Ghost in the Seal (Ghost Exile #6)

by Jonathan Moeller

  “No,” said Kylon at once.

  “I have the shadow-cloak,” said Caina. “The nagataaru can’t see me.”

  “I can wear the shadow-cloak as well,” said Kylon. “I also have the valikon. If the nagataaru detect me, I can fight my way out.”

  “Past hundreds of them?” said Caina. “The ones in the bloodcrystal chamber are at least as strong as the warriors we fought above. All six of us together could not fight past so many nagataaru-infested corpses.”

  “You certainly could not do it alone,” said Kylon.

  “I’m not going to fight anyone,” said Caina. “I don’t intend to let the nagataaru find me. I have another advantage as well. I can sense sorcery without using a spell. If there are wards or sorcerous traps, I can avoid them, and if I come across a locked door, I can pick it. All I’ll do is have a look around, and I find the Staff and Seal, I’ll bring them back here with me. If they’re guarded, I’ll return and we can make a plan.”

  Nasser grunted. “Are you attempting to sacrifice yourself for our sake?”

  Caina blinked. “What?”

  “You almost did that at the Maze, when the Immortals had us surrounded,” said Nasser.

  “That was a distraction,” said Caina.

  “And again at Silent Ash Temple, when you intended to surrender to the Huntress to allow Lady Claudia and Lord Martin to escape,” said Nasser. Kylon gave her a sharp look. Caina had not mentioned that particular detail to him. “You have, Ciaran, a noted tendency to seek death even when it is not necessary.”

  “Maybe,” conceded Caina. “And this is dangerous, I admit. But it’s the best way. Does anyone else have a better idea?” No one did. “It is a risk, but a calculated one. I think this is the best way to take the Staff and the Seal without drawing Kharnaces’s notice.”

  And if she died, if the prophecy of Sulaman came true in the Tomb, at least Caina would be dying alone. She would not be taking anyone else with her.

  She would not take Kylon to his death alongside her.

  “Very well,” said Nasser. “I can think of nothing better, and you know what you are doing, Ciaran. Proceed as you think best. We shall await your return here.”

  “No,” said Kylon, stepping forward. For a moment Caina wondered if he would stop her from going. “You’re going to get yourself killed for nothing.”

  “Maybe,” said Caina. “A lot of people die for nothing. Maybe I’ll be one of them. But something is wrong here, Kylon. Those bloodcrystals…Kharnaces is preparing something. Maybe something even worse than the Apotheosis. Whatever it is, we can’t let him use the Staff and the Seal to do it.” She shrugged. “So I’ll steal the regalia out from under his nose, and we’ll sneak out of here.”

  For a long moment Kylon stared at her, his left hand clenching and unclenching. She felt touched that he cared so much…and a crushing wave of guilt followed. What would he do when she died? She was going to die if she went in pursuit of the Staff and the Seal, if not in the Tomb, then at some point.

  Maybe it was better just to get it over with.

  “Gods of storm and brine,” muttered Kylon. “I’m going to regret this. I know I’m going to regret this.”

  “I went alone into Caer Magia and came out again,” said Caina.

  “You weren’t alone,” said Kylon. “You had Corvalis with you.” Both Morgant and Nasser gave Kylon a sharp look. Caina had never mentioned Corvalis to either of them.

  “True,” said Caina. “But he had a shadow-cloak. We just have the one…and I’m the best one to do this.”

  Kylon let out a long breath. “All right.” He offered a curt nod. “This is a mistake, but I can’t stop you. Good luck. We’ll be waiting here for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Caina. She wanted to tell him more. Had they been alone, Caina would have said more. They likely would have done more. But she was not about to speak her heart before Morgant and Nasser and Laertes. Annarah likely had figured it out. Certainly her eyes were sad as she looked at Caina.

  “Good luck, Balarigar,” said Annarah. “May the Divine go with you.”

  Caina nodded again, took a deep breath, and headed back down the passageway before she could change her mind.

  ###

  A few moments later Caina dropped the final few feet to the chamber floor, the rope swaying above her, the light from the bloodcrystals flickering and dancing against the walls.

  The dead moved around her.

  Hundreds of the undead warriors strode near the circular dais, all of them wearing bronze armor and carrying khopesh swords. Her instincts screamed for her to run, to get away from them, but the nagataaru-possessed corpses took no notice of her. Even from so close, they were unable to detect her so long as she wore the shadow-cloak.

  Caina crept to the wall and moved along it, keeping her eyes on the undead. They couldn’t sense her, but if she made too much noise, they would almost certainly hear her, and she was pretty sure they would notice if she blundered into them. Fortunately, the warriors did not move too close to the wall, and Caina circled through the chamber without incident.

  She kept her eyes away from the Ascendant Bloodcrystals and the massive black sphere above them. The pyrikon could have granted her the ability to look at the sphere, but Caina might need the pyrikon’s power for a more urgent purpose.

  And she did not want to look at the thing floating below the dome. Even with the pyrikon’s protection, looking at it had sent an icy chill down her spine. Combined with the headache and the nausea from the overpowering aura of sorcery, it made for an unpleasant sensation.

  Caina reached the stairs she had seen and started climbing, leaving the chamber of the bloodcrystals behind. No undead warriors moved upon the stairs, and rows of Maatish hieroglyphics covered the walls. Caina reached the top of the stars and peered into the room beyond. It was an elaborate throne room, a smaller replica of the Hall of Torments in the Inferno, which had been Kharnaces’s throne room long centuries past. A dais stood in the center of the room within a double ring of glowing emerald hieroglyphs upon the floor. Atop the dais rested an elaborate stone throne, its back carved like a rising sun.

  Caina went motionless.

  Kharnaces, a Great Necromancer of Maat, sat upon the throne.

  It had to be him. The figure wore a brilliant white robe, still stark and bright despite the centuries. A golden torque encircled his neck, and a golden mask covered his features, its expression serene and ageless. Rhames had worn a similar mask, and Sicarion had taken it after the Great Necromancer’s death.

  Caina wondered what had happened to the damned thing. Sicarion had committed a string of murders while wearing the mask, using its power to take her appearance as he did so, and that was part of the reason she had been banished from the Empire.

  She watched Kharnaces for a moment. He was motionless. The robe was white and beautiful, and the golden mask and torque concealed his features, but the hands gripping the arms of the throne were withered, mummified claws. The same was true of his feet, which were visible through his ornate sandals. The undead Kharnaces might have been hibernating. Or he might have been awake, and contemplating Caina. Her shadow-cloak had been unable to completely conceal herself from Rhames, and Kharnaces clearly had similar levels of arcane power.

  But if Kharnaces was truly hibernating…

  A sudden idea came to Caina. If Kharnaces was hibernating, perhaps she could find his canopic jars and destroy them. There would be seven, holding his mummified lungs, kidneys, heart, stomach, and liver, and those seven jars anchored his spirit to the material world. Caina had destroyed Rhames’s final canopic jar, banishing him from the mortal world for all time. If she found Kharnaces’s jars, she could do the same to him. The strange sphere in the bloodcrystal chamber could do no harm if she destroyed the canopic jars.

  She dismissed the thought. Kharnaces had seven canopic jars, and if he was even halfway clever he would have hidden them throughout his Tomb, rather than leaving them in one
place. Furthermore, if she destroyed one, that might awaken him, and then he would kill her before she could locate the other six.

  Knowing what the Great Necromancers had been like, he could do far worse than kill her.

  Caina edged around the throne room, keeping well away from the burning hieroglyphs upon the floor. There was an entrance on the far side of the chamber, and Caina made for it, keeping an eye on the throne.

  Kharnaces did not stir.

  She slipped through the archway and found herself in a library.

  It was a large rectangular room, filled with rows of bamboo shelves. The shelves had been divided into small cubbies, and each cubby held a rolled papyrus scroll, its shelf labeled with hieroglyphs. Caina felt the preservation spells that crackled around the shelves, the wards that had kept the scrolls preserved for the long centuries of Kharnaces’s imprisonment.

  She shivered as she moved through the aisles of shelves, glancing at the scrolls. In their way, the scrolls in this room were as dangerous as the bloodcrystals below. The five Ascendant Bloodcrystals could kill half the world. The scrolls held the knowledge of how to create more bloodcrystals, along with all the other necromantic lore once wielded by the priests of Maat. With one damaged Maatish scroll, Maglarion had created a bloodcrystal that had almost killed everyone in Malarae.

  What, Caina wondered, could Maglarion have wrought if he possessed a library like this one?

  At the other end of the library she saw an archway, a flight of stairs leading downward to a massive stone door. Likely that was the sealed door she had seen earlier, and those were the stairs Morgant and Annarah had taken to the library all those years ago. Caina turned, her eyes sweeping the wall.

  A jolt of shock went through her.

  A stone table stood against the wall, and upon the table rested a long staff of silvery metal and a ring set with a large blue stone. Iramisian characters marked the length of the staff, and the blue stone in the ring had been carved into the sigil of the Princes of Iramis, a pyrikon ring wrapped around a seven-pointed star. Caina reached out a hesitant hand and tapped a finger against the length of the staff.

  The strength of the sorcerous power knocked Caina back a step. She stared at the staff and the ring, and then after a moment brushed the ring with one hand. Again she felt the tremendous jolt of power, of sorcery beyond imagining woven into the strange metal.

  There was no doubt. She had found the Staff and Seal of Iramis.

  Odd that it had been so easy.

  She reached for the Staff, and a flash of white caught her attention.

  Caina whirled, her heart hammering, expecting to see Kharnaces striding between the shelves, the empty eye sockets of his golden mask fixed upon her.

  Instead she saw a white-robed man gliding towards her, his expression serene, his hands folded before his chest in a contemplative pose. His brown skin had a golden tinge to it. He had jet-black hair, his robe hanging open to the waist to reveal a chest corded with muscle.

  He wasn’t walking towards her.

  He was, in fact, gliding a few inches off the floor…and his eyes burned with the purple flame of the nagataaru.

  Caina turned to run, and the white-robed man gestured.

  Kylon had been right. This had been a terrible, terrible mistake.

  Sorcerous power wrapped around Caina, holding her immobile. The pyrikon gave off an angry chiming noise, flashing with white light, but the torrent of arcane power around Caina held her fast. She struggled, but it was useless. She could still breathe and move her eyes, but otherwise it felt as if she had been encased in iron.

  The white-robed man glided closer, the purple fire in his eyes brightening, and Caina realized that his features matched the golden mask Kharnaces had worn upon his throne. As the man came closer, she sensed the terrible necromantic power around him. Was this some kind of guardian? Another undead creature?

  Or was it somehow Kharnaces himself?

  The man said something in a strange, liquid-sounded language. He stared at her for a moment, then nodded to himself and drew back the cowl of her shadow-cloak. His hand moved in a fluttering gesture, and something green crawled across the back of his thin hand.

  It was a jade scarab, moving as if it were a living insect. Its wings fluttered, and it leaped from the man’s hand to land upon Caina’s left temple. It felt cold, horribly cold, and its little jade wings scrabbled against her skin.

  Then it bit her.

  Pain erupted through her head, far out of proportion of the bite. It felt, in fact, as if the scarab had transformed itself into a nail and stabbed itself into her skull. Caina screamed, or she would have screamed, had she been able to move. Waves of pain rolled through her mind, and as they did, something else came with them.

  Words.

  Words, countless words, words she had never known before. Bit by bit the pain faded, and the jade scarab jumped from her forehead, landed back upon the man’s hand, and crawled up the sleeve of his robe.

  “Ah, excellent,” said the man in the liquid-sounding language, but to Caina’s shock, she could now understand him. “Sometimes the device causes irreparable insanity, but it appears your mind is well-conditioned to withstand shock. Good.” He waved his hand in front of her face. “We shall need to speak briefly before we continue.”

  Caina worked her mouth and found that she could speak. “Maatish. You’re speaking Maatish.” She had spoken in Istarish out of habit, but she switched to ancient Maatish, the strange words falling from her lips. It was a damned peculiar feeling.

  “This is correct,” said the man in Maatish. “I am perfectly capable of speaking Istarish, but it is a barbaric, uncouth tongue, and will not sully myself with it unless necessary.”

  “What did you do to me?” said Caina.

  “The Scholae made the device for us, long ago,” said the man. The jade scarab skittered across his hand and vanished once more up his sleeve. “A useful means of transferring memories, though it does carry a risk of permanent madness. You may also have learned Iramisian as well, as our tongues were closely related.” He scoffed. “I suppose the Scholae is still in existence? They scuttled off like the frightened cockroaches they were when the abomination destroyed the Kingdom of the Rising Sun.”

  “They are,” said Caina, watching the white-robed man. “They settled in Catekharon.” He could not harm her with that knowledge, and perhaps if she offered some information, he would repay her in kind.

  “Indeed,” said the man. “As far from Maat as they could go. Interesting.”

  “Who are you?” said Caina.

  The man smiled, the purple fire burning hotter in his eyes. “Have you not yet realized it?”

  “Kharnaces,” said Caina, and the man smiled again, inclining his head.

  “Clever,” said the man. “That will prove useful.”

  “How?” said Caina. “Your appearance must be an illusion. I saw your body in the throne room. Either you’ve gotten a lot younger in the last five minutes, or you’ve wrapped yourself in an illusion.”

  “Not at all,” said Kharnaces. “My body remains secure upon its throne. But for the last two and a half thousand years I’ve had little to do but practice the arcane sciences. I have developed feats beyond the imaginations of the petty fools who banished me.”

  “Such as?” said Caina, her mind racing. Kharnaces had not killed her yet, and he clearly possessed the power to kill her with a wave of his hand. Perhaps the ancient necromancer wanted something from her. Perhaps Caina could yet talk her way out of this. Or maybe he was bored after centuries of imprisonment and simply wanted to chat before he killed her. “That sphere downstairs?”

  “Among other things,” said Kharnaces. He gestured at himself. “This, for instance, is merely a projection of sorcerous force. My body and canopic jars remain safe behind their wards.” He waved a hand, and it passed through the nearby shelf. “Though with an effort of will, the projection can become solid enough to handle objects.” He tapped
her in the center of the forehead. His finger felt very, very cold.

  “A useful trick,” said Caina. He had said his body and his canopic jars were secured behind wards. Did that mean at least some of the jars were with his body on the throne? Or even all of them, perhaps?

  “Indeed,” said Kharnaces. His eyes pulsed with purple flame, harsh and malevolent. “It is one of the many secrets I have learned from the nagataaru.”

  “I had heard,” said Caina, “that you worshipped the nagataaru as your gods.”

  “Your statement contains a falsehood,” said Kharnaces. He gestured, and something small and dark slid down his hand. At first Caina thought it was another scarab, but it was a small black bloodcrystal the size of her thumb. It floated off Kharnaces’s palm and started to circle around him. “You imply that I chose to worship the nagataaru as gods. That is incorrect. The nagataaru are gods, regardless of what you and I think. Kotuluk Iblis is the true master of this world…and his wish is to devour it.”

  “Is that what you think?” said Caina. “Or is that what the nagataaru inside of you thinks?”

  “There is no longer a difference between us,” said Kharnaces. He gestured, and his shadow spun around him, seeming to hiss and whisper. Kalgri had done something similar a few times. “The nagataaru within me is the Harbinger. For it shall open the way for Kotuluk Iblis and the host of the nagataaru, and this world shall perish in their hunger. It is inevitable. It is our world’s purpose.”

  “You’re mad,” said Caina.

  “No,” said Kharnaces. “Perhaps I was, once. But then I understood. I studied the lore of Iramis, its history and fables. I learned of the Demon Princes that Istarr and the Prince of Iramis defeated, and I realized the demons within the Demon Princes were great lords of the nagataaru. I summoned one and bound it within me…and the Harbinger told me so many things. The fools of the priesthood did not understand the truths given to me, so they bound me here…and I have worked for the arrival of Kotuluk Iblis ever since.”