The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)

by H. Anthe Davis

  Across the third ring, static crackled through his short hair and crawled up his robes. Had he been wearing metal accessories, he might have been burned; as it was, the temperature spiked and sweat immediately began rolling down his back.

  “You're right-handed?” said Enkhaelen, holding out his spark-shrouded hands.

  “I— Yes.”

  “Then we can mirror this easily. You've done an energy relay before, I hope.”

  “In the introductory Energies course, and in a few upper-division wards. But I'm not practiced in cooperative magic...”

  “Well, try not to die.”

  With that, Enkhaelen clamped his hands over Geraad's, and the electricity that still danced about him moved to encompass them both. Geraad sucked in a breath as he felt the power start burning through his wards, but contained the panic and tried to concentrate on what Enkhaelen was doing.

  On paper, energy relays were simple, like pouring water from one vessel into another. The complication was that these vessels were mortal bodies, each with a unique structure and resistance, each commanded by a soul of unequal strength. As their hands linked, Geraad became instantly aware of the vastness of Enkhaelen's reservoir, and just as aware of his own, like a bucket next to an inland sea. Parts of that reservoir felt blocked or disjointed like the channels in the crystal blades—inaccessible—but the remaining space could have swallowed up thousands of mages of his caliber. The energy just at Enkhaelen's fingertips was enough to burn him out a dozen times.

  “Please—“ he started, terror squeezing his heart, but Enkhaelen's hands were vises and his gaze already fixed on the arcane middle distance. As Geraad forced his attention to the magic, he felt fine threads unreel from the necromancer and into him to begin the transfer.

  It should have hit like a flash flood, so much did he feel it pressing on him, but instead it came as a slow controlled stream through his receptive left hand. Shivering with fear, he managed to start its circulation—directing it through his wards and robes and the peripherals he had already created, across his shoulders in broad loops, and finally his skin—but even with that, he swiftly approached his limit. The all-encompassing tingle heightened toward pain, and a groan escaped him.

  Then something shifted in the atmosphere of the rings, and he felt a heaviness descend about his body like thick robes or some kind of armor. It dispersed the pain, and as he glanced down at himself he realized that Enkhaelen had just transferred his own personal wards: an eight-inch-deep swaddle of additional layers that circulated the energy in intricate maze-like patterns, no two lines ever crossing. A network of pipes to prevent the bucket's overflow.

  “That should be enough,” Enkhaelen murmured. “Now just complete the circuit...”

  And suddenly Geraad felt the rings in the floor, the wards in the walls, and every single crystal blade placed around him. All the spells that Enkhaelen had been maintaining fell on his shoulders, and he gasped as the energy he had struggled to hold began gouting from his projective right hand like lifeblood.

  “Focus. Channel it,” said Enkhaelen, releasing his hands to prop him up as he began to sag. “You are the keystone; if you crumble, so does the whole working. Just breathe and let the energy move through you naturally. It won't hurt you if you don't fight.”

  Easier said than done, but Geraad tamped down his fear with an effort of will and concentrated on letting the power flow. With Enkhaelen's wards hanging about him like an armature, there was nothing else he had to do; the network had already been formed, and as long as he stayed calm, it all functioned automatically. His contribution was the veins and nerves, the beating heart, the living vessel of the process. Enkhaelen's magic did the rest.

  “Sufficient,” said the necromancer finally, stepping back. “Your channels are woefully restricted; we should work on that later. But for now, just breathe. I'm not sure how long I'll be, so...good luck.”

  With that, he turned and strode from the circle, black boots kicking up sparks.

  Geraad stared after him, dumbfounded, as he immediately resumed his one-sided argument. “Yes, I'm finished,” he said, angling for the far side of the room, “no thanks to you. Give me a moment to open the portal and I— What? No, don't you dare—“

  Enkhaelen's steps stuttered on the basalt, then stopped. Then, to Geraad's shock, his legs unhinged and he crumpled to the ground to lie splay-limbed just beyond the wards, head cocked at a weird angle, eyes empty.

  “Master?” Geraad called out cautiously. He had seen the necromancer switch bodies before, but never so suddenly. So unwillingly. The sight brought back the horrid tangle of hate and fear Geraad had felt from him in the Palace.

  To think that the Emperor had such power over him...

  A tremor went through the cycling energy, and Geraad forced himself to settle down, all too aware that to lose control was to die. Surely Enkhaelen would return soon. This project seemed important to him, though Geraad could not fathom what he wanted with two dozen channel-broken crystal blades. No Artificer, he could not even tell the purpose of the magic he saw wrapped around them, tied into the circuit he controlled but not actively drawing from it. Whatever Enkhaelen was doing, he had put it on hiatus in Geraad's hands.

  Just as well, because as the moments lengthened to quarter-marks, the beads of sweat on his neck and face became lines, then rivers. The heat of the circulating wards never increased, but his distress claimed otherwise, and only his mental discipline kept him from panic. It seemed impossible to focus on anything but the great wave about to break over him, impossible to feel anything but impending doom.

  Then a flicker of movement by Enkhaelen's downed corpse caught his eye. As he split his psychic attention, the paralytic terror lessened.

  “Rian, no,” he croaked, his voice carrying just enough to freeze the goblin with hands poised over the necromancer's face.

  “Why?” came the goblin's baffled response.

  “He's not— That's not him. And even if it was...” He trailed off, not sure what he wanted to say. That Enkhaelen was too dangerous to oppose? That he could wake up at any moment and kill them?

  That he deserved their gratitude?

  “Just keep away from him,” he said. “I told you not to come back!”

  “Never left,” said the goblin smugly. Something glinted in his black harness as he straightened, and Geraad squinted. A triangular silvery shard...

  Cob's arrowhead. The one Enkhaelen had so recently extracted from his own back.

  “You can't steal that,” he said with ice in his veins. “He uses it regularly, he'll know it's missing.”

  “Is not his!”

  “That doesn't matter. You can't. Not if we want to stay out of trouble.”

  The goblin hunched low, eyes narrowing to cat-like slits. “Trouble,” he said, prodding at the necromancer's corpse with one pointy black digit. “All trouble since he find us, me and Cob. Now you. Should pluck out his eyes, bite off his fingers—“

  “Don't touch him.” Even from here, Geraad could see the wards on his robes. Without his presence to power them, they were dormant, but a strong-enough poke could trigger them.

  And he had more bodies. In this chamber alone, he had dozens of options.

  “Why you on his side?” said Rian.

  “I'm not—“

  Geraad stopped. Was he? Right now, he had enough energy in his hands—and enough access to Enkhaelen's arrays—to potentially overload the chamber's wards while staying protected within the circles. He could destroy this laboratory and put an end to the necromancer's experiments.

  He hadn't even thought of that until now.

  And, considering it, the first thing that came to mind was that he shouldn't, because Enkhaelen had trusted him.

  But what was Enkhaelen planning to do with this place? With these daggers and these 'new mages' and his connection to the Emperor? Gratitude over a rescue and a few fixed fingers seemed a petty reason to let Enkhaelen just do whatever he liked. To help him.
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  I don't know enough, he told himself. It's not that I side with him; I'm just being cautious. There's so much I need to learn before I take action. His plans, his creations, the truth of the Palace...

  His real body.

  There had to be one. Enkhaelen was no ghost, no disembodied soul. He had a mind—the Palace excursion had verified that—and a mind needed a brain as its anchor. Whether it had to be properly alive, Geraad did not know; before meeting Enkhaelen he would have said obviously yes, but Enkhaelen seemed to operate fine while dead.

  But then, the only time he had heard Enkhaelen's thoughts had been in the Palace, so presumably his living brain was there and it controlled dead bodies by proxy...

  So the question was: where in the Palace was he?

  With a shudder, Geraad allowed himself to slip back into that dreaded experience. As much as he wished to forget it, he had to examine the evidence while it was still clear. It took effort to focus past the intrusive horrors—the roiling floor, the prisoners' glassy eyes—but he owed it to those who had vanished into the depths. All those he had been unable to help.

  As the white walls of memory rose around him, he concentrated. He had decades of practice in picking a single mind from a crowd of loud thinkers: it had been an essential skill in Count Varen's court, where mistaking one man's thoughts for another's could let an assassin slip through at the expense of an innocent. More sordidly, he had used it to pick the best chance out of any group of women; it wasn't a matter of influencing them, which would have been both immoral and patently illegal, but of detecting who was actually interested.

  He'd grown out of that tactic, though. Or just grown too busy. It had been a while since...

  Pikes—focus!

  All around him were minds of varying sanity, varying strength. As one part of his attention maintained the energy-channel, the other paged through the data, until he found the thread of Enkhaelen's thoughts and began triangulating it. They had walked a long way through the white halls, drawing ever closer to the source of that burning rage, and then through the throne-room and right up to the dais.

  By all evidence, Enkhaelen's true self was there. Not in the corpse he wore, but close.

  The Emperor? he thought, then discarded it. The Emperor was something else, some blinding entity far beyond even Enkhaelen's reach. There had been others on or near the dais—the broken-minded Empress on her lesser throne, the blind mentalists, the White Flame guards—but he could account for all of them or their feelings of warded absence.

  None matched Enkhaelen's mind. Yet he was right there.

  Right there, and back a bit. And slightly up...

  According to his mental picture, that should put him in the wall behind the throne.

  A hidden room? A peephole, maybe? The wall looked solid but he already knew that was a lie. As he tried to distill some kind of concrete answer from the data, his mind's eye drifted upward, to a place above the throne where the wall glowed with internal radiance.

  Theories and suspicions crowded together, tripping over each other's feet, until with a spasm of exasperation he finally brushed them all aside. He didn't know enough to be drawing any conclusions, and even if he could, who would he tell? The Valent Council?

  He hadn't contacted them yet, for all that Rian had been clambering back and forth between here and topside for days. He could have sent a message at any time, but no. And in this situation, silence meant complicity.

  Opening his eyes, he spotted Rian climbing shelves in the distance. He considered calling the goblin back, but he seemed to be doing no harm; the skeletons he half-suspected were guards had not animated despite Rian's rummaging, and Enkhaelen was still gone. Geraad just hoped Rian would put the arrowhead back where he'd found it.

  Some inestimable time later, a wheeze and the clatter of metal on the floor brought his attention to the necromancer's seizing body. He swallowed his nerves and watched the spasms ebb, the eyes roll then refocus, the hands flutter to stillness against the etched stone floor. With a groan, Enkhaelen propped himself up to elbows then heaved forward to plant his face in his hands, and for a surprisingly long time he stayed that way: unmoving, unbreathing, huddled in on himself like an ink-blotch.

  Then he dragged his hands through his hair and rose to his feet. His eyes were dull as he looked to Geraad and the circle and blades, then he nodded once and stepped in, movements initially jerky but smoothing as he passed through the electrical fields.

  “You've done well,” he said in a subdued voice, attention tracing the web of magic straight through Geraad. “I'll take it back and you can consider yourself at leisure until I need you next.”

  Before Geraad could say anything, Enkhaelen grasped his hands again. This time the connection was immediate and total, and like a bucket being dumped into a well, all the energy fled him. The wards Enkhaelen had lent reverted in an instant, the magic leaping away as if repelled. As the current left him, he wobbled, gut-punched by weariness.

  “Go. Sit down. Take your time,” Enkhaelen said as he resumed full rein of his spells. With the magic coruscating around and through him, his eyes regained their fierce light, the dull-animal expression obliviated. “While you're here, you might as well check the hawk. If they've outdistanced it, don't worry. I'll adjust it later.”

  Geraad meant to just nod or say 'yes sir' or something of the sort, but as he steadied he couldn't help but ask, “Is everything all right?”

  Enkhaelen didn't look at him. “Don't concern yourself, Geraad.”

  It took until he had stumbled from the rings and past the wards before he realized the necromancer had finally used his given name.

  He glanced back, but Enkhaelen was already engrossed in his work, the energy ramping up around him to spit sparks across the ceiling again. Too exhausted to start the trek back to his own cell, Geraad looked around for somewhere to sit.

  And saw the door to Enkhaelen's office standing ajar at the far end of the chamber.

  Was it like that before? he wondered, but even his mentalist's memory was unclear; his view from the casting circle had been obscured by the angle. He looked back again to find Enkhaelen facing away, concentrating his spellcraft on a blade at the far side.

  Am I being set up?

  That was paranoia speaking, surely, but at this point it seemed like the sanest voice in his head. Still, the hawk's mirror sat close to the office, so with only mild trepidation Geraad started that way.

  Rian joined him near the mirror and pointed poutingly to the arrowhead he had left by it. “Am good,” he said, then beamed when Geraad smiled appreciatively. Letting the goblin clamber onto him again, Geraad spent a moment squinting into the mirror—it seemed to be daylight wherever the hawk was, but the tree-cover was too heavy to see more than a slice of empty trail. Then he let his gaze stray to the office again.

  He had seen the books in there. In his memory's eye he could even read their titles. It was like looking through the Great Library's loss logs all over again: Citadel construction journals, necromantic and artificing tomes, ancient and modern histories, treatises on pre-Mirrimane wardcraft, a whole shelf of lost spiritist and summoner texts, and bound volumes of incident reports galore. While they couldn't be everything that Enkhaelen had removed from the library, they were apparently the ones he deemed important. The ones he kept close at hand.

  Another glance down the room showed Enkhaelen with his back still turned. His skin crawled; this felt like a trap, so much so that he envisioned himself crossing the threshold only to be caught by some horrific spell—held immobile as Enkhaelen came to punish him.

  But the need to know was too great, and when he touched the door, it swung open for him. When he stepped inside, only a faint tingle crossed his skin.

  And when he pulled the first book out and began to flip through, mentally imprinting the pages, he knew he had found something too important to ignore.

  *****

  Several candlemarks later, Geraad lay staring at the ceili
ng in his small chamber, poring over what he had seen. The pages floated before him as if spread on a table, each perfectly preserved in his mind's eye. The problem was fitting them all together.

  He had skimmed the construction journals but found them less than helpful now that he was down in the depths that they described. The only mages who knew how Enkhaelen had formed the Citadel were the Master Summoners, who described a monumental and almost unfathomable working of elementals, constructs and protective wards coordinated like clockwork by the oppressively omnipresent Artificer Archmagus Morshoc Rivent—one of Enkhaelen's alter egos. That Rivent had been obsessed with overseeing every aspect of the Citadel's raising was blatant, and there were many accounts of his temper, his scathing criticism of even the Masters, and his insistence on using only unbound elementals. When the Master Summoners had threatened to quit the project en masse over that requirement, Rivent had met each and every one of them in private. None dared detail that meeting in their journal.

  That Enkhaelen was a spiritist did not surprise Geraad. It was hardly the strangest thing about the man, and explained the wealth of summoning tomes he had stolen. Most detailed the older style of summoning, where elementals were snared and bound and then severely disciplined to break their will. According to the texts, this resulted in tractable slaves that would not dare retaliate against the summoner even if freed.

  The current way was less abusive, but still strict. Geraad knew of a few Valent student groups who demanded that not even bonds be used—that elementals be recruited as volunteers and not servants—but the administration mandated that all elementals within the Citadel be shackled in the interest of safety.

  As for the other books, the incident reports did not tell him much. None of Enkhaelen's known aliases showed up as a perpetrator, but he appeared regularly as the faculty advisor—equally distributed between the offenders and the victims—and was mentioned a few times for disrupting unsanctioned duels. Apparently he had a penchant for walking into the crossfire and just standing there, absorbing the spells, until the combatants realized who he was.