Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle)

by Siana, Patrick

  Elias assessed his situation. He had been divested of all his effects. Along with his duster and sword his shirt, shoes, and socks had been taken, leaving him bare-chested and barefoot. The manacles, which gripped his wrists fast, left him little room to maneuver as their chains were attached to hooks on the floor diametrically opposed to each other on either side of the small chamber. They allowed only slack enough for him to sit or rise to his knees. Either one of these actions pulled the chains taut, causing the manacles to cut into his wrists and his shoulders to groan and pop in protest.

  Elias sat back on his haunches and wondered why he was still alive. He had been sure he had met his death in the throne room. The fact that he yet lived, Elias mused, was not cause for celebration as he had scant hope of escape and undoubtedly long hours of torture to look forward to. He prayed his allies were not foolish enough to attempt his rescue.

  As Elias’s thoughts turned to Danica, Lar, Phinneas, and his new friends and mentors Ogden, Bryn, and the queen, tears pooled in his eyes. Desperation and anxiety sparked an intense, slow burning anger when Elias thought of all he had lost at the hands of the Scarlet Hand. What nettled him most was the knowledge that the architect of his doom had been hiding in plain sight the whole time, masked as the Prelate of the Church of the One God.

  Elias found a grim solace in the fact that he had struck a final blow against Mirengi. He dared to hope that blow had been fatal. If he had slain the dark Lord of the Scarlet Hand then he could at least find some peace in death. More than that, he had given his comrades a chance to escape, and thereby there remained the seed of hope that they could one day take back the capital and drive Galacia’s ancestral enemy from their homeland once and for all. If the Denar line yet lived, then a chance remained that the shadow of the Senestrati could yet be turned back.

  The answer as to whether or not Sarad Mirengi lived would remain unanswered for several days. Elias anxiously awaited his captors to show themselves, but several days had passed without any encounter. His only gauge of time was the window which permitted some few slants of light during the daylight hours to cut the oppressive gloom of his cell.

  The windowless door had not been opened once, and he guessed he had gone three days without food or drink. He reasoned his captors were trying to wear down his resolve and weaken him prior to his eventual torture and execution. Well Elias Duana was damned if he was going to let the Senestrati break him.

  Elias’s thoughts wandered to what little he knew of torture. He had asked his father about it once and the distiller had said that all men break under torture, eventually. Many a man had confessed to crimes he never committed under the duress of a skilled torturer, simply to end the agony.

  Elias tried to hold onto his anger and let that sustain him, but the countless hours began to weigh on him, gathering gravity with each passing moment. At times he felt the walls of the stuffy chamber closing in on him and he couldn’t breathe. His heart fluttered weakly in his chest and then beat so rapidly he feared it would burst. He had to focus on his training with Ogden and drop into the calm meditative state he learned from the wizard to stave off the panic and despair that threatened his sanity. He needed to maintain his wits as long as possible to resist breaking under torture and die with some shred of dignity intact.

  Death. When Elias faced down Sarad in the throne room he held no illusions that he would survive the encounter, but nor did he have time to dwell on his mortality or what lay beyond—an afterlife or oblivion. Now he had nothing but time to ruminate upon his demise. After Asa and his father died and his tidy little world had been crushed to pieces, Elias had often wished that he had perished with them that day. All that had sustained him was his sister and his quest for vengeance, and when he set out on his mission he cared not that it might claim his life, indeed he assumed it would. However, here, lying in the dark, alone, famished, doomed, Elias discovered that he wanted to live despite all he had lost.

  A wild tumult of emotions raged through him, from despair to hysteria. Elias pulled at his chains, his muscles flexing and bulging with effort, and howled a deep, visceral scream that rebounded off the walls with arcane force. The dust of powdered mortar flitted around the cell, illuminated by the slants of light that sliced through the twilit gloom like spectral blades.

  “Come, then!” Elias roared. “Face me you cowards and let us be done with it!”

  Much to Elias’s surprise, before long he heard the jingle of keys and the door opened, letting in the orange glow of torchlight. To Elias’s light deprived eyes the torch might well have been the midday sun. He heard the scrape of boots on the stone floor and then silence. When his eyes adjusted to the light he looked up, blinking away tears, and saw a man clad in a dark tunic and loose fitting pants standing before him. The exotic-featured man peered at him with almond shaped eyes and a countenance devoid of expression.

  Elias opened his mouth to speak but a disembodied voice preempted him. “Are you so eager to die, Elias Duana, that you would waste your fledging strength summoning me?” A figure emerged from the darkness at the torch’s fringe. Elias startled that he hadn’t seen the hooded person, for his eyes were well adjusted to the dark. The shadows gathered around the man like a cloak, fluid, flowing like water, and blurred his line, lending him the insubstantial aspect of a wraith.

  “Mirengi,” Elias said, doubtless as to the identity of the threatening presence.

  “You will find you are quite powerless now, my friend,” the false prelate said. As if on cue, the torch bearer directed the light at the stone beneath the kneeling Elias. The flickering flame revealed a spell-circle laden with arcane sigils drawn on the floor in a crimson paint. Elias knelt at the circle’s center at the crux of intersecting lines. “Your magic is sealed.”

  Elias made no reply. He held his head up and met Sarad’s gaze, unflinching.

  “First,” Sarad said, “you will tell me with what command word, or by what means, I can use to move your sword. It is an eye-sore.”

  Elias barked a laugh. “Water,” he croaked. “I can hardly speak.” True, he had a powerful thirst, but his chief purpose was to buy some time. Elias found himself perplexed by Sarad’s query. He did not utilize a command word or any spell to wield his sword, yet Sarad indicated that for some reason he and his minions could not remove Elias’s sword from where it had fallen. Elias filed the information away, though he doubted it would do him any good in his present situation.

  Sarad crouched and leaned into the circle. He took Elias’s chin in one hand and with the other brought a drencher of water to the Marshal’s lips. The gesture was oddly gentle, which somehow unnerved Elias all the more.

  Even as Sarad crouched close to him, Elias couldn’t see the Necromancer’s face. Shadows coalesced around the fell wizard, thick and opaque as tar. A peculiar, cloying odor reminiscent of putrid cream lingered in his wake, faint yet persistent.

  “Now,” said Sarad, “of the sword. Do not think to trick me. I can sense deceit with ease.”

  Elias licked his cracked lips and wondered if detecting lies truly was part of Sarad’s repertoire. Considering what he had seen from the false Prelate thus far, it seemed likely. “I will not tell you how to master the blade,” Elias said.

  Sarad nodded, unsurprised by his captive’s response. He extended an index finger and a ray of icy energy shot from his hand and stole the breath from Elias. The fell magic struck him in the clot of bruises amassed around his sternum. Elias crumpled to the floor in exquisite agony as his days old wound, received from Sarad’s bolt of dark magic in the throne room, throbbed with renewed gusto.

  “You will tell me!” Sarad all but screamed, his calm façade dissolving.

  Elias struggled to breathe, convulsing as pain wracked his torso with each ragged gasp for breath. He could feel black rage rolling off Sarad in palpable waves. The wizard had lost control. Elias made a grim decision. “You haven’t what it takes to break me, you miserable cur.”

  Sarad grew still,
but his voice quavered when he spoke. “We’ll see,” he said. He thrust splayed hands at the downed Marshal. Purple energy gathered in his hands and then discharged in a blast of black lightning.

  Elias held his breath and surrendered as the fell electricity rush through him. The initial pain faded momentarily and in its wake came a sensation of numbness as all of the muscles in his body convulsed and twitched of their own accord. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, then a pinprick.

  “My Lord, you’re killing him!” someone cried. “We need him alive! Don’t you see, he wants to die so as not to give up his secrets!”

  “You dare to question me, imp!” Sarad growled, but he ceased his attack.

  “No. Not ever, my liege. However, I do not wish to see this scum get off so easily,” added Sarad’s clever familiar.

  Sarad drew in a deep breath and willed his blind wrath to recede. He realized his hands shook and he clenched them into fists. “Indeed. My intention was merely to bring him within an inch of his death.”

  “You are most wise, my lord.”

  Elias struggled to pry his eyelids open but they felt laden with sand and he saw only lazily fluttering dots of light. Panic rose thick in his throat. He had prepared himself for death, not blindness. He blinked and strained to focus. Slowly shadows began to form between the false stars. Elias saw a squat form crouching some feet away that seemed vaguely familiar but then a boot stamped down in front of his face and he lost the thought. With titanic effort Elias turned his head and the stars crashed back into his field of vision tenfold; before they cleared a sledgehammer of force crushed into his skull and he knew no more.

  †

  Elias was drowning. He sputtered and flailed his arms in a pathetic attempt to swim only to discover that his arms were bound. He tried to cough but instead inhaled more water. Elias kicked and writhed.

  Then someone booted him in the ribs.

  Elias’s eyes groaned open. Sarad crouched over him with a bucket in his hands and said, “Good. You’re awake.”

  Elias licked his lips. “Really?”

  Sarad chuckled. “Surprised to find yourself alive, Marshal? You didn’t think you’d get away from me that easily did you?”

  “No. I meant the bucket. Really? A bucket of water? I expected you would use magic to rouse me, or something more elegant, not...this...” Elias somehow managed to shrug despite his chains.

  “Your attempts to elicit a reaction from me are in vain, I’m afraid. I have long ago sold my soul. Yet I warn you to think long and hard before you trifle with me.”

  Elias looked up at his captor. He could feel menace oozing out from Sarad and sensed the dark energies that swarmed around him. He felt at once very, very cold, as if the mere presence of the fell wizard sucked all the heat from the room and his body alike. Sarad had the cowl of his robes pulled up over his head, his countenance concealed under the veil of a preternatural darkness, for not the barest scintilla of light touched upon his face.

  Elias willed himself into a state of quasi meditation, first dropping his awareness within himself, seeking the void as he had practiced in painstaking hour upon hour with Ogden, and then reached out with his senses to probe Sarad. He at once felt carefully restrained rage spilling out from the Senestrati and something else: an acrid, sharp, metallic sensation that left a peculiar taste in his mouth—fear.

  “No,” said Elias. “I fear you mistake yourself, Sarad. Anger fuels your every thought. You are beside yourself that the Denar line yet lives, having escaped your careful, clever snare, for you need the queen’s blood to break the geas that binds your masters.” Elias read in the stiffening of Mirengi’s posture that the deduction he had made on the night of the coup was correct.

  “You have not yet won,” Elias taunted, “and both you and your masters know it.”

  “Enough!” Sarad hissed and with a swing of his arm sent a bolt of icy energy into Elias.

  The Marshal fell onto his back and felt his heart stutter. He focused his will on making it beat. Despite the fact that his plan had been to goad Sarad into killing him, his natural instinct was to fight for survival.

  Elias recovered momentarily to find Sarad perched on his chest, pressing his eye-less stare into him. “I can tear the information I need from your mind, boy, but it would save us both a great headache if you cooperate. If you do I give my word that your death will be swift and painless.”

  “Why do you hide your face, Sarad? I have seen your visage before, or was that an illusion?” Before he finished speaking Elias felt a weight boring into him, pushing through his skull. He resisted at once, but fatigue had weakened his reflexes and his resolve. When he realized Sarad’s intention his pulse quickened and his mind cleared as a psychic force tore through him.

  “Your desperation only fuels my magic!” Sarad snarled.

  Elias bristled. He stiffened beneath Sarad. It was not desperation that moved through him but rage, the equal of Sarad’s but born of an utterly different source. As Elias often experienced, in the presence of so much arcane energy, his perception of time slowed. Discordant images flashed in his mind’s-eye as he felt himself slip from reality into the timeless, spaceless depths of his psyche.

  He saw his father turn to look at him over a shoulder, lips pressed to a thin line, head held high, eyes shining wetly as he looked upon his son for the last time as the carriage carried him away.

  He looked down at Asa’s face as he cradled her slight form. Crimson, almost black, blood splattered her creamy throat and tangled in her golden hair. The light faded from her round, blue eyes, as the coppery aroma of blood filled his nostrils.

  He stepped through a doorway, his boots sticking in the combined offal of sweat, urine, and congealed blood. Danica lay naked and bound atop the table in seeming death, desecrated by the sigils of the enemy branded deep into her flesh, and her soul.

  Resolve born of outrage stole over Elias Duana. To perish here, desperate and unavenged, after all the evil perpetrated by this man and his cursed order, was more than he could bear. He couldn’t allow Sarad victory. So, Elias decided that he would not die after all.

  Elias seized his indignation and the immortal strength that inundated his soul and used it as tinder for the inferno of his magic, even as Sarad rifled through his thoughts and memories. Elias envisioned a wall of raw energy surrounding his skull.

  Sarad pulled back, scorched by Elias’s magic, for while he had bound Elias’s power and barred him from exerting it in the world, he could yet exert his might within his own mind. Elias did not retreat. He did not hold. He pushed forward, into the breach, into the vacuum left behind, as Sarad withdrew his consciousness from Elias’s psyche. He sank into Sarad’s mind spitting the fire of his fury all the way…

  ...Sarad Mirengi knelt before a circular mirror set into an obsidian flagstone, reflecting a dim, orange candle glow as the sole source of light. A child’s face looked back at him, tight with dread.

  “Speak the name,” a voice said behind him, close to his ear. “You must say it thrice.”

  Sarad licked his lips. “I’m afraid,” he said.

  “Fear is the refuge of the weak. Speak the name!”

  “I...I can’t.”

  “You will!”

  A sharp, icy pain sprang into his right shoulder blade. The pain radiated in waves, spreading rapidly throughout the entirety of his body. It felt like he had been cast into a body of frigid, arctic water.

  “Do not forsake your teachings! Summon the demon! Otherwise your life will be forfeit!”

  “Talinus Baelorus,” Sarad cried in a shrill, brittle voice. “Talinus Bae…lor…us!” As Sarad spoke the name the second time the words came with a great effort as if something pushed against his mind making it an effort of will to form the syllables and utter them. As he prepared for the third and final utterance a nigh unbearable pressure built in his head and bands of force wrapped his throat, choking off his voice.

  “Speak the entity’s true name or die!”
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  Sarad struggled against the roar in his skull and with a hoarse rasp spat out the name for the third and final time. “TA-L-I-NUS BAE-LO-R-US!”

  A black vortex of fire erupted from out the mirror. An inhuman howl echoed into the silence of the chamber as the demon took shape in the infernal fire. Crimson, malevolent eyes pierced Sarad and the fiend spoke directly into his mind: release me and live! The dark entity tested the invisible barrier that contained him, but found it impenetrable. The enchanted circle of the mirror held him fast.

  “You are ensnared demon and bound to do my bidding,” Sarad said, but the quaver in his voice belied the conviction of his words.

  “Incorrect,” said the demon. “You have trapped me in this spell-circle. You must bargain for my service. We must strike a compact.”

  “I compel you for I know your true name!” Sarad looked to his mentor, but his master only looked on stoically.

  The entity chuckled. “True names are a finicky thing, young necromancer,” the demon said conversationally. “You must pronounce every syllable precisely and with enough will to empower your knowledge, and I must identify myself enough with the name to be beholden to it. Otherwise summoning the damned would become daily occurrences every time a fledging wizard uncovered a moldy tome. You have not complete power over me, although I must confess you have me tidily bound.”

  “So...” Sarad said stupidly.

  “So, we strike a deal. For the price of my service I demand release from this circle, and a wage of blood. Your master’s should do nicely, I think.” The demons visage grew dark once more. His gaping grin revealed rows of sharp, yellow teeth, and his eyelids narrowed, compressing the red-black coals of his eyes.

  Sarad turned to the robed and hooded figure behind him with the scarred face. His master began to draw sigils in the air with his fingers, a spell on his lips.