By Blood Hunted: Kingsblood Chronicles Part Two (The Kingsblood Chronicles Book 2)

by David J. Houpt

  At that moment in the dream, he’d heard something behind him, and when Alan turned, he saw all of the missing dignitaries, both family and not, together behind his laughing, mocking aunt. Each of them showed evidence of their wildly varied death wounds, and blood soaked doublets and dresses alike. Behind Aunt Jisa, four of his siblings stood, their faces filled with a terrible rage and loathing, and the moment they locked eyes with Alan, they’d thrown themselves at him with shrieks of hate, forcing him to wake.

  “That was the first night in Mola, was it not?” Gem inquired. When Alan nodded, she continued, “It woke you from a sound sleep and you cried out quite loudly.” After that, Alan had been able to keep the discipline not to cry out too loudly even while sleeping, but the silence warding the casters raised on their quarters was certainly helpful in that regard.

  “Which four?” Lord Grey asked.

  Alan blinked, then said, “Alec, my oldest brother, Darwyn and Keven, the middle ones, and Radiel, my twin.” As he uttered the word “twin,” he was gripped with grief, and tears started to flow beyond any ability he had to stop them. He was wracked with sobs for several minutes.

  Snog’s people were not known for weeping, but his face was long and showed his concern for his liege lord.

  “Please continue,” Lord Grey said after Alan was able to get some control of himself, not asking any other questions.

  “The dreams continued in the same vein aboard Searcher, waking me up more often than not, but after the attack by the lizard men, I had several dreamless nights.” With a voice cracking from sobbing, he described dreams of being hunted and pursued by unseen and terrible beings, the details varying from dream to dream, but in all of them, four of his siblings were among, or were the only, hunters.

  Lord Grey confirmed that the third sister, Jenine, was absent from each of these dreams as well, and then fell silent for Alan to continue.

  “The next dream was in Avethiel, the one about the winter storm at sea I told you about,” Alan says, this time describing the cold hands drawing him under the water to drown, shuddering in remembered horror.

  “And you did not see any of your attackers in this dream?” the necromancer asked.

  Alan shook his head. “I just felt them out in the storm somewhere, and then their icy grip when they grabbed me from below,” he said, thinking. “It could have been four people’s hands, though, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I don’t have enough information yet to make any assumptions or conclusions,” Lord Grey said. “I will, therefore, refrain from doing so. Other than the dream about Elowyn trying to help you, have there been any other dreams of note?”

  “Not dreams, no,” Alan said. “But the night we were attacked by the lizard folk, maybe before that, I was seized by the urge to change course. It was a very strange feeling, like the world had grown smaller and I was almost alone in the universe.”

  Lord Grey said, “As if you were alienated from the world, set apart from it somehow?” He spoke intently, and also as if he knew exactly what Alan was describing.

  The prince nodded. “I didn’t know what it was at the time, so I shook it off as nerves or lack of sleep. It might have saved a few mens’ lives if I’d listened to the warning…assuming Cedrick didn’t think my desire to change course was sheer madness or foolishness.”

  “And you’ve not felt this same distancing since?” the skull asked. Alan shook his head.

  Gem had remained silent throughout the telling, a growing horror in her thoughts. Now, she asked, “Why is Jenine never in these dreams? And why are the others always in them?” Other than the fact they were all Alan’s brothers and sisters, the similarities weren’t as great as the differences. Crown Prince Alec, for example, was, like Evan and Lian, not magically talented, while Darwyn, Keven, and Radiel were all sorcerers.

  Radiel had been close to her twin, and Alec was close to both of the youngest siblings. Darwyn and Keven, on the other hand, had had little to do with Lian outside of family gatherings. This wasn’t because of any inherent dislike—both siblings loved their family—but simply because their duties and the twins’ didn’t overlap and they were quite busy with their own lives. After Prince Kale’s death, Darwyn had withdrawn from the family, her attention focused inward on her grief. And Keven’s betrothal to a Dethiel lady had occupied a lot of his attention, and kept him away from Dunshor City, so the youngest prince and princess rarely saw him.

  “That is an excellent question,” Lord Grey said. “Unfortunately, I can’t even hazard a guess at this point; I can only hope that additional visions will allow the riddles to be unraveled.”

  Alan said, “You think Jenine’s absence from my dreams is significant? I just figured that having dreamed the first time with the four, my subconscious just keep supplying the same bogies.” His voice cracked with the grief that was always beneath the surface, and tears trailed down his face as he failed to stop himself from weeping. It was the longest display of his grief he’d given since the night of the coup, and while it wracked Gem with pain and grief of her own, she was glad to see the outpouring of tears.

  “That’s a possibility, I will admit,” the skull replied, his deep voice gentle. “Any seer’s visions are influenced by their lives; this contributes to the difficulty in interpretation as I said before. But it’s been so consistent and unwavering, I believe it means something.”

  Alan took a great, shuddering breath and wiped the tears from his eyes. “From now on, no matter the subject matter, I will share my dreams with the three of you. Snog, you’ve stayed pretty quiet during this—do you have an opinion?”

  “Only that I agree with Lord Grey that the dreams are foresight,” the goblin replied. “The shamans figured out pretty quickly that I have no talent for prescience myself. It’s one of the reasons I was guided into another path. Still, I’ll pray to Saael about it, milord. Maybe he’ll choose to reveal some part of it to me.” He started packing the pipe Nan had made for him with some tobacco he’d acquired in Avethiel, wanting to save his stock of the mushroom-scented variety for when he needed it, since he didn’t know if the mushrooms and herbs needed to make it existed in the south.

  “I appreciate that, Snog,” Alan said, clasping the goblin on the shoulder. Talking about his visions had exhausted him, and he began undressing for bed, his heart heavy and his mind occupied with his siblings.

  ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

  “I have concerns, husband, about one of them,” the queen said as they lay in their bed. Although Rishak’s guards were right outside the door, this was one of the two rooms in the palace they did not follow him into, the other being the conjuring room deep belowground.

  King Rishak regarded his beautiful queen’s nude body as she lay straddling one of his equally nude legs. Although she was often exhausted from her long hours of casting, he’d found to his delight over the years that she always managed to find the energy to respond to his lovemaking. He knew of whom she was speaking. “Enough to only send three?” he asked, even here in private being careful to speak in generalities, though the chances of being overheard during their pillow talk were slim to none.

  She shook her head and then settled back onto his broad chest. “No, but I may have to pass his reins to one of the others to keep him on task. His attention wanders and I don’t think he’s completely sane.”

  Rishak was a little surprised to hear her describe the subject that way. “Are any of them sane?” he asked. “Given what’s been done to them,”—by us, he thought—“I would expect them all to be utterly mad.”

  “From a certain point of view, that’s true,” Jisa said. “Their mental state’s a far cry from the starting point, in any event. But the other three are quite rational, just corrupted to see the world in a completely different light. They’re focused on their goal with a powerful obsession, but that’s as I’ve caused it to be.”

  She sighed. “I suppose you could call that insanity.”

  He rubbed his hand along her slen
der arm. “Is there enough of the fourth to be of use?”

  Suppressing a yawn, the queen said, “Yes, he’ll be an effective enough weapon when the time comes. He wants the target dead as much as the rest of them do; he just gets distracted from the purpose by whatever catches his attention. I’ll handle the difficulty, no worries, Rish,” she murmured and settled in to sleep against her husband and king.

  The Usurper didn’t like Undead in the first place, and the ones his wife had created in their private sanctum were among the worst he’d ever heard of, even in legends and tales. She had assured him repeatedly that they wouldn’t be able to break from their assigned mission, that they’d do the queen’s bidding in regard to their brother and return to report the deed done, and that she would retain control of them when they did so.

  He trusted her judgment in regard to her magic, and he’d never seen her put this much effort and control into any casting. Normally, her innate magical and musical talent served to make up for any fine tuning she might have to do in the middle of a spell, and she didn’t bother doing much preparatory work. With the long ritual she was soon to complete in the sanctum, she fully cleared her mind before every session, performing her preparatory rituals and spells with a diligence he actually found disturbing given her normal total confidence in her ability to make adjustments on the fly.

  What are we creating down there? he asked himself, not for the first time. And can we control them when the time comes? The price to the king and queen both, and, he supposed, to Dunshor itself, would be dreadful if the terrible deed ever came to light. Once their mission was accomplished, it was vitally important that the four of them be utterly destroyed, that no trace of them remain to reveal just how far the Usurper and his queen had gone.

  Chapter Twelve

  It is not enough to have musical talent to manifest one’s will into physicality. Nor is it enough to carry Witchblood in one’s veins to bring magic to life. One must have a portion of both to be a successful magician. But if one wizard has both talent and training to bring forth the magic, and another does as well, it creates a new possibility: the duet.

  When a pair of minstrels sing together, the harmony is often obvious and straightforward. They learn to blend their voices together to sing their song and then, they sing it. So, too, with a larger group, though it takes much more practice with many than it does with two.

  But for spellsingers, it is not merely music that must be in harmony, but also the power and purpose of the spell. It is difficult in the extreme to bring all three together into perfect pitches, proper meter, and impeccable timing, but it is worth the effort, for the pair can accomplish together what neither could accomplish apart.

  It is the difficulty in this that makes most cooperative magic quite inefficient. The spellsingers must usually rely upon a chanting, droning approach, where the secondary mages support the power of the primary one without needing to reach the harmony of which I speak.

  -- “Chords of Power,” author unknown, c. 443 PE

  Talking about his dreams with Lord Grey, Gem, and Snog triggered a resurgence of his nightmares. The next nights brought more of the deadly storm dream aboard Searcher; all were variations on the same theme.

  Sometimes, it was much like the first dream, with Searcher capsized and Lian thrown from her deck when she rolled. Sometimes the mizzenmast sheared off, sweeping him breathless and gasping into the water before the ship capsized. Sometimes he rode the ship down into the sea as it sank. Once, the lightning set the ship ablaze and he was forced to leap into the waters to escape the flames. Never in the storm did he see his attackers, but he was now certain there were four of them, clawing at him and pulling him beneath the dark water.

  The intensity of the dreams, and the amount of horror they instilled, increased as the days went on, and Alan became pale and exhausted, for whenever he closed his eyes, the dreams were there. They reached a peak on Mid-Year’s Night and then ceased as suddenly as they had started. Mid-Year was exactly halfway through Dalshana’s orbit of Tieran, on the night of the new dark moon, and was often considered an ill-omened night.

  Of course, nearly anything in regard to the Dark Lady’s moon, save its departure from Tieran, was considered a bad omen. Other traditions held it was the midpoint of the dark season and that evil would begin to lessen afterward, but that wasn’t what Alan or Snog had been taught. Until Dalshana departed to circle great Lushran once again, the dark season was here and now. But that night, once he’d awakened from the nightmare near midnight, he’d fallen back to sleep without dreaming, waking in the late morning reasonably well rested for the first time in nearly two weeks.

  Early in the nightmare cycle, Lord Grey had bidden Alan to make a celestial chart, describing how to draw it. It was a fairly small excerpt from the great cycle, Alan recognized, and he was impressed that the necromancer could do it from memory. The skull had also taught him how to make seven different annotations, symbols that didn’t mean anything to Alan but held meaning to Lord Grey. Each night Alan dreamed, he’d been asked to draw between one and four of the symbols on the chart. He’d back-populated the chart, representing each of his earlier dreams.

  “This breaks the pattern that might have been forming,” the necromancer said as Alan placed four of the symbols, plus a new one in the shape of an hourglass—or a black widow’s mark—on the chart. “I’ve no doubt this will all be clear to me in hindsight, but I’m afraid the deeper meaning is hidden at the moment.”

  “Isn’t that how it works a lot of the time?” Gem said. “The visions become clear in hindsight?”

  Lord Grey chuckled. “That’s true of nearly any foreseeing or prophecy. A friend of mine once said that all prophecies are self-fulfilling when looked at through the lens of history. However, my belief is that if one is clever enough, the meaning is there to be found.”

  “Your friend must not have been popular with the Sleepless One’s priesthood,” Alan remarked dryly.

  The skull laughed aloud at Alan’s statement. “Hardly! She was one of her priestesses!”

  For some reason, Snog seemed to think that was funny, and he chuckled about it for quite a while, although both Alan and Gem found it somehow a little blasphemous.

  Indigo Runner had now been at sea for eighteen days, having made good time south and past the doldrums without incident, other than Quivell’s death. Their estimated arrival in Kavris was another ten to twelve days if the weather held.

  Olivia del Quivell—just Quivell now, Alan reminded himself—wore a veil, as was the Thracian custom for mourning. Snog had thought it quite suspicious that she happened to be carrying one, but Alan knew that Thracians often wore veils for various purposes, including some religious rituals. Her having an appropriate one with her wasn’t damning. Her own seasickness was a thing of the past, but she still ate little unless Qan pressed her to eat, and she was the epitome of the dutiful, grieving daughter. She spent a lot of her time on the poop deck, sitting on a barrel the mates had arranged for her, gazing out to sea behind Indigo Runner.

  Alan had played his part, giving her what comfort he could, thankful he was supposedly Staikali, because their custom was, like the Thracians’, to let the bereaved grieve in private for whatever time they needed. A Ten Kingdoms man, in contrast, would have felt obligated to intrude upon her mourning, to entertain and distract the woman from her sorrows. He didn’t feel up to doing that, given his suspicion that her grief was self-inflicted.

  So it was, two days after the cessation of the nightmares, Alan found himself at the stern railing talking to Quivell. He wasn’t surprised when she continued the conversation after the mild pleasantries they usually exchanged. “Another matter, Alan, if you would indulge me,” Olivia Quivell said from behind her face-covering veil. The wind was coming from the port side, a fairly fresh and steady stream, and she and Alan were facing each other fore and aft, the wind trying to pull her veil out of her collar. The veil was a tightly-woven mesh of silk, effectively hiding he
r blue eyes without completely concealing the lines of her face. Her hoarse, throaty voice was serious, as it had been since the elder Quivell’s death, but there was a hint of pleading in the tone.

  “Of course, my lady,” Alan said, setting himself against the ship’s motion unconsciously as he waited to see what she wanted. He already suspected what it would be.

  “My father’s death has left me without a protector,” she began, hesitating slightly.

  Right on the money, Alan thought to Gem. She indicated agreement wordlessly so as not to distract him.

  When Alan didn’t answer her, although he nodded slightly, she continued. “His agents in Kavris are, of course, part of the reason we were journeying south, and I am not at all certain that I can trust them with my safety.”

  Alan suspected that for a High Realms knight, she’d have taken a different tack, instead making an appeal to such a warrior in terms of her honor rather than safety, but he reined himself in. She really could be in danger in Kavris, being a woman alone, and a rich woman to boot. “I have business of my own in the Empire, my lady,” Alan said. “However, I am certain that I can delay my dealings for a few days in order for you to hire or purchase bodyguards. The Mercenaries Guild would be a good place to start if you don’t know of a better place.”

  None of the small party liked the idea of delaying their own business in lieu of Olivia Quivell’s safety, but all of them had agreed it would be out of character for Alan to refuse her outright. “We must come to an agreement on compensation, of course,” he added with a little bow and a half-smile.

  If his avarice bothered her in the slightest, it didn’t show in her body language or tone of voice. “Of course, Alan,” she said. “I wouldn’t think of inconveniencing you in this way without a fair payment. It would mean that you would be working for me, and I have certain expectations in that regard. You may overhear things as I speak to various proctors and agents that I expect to be kept confidential.”