“Fine, cast the shield and let me toss something at you,” Alric said finally.
“No”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want you throwing things at me.”
“But your shield will block them.”
She looked over at him curiously, “Why are you so interested to see magic?”
“It’s fascinating.”
“Is it that or does Sithias want to see it?”
“I think he’d be interested.”
“I’ll tell you what. Next time I go sacrifice, you can come with me.”
Alric stopped walking and frowned, “You do that here?”
“Of course.”
“People?”
She smiled, “No.”
“Are you lying to me or do you really stick with animals?”
“Don’t worry, I won’t sacrifice you next,” she said, laughing.
“That’s not what I’m worried about.” It was starting to get dark and her talking about sacrifices was making him nervous. Since they found the altar with the heart years ago, everyone was afraid there was a necromancer around.
He ran to catch up with her and saw that she was still grinning.
“I love when I scare you,” she said, looking out into the dark.
“You don’t scare me.”
“Fine, I love when my ways scare you.”
“Which is…” A loud crack of electricity shook the ground and they both spun suddenly and came face to face with Daemionis.
Alric let go of Kyrin’s hand and drew his sword, but Daemionis was looking at Kyrin, “The Nosata have one of my Priests.”
She gasped, “Which one?”
“One you do not know. Retrieve him for me.”
She nodded, “I’ll leave immediately.”
“Wait!” Alric yelled, and both turned to him, “Is the Nosata one of the Consortiums?”
“Yes, they are the undead,” Kyrin explained.
“And you’re going after them alone?”
“Yes”
Daemionis walked slowly around Alric.
“I’m not ok with that. You said it can be years to get back to a dimension and you just got here.”
“I know now how to find the portal though. It’ll be faster this time.”
“If you return! You can’t take on a Consortium alone!”
“Yes she can,” Daemionis said. He then turned to Kyrin, “Return him to me in Paramide.”
“Yes, my Lord,” she said, bowing deeply. He disappeared, and she turned and ran for the castle.
“Stop!” Alric shouted, running after her. “You can’t do this.”
She ignored him and ran up the stairs to her room in the castle, where she began throwing things into the enchanted backpack.
“Kyrin,” Alric said, taking her arm. “Don’t go.”
She looked at him, “Would you turn down such a request from Sithias?”
“Sithias wouldn’t send me alone into the hands of a Consortium.”
“He knows I can do it. I know the Consortiums better than anyone.”
“You’ll be outnumbered… what? 100 to 1?”
“Or 800 to 1 with the Nosata, they’re not very big.”
“Stay here, please. Sithias can protect you.”
“I have to go and get him, Alric. No one else can…”
“Send Creteloc. This sounds like a job for an Assassin.”
She ignored that and started for the door, but he stopped her, “I could keep you here.”
“No you can’t and you know it.”
“Then take Knights with you.”
She sighed, “I don’t need the added stress of watching over your Knights on my mission.”
“Not to babysit! They can help you.”
“I’ll be back, ok? Trust me. Daemionis wouldn’t send me if he didn’t think I could do it.”
“Yes he would. He would send you for sheer entertainment.”
“He trusts me. No one else has been held captive by each of the Consortiums but me. I know their compound layouts. I know their ways and their…”
“Do you not see how dangerous this is? You just admitted to being a prisoner to each of them, and you’re running in to save one of Daemionis’ Priests alone?”
“I’ll be back,” she said, and he followed her out of the castle. She began looking around, trying to find a portal key to get out of Paragoy. When she didn’t find one, she started across the orchard, picking an apple to eat on the way. She had a sudden thought and opened her backpack, then filled it full of apples while Alric fumed.
“You said you’d trust me,” Alric said, starting to panic when she began looking for another portal.
“I do, and you need to trust me. I have a god and I have to follow his will.”
“Not into your death!”
She reached down and grabbed something off of the ground that he didn’t even see.
“What?” he asked, following her gaze into the trees.
“It’s my portal. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said, and then started through it.
When half of her disappeared, Alric realized she was serious and pulled her back through, then kissed her softly.
“I’ll be back,” she said again, and then disappeared.
Chapter 15
Kyrin waited outside of the compound for a way inside. She’d been tracking the Nosata for almost a month and had finally found one that was careless enough to lead her to his compound. She knew that Daemionis’ Priest was in there, and she was determined to get him back and return to Paragoy to prove to Alric that she was capable.
As she watched, she saw that the Nosata had wight’s guarding their boundaries and revenants walking around. Both animated corpses posed a great problem to a fighting magic user. They were able to drain the power she had to pull from to cast magic.
There had to be another way in. The Nosata weren’t the smartest of the Consortiums, but they were smarter than the Shadowmere. Necromancers started the Consortium but were killed off when the Clemency Consortium outlawed magic. Now it was being run by worshipers of the dead, a type of necromancer that used their deity instead of magic to animate corpses into the undead.
The Nosata compound had water on three sides of it, but Kyrin figured they would have draugen hiding in the water itself. She’d much rather have to fight off wights or revenants than the draugen. She studied them to see if any spells came to mind. That’s how she usually found spells. They seemed to pop into her mind when the need for them arose.
Nothing was happening though, and it would be dark soon, putting her at a disadvantage. She was glad that the other Consortiums tended to stay away from the Nosata because of their tendencies toward evil. That meant she had little chance of running into the Shadowmere tonight.
The only idea to get inside easily wasn’t a pleasant one. She’d done the spell before, and it made her appear dead. It ceased the heart and lungs, while still maintaining the body for some time. The problem was, to keep the body alive it required a type of stasis, so while under the spell, she wouldn’t be aware and would be unable to defend herself if there was a problem.
She suddenly had another idea and ran back into Kyrstalis. The first house she came to belonged to an elderly man and woman living out their lives in peace. They weren’t aligned with a Consortium, so they were ignored by most of them, unless they did something illegal.
Kyrin studied them as they got ready for bed. This wouldn’t be hard. Killing the elderly was easy compared to some of the fights she’d had. She first had to make sure that there was no one else in the house. After a few hours, she was sure of it, and she quietly slipped into the house through an open window.
When under the cover of the house, Kyrin chanted softly, and slowly began to transform into the old man, then tucked her flail onto her side. She had both of them dead in seconds, and pulled on the old man’s clothes. She then picked up the old woman, using a levitation spell, and started to carry her to t
he Nosata.
A lot of the people of Kyrstalis thought the Nosata had the ability to bring back the dead. As such, anyone brave enough to walk up to the compound, would then ask for a loved one to be brought back. Kyrin had seen it many times, and knew that the Nosata always offered to bring the loved one back, and invited them inside. After that, she didn’t know what happened to them, but none of them had ever stepped foot outside again.
When she was within sight of the Nosata compound, she slowed her gait and slumped, so as to appear old. The revenants and wights ignored her. They were there to find trouble, not to deter someone from handing themselves over to the Nosata.
“What do you want?” A tall man asked. He wore the black torn robes that were customary with the Nosata, and he smelled of death.
“Please, my wife… my love is dead,” Kyrin said, faking a deep voice as best as she could. “Can you help her? I can pay…”
“You can pay?” the Nosata asked, looking down at the frail old man and his dead wife.
“Yes, I can pay 10 platinum if you can bring her back. Please… help us…”
The Nosata smiled, “For 10 platinum? I guess I can do that. Let’s bring her inside and see what we can do.”
Kyrin nodded and then swallowed hard before walking voluntarily into the compound of a Consortium. Just inside, a heavy stone door was shut behind her, and she followed the Nosata down dark passageways. Screams pierced the building and there always seemed to be someone running through the hallways.
“In here,” he said, pointing to an empty room. Kyrin walked in and then jerked when the door slammed behind her. She was now in the custody of the Nosata.
She dropped the woman to the floor of the cell and then counteracted the spell that made her look like the old man. She listened carefully and heard rustling from all around her.
“Usstan lac natha m'thain nindel zhahus plynnet dal Daemionis,” she whispered toward the doorway. The rustling stopped, and the area grew eerily silent.
She knew the best way to stand apart from the Nosata was to speak in shadow elf. They swore that the language of the dead was orc, and refused to learn the shadow elf language. When no one answered her question about a stolen Priest, she sat down to think through the rest of her plan.
Footsteps broke the silence, and Kyrin sprang to her feet and moved back to the wall when the door opened.
“The old man is in here,” one of the Nosata said, and then looked inside. His eyes went from the dead woman to the cloaked figure in the corner, “Who are you!?”
Kyrin stood tall, “I’m a representative of Daemionis, and I’ve come to retrieve the Priest that you took.”
The Nosata snarled, “See how Daemionis likes the Nosata having two of his minions!”
She knew the compound rather well, and with the Priest not in the prison block he had to be down below in the torture chambers. She saw only two Nosata at her door, and quickly killed both of them with electrical bolts from her hands.
She ran out of the prison block and hid in shadows, working her way along the hallway to the lower dungeons. When the alarm sounded, she knew the dead Nosata had been found though, and her way became blocked with angry men looking for her.
Her heart almost stopped when a wight appeared in the hallway. The Nosata were getting smarter. He turned dead eyes directly to her, and she ran, hoping to find a lucky break out of there. She felt the pull of the wight as she ran, and knew if she didn’t do something fast she wasn’t going to have the energy to cast a spell.
She tossed fireballs over her back blindly, hoping to catch the wight, but something slammed into the back of her neck, and she collapsed onto the floor.
When Kyrin started to come around, she felt her arms were trapped straight out to her sides, and her head was pounding. She felt weak and knew that the wight had drained her of energy.
She struggled to open her eyes and saw she was standing in a long room, up against the wall. A bar had been slid through the sleeves of her tunic and held her hands out to her sides, with no chance of getting them together.
She pulled against the metal cuffs holding her to the wall, but there was no give. Off to the left side of her was a smaller woman hanging by her wrists and probably dead. To her right was a decayed corpse that had once been shackled to the wall, but as his body rotted, the weight of it pulled his hands away from his body, and it had slumped to the floor in a congealed mass, leaving the grotesque hands to hang from the shackles.
Cages stood along the floor down the right side, and in them were prisoners in various stages of rest. Across from them were the rack tables, and in one was a dark-skinned elf with white hair and a jagged scar down the side of his neck. His clothes were torn off and tossed beside the table, but she saw the distinct mark of Daemionis on them.
Kyrin pulled at her sleeves, but the metal bars wouldn’t bend. It was irritating how they used her own tunic to keep her hands apart so she couldn’t use magic. She looked down and saw her flail was no longer at her side, which didn’t surprise her. She just hoped she could get it back.
She whispered softly into the air, asking in shadow elf if the Priest on the table was alive. He nodded slightly, but was obviously in a great deal of pain.
“I’ll get you out of here,” she whispered again.
“You? Young one?” one of the prisoners in the cage said. “They’ve already sent for the Clemency Consortium to come and get you. It’s going to pay off some huge debt they owe.”
She sighed and again tried to pull her hands away. If she could get the tunic to tear, it would drop her arms, but the tailors in Valhara were very good, and she couldn’t get them to rip even a little.
“When did they contact Clemency?” she asked.
“Not long ago, then they complained that Clemency can’t come and get you until morning.”
“Good, I’ll be gone by then,” she said.
“Every Consortium is looking for you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Your picture, my Dear. It’s posted on every street corner. The Shadowmere and Clemency have joined forces to find you, and the reward is great.”
“I bet the Nosata will love that.”
“Except they don’t know what they have. They told the Clemency that you are merely a young magic user that needs punished. They do not know you are the much-sought after Kyrin.”
She nodded and looked around, to see if she could find a way out of this mess.
They all looked up when the doorway at the end of the room opened. A Nosata entered and headed straight for Kyrin, “You, magic user. It’s your turn.”
“For what?” she asked, trying not to sound afraid.
“You need punished for killing one of the Nosata,” he said, and roughly pulled her from the wall. He slipped the bar out of her tunic, but held her wrists tightly so she couldn’t get her hands together.
Thinking quickly, she kicked off from the wall and slammed her knee into the side of his head. He fell forward and crashed into one of the empty cages, sending it in pieces to the ground.
Kyrin jumped onto him and pressed her foot onto his neck as she kicked the side of his head to keep him down. When he fell silent, she ran to the Priest and began untying him, “We have to get out of here.”
Just when she got his first hand free, a punch flew in from the side and connected with her jaw, sending blood flowing from her mouth and onto the Priest. She spun, and the Nosata blocked all of her hits and dodged each attack, but managed to hit her a few times. The last punch was squarely to her stomach, and she doubled over in pain. He slammed his elbow into the middle of her back and sent her onto the floor, now at the mercy of the Nosata again.
When a bucket of water was poured over her, she woke up with a gasp and shook the water from her face. Her limbs were all pulled away from her and tied to horses that faced away from her in all four directions. She was surprised to see horses, but their hollow eyes, sunken faces, and decaying skin let her know they were un
dead also, probably stolen from another dimension.
“Prisoner, it is the decision of Ryder, our most holy leader of the Nosata, that you are to be drawn and quartered in punishment for the killing of two of the Nosata.”
He gave the signal for the horse’s riders to move forward, and she screamed in pain at the feel of her limbs being torn from her body. She finally managed to shout, “The Clemency will be mad at this!”
“Pull back,” he said, moving the horses back a bit. Kyrin did a quick assessment and found that her left arm was dislocated but the rest of her limbs were fully attached, albeit in pain.
“Why would the Clemency care that we kill a magic user?” one of the Nosata asked.
“Because I’m Kyrin…”
Just the name brought a murmur through the Nosata and one of them knelt down to study her, “It’s hard to tell with the look of her face.”
She knew she must look completely different. One eye was swollen shut, and she felt her jaw might be broken. Her lips were puffed and bloody, and her mouth was filled with the taste of it.
“It could be,” the Nosata said, studying her.
“If it is her, we cannot harm her, or they will punish us.”
“She could be lying though.”
“Only if she’s stupid. Why would she prefer to go to the Clemency Consortium?”
Kyrin tried not to groan in pain. She didn’t want to give the Nosata the satisfaction to know they’d already injured her badly enough it was hard to concentrate.
“Let her go then. If she wants to meet the Clemency Consortium so badly, we’ll let them know.”
It was more than she could hope for. In their haste to turn her over to the Clemency Consortium, they untied both of her hands at the same time.
With her left arm useless at her side, she swung onto her left side and brought her right hand to the left. The second they connected, she yelled, “Vasiieth!”
Lighting shot out from her hands and killed each of the Nosata and their horses. The loud thud from the fall of the horses made her nervous that others had heard, so she quickly untied her feet and then ran back into the compound, in search of the dungeons.
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