“Done,” Sarad said. “Farewell, father.”
The demon tore out of the circle in a pounce empowered by its leathery wings and onto the retreating wizard. The wet sounds of flesh being rent from bone filled the chamber...
Sarad resisted Elias’s intrusion into his thoughts and struggled to redirect him, to push him away. The fell wizard, however, found himself unable to focus his will completely, his mind clouded by doubt, fear, and rage, the source of which Elias was about to see as he crashed through his nemesis’ memories.
...Sarad howled a banshee’s wail and convulsed on the bed as his soul was forced back into his body through the red hole in his chest.
Seizures wracked Sarad as dark magic poured into him and forced animation back into organs that had shut down. His senses began to return. First, he smelt burning flesh. Next, he heard the thrum of raw energy and the sizzle of bacon. His eyes focused and he saw four of his acolytes standing over him. Black and purple lightning arced from their fingers and forked into him, sending dozens of rippling waves of electricity across his livid skin.
Sarad tried to speak, to call out, but his tongue was swollen and burnt like a bloated worm too long in the sun and he only managed an inarticulate rasp. Abruptly the spell snapped off with a pop.
He felt otherworldly eyes upon him and he turned his head, despite his protesting spine. Talinus grinned a toothy smile at him and said, “I think we lost you for a minute there, my Lord.”
Sarad’s vision began to fade and with it his grip on consciousness. He heard a voice say, “Will he live?” Another answered, “I don’t know. He’s lost a lot of blood. We’ve done all we can, the rest is up to him.”...
With an adrenal burst of anger Sarad cast the memory aside and struggled against Elias. The two engaged in a contest of wills. Elias, new to such psychic battles, acted on instinct and his father’s basic precepts of battle: always move, always cut and when there’s no way out, push further in. So, he pushed against Sarad with all his might, all his will.
Elias felt Sarad give way grudgingly, and as he did so images flashed in his mind’s-eye—vignettes of torment and suffering as Sarad lay in his sick bed wracked by fever, too weak to rise and relieve himself. Elias felt Sarad’s horror and disgust as he looked upon a body littered with blisters and lividity from the fell magic that had literally shocked him back to life. Inexpressible rage overcame him as he gazed into the looking glass and beheld the ravaged remains of his once beautiful face. Thick, lustrous hair had been scorched away, leaving patches of coarse, singed stubble; dark and shining eyes had withdrawn into his skull, obscured by milky cataracts; full, smooth skin stretched paper-thin and pocked with scars and blisters; wide, generous lips shrunken and turned the purple of rotten plums.
It was then that Elias learned his nemesis’ weakness: vanity.
If the Marshal could exploit this advantage, there may yet be hope for him. Satisfied that he had learned what he could from his disorienting foray into Sarad’s psyche, and tiring rapidly from his efforts, Elias pulled back, willing his consciousness back into his own body. As he did so, visceral pain overcame his senses once more, but Elias took a grim satisfaction in the knowledge that he suffered no more than his tormentor had. Thus bolstered, Elias ignored his pain and cast Sarad off him with a heave of his legs and rolled himself into a crouching position.
Sarad regained his faculties momentarily and hunkered, crouched outside of Elias’s reach. “You have been trained well,” he said, “but it will not avail you.”
“I thought you left me alone here for days because you were putting me on ice. Now I know your secret. I know why you hide in those robes, cloaked in dark magic. A shining patriarch you are no more.”
Sarad grew still. “Before you die know this: I will scour the kingdom and hunt down each and every one of your comrades. Not a single thing will capture my attention until I have them all. I will torment them with every dark art of Senestrati lore. Their agony shall know no equal, and special attention will I pay to that slattern you call sister. Then I will go to that backwater you hail from and raze it to the ground. I will leave nothing—not a single blade of grass—left alive and then I will sow the scorched earth with salt.
“With blood-magic I will discover any that can claim kinship to you and wipe them and their seed from this land. When I am done no one will remember the name Duana. It will be as if you never existed at all.”
“Yet you will still have no face.”
Sarad gathered a clot of inky energy in his hands, drawing on the black reservoir of his hate, and launched himself at Elias. He could have struck the Marshal down from where he was but he was overcome by a consuming need to wring the life from his nemesis with his hands.
Elias, prepared for Sarad’s attack, waited until the necromancer closed on him and threw himself backward, out of his crouch, and with a scissoring kick, swept the legs out from underneath Sarad. The fell wizard tumbled to the ground, throwing out his hands instinctively to catch himself, and thus loosened a torrent of explosive magic into the granite beneath them. As the pair were showered in shards of fractured stone, the circle of binding etched into the floor, which imprisoned Elias and his magic, sundered with an audible pop and a wild discharge of sparks.
Sarad reeled, stunned by the backlash of his own fell power. Meanwhile, Elias reflexively channeled his own magic, his efforts fueled by desperation and fear. He fed raw arcane energy into the chains that bound him even as Sarad regained his senses and made for the door.
Once out of Elias’s reach Sarad turned on him, hands screwed up into claws, a death curse on his lips. Elias, sensing his peril, bellowed and strained against his chains, caught halfway between a crouch and standing. The links glowed the incandescent red of forge-hot iron. Every muscle in Elias’s body burned and flexed as he strained against the enchanted shackles.
Sarad’s voice gathered volume and echoed with power as his chant reached crescendo, and Elias knew his death was on those lips, mere heartbeats away. The links of the ensorcelled chain stretched and with a final grunt of effort they gave way and Elias exploded into a lunge even as a black mist began to curl out from Sarad’s mouth.
Utilizing the coiled energy released when he broke free, Elias threw all of his momentum into swinging the chain. The lambent links whipped through the air like a serpent of fire. The near molten links of the impromptu chain-whip tore into Sarad’s face.
Sarad’s spell died on his lips. The chain, heavy with the gravity of enchanted iron and Elias’s magic, snapped his head to the side, gouging him from temple to chin even as it cauterized the wound, and sent him hurtling to the floor.
Elias wound the chains around his hands, keeping a wary eye on the felled Sarad, and crept forward. The scent of burning flesh—his—tickled his nostrils, yet he felt no pain. He was beyond pain. He swung the smoldering chains in a flurry. Sarad’s robes and skin peeled away beneath the blows.
Elias stood over his enemy. Sarad looked up at him with glittering, granite-black eyes, the muscles in his face slack, his expression flat, apathetic. Elias knew in that instant that Sarad had been beaten. The necromancer’s resources—his magic and his will—had been drained. If he struck now, Sarad Mirengi would die.
Yet, Elias stayed his hand. When he questioned himself—as he would many times in the years to come—afterward as to what precisely had stayed his hand, he would remain forever unable to articulate why. His best guess upon further reflection was that having been inside Sarad’s head and privy to his thoughts had changed him in some subtle way. As Elias looked down on the ruined face of his enemy and his smoking wounds, a profound ice-numb weariness stole over him, not a bodily fatigue but of something more essential, although, again, he couldn’t put a name to it. The molten core of his rage winked out.
This man, this false Prelate, deserved to die. Countless innocents had perished at his hands and he and his brethren would see this land dismantled and rebuilt in their own dark image. Killing him was the right thing to
do. It needed to be done. And yet Elias could not raise his hand to deliver the final blow.
“The flaw of your kind is the inability to make hard decisions,” Sarad said as his black will and power returned to him in the presence of Elias’s impotence, and a plan sprung into his mind. “You want to rule but don’t wish to stain your hands with blood.”
Elias, consumed by a sudden fatigue that turned his guts to sand, drew into himself as Sarad uttered a sibilant string of fricatives, and erected an energy shield before him, but he misread the necromancer’s intention, for no attack came. Instead, Sarad cocooned himself in a cloud of black smoke that poured from his mouth. The necromancer dissolved into the ashen mist, which then swirled about Elias, slipping around his shield, and slithered underneath the door and was gone.
Elias coughed as he inhaled the fine sooty dust that Sarad left in his wake.
Alarmed by the mist that crept down the hall, two sentries burst into the chamber with drawn steel and spells on their lips. Elias, who had slipped into a trancelike state, watched the advancing figures with detachment. They moved honey-in-winter slow and words born of frost trickled from their lips.
Elias, motivated purely by reflex, countered frost with flame. “Feora,” he said, as a vague memory flitted across his consciousness. Fire, liquid and golden, exploded through his mind, stole his sight momentarily, and gave a semblance of clarity back to his thoughts.
A detonation like dynamite hurled Elias against a wall. When the haze cleared, or when his eyes regained their function—Elias didn’t know which came first—he discovered the other two men were gone and with them the door and a portion of the archway.
He stumbled out of his cell and into the corridor where he found the charred and shrunken remains of Sarad’s acolytes. Their desiccated hands still grasped their scimitars. Blackened and hot to the touch, the swords still held their form and edge, attributable, Elias assumed, to some enchantment.
He paused as a series of dry coughs overcame him. He pulled a hand sprinkled with ash from a mouth thick with the acrid taste of sulfur. His contemplation of this oddity proved brief, though he knew it significant, for a string of exclamations in a language he did not know issued from somewhere close by.
Elias approached an oak door reinforced with iron bands. He considered the door briefly, then raised a hand and focused his will. He envisioned the door exploding under a concussive force. He believed it would explode, then his perspective slid, and with a detached certainty he knew the door would explode. A dam of energy, which he perceived as a pressure that collected and built within his skull, burst from him with an inarticulate cry. Convex rings of force, visible like a heat-wave distortion, crushed into the door and reduced it to splinters.
When the motes of wood dust settled Elias entered a cell similar to his own and set his eyes upon Agnar Vundi.
“Come then sons of summer,” Agnar cried, “men of the north do not fear death!”
Elias responded with a toothy grin.
“Duana?” Agnar gasped. “Can it be you?”
“None other. But under the circumstances, I think you may call me Elias.”
Agnar eyed the disheveled, glassy-eyed Marshal and ran a dry, sandy tongue across his chapped and split lips. “Elias you don’t…” he trailed off and his voice dropped to a whisper. “What have they done to you?”
Elias shrugged. “Torture. Starvation. Holidays inside a necromancer’s head.”
“Yet, you’ve escaped,” Agnar said and looked past Elias, expecting a cadre of soldiers at any moment.
“For now. We are in Treacher’s Tower, the highest spire at Lucerne Palace. It’s some six-hundred feet high. Sheer Walls. One stair case leading up. Built, I think, by Jonas the Just for the most traitorous of criminals after—”
“Elias, perhaps we can continue this conversation on foot? I don’t suppose you have a key.” Agnar eyed the chains that hung from Elias’s wrists and then lifted his own manacled hands.
“Key, no. But I’m a wizard.” Elias waved a hand indicating the door shrapnel.
“Oh,” said Agnar, unsure, “of course you are.”
Elias grinned again. “I haven’t really had much luck before tonight.”
Elias’s words did little to put Agnar at ease, who already felt ambivalent about entrusting himself to a half-mad fledgling wizard, but he figured dying on his feet, or in a botched blast of magic, preferable to rotting away in a cell. Agnar Vundi drew a deep breath and raised his hands.
†
“Offer him some resistance, but let him escape,” Sarad said to his hastily gathered council. “Sacrifice some of the fledgling acolytes.”
Talinus’ eyes narrowed. The imp, not unpleased—he had been trying to come up with a plan to arrange for the Marshal’s escape, although he despaired that Sarad would kill him before he had the chance—was nevertheless taken off-guard, and therefore suspicious. “But why, master?”
Sarad cast a quick glance at the others assembled. His underlings knew better than to question his command and stood at attention, expressionless. Good. He could ill afford dissention at this critical time. “The Marshal is useless to us dead. Torture is likewise futile, for a Marshal trick enables him to separate his consciousness from his body. He can’t be broken. We employ a similar technique under capture, as many of you have learned. Meanwhile we have discovered the queen’s secret escape route, but neither our scouts nor our diviners have been able to track them. If we allow him to escape, he will lead us to his comrades, to the queen.”
“Clever,” Talinus said. “Simple, but clever. It just may work. But is it too risky to let such a dangerous man free?”
“Alone, unarmed, he is of little danger to us,” Sarad said, “and, he shall be watched closely.”
“Who shall we send to track him?” one of the lieutenants asked. “Nervas is perhaps our best scout.”
“No,” said Sarad, “send three hands but give him a day’s head start and instruct them to stay at least that far behind him at all times. The Marshal is cunning and will double back on his trail. If he discovers he is being tracked he will lead us away from the queen. No, I have arranged for another way to keep an eye on Duana.” Sarad paused for effect. “I have performed the Kin Carnum.”
Talinus offered up a silent curse to the Eldritch Circle as a charged silence fell over the chamber.
Chapter 28
Autumn’s Prayer
Eithne tasted the promise of autumn on the air as she inhaled the rich, earthy scent that rode the crisp wind. She had always felt the fall to be a magical season infused with vibrant energy. A restlessness always crept over her when the leaves began to change and with it a wish to escape the confines of palace life. Now all Eithne wanted was to be home.
Her thoughts turned to her father. How would he have reacted to losing the crown in a midnight coup to a storybook enemy out of legend? Could he have spotted the snake in the grass? Elias had, at least on some instinctual level. He didn’t suspect the Prelate was a lord of the Senestrati, granted, but he had distrusted him. Eithne cursed herself for having not looked into the matter more deeply. It fell to her to make decisions based on the information with which she was presented. She should have put more credence in Elias’s instincts. But she hadn’t and now her Marshal was dead.
Yet Elias Duana had served her, and Galacia, well. His sacrifice had allowed for her escape with a small complement of her most loyal friends and advisors: Captain Blackwell and two of the Whiteshields, Bryn, Ogden, Danica, Lar, and Phinneas.
They escaped through an ancient route, old as Lucerne palace, if not more so. In the royal sitting rooms a secret door in the fireplace opened to a passage that tunneled to the basement of the palace and then through the granite plateau. The passage opened some half mile from the city proper into a copse of trees, and that was the merit of the secret route, for that exit was a decoy.
Under the bedrock rested a subterranean aquifer, accessible through a small rectangular rift s
et on the edge of the tunnel where the wall met the floor, nearly invisible to the eye in torchlight and scarcely large enough to accommodate a grown man.
On the granite bank of the aquifer rested a narrow, shallow boat that sat twelve. The underground lake opened into a fast moving river scrunched tight by jagged walls and reaching stalagmites. They rode the turbulent waters for the better part of the night, which finally deposited them in the pre-dawn light into a primordial lake situated amongst a towering wood. The Renwood, Odgen explained, was an ancient forest sacred to the Druids of old. “The Druids called this lake Gaudvohg,” he had said, “which means lake of mirrors.”
The wizard felt secure that while the trap door in the royal suite would be discovered, likely sooner than later, the aquifer would probably remain undetected, seeing as he had used magic to obfuscate any arcane tracking methods. Nevertheless, he thought they should not tarry in the vicinity of the Renwood, as boundless and mazelike as it may seem. The Prelate—Eithne urged herself to stop thinking of him in terms of his office—would go to any and all ends to secure her capture. Whatever the apostate’s plans, he could ill afford leaving the legitimate heir to the throne alive.
Yet the queen had ordered that they remain camped in the heart of the wood, by a small river tributary of the Gaudvohg some twenty miles from the lake, for three days now. To Odgen and Blackwell’s urgings that they break camp and seek a safer haven, she said only, “Am I not still queen?” Truthfully, trepidation gnawed at her with rusty teeth every moment they remained here, despite the tranquil, mystic thick of the wood. She stayed for Danica Duana, and for Elias.
As they made camp their first night out from the lake a raw-eyed Danica approached her tent. The young White Habit wasted no time with pleasantries. “I know how this will sound,” she had said, “but I think Elias is alive.”
Eithne, in her gentlest words, tried to explain the impossibility of her brother’s survival, but the girl was insistent. “If he died, you think I would feel…something,” Danica said, “but instead I feel this—” she clutched a hand to her breast, “—this itch, this sense, that he’s still alive, and he needs us.”
Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 32