Death Mage (Prof Croft Book 4)

by Brad Magnarella

  The last two would be easy. I was given a cloth napkin with each meal, and blood pricked from my finger would make a passable ink. It would just be a matter of smearing out the message and then folding and waving the cloth over the flame. Producing that flame would be another matter, though. Oil crystals were hard enough to find in the city, and the cup I was being served water in was some sort of brass alloy, not even close to silver.

  Would substitutes work?

  From the way Chicory had explained it, the combination of silver and the incantation I’d been given were my connection to the Order. Anything else, and the message would end up in a different dimension, or more likely as a pile of ashes in this one. Back in my library, my shelves held several books on alchemy, but little good they did me here. I blew out a hard sigh.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” a man’s voice said from behind me. “We’ve come to change your bedding.”

  I turned to find two of the automatons, a young man and woman, entering, sheets and fresh pillows in their arms.

  “Oh, sure,” I said absently. “Thanks.”

  They nodded and went about their work. I watched them strip the bed, reflecting on how I’d uttered the thanks on instinct. Assuming the two were automatons, they were hardly sentient. I could have told them to piss off and cracked my chair over their heads, and they would have simply left, not phased in the least. But everything from their blinking eyes, to their subtle gestures, to the way they stooped to their work was all so convincingly human that I couldn’t divorce myself from the social norms that had compelled me to thank them. And to think that they were products of someone’s thoughts.

  I stopped. Of course.

  I let out a choked laugh, prompting the automatons to glance over. Fresh energy surged through me. I hadn’t been thinking. The Refuge, brought into being by the Elders a thousand years ago, was the product of thoughts. As an ideational realm, thoughts here had special manifesting powers.

  I didn’t possess Elder-level magic, no, but I wasn’t talking about thinking a world into being. I only needed a cup and a crystal. Though I’d never manifested matter before, I had performed projection spells—taking something solid and projecting its likeness somewhere else.

  I was betting that here the same process would work with thoughts.

  I waited for the automatons to leave, then waited a little longer to ensure no one else was coming. As the sky darkened outside the windows, revealing the realm’s two moons, I left the room’s lamp off. I climbed into bed, rolled onto my side, and pulled the covers over my head.

  “Oscurare,” I whispered, deepening the darkness around me.

  Certain I was as concealed as I could be, I pictured the silver cup from my apartment, rotating it into a three-dimensional model in my mental prism. “Imitare,” I chanted. “Imitare.”

  Energy coursed around the prism, seeming to harden the thought into something independent of my mind.

  “Liberare,” I said, and released the thought.

  The energy around my prism rushed out of me, and the image of the cup disappeared. I was sure the attempt had failed, when a moment later something cold rolled against my forehead. I worked my hands up into the pocket in front of my face until I was holding a metal cup. I brought it to my nose and sniffed.

  Silver.

  Holy crap, it worked.

  I repeated the ritual for the crystal, manifesting the thought and then releasing it. Something pinged into the cup. I reached inside and rolled the oil crystal between my fingers. Okay, I thought hiding the cup and crystal beneath a pillow, now for the message. I extended an arm and pawed for the cloth napkin on the bedside table, then stopped myself.

  If I could manifest the other items, why not the message?

  Gathering energy to my prism, I composed the message, as though giving dictation. I found myself using the formal system the Order required, a case of an old habit dying hard, but I was also worried that if I didn’t defer to the Order’s specifications, the message would be tossed.

  To the Esteemed Order of Magi and Magical Beings,

  Re: Imprisoned in the Refuge/Chicory Dead

  Urgency: Ultrahigh

  Pursuant to your mandate, Chicory sent me to the Refuge about one week ago tonight to find and destroy Lich’s book. I succeeded in the task; however, in attempting to retrieve me, Chicory was slain. I am now a prisoner of Marlow and the Front, a group intent on subverting my will and magic to the Whisperer’s malevolent ends. I urgently request your help.

  Humbly Submitted,

  Everson Croft

  I repeated the ridiculous message in my mind, imagining it handwritten on a sheet of parchment paper in lampblack ink. When the thought hardened in my prism, I released it with another “Liberare.”

  The parchment settled in front of me. I took it and blew across the wet ink. Then, as casually as I could, I drew the sheets back, placed the cup with the crystal on the bedside table, and sat up.

  “Fuoco,” I whispered, my heart pounding through the Word. I was sure that any second, someone was going to come through the door, banish my creations, and prevent me from conjuring others.

  The oil in the center of the crystal glowed, then jetted into a bright flame. It sputtered and smoked, as if on the verge of going out, before shifting into a familiar plum-colored column, where it steadied. I pumped a fist. My magic was almost spent, but the thought items were doing their jobs. I reread the message and folded the parchment into a six-sided disk.

  “Consegnare,” I said, waving the disk over the flame, my eyes cutting to the door and back. “Consegnare.”

  The report began to smoke. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, I thought, then jerked back as a bright flash tore the report from my fingers. I leaned forward again slowly, riveted on the flame. It cycled through the color spectrum, becoming orange, before returning to its original plum color.

  I let out my breath in a long, shuddering sigh.

  The message had gone through.

  10

  “It looks like you’ve recovered.”

  When I raised my head, sleep seemed to run off it like thick water. Morning light filled the room. Connell was standing at the foot of my bed. I followed his gaze to the bedside table. Beside a fresh pitcher of water, the plum-colored flame continued to burn from the silver cup.

  Fear shot through me. After sending the message last night, I’d closed my eyes, planning to rest just long enough to recharge my powers and manifest a weapon for protection. Instead, I’d fallen into a deep sleep, the manifestations having drained me much more than I’d thought.

  Connell dragged the chair to the foot of the bed and sat so he was facing me. He nodded toward the cup. “It’s why the Front chose this place,” he said. “Its responsiveness to thought magic. The defenses the Elders created were superior to anything we could have manifested on the material plane or by our own magic. Through collective thought, we’ve maintained the Refuge.”

  “Until now,” I shot back.

  He nodded grimly. “That was an Elder book you incinerated. And yes, it contained powerful symbols that cannot be replicated, symbols instrumental in countering Lich’s efforts.”

  “Nice try, but I saw the book.”

  “You saw what someone wanted you to see.”

  “Give it a rest. Lich was destroyed centuries ago.” I sat up on the side of the bed, emboldened by the knowledge that the Order had received the message, that they were on the way.

  “I assure you,” Connell said, “Lich is alive and well.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “I’m going to tell you everything.”

  “Your version of everything?” I snorted. “Don’t bother.”

  “You’ve been conditioned to distrust us, and I accept that.” His gaze cut over to the plum-colored flame. “But what I’m going to tell you will explain why no one’s coming to your rescue.”

  I shook my head even as a ganglion of fear formed in my gut.

  “And when I fi
nish—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted, “I’m going to throw my arms around you and thank you for showing me the light.”

  “When I finish,” he repeated patiently, “we’ll release you.”

  I felt the sarcastic retort I’d been preparing fall away. “Come again?”

  “Return you through the portal you entered by.”

  “And I’ll be back in New York?”

  “New Jersey, technically. But yes.”

  I stared at him. “Why?”

  “Because we know the only way you’ll accept the truth is by investigating it for yourself.”

  “Why is that so important to you?”

  “If you’ll let me begin…”

  I looked around the room, searching for an anomaly, just one. I knew what I’d seen when I arrived at the Refuge, dammit. Mold-coated walls, fish-faced creatures, a summoning ceremony fit for the seventh circle of hell. My perceptions had only changed once the Front knocked me out for five days. And Chicory had warned me their mind-warping magic was potent. I mean, hell, it had turned the Elders against one another, almost toppled them. I had resisted thus far, but would listening to Connell’s account endanger that?

  “You’ll send me back as soon as you’re done?” I asked.

  “We’ll give you time to change into some clothes, of course.”

  I bristled at his attempted humor. “And if I don’t investigate your claims you’ll, what, pull me back here?”

  “We don’t have that kind of power, Everson. We can pull, but you would have to push. You’d have to be willing, in other words. But it’s a moot point. You’ll want to investigate.”

  I didn’t like his self-assuredness. But for a chance to be sent back, especially if the Order was slow on the uptake… I snuck a peek at the plum-colored flame that didn’t seem to concern Connell. I would keep an iron-clad hold on my skepticism, I decided. The second I felt my mind starting to bend, I would block out what he was saying and re-center myself.

  “Fine. Tell me.”

  Connell nodded. “I received a similar training to yours. We all did. You know the story of the First Saints, Michael’s nine children, how the Order came to be. That much of our history is true. You also heard the account of the rebellion in which Lich tried to overthrow his siblings.”

  Not wanting to give Connell a finger hold in my thoughts, I simply looked back at him.

  “Lich made a pact with an ancient being called Dhuul. Chaos itself. In exchange for the power he felt he’d been denied, Lich sacrificed his soul to Dhuul and pledged to help him into our world. By his very nature, Dhuul reduces systems of order to darkness and madness.”

  Chicory hadn’t told me that part of the story. Because it’s a lie, I reminded myself.

  “So, yes, Lich did die, but not at the hands of the Elders. He rose as an undead being, a demigod, in full possession of Whisperer magic. And with that magic, he slaughtered his eight siblings.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, unable to help myself.

  He ignored the remark. “No more Elders. No more Order.”

  “Then who in the hell have I been working under for the last ten years?”

  “Lich,” Connell said. “After destroying the Elders, he used the same magic to create the illusion that the First Order continued to exist. Then, assuming various guises, he murdered the representatives of the Second Order, those with direct access to the Elders. From there, the Elders existed in name and legend only, a legend Lich could manipulate to his, and Dhuul’s, ends.”

  “So you’re saying that all of the creatures I’ve captured and sent back were illusions?” I fingered the place where a nether creature had torn off a chunk of my right earlobe.

  “No, Everson. The work of everyone who served under what we believed to be the Order was very real. Beings do exist in the nether realms, the lesser ones seeking sustenance in our world, the greater ones hungering for dominion. Much of the critical work of the Order actually continued.”

  “And that helps Lich how?” I asked skeptically.

  “In two ways.” Connell stood and began pacing the room, hands clasped behind his back. Something in the way he carried himself bothered me. “First, it acts as a distraction, keeping magic-users like us busy. We don’t question what we’re being told to do, nor by whom. That has given Lich freedom to devote himself to building the portal between our world and Dhuul’s. Second, the practice and experience we obtain grow our power. And—”

  “That doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” I interrupted. “Why would Lich want magic-users to become powerful enough to challenge him?”

  “Oh, they never get to that point. He only lets them grow powerful enough to sacrifice them. The lion’s share of their power goes to the portal while a quotient is entrapped in a glass pendant that sustains Lich himself.”

  I blew a raspberry with my lips. “Like other magic-users aren’t going to know their colleagues are suddenly missing.”

  “Even under the policy of compartmentalization?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “And let’s not forget the zero-tolerance policy. Magic-users are hit with enough warnings and threats in their early years that were any of them to learn about the execution of a fellow magic-user—or told they were up for execution themselves—they would hardly be surprised. Terrified, yes, but not surprised.”

  I couldn’t keep myself from revisiting the numerous warnings I’d received over the years. But that didn’t explain Grandpa, an old and powerful mage. His death had been an accident, stepping into a street at the same moment a bee happened to sting an approaching driver. He hadn’t been sacrificed or had his soul harvested.

  I was going to say as much, then remembered something the vampire Arnaud had told me shortly before I blew him apart. I kept close tabs on your grandfather since his arrival in Manhattan, he’d said. He was behaving quite curiously, performing work far beneath his station. A stage magician and insurance man?

  Almost as though Grandpa was trying to hide his abilities from someone. I broke off the thought when I realized Connell was watching me intently.

  “Yeah, nice story so far,” I said. “There’s only one problem. If Lich the Great and Terrible created this perfect artifice, fooling everyone, how in the hell do you know about it?”

  “Your grandfather,” he said.

  I stiffened. “What about him?”

  “Asmus Croft was a scholar in Europe, a brilliant man.”

  “A scholar?” I’d never heard anything about that.

  “Yes, of mythology. Interesting how you followed in his footsteps without ever knowing. In any case, in his early days as a wizard, Asmus took a great interest in the history of the Order. He learned everything he could about it, going back to the earliest records. That had been Lich’s role in the First Order: penning its history and protocols, its first spell books. After overthrowing the Order, Lich took many guises, but he kept up the history. He gave an account of the rebellion, and his own role in it, but reported that it ended in his death and the closing of the seam to Dhuul. The falsehood was not only to evade suspicion, but to enact harsher punishment for magic-users who committed any number of infractions. Lich set up wards to spy on them. Thus began the regime of warnings and executions.”

  That was actually consistent with what Chicory had told me about the Elders taking steps to ensure nothing like the rebellion would happen again. Careful, Everson, I warned myself. Probably exactly how Whisperer magic works, grafting lies onto what one already accepts as truth.

  “But Asmus was exceptional in languages too,” Connell continued. “He developed an expertise in what would later become the field of linguistics. Though Lich had altered his penmanship in composing the post-rebellion history, your grandfather saw similarities in the diction between that history and what had come before. He began to ask questions. Not aloud, no—he knew better. The questions he posed were to himself: What if the rebellion had succeeded? What if Lich had destroyed his siblings and not vice versa? What if
this Dhuul was directing what everyone believed to be the Order? With those questions in mind, your grandfather simply observed. What was said, what was done, what was promulgated down the ranks. He did this for many years, continuing his work as a scholar and wizard, never letting on what he suspected but becoming more and more convinced of it. When the regional enforcers of the Inquisition grew bolder in their threats against European magic-users, he requested guidance from the Order, and this was where Lich slipped up.”

  I caught myself leaning forward slightly and sat back.

  “The Order advised your grandfather to ally with the vampires to confront the threat,” he said.

  “What was wrong with that?”

  “It went against the Order’s entire reason for being,” Connell replied. “Saint Michael sired children to combat the offspring of the Demon Lords, which included vampires. For hundreds of years, the Order had never wavered from that position.”

  “Yeah, but this was for survival.”

  “Saint Michael forbade his children from warring against humans. Again, it went against their reason for being. But now, just like that, two of the central tenets on which the Order was founded had been altered.”

  “How would that have been advantageous to Lich?”

  “Your grandfather believed Lich saw war as the best chance for the long-term survival of magic-users. The longer they lived, the more powerful they grew, and the more of that power Lich could channel into his portal. Thus, the more powerful he would become.”

  “Then why did my grandfather fight?”

  “He saw the fog of wartime as an opportunity to meet with other magic-users in secret. That was how he met Marlow. They compared stories on their experiences. Both of the mentors who had inducted them into the Order had been put to death for one violation or another. Other magic-users shared similar accounts concerning their own mentors. It was there, during the war against the Inquisition, that your grandfather, Marlow, and several others formed a rebellion to defeat Lich. It would take time and resources. Lich had been building his portal for centuries, after all. Several magic-users faked their deaths during the Inquisition, Marlow among them. They came here, to the Refuge, where they discovered Elder books and began the work of stalling Lich’s progress. Following the Inquisition, your grandfather feigned a serious head wound and claimed he’d lost much of his own power. He requested and was granted a release from the Order. Lich had no more use for him. Keeping a low profile, your grandfather worked between worlds, gathering information and resources out there, supplying it to us here.”