by Layton Green
Val sipped his granth, which tasted like a rare whiskey infused with hints of vanilla and butterscotch. Delicious indeed, though Val barely noticed as he braced himself for the worst. Fighting was pointless; the house was heavily guarded, and Lord Alistair could snuff his life with the twitch of a finger.
Mere hours had passed since his and Adaira’s arrival in New Victoria. Val’s request to stop by his own residence to clean up before the meeting with Lord Alistair had been granted, though a majitsu escort had accompanied him. Val had showered, changed clothes, and on instinct, dropped off his staff. Though neither Adaira nor anyone in Queen Victoria’s court seemed to recognize it, he guessed the Chief Thaumaturge was alive during Dane Blackwood’s time in the Congregation. Val had no idea what their relationship might have been, but better not to raise uncomfortable questions. Not unless he had to.
“My daughter told me about Porlock, and of your encounter with the townspeople in the other world.” His face tightened. “What they tried to do to her after she healed a little boy.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you,” Lord Alistair said. “For saving her.”
Val tipped his head in response, thinking of another child he had failed to save, gutted by the end of his own staff.
“I have also learned of your confrontation with the Black Sash gypsies during the hunt for the assassin.”
This time Val’s face darkened.
“Power is both a privilege and a duty,” the Chief Thaumaturge said. “Hard decisions must sometimes be made. Decisions that not everyone will understand.”
Where’s he going with this?
“I believe you to be the kind of man with the disposition it takes to make such decisions.” Lord Alistair’s regal gaze locked onto Val. “A born leader.”
“Thank you,” Val said, confused.
“While you have much to learn, by completing the Planewalk you have technically fulfilled the requirements to become a spirit mage. I would like to make it official, Valjean. Join the Congregation. Join me. Help arrest the spread of ignorance and bring enlightenment and prosperity to the Realm. I will take you under my wing, see to your continuing education myself.”
This was not at all what he had expected to hear. In fact, it was the opposite. “Lord Alistair . . . thank you. Again.”
He didn’t know what else to say.
The Chief Thaumaturge took a swallow of granth and leaned forward. “It seems my daughter has taken quite a liking to you.”
Val didn’t move a muscle. Here it comes, he thought.
“I have to say, the sentiment in our family is not hers alone. I want you to know that you have my permission, should the time come, to ask for her hand.”
A master of his emotions, able to control his expression in the most chaotic of circumstances, Val found himself floored once again.
Lord Alistair leaned back, amused at the effect his words had imparted. “Understand that not everyone in the Congregation is ready to accept your role as my protégé. In their eyes, after all, you are a recently pardoned criminal who failed to return the crown.”
Val nodded in understanding, still wondering where this was headed.
“We need to change that, in a very public manner. There is an item that has recently been lost to us. Stolen by a thief. An archaic religious object, a coffer, with symbolic importance to the followers of Devla. Should this item be recovered by the black sash gypsies, it will ignite more false hope among the people, and spark the Revolution. You’ve seen firsthand the dangers of this path.”
“I have.”
“Fulfill this task for us, recover the coffer, and I will be able to introduce you to the Congregation not just as a full spirit mage, but as my apprentice.” He leveled his gaze at him. “And, I hope, as my future son-in-law.”
Val’s head was spinning, but he forced himself to stay calm. “I . . . don’t know what to say. I’m flattered beyond belief.”
“Then say yes.” Lord Alistair finished his glass of granth, his tone implying an imperative rather than a suggestion. Not only that, but the silver bracelet Val could not remove, the one affixed to his wrist before the journey through the mist and which allowed the wizards to know where he was at all times, was a constant reminder that he was not yet a free man.
Still, he understood. He had broken their laws and narrowly escaped execution, and was still earning their trust.
The Chief Thaumaturge rose to clasp Val on the shoulder. “I’m confident of your answer, but I know you have much to digest. Go. Rest well. In the morning, you can inform me of your decision.”
Val planned to take his advice, though he already knew his answer. He didn’t really have a choice, and if successful, he could think of no better way to help his brothers.
Yet there was more to it than that. He did not find it distasteful—not at all—to agree to everything the Chief Thaumaturge was offering. He could not deny that he was falling in love with Adaira, though he had hardly considered marriage. Also, he enjoyed being a wizard and the power it conferred.
Nor was Val even sure, after the terrible things he had done on Urfe, that he belonged back home any more.
Keeping his conflicted emotions to himself, Val bowed and took his leave. Once he completed the new mission and found his brothers, he could deal with everything else—Adaira and his guilty conscience and the choice between worlds—when the time came.
After Val left, Lord Alistair poured another glass of granth, deep in thought.
Momentous events were in progress. After the mysterious disappearance of Dean Groft, the War Council would have the unanimity it needed to usher the Protectorate into war. At first Lord Alistair had thought—guessing Dean Groft had fled through the dimensions and died in some far corner of the multiverse at the hands of the two Spirit Lieges—that the lack of a body was unfortunate. He soon realized it was a boon. With no evidence to contradict him, the Chief Thaumaturge could spread whatever information about Dean Groft he wished.
Combined with the untimely death of Garbind Elldorn and the capitulation of Jalen Rainsword, who had not the stomach for lone dissent, Lord Alistair now had complete command of the Conclave. Except for the increasingly remote odds of that accursed prophecy, the one about the sword born of spirit, the path to his ascension was clear. The whispers of unease that floated about the Sanctum, the unspoken questions about the convenient disappearance of the dissenting mages, were too dangerous to speak aloud.
Recovering the coffer would reduce the odds of the prophecy even further, as would finding Zariduke. He would have to take the sword from its owner, a once-mysterious warrior whose identity had been revealed in a journal recently recovered from Zedock’s obelisk by Lord Alistair’s men. A touching missive that detailed Dane Blackwood’s instructions to his sons should they ever travel to Urfe.
It was clear, from the confusing nature of their actions, that the Blackwood brothers never had a chance to read their father’s journal. What a great irony that this same diary had helped Lord Alistair—the same man Dane Blackwood had warned his sons to avoid at all costs in the diary—to locate them.
The recovery of the diary had made Lord Alistair suspicious about the true identity of his talented young protégé with the enigmatic past. The evening before, the Chief Thaumaturge’s suspicions were confirmed when Queen Victoria informed him of the return of a certain azantite-tipped staff.
A staff that had once belonged to Dane Blackwood.
Glass in hand, lost in the past, Lord Alistair rose to stoke the fire. The white flames were artificial, of course, and did not give off any heat. In a purely symbolic gesture, he tossed the journal of his old enemy into the fire, watched the light flicker around it, and then burned it to ash with Spirit Fire.
EPILOGUE
Atop a frozen plain in the Great Northern Forest, beyond the farthest reaches of the Ninth Protectorate, a lone traveler gathered her cloak against the wind and felt a stabbing pain in her side.
A pain that
struck not at flesh and bone, but somewhere deeper. A pain of the mysterious regions of the heart.
Though she had just recently arrived, the lone wilder was eager to hone her craft and become a beacon of light to those in need. Proud and fierce she was, but also a lost young woman far from home, far even from her own world.
Following her intuition, she had asked the rukh that carried her away from the Yucatan to deposit her here, planning to study the northern climes before making her way south. She had no final destination, no method to her travels other than to act as a steward to the land and those it sheltered. Deep down, she knew that she, too, had something to mend, an aching spirit for the man she loved and a wrenching despair that she could not, no matter how much she tried, ever make him whole.
But something had changed, she knew, as she pressed her hand to her breast. Whether due to their past connection or the strange and magical energies that seethed across the surface of Urfe, Yasmina knew, without a doubt, that something had happened to Caleb.
Something terrible.
Owl staff in hand, a healthy harpy eagle perched on her shoulder, the wilder spoke softly to her mare as she gripped the reins. With a powerful neigh, the chestnut steed bunched its muscles and galloped south.
Atop a high and forested hill, at the foot of a mighty redwood, the Prophet’s closest disciples gathered around their leader as he gazed through a silver monocle upon the chaos below.
Thousands more crowded the long slope of the hill behind the Prophet, most of them bearing arms concealed within the folds of their gray caftans. The followers of Devla anxiously awaited word of what had caused the journey to stall. The long march to Freetown—weeks of arduous travel—had pushed their supplies to the limit. Yet the Prophet had insisted on traveling as fast as possible to the Roma capital, risking hunger and snowfall and bandits in the passes of the Dragon’s Teeth, all in service to his vision.
They trusted him, but they needed a sign. Something to confirm their faith in his leadership. Now that they had arrived at the Barrier Coast, whispers of the ocean views and the shattered remains of the city drifted down from atop the hill. The followers were eager to know what had transpired.
Was he down there after all, the one whom they longed to lift up as their savior? The blue-eyed boy in the Prophet’s vision?
Those surrounding the Prophet edged closer. All except Allira. Though she didn’t have a spyglass, the silent healer was staring down at the city with a somber gaze, as if she, too, had seen the miracle that had transpired.
Slowly, the Prophet lowered the monocle to address his followers. O Devla, the power he had witnessed! The return of the coffer, the righteous fury arcing out of the vessel to consume the agents of the Congregation! A display of celestial might unseen in the Realm for millennia!
Shivering at the import of the events, the Prophet could barely manage his first few words. “I was wrong,” he whispered, causing his disciples to edge closer so they could hear him.
No, not wrong, he thought. The visions are never wrong. Just incomplete.
“It’s not the boy,” he said, in a louder voice this time, his eyes moist from the tragic death of the woman and the poor child. After the man who had opened the coffer had flung himself across their broken bodies—clearly related to them—the Prophet had turned away from the scene.
The new age, it seemed, would be one born of tragedy.
“The Templar is not a boy,” he said, his words gaining strength, “but a man. One who stands in the city below us at this very moment, in dire need of our aid and compassion.”
As his words spread among the masses, causing a great commotion, one question was shouted above all the others, over and over. Voices crying out for guidance in the wilderness. “What do we do?”
The Prophet gazed down the hill at his followers. Though weakened to the point of collapse from hunger and the long march, his flock was no longer a defenseless body of worshippers, awaiting reaping by the Congregation.
They were an army now. A small army, yes, but one which would multiply tenfold once word spread that the coffer had been opened.
An army that would be led by a man far greater than he.
“What do we do?” the Prophet repeated as he drew to his full height, the power of conviction ringing in his voice, overcome by awe at the mysterious workings of the one true God. “We serve him.”
* * *
TO BE CONTINUED IN
THE RETURN OF THE PALADIN,
BOOK FOUR of FIVE in THE BLACKWOOD SAGA
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Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to editor Michael Rowley for lending a guiding hand to the course of this series. Likewise, as always, I received invaluable input from my pocket aces: early readers Rusty Dalferes and John Strout. Cover designer extraordinaire Sammy Yuen designed another brilliant image, and proofreader / formatter Jaye Manus made sure the final text sang. Maria Boers Morris, Lisa Weinberg, and Bill Burdick provided excellent early reads. As always, during the writing of the novel, my family was the azantite pillar on which I leaned.
Finally, though the author of the Canticles of Urfe remains unknown, one might find similar inspiration in the moving poetry of Polish-born Roma Bronislawa (“Papuza”) Wajs.
About the Author
LAYTON GREEN is a bestselling author who writes across multiple genres, including fantasy, mystery, thriller, horror, and suspense. He is the author of The Blackwood Saga, the Dominic Grey series, and other works of fiction. His novels have been nominated for multiple awards (including a finalist for an International Thriller Writers award), optioned for film, and have reached #1 on numerous genre lists in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
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