Mother of Slag

by Timandra Whitecastle

  Mother of Slag

  Timandra Whitecastle

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Timandra Whitecastle

  Kindle Edition

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Books by Timandra Whitecastle

  Dedication

  Foreword

  The Sword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Seer

  The Lover

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Break the Chain

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgements

  Enjoyed this book?

  Books by Timandra Whitecastle

  The Living Blade series

  Bloodwitch (novella)

  Touch of Iron

  On the Wheel

  Mother of Slag

  Short Fiction:

  The Lone Wolf Anthology, Undaunted Publishing

  Lost Lore. A Fantasy Anthology

  The Art of War. An Anthology for Charity

  Grimdark Magazine #16

  Thank you for purchasing this book! By doing so, you enable me to continue writing more fiction. Want to be the first in line for any new release?

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  To all who waited

  Foreword

  As this is the THIRD book in the trilogy, I want to use this space before the story starts to briefly provide a re-cap on what happened previously…

  (If you have just finished On the Wheel and immediately want to start reading this, GO YOU! You can skip this.)

  • Noraya and Owen Smith are twins from the northern half of a decaying empire. Twins are regarded with superstition, and they have run away from their charcoaling home life only to stumble into exiled Prince Bashan’s quest to find the Living Blade – a mythical relic said to empower its wielder with godlike power.

  • Bashan isn’t the only one who wants the Blade, however. Self-acclaimed Queen Suranna, also High-Priestess of the Fire God Shinar, seeks the Blade’s power to revive her fallen god. A mistress of prophecy and seduction, she is working towards her own endgame, and it might cost her ex-husband Master Telen Diaz far more than he is willing to give – and he has already given her control over his body …

  • After surviving imprisonment through Suranna in a dry cistern, Nora knows: the Blade must never be remade. But she can do nothing to stop her twin Owen, who sacrifices his life so that the Blade is re-forged. Nora is devastated.

  • Bashan wields it, but the Blade is quickly corrupting his mind. He marches on the capital of the empire to take back what he believes he deserves, and to mete out revenge on the whole world.

  • However, the Blade is also affecting Nora dramatically. Believing she can see and hear her twin, she follows his guidance, and heads to the capital of Arrun before Bashan can get there. She can deflect the destructive power of the Blade at great personal cost, and … after an exchange of blows, the Blade is taken from Bashan, and Diaz watches Nora die.

  • But she is resurrected as the Living Blade.

  • When Diaz tries to confront the nightmarish creature she has become, she tears his arm off at the shoulder. He is now completely free of Suranna’s binding magic, but falls to the ground bleeding out his life as the Blade walks away …

  And now, read on.

  The Sword

  Chapter 1

  Nora opened her eyes. At least, she felt her eyelids move. She saw nothing. Darkness lay in front of her. Pitch black and deep, a hole into a starless void. She heard the sound of gravel crunch under her boots as she shifted her weight to turn around.

  “Owen?”

  Her faltering breath misted in front of her. She could feel the moisture, but couldn’t even see the hand she raised right in front of her face. She could sense the air move as she waved her hand. It streamed past her splayed fingers. Out there in the black, she felt a shadow flit away.

  So this was death.

  Nora was dead, and her journey down the silent road into the Goddess Lara’s shrouded realm was one of darkness. She took a step forward. Another crunch below her foot. Like hoarfrost covering the hardened earth on a late autumn morning. Why was she here? She hadn’t been prepared for this. This loneliness … this empty hollow. It didn’t feel right. She had never been alone. Never.

  She had expected a fight. No, wait. She had been in a fight. She had fought against Bashan and the Blade. And Owen had been there with her. But Owen was dead. She saw him die, saw him swallowed by the silver fluid. Bashan had sacrificed her twin to remake the Living Blade. But no. She still felt him right there by her side, even after he had fallen to the Blade, a throb of heat running through her. An echo of her heartbeat.

  Owen.

  She had to find Owen.

  She took a few steps forward. Where was she? What was this place? It was cold. There was slight movement in the air as she walked into the blackness, into which direction—she didn’t know. There was no way of telling. No light or shadow to guide her path. No sound but her own breathing.

  She shouldn’t be alone. She had expected Owen to be here. Why wasn’t he here?

  This was a test. Everything was a test. Everything was always training. You had to make choices. You never got told which ones were right. Nora had made choices. They had led her here. This was nothing more than another test. She’d figure it out. She’d push through the darkness and then find Owen. He must be close. He was always close.

  She wished her mind was working faster. She couldn’t think properly. Her head felt full of fog and mists. This black country was a land of fog and mists. She felt the chill on her bare arms, on her face, as she moved through the dark. Where was the light? She had heard of people who had nearly died but had come back to the land of the living. She remembered they spoke of a light—but did the light guide them back to life? Or did it lure them farther down the silent road?

  She missed a step, and plunged blindly into a body of water. The sea? A lake, perhaps? Her eyes saw nothing, but her hands, breaking her fall, were stuck in a sludge that reeked of rot. She pushed herself up to her knees, and took a step backwards. Back to the dry land. But it wasn’t there. Wherever she turned, she only stepped deeper into a swampy mire.

  The stench of decay made her gag. She could taste the rot in every inhale. The fetid water splashed against her knees, slowly reached over her hips as she pressed on for minutes, maybe hours? How could she tell? There was no way to tell.

  Her ears, so used to the silence—at first she wasn’t sure she had heard anything but her own splashes as she waded through the muddy water. But there was something dissonant from her
own movements that made her stop to listen.

  Behind her. A faint slurping sound as of a body being dropped into the water.

  “Owen?”

  A lazy wave of the murk rippled against her hips.

  kill

  She heard a voice whisper from far on her left, and her hand reached for her trusted dagger at her hip. But it wasn’t there. She was weaponless. Defenseless. Panic rose in her throat, but she swallowed it down. The whisperer sounded far off, not as far as she would have liked, but she slid away in the opposite direction.

  devour

  Another whispered word made her change her course yet again, slowly but steadily making her way through the darkness. Was it darkness? Or was she blind? Had she lost her vision, but kept all her other senses? Could whoever was whispering out there see her clearly, track her movements in a way she couldn’t theirs? She tried to breathe calmly. In through the nose, out through her parted lips.

  Was this real? Was she in a real place? Because it felt like a nightmare. A very vivid nightmare. Was she dreaming? She tried to line up her thoughts. Before she awoke here, she had been in the throne room. Yes. She was fighting Bashan in the throne room. There had been a ball of light, a piercing sensation as Bashan ran her through with the Living Blade, and she remembered dropping to the cold floor. A last view of Diaz, his face a mask of anguish, his large black eyes dabbled with light and shadow. Everything had been filled with light. Specks of blue-white light illuminated the blood on the marble floor. Her blood. So much of it.

  The life is in the blood.

  Owen had said it.

  Owen.

  She had felt him close by as she died. That’s what happened, wasn’t it? She had died. This was death. This was darkness. It smothered her from all around, closing in on her like quicksand. Where was Owen?

  Find her. Rip her. Steal her.

  There was more than one whisperer and they were moving towards her. She felt the water lap against her body as they honed in on her. She couldn’t see, though.

  Doesn’t matter. Could they see her?

  She had to move. Breathe slow. Stay silent. Feel her way out.

  There was a breeze, a slight current of fresh air just above the surface to her right. She could sense it stream past her fingers. The stink of rot wasn’t quite as strong in this direction. Good. She followed the breeze, trying not to stir the water too much.

  A tremor in the water ahead made her stop and hold her breath.

  A smudge of deep shadow passed before her in the black. A huge wallowing shape, vaguely human. She could just make out a bulbous head perched on hunched shoulders. As it passed, the reek of rot intensified, and she gagged again, bile rising to the back of her throat. She heard it snuffle, as though trying to catch her scent, but then the shadow was gone.

  Where is she?

  The whisperers called to each other. So it seemed they couldn’t see her either?

  She squinted ahead. In the darkness that followed after the passing shadow, she could make out a lighter patch, rectangular. It might be an arch? A doorway?

  She waded towards it.

  There was a crackle and a sputter and a surge of warmth as though someone had lit a fire nearby. Or a torch? She took a deep breath. Above the rankness, she thought she caught a whiff of beeswax. A candle, then? Its flame was devoid of color but not warmth, and it drenched what looked like an archway with a drab, gray light, not illuminating it exactly, but making it stand out more in the black. The breeze came through the arch, and when she put her hand out, she brushed up against the rough stone.

  The first sense of firmness she had felt so far. She pressed her forehead to it for a moment, drawing up more courage to press on into the pitch black beyond it. She could do this. She would find a way out of here. She would find Owen.

  The sludge grew thicker beneath the archway. She trudged through the slush, her left hand trailing along the curving stone wall, and the small patch of gray faded into the blackness behind her. The archway had led into what seemed to be a tunnel, and she walked into it, the water level falling back to just below her knees.

  The whisperers didn’t seem to follow her. Maybe she had lost them.

  After a what might have been an hour of marching, the stone wall to her sides just fell away, and she gasped in pain as her foot scraped against something. She stumbled, banged her shin against a stone step she hadn’t seen in front of her, and swore.

  There! We found her.

  The whisperers were back, though she couldn’t figure out from where the voices came. They seemed to be all around her. Maybe they hadn’t really been gone. Maybe they had just been waiting for her to trip and then—she took a deep breath and oriented herself.

  She was at a junction. Stifling blackness gaped to both her right and her left. It opened up before her, too. Nora lingered where she could still feel the wall, unsure of where to go next. The guiding breeze was gone. She had felt it against her fingertips for a while back in the tunnel, but she couldn’t sense it now. Maybe she should turn back? If she could find the breeze again, perhaps she’d find a different way out. A hole in the wall she had overlooked, perhaps.

  She stretched out her hand to touch the obstacle in front of her. She felt a rough stone edge that seemed to run across the width of the tunnel she stood in. If she wanted to go down one of the adjoining tunnels, she’d have to climb up the stone ledge. Water ran over her hand. It trickled over the ledge into the sludge in a steady stream. She raised her hand to her lips. It smelled fresher than the mud she had sloshed through so far. A quick lick across the back of her hand—she pushed back, fought back, slipped from their grasping fingers and clutching claws—the water tasted brackish but was clean. If she followed the water upstream … She felt something shift behind her, a noise like a ruffle of feathers, a flap of leathery wings.

  She hoisted herself up onto the ledge and remained in a crouch to feel the current of the tunnel’s brook. Left. Upstream was to her left. She put out her hand to the tunnel wall once more and started following the course of the brook. The water ran over her feet, but rarely did it reach her ankles. It was harder to move without splashing a little. Ahead she saw another little gray sputter of light. Something roughly the shape of a man stood motionless ahead of her. She stopped for a few heartbeats and waited for the man-shaped thing to move towards her. But nothing happened. Instead she crept up cautiously, fingers grasping for the hilt of her knife again and again. But the dagger wasn’t where it should be. Where had it gone? When had she lost it? She couldn’t remember and swallowed hard. The whisperers had quietened. Maybe they were laying a trap?

  As she came upon the edge of the strange dull light, only an arms length away from the man-shaped thing, she saw that it was nothing more than a pale sheep’s skull rigged together with long sticks and a tattered, black cape. A kind of scarecrow. She had made similar ones with Owen as children. Silent guardians for their vegetable garden. She tiptoed around it, but couldn’t shake the feeling that those eyeless holes were watching her as she walked on.

  The darkness lifted slightly further ahead, as though the night was shifting slowly to dawn. She saw better in the settling gray and quickened her step. Again the rough stone beneath her trailing hand fell away and she entered what felt like a large space. A cavernous hall of some kind. She could make out enormous cylindrical shapes like carved pillars holding up a ceiling, yet here they stretched up into the starless void. The scene reminded her of the great hall in the temple of Shinar, only inverted. Distorted. Instead of leading down into Suranna’s throne chamber, an enormous set of stairs in the center of the hall led up into the black. Another difference was that between those few structural elements, vast pools of shadow flowed about, and something was prowling in them.

  She couldn’t hear footsteps, but she could sense movement in the dark, could hear what might have been the muffled whispers of a crowd or the rustle of dead leaves. She shuddered. But if she wanted to find Owen, it seemed like she’d
have to make her way to the stairs. Ascend. Out of the darkness and into the light.

  Hopefully.

  Chapter 2

  Nora stretched a hand to break a fall and slowly shuffled across the first swath of coiling dark mists, head snapping from side to side whenever she heard a murmur rise among the incessant whispering, a sniffing or a sharp sigh. In the muted light, she could make out ghostly figures roaming between the pillars, the darkness rippling in their wake. They were vaguely human-shaped, but twisted, deformed; as though blind, mad gods had been given soft clay, the raw material of humankind, and been asked to re-create men. It was all wrong. She saw monsters as broad as oxen scurry along on eight thin legs with hands for feet. A slender thing with arms branching off of the pale skulls of its double heads. Another stalked past her on all fours, its arms as long as its hind legs, and sporting a second pair of legs that grew out of its humped back. It had no head and no face or nose, and yet it sniffed in her direction as though tracking her scent. She backed off quietly and moved out of its ambling path, listening to the whispered voices fade away.

  break crack feed

  When she reached the first stone pillar, she pressed herself against it to catch her breath. She realized she had been holding it as she walked through the pool of darkness.

  A sudden tremor shook the stones beneath Nora’s feet, followed by a deep rumble. As the ground shifted, she swayed, holding her arms out wide for balance, clutching the pillar. She looked up at the swirling blackness and a soft rain of dust fell into her eyes. It stung. She rubbed her eyes with one hand, hugging the steady stone while the earth moved.

  A thud against her pillar.

  She opened her eyes once more, blinking away the rest of the fine dust, and gasped.

  One of the claycreatures had stumbled against it, snarling, shattering where it touched the light and putting the fragments of itself back together again in seconds. Up close, its skin seemed brittle, like glass, not soft at all. The stink of rotting flesh emanated from it, making her retch.