Once past the gate, the mage resumed his post and refused to look back to Raeb and Saydee. They stood for a few seconds before looking down the corridor. Saydee took a deep breath. “Ready?” she asked.
Raeb wasn’t sure whether she was asking him or herself, but he answered anyway. “Ready.”
She glanced at him with a small nod, and they entered the mage’s prison.
26
The halls here were even more depressing than those they’d come from. They were old—so old Raeb could feel the weight of centuries in the walls. The air of madness was stifling, as if he was wading through a fog. Raeb felt tainted with it just from being here. Their echoing footsteps were like a clock ticking down their last remaining seconds of sanity.
Saydee had gotten quiet and nervous again, but this time it was a nervousness born of terror. Raeb could feel how horrified she was to find herself here as easily as a predator smelled fear in their prey. Saydee wanted nothing more than to run away screaming, and that primal fear oozed from every pore in her body.
“Saydee, what’s wrong?”
She jumped at his voice. He put his hand on her shoulder, strong and comforting, hoping to calm her nerves. Her entire body trembled. Her eyes were wild with terror.
He forced Saydee to look him in the eye. At first she cowered at the sight of his Entana eyes, but she relaxed as she recognized him. She was still as scared as a bunny, but the crazed madness in her eyes dimmed.
“Saydee, talk to me. What’s going on?” He paused, forcing his voice into the calmest, most soothing tones he could manage. “What happened to you here?”
Tears welled in her eyes. Her voice was so quiet he could barely hear her, even in the silent corridor. “This is where I was -taken.”
Well, that explained a lot. Raeb had no idea how he would react if they returned to the Taronese temple where he trained and was -taken, but it was something he’d avoided since he first left. Probably because, deep down, he knew he’d react something like this.
His questions still burned inside him, but he didn’t ask them. Now wasn’t the time to dig into her past.
“C’mon, Saydee. We can’t go back now. Let’s just find the lab and get out of here. Deep breaths. One step at a time.”
He held her arm and led her further down the corridor, keeping his motions smooth and his attention on her. They passed door after door, all closed, some with the distinctive sounds of experiments being conducted coming from behind. Raeb half expected to hear cackling and explosions at any moment.
This place was a maze of identical hallways, but Saydee led them through it like—as Raeb was now sure—she had spent many years doing so. She was hardly cognizant, didn’t respond to any of Raeb’s comments, but though slow to the point of painful, her steps were sure.
They stopped in front of a door that looked just like any other. Saydee placed her hand against the wood and closed her eyes. A shimmer of magic raced across the surface, glowing with runes and every color of the rainbow. When the waves of magic receded, Saydee removed her hand and opened the door.
Raeb wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. A well-kept, innocuous-looking laboratory lay before them. Glassware and containers were arranged on every surface. None of them held any kind of interesting, glowing, bubbling mixtures. He was almost disappointed by that. Papers were stacked here and there, and he stepped over and paged through a few. Raeb wasn’t sure he could pronounce half of the words written there, let alone define them.
“I thought you said this Ashwinn guy lived a long time ago.”
“He did.”
“So who does all this junk belong to? They must have given this lab to someone else.”
Saydee looked at the glassware, then bent over a stack of papers. “No. This is his.”
Raeb, too, looked around. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, let alone cracked containers or papers crumbled to dust. Nothing to indicate this lab hadn’t been used in days, let alone centuries.
“One of the wards I dispelled was a preservation spell. As long as the spell held, nothing in here would age or decay.”
“Handy.”
“It won’t help us if we can’t find anything.”
“Relax, Saydee. We’ll find something.” He wasn’t as confident as he hoped he sounded, but he wasn’t about to show any doubt or fear now. Saydee was starting to come back to her senses. The last thing he wanted to do was send her reeling back through panic and terror.
They shuffled through an endless stream of papers, reports, and scribbled notes. Half of the time Raeb couldn’t even begin to guess what he was looking at. There were so many strange words and formulas and things that looked more like gibberish than language. He could be holding the answers to all their questions and have no idea.
“Does any of this make sense to you?” he asked.
She squinted at the lettering. “Some of it.”
“Can you tell me what we’re looking for?”
“Ashwinn’s research was focused on enhancing magical powers and extending a mage’s life. The title should say something about that.”
“And he was using Entana to do this? It’s impossible.” But Raeb heard the Keeper of Secret’s voice in his mind as soon as he said that: The -taking of mages is not as impossible as you think. He shuddered.
Saydee had replied, he thought, but it didn’t matter. This was a subject he wasn’t keen to investigate any further than they had to.
He considered asking how the research would help them, but he wasn’t sure he wanted the answer to that one, either.
They rifled through some more papers in silence. “What was he to you?” Raeb asked.
Saydee froze. Her eyes had gone wide again, like a startled deer. “What … what do you mean?”
“Don’t take me for a fool, Saydee. I’ve been misleading people and withholding information long enough to know when it’s being done to me. Ashwinn wasn’t just some historical figure you studied.”
It wasn’t a question, and after a moment’s pause, Saydee didn’t deny it.
“So what was he to you? Father? Lover?”
She shook her head. “He was the guard at the petitioner’s door. I came here every day for over a year, begging to be admitted. I showed him my glamour and promised I would learn everything, if they’d just let me in.”
“And he listened to you?”
“Not at first. It took a long time before he even looked at me. It was almost a full year before he spoke to me, and then it was just a few words at a time. He’d ask me about certain things, whether I could do certain types of magic, what the extent of my powers were. He seemed interested when I admitted just how limited they were. That should have warned me, but I was too excited at the time to notice. Why would a mage be interested in someone who has so little power she can barely conjure a basic glamour?”
Saydee continued to search through Ashwinn’s research, keeping her eyes away from Raeb’s. “Anyway, one day he asked me to follow him inside. I was elated. A look inside the Mage’s Academy! Maybe once inside, I could find a way to convince them I belonged here.” She scoffed, grumbling under her breath for a moment. “He brought me to his lab—not this one, at the time he wasn’t considered a danger—and ran some tests on me.”
She stopped, pulling a thick sheaf of papers from a massive stack. She stared at it, reading the title over a few times, before going deathly pale. “Saydee? What did you find?”
She handed it over without a word.
Infection or enhancement? Modifying the mage's response to the effect of the subdural implant of a secondary influence to benefit the host organism.
Raeb stumbled over the title again. “I’ve seen a lot of research in my time, but nothing like this. What does that even mean?”
Saydee stepped beside him, trembling. Her hands were ice cold when they brushed his. “This is Ashwinn’s research—at least, this is the research he submitted to the Academy.”
“
So this is what we’re looking for.”
“No,” Saydee said. “This is part of it, sure. But this is the version that won’t have a single mention of the Entana in it, and no specifics about how they affect a mage’s mind. This won’t tell us if we can use the Entana to strengthen my connection to them.”
“Great. So what good is it, anyway?”
Saydee leaned forward and turned a page, then another, scanning the cramped writing. She pointed to a paragraph. “It’s good for continuing my story,” she said in a tiny, childlike voice. “This is what he did to me.”
Raeb started reading.
One subject underwent a subdural implantation of a biological secondary influence to assess whether an improvement in mental and physical prowess could be accomplished and maintained. Both short- and long-term mental and physical testing were performed pre- and post-implantation to assess the physical and magical capabilities of the subject. Mental stability and changes in magical ability were measured through a standardized battery of exams executed at set timepoints. Basic vital signs and other health parameters, such as response to external stimuli, were regularly measured and changes in status tracked over time.
His head spun. “I’ve read every word, but I don’t understand. Does anyone even talk like that?”
She almost smiled. “Over the next few months, Ashwinn assaulted my system with everything he could think of to see how my magic would react. Submerged in water until I almost drowned, torched with fire until I was covered in burns, subjected to every kind of magical probing you can imagine and more. He kept asking me to perform a complex spell I’d never been able to manage after he’d finished, when I was half-conscious from torture. I never could do it, and he would punish me every time I failed.”
“Why didn’t you leave?” Raeb asked.
“At first I was desperate to have more magic. I thought this would do it, and then I’d be able to stay and do my own magic. After a while, though, Ashwinn wouldn’t let me.”
She swallowed, steadying herself with several deep breaths. “Then he came to the last experiment.”
Raeb, too, felt the need to steady himself. “The Entana.”
“It was awful. Ashwinn ripped through my magic to force the Entana into my mind, and the creature hacked through whatever was still in its way. It felt like my soul was being shredded by thousands of teeth and claws. Each second lasted an hour, and I wished for death in every single one.” She paused, looking up at him with haunted Entana eyes. “It took half a day before I was completely -taken.”
Raeb was staggered into speechlessness. Being -taken was a horrifying experience, but it was over in minutes. To suffer like that for hours on end … he couldn’t even begin to fathom it. His own experience was downright pleasant compared to what Saydee had gone through.
His eyes traveled back to the paper, and a single sentence stood out to him. Even if the words were unnecessarily complex, the intent was clear.
The results showed a statistically significant augmentation of magical ability without deleterious effects to the physical being.
Raeb’s heart burned with rage. Ashwinn hadn’t seen Saydee as a person. She’d just been another experiment, not a woman with feelings, who would be hurt emotionally as well as physically. He hadn’t cared she’d been tortured by his hand and the Entana. Her magic was increased, and that was all that mattered. How could someone be so callous? If Ashwinn were here …
Saydee continued. “Once it was clear I was -taken, Ashwinn asked me to do that complex magic one more time. This time, if I couldn’t do it, it would mean the experiment had failed and I would be useless to him.”
She held out her hand, palm up, and closed her eyes. After a moment, a glowing sigil appeared in the air above her hand. Raeb had never seen anything like it.
“So it worked,” he said.
Saydee nodded. “And I was allowed to live.”
The bitterness in her voice shocked Raeb. He’d never heard Saydee speak so harshly about anything before.
“Since I was now a living, successful experiment, Ashwinn couldn’t let me go. He had to continue studying me, to see if the effects lasted or had any kind of consequences on my sanity. So he bound me to him, forcing me to stay, and kept me here as his assistant.”
“You mean slave,” Raeb said.
Saydee nodded. “Anything and everything from cleaning equipment to scribing reports to … well, he was a creative person. I’ll let you imagine the rest.” She paused, as if swallowing bile. “Whatever he wanted, he took from me. If I fought him, he’d let the Entana loose in my mind for a while. Then he would beat me to within an inch of my life and see how long it took me to recover.”
Raeb’s mouth was dry, and his hands squeezed the report so hard his knuckles were white and painful. He twisted the pages, imagining they were Ashwinn’s neck.
He didn’t know what to say to her. He’d thought his own past was a difficult one, but he would live it ten times over before having to experience even one day as Ashwinn’s slave. Even reliving those memories to tell Raeb about them seemed painful for her. “Saydee, you don’t have to …”
“Yes, I do. I promised you the truth, Raeb. After everything we’ve been through together, and the truth about your past, you deserve to hear about mine. Besides,” she said, casting her eyes around the lab, “it’s about time I faced it.”
If only he was half as brave as she was, maybe Raeb could have fought against the Keeper of Secrets better. It had taken him centuries to confront the Entana ambassador, and even then he’d caved and crumbled like a beaten puppy. But here was Saydee, standing in the very place she was abused and enslaved, refusing to let it defeat her. To say he was impressed and humbled barely scratched the surface.
“You said Ashwinn did all his research before my lifetime,” he said, not knowing how to phrase his question.
“I know what you want to ask,” Saydee cut in. “Go ahead and ask it.”
He only paused for a second. “How old are you?”
She looked at him, and Raeb saw the same look in her eyes he’d seen the first time they’d met. It was the jaded, calloused look of someone far older than she seemed. “I stopped counting after three hundred,” she said. “I am the first of the Entana-taken mages.”
“The first. Not the only?”
“Of course not. You don’t think Ashwinn did all these experiments on me just because he was curious, did you?”
“He wanted the enhanced power and extended life for himself,” Raeb guessed.
“But he was too cowardly to try it on himself first,” Saydee continued. “So he used me instead.”
“Did he go through with it?” Raeb asked.
“Did he become a -taken mage, too? Yeah. He did.”
“Then how did you escape from him?”
Saydee took a breath to answer, but instead of speaking, she screamed. Her body convulsed once, twice, and her eyes morphed into those of a fully -taken.
The Keeper of Secrets twisted Saydee’s head to look at Raeb. Then he laughed, the sound warped from Saydee’s normal, happy laugh to something demented and terrifying.
“You can try to run,” the Keeper of Secrets told him, “but it won’t do any good. The mages are already on their way to kill you.”
27
They were still miles from the frontlines, but Aeo and Dragana both knew something was wrong. There was an unnatural stillness in the air, like the whole countryside had been abandoned.
The fallow fields of the river valley were covered with a perfect layer of snow. No footprints, wagon tracks, or even animal tracks marred it. They were pure, unbroken white.
It hadn’t snowed in more than three days.
Dragana limped down the road. It was the best she could do after two weeks of solid travel, now that her bones were starting to grate against each other. She kept her eyes open for danger, even though Aeo knew her eyesight was beginning to blur. Neither of them mentioned it. Or the fact that her face wa
s now lined like a middle-aged woman’s, and the crimson streaks in her hair were fading to maroon.
Watching Dragana age just to keep him alive was a new kind of torture for Aeo. He hated his existence for what it was doing to her. Dragana was far too young and good to be aging like this, all to keep a useless assassin alive. Well, alive after a fashion. He still wasn’t sure whether he could be alive if he only existed as a spirit inside a sword.
“Would you shut up already?” Dragana mumbled. “I think I liked you better as an arrogant ass.”
And I liked you better as the young, fiery warrior-woman who would have beat me out of the Bok’Tarong with my own dead body if she could have.
“Don’t kid yourself. I’d still do that, if I thought it would do any good.”
You’d miss my charming conversation skills too much. He infused the statement with as much sugary-sweet innocence as he could.
Dragana scoffed and grimaced, but her sour expression couldn’t last. Her smile, still full of charm, broke through. Aeo’s spirit replied in kind.
“Still, you’re distracting me. If you don’t shut up we might miss something.”
Aeo cast his gaze around. He was sheathed, so his vision was black-and-white and he couldn’t hear a thing besides Dragana’s voice. What are we going to miss?
Dragana paused, stretching her limbs and groaning as several joints popped. “How about any hint as to what on earth happened here?”
She had a point there. By this time they should be seeing signs of the war raging just a few miles ahead—trampled snow, exhausted, terror-stricken peasants, wounded soldiers turned to begging or trying to get home. But there was nothing. Not even a bird in the sky.
Has the Mage General pushed back the Halkronians? Aeo wondered. Have the frontlines moved further away?
Dragana shrugged, but Aeo knew her thoughts were in sync with his. The war hadn’t been going well the last time they were here. The Mage General and his -taken soldiers had been desperate. What could have turned the tide?
Soul of the Blade Page 23