suspected.
The withered crone showed no reaction, my words like raindrops off oilcloth. “There will always be peasants toiling in the mud,” she said, “and there will always be impoverished wretches working day and night. What of it? Cheap and abundant labour is necessary for the efficient running of an empire.” One long-gone, I thought. “The smallfolk breed like rats and live near as long,” she continued. “They are just a herd of cattle to me, a resource. Do you expect me to care for them as if they were my own children?”
I lowered my eyes. “No. Sadly, I don’t.” I was horrified at the thought of how she might treat her own children.
Shadea pursed her lips. “A tyrant’s insight is most interesting. Let us hope that you are found guilty and we can engage in a more thorough discussion.”
I shuddered at the thought of the horrors she had in mind. “I’m no tyrant.”
“Magi with an affinity for fire magic are pyromancers,” Shadea said. “The usage and degree of power at their disposal is irrelevant. You are a tyrant.”
“I prefer peoplemancer,” I muttered.
“I’m sure you do,” she replied.
I wasn’t about to accept that from her. I opened my mouth to start arguing when Cillian finally had enough and snapped her fingers. My escort dragged me forward. I shook and scrabbled to open my Gift but the sanctor was close behind me, just far enough so the other magi remained unaffected.
“Control yourself, Edrin,” Cillian said. “If what you told me is the whole truth then you have nothing to worry about.”
“Well, not about this,” Martain said from behind. “There are other crimes to answer for.” I could well imagine the slimy git’s smug expression.
“Give me a damn moment,” I snapped. “None of you know what I went through down here.” But I knew I had to go. Today was Sumarfuin and we had to stop this blood sorcerer.
“No time,” Cillian said. “Evangeline – lead the way.”
I struggled, but it was useless. Eva advanced with her heavy knife in one hand and a lantern in the other, clear, bright, unwavering gem-light flooding the tunnel ahead. Her face looked daemonic in the lantern-light, a painting of shadow and malice. She was familiar with blades and was not the bookish type. She had to be a knight with full mastery of body-enhancing magics. No wonder she had almost broken my arm. If she had been serious she could have torn it off and beat me to death with it.
“If he will not walk then tie and carry him like a sack of grain,” Cillian said.
I was about to lose any chance of escape and couldn’t do a damn thing about it – a black scum of paralyzing terror oozed through my mind. The light shed by the lanterns seemed to fade away to pinpricks and everything went hazy. Then a spark of blood-red light appeared in my guttering mind. Fury exploded. Searing pain from my leg accompanied that familiar, inhuman surge of rage – Dissever.
My head snapped round to grin at my guards. They flinched. It took all my willpower to stop myself ripping their throats out with my teeth and letting their salty blood fill my mouth. I barely managed to choke down the bloodlust. “I’ll cope,” I snarled, walking on my own again. “Let’s get this over with.”
Shadea’s eyes narrowed, scrutinizing my abrupt change. Not knowing what it was had to be killing her. As soon as I was no longer needed I was going to be in trouble there. It didn’t bother me; it wasn’t like I was going to live long enough for that.
They followed my directions, descending to where I’d been trapped as a boy and had nearly gone insane. Shadea froze as we entered the room, staring at the black stone ceiling tapering up into darkness. Something like astonishment, then anger flickered across her face and I thought I caught her mouthing Byzant’s name. She hurried us onwards.
After a while she bid us hold at a rockfall. “I sense the corruption of blood sorcery beyond.” She waved a hand and the rock rippled and receded like water, revealing a large and familiar cavern whose walls bore recent scars inflicted by superheated rock and flame.
The pyromancers sent fizzing globes of fire soaring across the chamber to reveal a huge empty pit in the centre. Instead of the lake of blood and the fleshy abomination there were now only shallow dregs of black water and a stained lip of crusty brown. The entire far wall had collapsed into a mess of shattered bone and rubble, a hole knocked through to remove the thing in the lake and then resealed. Even with the sanctor shutting down my Gift I could feel a miasma of foul magic tingling against my skin. The magi all looked decidedly queasy. Maybe having a sanctor around to shut down my Gift did have some benefits.
“Is this the location?” Cillian asked.
I nodded.
Shadea bent down and ran two fingers across the lip of the pit. She rubbed the wetness into her fingers for a few seconds, lifted them to her nose and took a sniff, then licked them. Her face twisted like she’d bitten into a lemon. She spat into a kerchief. “Residue of blood sorcery,” she said as the cloth incinerated in her hand. She looked at me with perhaps a little less distaste as she wiped her fingers. “The strongest I have ever encountered, with traces of the Gifts of many individuals, which partially verifies his story of mageblood.” She turned to me. “Show me where you entered the cavern.”
I raised an eyebrow, glanced at the guards holding me in place.
“Oh, very well,” Cillian said. “Let him loose, but stay close. Do not let him touch your skin.” Even with the sanctor shadowing me they were taking no risks.
The iron grip of the guards vanished. I cricked my neck and stretched manacled arms, pointed over at a small rubble choked alcove. “I entered from there.”
Shadea looked thoughtful. “You fought this blood sorcerer, you say? A pyromancer magus?” She studied the heat-scarred walls and traced the origin of the conflagration, fixing on the circle of melted stone down by the edge of the lake where the hooded magus had been standing. “Tell me then, how exactly did you fight him from all the way over there?”
It was difficult to keep the sudden stress from my face. I had two choices: to reveal the true extent of my swollen powers, or to lie. I chose a half-truth, the very best of lies, just enough of the truth to make it believable.
“Harailt wasn’t alone,” I said. “He had four men with him. Disciples or apprentices all with bodily corruption. I grabbed one of them and send him into a killing frenzy.” I talked them through a revised version of the events up until the shard beasts attacked and the tunnel collapsed as I fled.
One of the pyromancers looked at Cillian curiously. “Shard beasts?”
“Daemons summoned from a strange realm of living crystal,” she replied. “Scant knowledge of them exists, mostly references from Archmagus Byzant’s personal library.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “A curious connection, since Edrin was once a favoured pupil of Archmagus Byzant.”
I snorted. “Yes, and what of it? Aside from yourself, Edell, Ailidh, and a half dozen others also had personal tuition from Byzant. That insinuation isn’t worth the spit I’d waste on it. Guess who else Byzant taught? Harailt.”
A shiver rippled through me as the air currents changed and swirled across my hair and skin. Something was moving overhead, something big. I peered up into the gloom where only the tips of stalactites were visible. A glint in the dark caught my eye,
then another. Dull splodges of colour began pulsing into life all across the ceiling. Not something big – lots of things.
“Shard beasts!” I shouted, preparing to grab a lantern and hobble to freedom while the magi were distracted.
Dozens of crystalline spiders clittered and clattered down the stalactites, glittering like grotesque jewels. If I hadn’t seen the thing in the lake I wouldn’t have believed it was possible for one man to tear so many daemons from the Far Realms. This was unheard of outside of peasants’ wild tales told in dingy taverns by firelight. How were they even alive? Daemons died in Setharis, everybody knew that. Much like the shadow cats then.
“Form a circle,” Shadea barked. Martain dragged me back and the magi formed a defensive ring a safe distance outside of the sanctor’s disabling effects. Palpable auras of power rippled up around them and the air vibrated. The guards drew short swords and planted themselves on either side of me. They swore like sailors – displaying some shred of personality at last – but didn’t show the fear normal people would have when confronted by such creatures. The sanctor remained behind me, no doubt intending to use me as a meat shield.
I tried to slip my hands from the manacles. “Let me free, damn you.”
The sharp point of Martain’s blade pressed into my back. “That will not be necessary.”
As the shard beasts advanced into our light they began moving faster. Bulbous obsidian eyes glistened as they fixed on us. They dropped, flipping in mid-air, knife-legs stabbing down at our heads.
Martain shoved me to the ground. The guards dropped with me. A deafening concussion thumped me on the back, searing my skin. I lifted my head, the only sound a ringing in my ears. Most of the shard beasts had been flung across the cavern by a pyromancer’s explosion but were already righting themselves and scurrying back. A good dozen of the things had darted through the flames and were now waging silent battle amidst the smoke, rearing and slashing razor limbs at Eva.
The knight slammed her fist through the bulbous abdomen of one beast, shattering it in a spray of glittering dust and glowing fluids. She tossed it aside and caught another mid-leap, knife-legs splayed to envelop her. Jagged crystal tore through leather and chain, but left only shallow scratches on skin gone hard as steel. Her mouth twisted into a savage grin as she crushed the creature between her hands. Two dead in two seconds. She drew her knife and set to work like a demigod of battle, destroying everything before her. This was the girl I had lied to and flirted with? Shite.
My hearing returned as Shadea and Cillian loosed volleys of crackling incandescent energy into the things, leaving twitching and jerking husks of blackened crystal.
The pyromancers spat roaring jets of flame across the cavern. Shard beasts glowed red hot and squealed, a teeth-on-edge sound like tearing metal. Cillian lifted her hand, sucking moisture from air and rock and drawing up the dregs of the lake to form a wall of water. With a wave the wall hammered into the super-heated daemons. They shattered like dropped glass and clouds of steam billowed upwards. Only a few of the daemons were left, and those were cracked and leaking stinking luminous liquids.
One last, enormous, spider dropped from the ceiling to land directly in front of Cillian. It reared, limbs slicing at her face. She ducked, quickly backed away and created a globe of black water around the daemon, hiding it from sight. Razored limbs burst from the sphere, thrashing as it lurched this way and that, blindly hunting its tormentor. Then it crashed to the floor and stopped moving.
“Impressive,” Shadea said. A compliment from her was rarer than diamond.
“Byzant’s records state that shard beasts breathe light instead of air,” Cillian said. “It is likely they were left as a trap and roused from hibernation by our lanterns.” The globe fell apart, splashed down and flooded back into the pit. Shadea loosed a lash of energy that cleaved the larger creature in two. The cavern trembled, followed by the unseen crack and tumble of a few rocks falling near the far wall.
Shadea carefully prodded the corpse with a toe. “We must discover what manner of power enabled these creatures to survive in Setharis, and who is behind it.” She looked to me, troubled.
Eva crunched through shattered crystal, heedless of the shards shredding her boots. She dispatched anything still twitching. “I thought you said this would be dangerous?” she said, re-sheathing her knife. From a shallow scrape a few droplets of her blood pattered to the floor.
The cavern floor collapsed.
I plunged into icy water. The lanterns sank to the bottom, dimming blobs of light leaving me almost blind as the weight of my manacles dragged me under. Something huge barged into me, sent me tumbling with a slash of pain across my side. Bubbles erupted from my mouth as I screamed. The water tasted of salt and iron. I winced as my Gift suddenly wrenched open. I was out of Martain’s range. Awareness exploded. The magi above me radiated panic as they struggled to pull themselves from the water. A mass of ravenous insanity surged up towards them.
Dissever shifted inside the meat of my thigh. The strange numbness blew apart, agony racking me as black tendrils of living iron speared through the bandages. Dissever birthed from my flesh and crawled up my body, leaving pinpricks of pain, its edge slicing though the manacles. The hilt squirmed into the palm of my hand.
A current dragged me to one side of the pit where a hole in the wall sucked at my clothes – the exit to an underground stream that somebody had hastily blocked off to keep the creature contained.
Flashes of light exploded overhead, silhouetting something large and misshapen in the water above me. It was far too puny to be the gigantic thing that I had originally seen.
My lungs burned for air. I kicked upwards, feeling my way along the wall until I broke the surface. I took great heaving breaths and clutched onto the wall, coughing as smoke tickled the back of my throat. One of my guards floated next to me, half his torso bitten off, pink and red organs drifting free. Above, a jet of flame engulfed a fleshy abomination. The formless thing of churning flesh sprouted arms and legs and gnashing jaws as it dragged itself from the water towards a terrified pyromancer. The magus shook with the torrent of power flowing through him, his flames intensifying. The mass of churning flesh rolled over him. His magic cut off with a wet crunch. Patches of rock glowed and burned but the creature’s rippling flesh was undamaged by the magical flames. It swelled as it absorbed him. The man’s horrified face sank into its body, the light of intelligence in his eyes guttering, decaying into feral hunger. He howled at me, jaws snapping.
I shrieked as my Gift clamped shut and something grabbed me by the collar, yanking me up onto the rock floor. I flailed behind me, Dissever slashing. Something grabbed my wrist and held it. “You are going nowhere,” Martain said, spinning me round to face him.
“Is that so?” I replied, smashing my forehead into his face. His eyes bulged, mouth gaping, as he lurched back, blood pouring from his nose. He’d spent too long dealing with magi who relied on magic as the answer to everything. I hobbled away until my Gift reopened.
Eva was down and bleeding, a gaping wound in her shoulder. I missed a step, torn between fleeing or helping. Her skin had been all but impervious to the shard beasts’ legs, how the f… Of course – this thing fed on magic just like its larger sibling. It had eaten straight through her magically hardened skin.
A swarm of green lights buzzed though the gloom to detonate in the thing’s flesh. A dozen conjoined mouths gibbered and cried out in pain, limbs jerking and thrashing. The skin was scorched but showed no other effects. Eyes appeared on its back and bulged out towards its tormentor. Shadea pulled the other pyromancer unconscious from the dark waters, a raised welt on his forehead, and then calmly loosed a lance of incandescent light that could burn a man to ash. All it did was blast a small crater into the thing’s hide. She tutted as her second attack also failed.
A dozen malformed limbs sprouted and it lurched towards her. Shadea grimaced, and then unleashed a dozen different attacks with bewildering speed, glob
es of fire, bolts of lightning, darts of purplish crystal that solidified mid-air. The thing shrugged them all off.
She paused, confounded for a moment but showing no hint of fear. Shadea was an elder magus, an adept of magics beyond her natural affinity and a magus who had faced down insane murderers, blood sorcerers, corrupted wild beasts, grotesque daemons and heathen god-spirits, and had defeated them all. If she couldn’t take this thing down then nobody could.
“The creature is resistant to direct attacks from magical sources,” she said. “Switch to secondary effect attacks.”
Cillian rose from the dark pool, feet planted firmly atop a pillar of water. A second pillar snaked up into the air beside her, tilting until it faced the creature, then swung forward. The giant fist of water hit it like a battering ram. The controlling magic broke apart as soon as it touched the creature but the weight of water slammed it into the wall in an explosion of dust and debris. The cavern shook, stone rumbling ominously as dust and fragments rained down. The light was growing dim as the pyromancer’s flames died and slagged rock cooled. I gritted my teeth against the pain and forced a trickle of power into my eyes. The darkness retreated. It was all I could manage after the abuse my Gift had taken, but even that damage was easing with uncanny swiftness.
Moans and wails bubbled from the thing’s shattered mouths and torn throats as limbs flopped aimlessly. Cillian started to smile, but it was stillborn. Broken bones cracked back into place somewhere inside its bulk. Torn flesh and spilt blood slurped into the body, reforming. All-too human faces burst from its skin, screaming in panicked animal pain.
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