Book 3 Chapter 34

JET 8.11: LESSONS UNLEARNED

“Ours is a small church and a narrow ministry. There is no place for us, yet we are here. While lesser gods sit and smile and trade their barbed pleasantries, our goddess sits apart, beyond them, in a silence of her own making. Were she to enter their presence they would each of them strangle, squirm in their seats, and then, making their excuses, depart. For she reminds them: there is no such thing as immortality, even for the gods. Oh yes, they will all use the word ‘mortal’ – the gods, the eldritches, the spirits – even the elves will deign to call us mortal, owing to their ethereal reincarnations and the continuity of existence they believe this will afford them. We are here to serve the Empty One’s function on this mundane plane – to remind them all: even the spirit does not live forever. God-killers exist and cannot be destroyed; it is only a matter of patience. Within a finite time, even Mortiforn will Die.”

– taken verbatim from ‘The Cult of Utenya’ secret recordings, Chraunost 945 NE

Everything was going as smoothly in Telior as could’ve been expected.

Sure, I was an arch-sorcerer. Sure, for my age I had a lot of experience under my belt. But no one had ever asked me if I was a good teacher, and no one really seemed to care. As it was, half my students over-performed, seeking my approval and my company… perhaps seeking some scraps of secret knowledge that the others wouldn’t hear. The other half underperformed, knowing I was an easy master to please: I was quick to praise, and slow to complain; when I did chastise my workers, my attack was always couched in a jest, never given the full force I thought at times it deserved. I knew this about myself, but despite my position and power, I still didn’t want to confront the slackers. They were older than me, and probably wiser in many ways – and yet repeated experience led me to believe that age wasn’t everything when it came to maturity. There were people ten, fifteen years my elder acting like giggling fourteen-year-olds – when they messed up they always descended into jibes and cackling, and even when they got something right the force-construct was always slip-shod, enough-so that I got tired of marking their work and had them bring it to me at my desk upon completion, so that I could tweak the lines, ensure the cleanness of the structure.

My diligence paid off, as much as it could here. Telese high society was alike and yet unlike what I’d witnessed in Mund. There was less pomp, more ceremony. The gods were invoked at meal-times, including Wyrda Virdut herself, and even the nobles seemed to actually take their prayers seriously. The derision directed towards the lower classes was less baked-in to the attitudes of the rich than it had been in Mund – it was more-readily exposed on the faces of those who bore it, and more-easily broken by familiarity with the poor. I’d met merchants with ten houses who felt free to dance with the rag-folk in the markets, laughing gaily along with the crude jokes and jibes of the crowd – and I’d met knights willing to outright punch peasants who merely got in their way. My efforts to bring such cruelties as I witnessed to heel were met with only partial success. The first time, I managed to err on the side of peace, and brought the issue before Deymar in private – but his bright eyes went roving, troubled, gazing out over the sea.

“How easy it would be,” he said, sighing, “to take a boat – sail away…” He looked back at me, and straightened, his voice deepening again. “I will have words with the man.”

For a couple of weeks it seemed to have worked – the particular knight cast me regular shady looks, but I didn’t see it happen again. Whether such incidents were now simply being hidden from me, I had no idea, but when I saw some young lordling kicking a beggar for no good reason I couldn’t help but get in his face, throw him around a bit.

That got me brought before Deymar, in a tense stand-off with a group of armed soldiers ringing me once more. I was chastised, and played along for the king’s benefit more than for my own. I apologised to the young lord, and he apologised to me.

No one apologised to the beggar. I took the poor man food and money instead, but, made suspicious by his answers, I set an imp on his tail – and within the hour Pinktongue reported that he’d sold the food, and used the proceeds along with the silver I’d provided to purchase himself a wrap of something like nailbiter, seasmoke or ‘riilavorr’ as it was called here.

For as much as things were different here – they were the same. It really was like home. The sickness in Mund – it wasn’t from Mund, wasn’t of Mund. It was the world’s sickness. It was the sickness in the human heart, a soul-disease from which there was no escape, no corner of the earth in which to find respite, salvation. Telior was only better than Mund. It wasn’t perfect.

The injustices were tolerable. They used a calendar derived at least in part from the Mundic one here, and it was the dinner of the Ocean’s Eve when I finally plucked up the courage to invite Nafala to go with me. I was always being told to bring a guest to these things, and the twins already had their own places at the table, given the eminence of their brother, their relationship with the crown prince. I did my best to sound nonchalant when I asked my pretty apprentice to go with me, but my hesitancy had been misplaced. Her awe-filled eyes welled up – she trembled, and stuttered as she accepted.

I’d thought inviting a lowborn to dine with the rich might cause some sharp words to be directed at us, never mind sharp looks, but if anything it seemed to reassure the locals that I’d taken an interest in a Telese woman. Lord Marsk Torloy, the man who’d accosted me in front of the throne on my first visit to the High Hall, finally let go of his mistrust – he got drunk with me, and admitted in a hushed whisper in the corner that he was just afraid of me, afraid of my power. His eyes shining with the passion of far too much booze, he confided he wished he had the abilities of an archmage – not to use them, but just to have them, to know he was capable of more than most men. I admitted it did feel good – the self-reliance, the freedom.

“But we aren’t invulnerable,” I told him.

“Eh? Zis – invowneral?”

“We feel like we can’t be hurt,” I explained, “but we can. We can’t do everything.”

He laughed. “I have seen Orcan stop ze… ah… offiod… title vave. Stop ze title vave! Do not tell me zis. You fought off ze dark elves! On your own!”

I shrugged, trying to appear modest, but I felt myself smiling.

Afterwards, I walked Nafala back to the house she shared with her extended family in the lower levels near the docks. We spoke about many things, but work was the one thing we most had in common, so we kept circling back around to sorcery. I told her so many half-stories I lost track, doing my best to couch the truth in lies, hide the reality of my past as best I could without making up a history wholesale. She seemed anxious to make a good impression, which left her only speaking in short, carefully-calculated bursts, and so I ended up wittering on with myself to fill silences. She didn’t seem to mind, and was keen to express her interest in the things I spoke about – “Oh, you must tell me more about zis demon,” “Ze towers in Mund, are zey all like zis?” Her voice sounded happy enough, but the smile on her face seemed to have been glued there, and when I tried taking her by the arm I felt the stiffness, the tension in her body.

We ended up in a dry patch outside her door, just beyond the reach of the moonlit spray that came stretching over the rails towards us. We stood there, just listening to the restlessness of the sea, observing the silver-black expanse before us – and between one heartbeat and the next she spun on me. The wind lashed us, sending her raven hair streaming back as she pulled my head down by the hood, pressed her mouth against mine.

Revulsion.

For the briefest instant I thought again of Emrelet. The first kiss, soaring beyond the Maginox. The wizard’s voice, her surety, her passion.

Then the memories were gone – not destroyed, but shut away, never to return, like those of the girls who’d come before her.

Leaving only the underlying sense of wrongness.

It never left, never even lessened, worsening as the moments extended. The softness of Nafala’s lips, her tongue, the sweet breath exhaled through her nostrils to dance across my cheek – her touch was like fire –

It’s wrong!

She thought I was older than I was. She didn’t know my past. She didn’t know me, what I was capable of. What I was incapable of.

I could never tell her the full truth about me. Never, not without doing something to bind her to silence. A greater sin.

I – didn’t – care. Not on the surface. It felt good, to be wanted. Reassuring. Exciting.

Exciting.

Yet the excitement, the excitement itself repulsed me, the core of my self reaching out to the forefront, taking hold of my hands and using them to push Nafala away.

Moonlight struck offence in her eyes, their starry depths searching mine, accusatory all of a sudden.

Then her expression swiftly twisted into one of horror.

“No! Wait!” I took her hands, impelling her to stay even as she turned to flee. “Please, Nafala…”

She returned her eyes to mine, and I found I couldn’t bear her gaze.

I looked down at our entwined fingers.

“I ju-just…” My voice was a husky mess. “I can’t – right now… But I…”

“I thought you… thought you liked me.”

“I do,” I pleaded, still looking down. “I do like you, but…”

“You need time?” she whimpered.

I met her eyes again, hoping to find understanding there, but the same shock was present as before, the same self-doubt.

“Please – yes.” I tightened my grip on her hand, trying to smile. “It’s not an excuse. I just… I’m not myself.”

She smiled wanly. I put my arms around her to embrace her and she reciprocated, but I could already feel that it was broken. The burgeoning relationship between us had been changed irrevocably: the way she held me… the way I held her… it was awkward. The chill of the night breeze didn’t fade like a wizard’s warmth spell, and when we separated she headed inside without a backwards glance.

After that, it took days for her to speak again in my presence. She used her hair to hide her face when I passed by her work-station, and only mumbled, eyes averted, if I asked her a direct question. I did my best to steer clear of her, give us both some room to regain our dignity. If I’d asked for time, maybe that was the least I could do to help things from my side.

Without so much as a whisper, never mind a bang, it was the twelfth day of the fourth month, Enyara, or Enir in Telese. My seventeenth birthday. Other than the twins, no one had been able to wish me well, and of the two of them only Jaid had put in any effort. As I lay in bed alone that night, surrounded by the emptiness of my spacious chamber, the globes extinguished and books closed with only the moon and stars for company, I started to regret denying Nafala’s advances. I could’ve taken her into my confidences, couldn’t I? I could’ve trusted her, told her everything… What was wrong with me? Why had I felt the way I did? It didn’t make sense to think she was under mind-control, that she was being forced to feel attracted to me. If Tyr Kayn had flown here just to meddle in my love-life…

But I found it didn’t matter. As much as I consciously lusted after Nafala, as much as I thought I could fall in love with her, the memory of the nausea that had washed over me when we kissed was pervasive. The lust was only skin-deep; its fires didn’t touch the cold monster dwelling deep in my heart. I wasn’t pining for Emrelet Reyd anymore – in fact, I hadn’t known Emrelet at all, had I? How could I pine for someone, for something I’d never really known? No. It was something more fundamental, but the meaning of my own disgust was hidden from me. The coins of introspection paid for nothing except sackfuls of frustration.

Eventually I retreated into myself, into my familiar patterns. I sat up, knowing exactly what I needed to do. Couldn’t sleep with the lights out? Put them on, get absorbed back into the texts…

“Happy birthday, Kas,” I said aloud to myself, and, sitting up in bed, reached for the nearest tome. “What’ll it be tonight? Ah yes. More conjecture on the efficiency of using serialised matrices to manage telepathic flow…”

It would be cool to figure out how to make glyphstones. I suspected the actual design specifications were trade secrets of the manufacturers, however, and there was nothing in my books detailing the process…

I woke up late the next morning with the glowing orb still floating above the foot of the bed, useless in the bright daylight. When I tried to move I realised the chronicle I’d fallen asleep reading was still lying open on my chest, and I gingerly lifted it, wincing to see the folded pages, feel the damaged spine.

“Pinktongue,” I murmured as I did every morning, “report.”

The imp appeared next to me on the quilts as I placed the book down on the bedside table, a scroll filled with hastily-scrawled writing clasped in his little claws.

Over the last weeks things had slowly been taking shape downstairs. The bottom levels of my tower – now referred to by most as the Tower of the Warlock, or, more affectionately, the Tower of Raz – had become an ever-extending set of workshops. All around the clock, at least a few of my sorcerer-apprentices would be present, and wizards and druids, enchanters and diviners were coming and going at all hours nowadays. The lights were always on, and our new glow-globes were the brightest Telior had ever seen.

The twins were coming along with their spell-craft, too. They had to put their minds to a profession sooner or later, and I’d snapped out of my sorcerous reverie one night during dinner and put my foot down about their attendance and punctuality. It might not have been the most respected of professions, sure, but at least sorcery would let them bring in money when they grew up – and it was good exercise for their brains. They were smart, but spell-casting was tricky to the extreme, requiring a level of discipline from the mage during every stage of the process. This was something that I, as an archmage, had largely overlooked previously. Now I was confronted with the sheer amount of work that went into refining the gestures, the invocations – even just preparing the reagents.

And, on the heels of that… the fatigue my poor sibling mages were enduring.

“Do you want to go out and buy us a fortify set?” I asked Jaid one afternoon, after I’d worked them to the metaphorical bone all morning and was feeling guilty. “I’d rather not spend half our treasury on it, but if it’s not –“

“Can’t you just get your pets to make you one?” Jaroan cut in. “Didn’t think of that, did you?”

Truthfully, I hadn’t.

“I…” I mulled it over. “I think maybe you’re right… Hey, we could get Zab to draw the pieces in the air, get Butcherking some wood and get him to hack them into shape… I could finish them off.”

But when I picked up the knife to carve the wood, my hand shook and the wraith-form went active of its own accord. I put down the knife, and didn’t end up trying again. By next week my purse had grown considerably fatter, the reward for a particularly impressive set of song-emitting stones and growth-spheres we’d produced… and I simply bought us a set of game-pieces and a board.

It turned out that the twins were too busy now to play much. Occasionally I’d hear them shouting at each other from their rooms below mine – it was good to know that all hadn’t changed in that department. However, Jaroan was advancing faster than our sister, and not by any natural aptitude – in fact, Jaid seemed to have more of a knack for the practical side of sorcerous things. Rather, it was because of his temperament. The change that had taken hold of our brother was fuelled at least in part by rage, and when we had quiet time in our shared living spaces I could see it coming out in the way he studied, frowning at his book, sometimes poking the page or even throwing the tome across the room in frustration. But I soon learned to keep quiet, keep my eyes on my own text – he always went back to the book in a matter of seconds, stomping over to scoop it up and shout at the thing as though it had hurled itself on the ground. A minute later I would glance over at him, to find him scowling again as he was back on the task, puzzling out the arcane passages.

Jaid had other distractions, too, contributing to her lack of focus. In this I could hardly blame her.

The prince.

At the next formal dinner – going it alone again – I was looking down the table at Jaid and Lathenskar. They were sitting together, as usual, and he was speaking words in a voice too low for me to catch, drawing something on the table with his fingertip. And she was giggling. Giggling.

I might not have been able to hear him, but I could hear the sounds she was making, and it was all kinds of wrong – I could detect mania there in the stuttering laughter. This infatuation… whether or not it was the reason she’d wanted us to stay here all those weeks ago, it had to end.

King Deymar caught me staring, and set down his flagon, confirming my worst fears at a single stroke.

“They should be betrothed next spring,” he said. “No earlier.”

My jaw dropped. “My king – Deymar – I don’t know exactly how things are done here, but she’s only ten, and there’s… there’s no way she’s –“

“Hold.” He raised his hand. “Your sister would have to be willing, of course.”

“I don’t think you understand –“

“They could not wed until the day of her fourteenth birthday.”

It turned out that Telese customs in this regard weren’t far off the Mundian standard. You were considered old enough to wed from fourteen – and according to the drunk lord on my right, you could even enter certain intimate professions. However, you wouldn’t even be able to look after your own money until you were eighteen. Further questioning revealed that in such cases the youngster’s guardians would keep and spend their payments – implying that parental consent for this kind of thing was considered commonplace…

Feeling sick, I pushed away my food. I knew a few girls who’d ended up in the love-houses of Sticktown, but they’d always been orphans, at least. No one had put them there. And no one had taken their earnings, at least not in the establishments I knew of. Surely that was the least, the least that the city and the gods owed them…

I sat there for the rest of the meal in silence, seething. The worst thing was that I knew in the end I’d do nothing. I had all this power, all the means in the world to change things, order it as I saw fit. And yet I was blocked, not by some external force, but by every internal pressure, moral and social, compelling me to stay in my seat, stay in my station… Enjoy the fruits of a civilisation that had seen fit to upraise me and those I cared for. Don’t shake the lantern, or risk getting burnt.

Wasn’t that what I’d always done? I’d accumulated wealth. I’d thought of myself as a little lord, all along, saving up to buy a big mansion… I vaguely remembered the first time I’d interacted with servants, the way it had incensed me to be served food and drink by someone paid to do it… Now I looked at myself, sitting at the right hand of a king, eating foreign delicacies that someone had prepared for me. Listening to the self-righteous droning of nobles who thought to joke over parents selling the innocence of children.

I finished my wine, and my brain did exactly what I feared it would:

At least she’s got nearly four years.

I nodded to Deymar before excusing myself, and breathed a little easier thereafter, in spite of everything.

There was a kind of melancholic despair that came with having all your needs met. Nothing really to strive for, nothing with an inherent meaning beyond existing to exist. If there was no hope of a better tomorrow, if today was as good as it got, then tomorrow became not an avenue of change and hope, but a quagmire of stagnation. When the goal each morning was to make each day as alike as possible to the last, all it did was invite complaint and criticism when it didn’t quite match up. Pettiness ensued. If I didn’t quite get as long to read one day, for instance, because of Jaroan acting up or work getting in the way, it blackened my mood worse than an Incursion. The whole state of mind left a sourness in the mouth no amount of mint could mask.

I tried to focus my energies. When people found out I was offering exorcism, not only for free but almost instantly achieved to boot, with the use of no smelly or otherwise repulsive reagents – I almost got my hand bitten off. Five came forward over the course of the first month, of whom two were merely confused mourners – but I found three genuine ghost infestations. Each was swiftly dispatched back to its plane of origin, to the sound of whimpers and tearful goodbyes from their loved ones.

One morning, the ice in the bay was thicker than they’d expected, given the weather, and it seemed the ice-breaker wizards must’ve been having a heavy night on the liquor, because by eight the ships still couldn’t move. Someone sent for Orcan, but I soon heard that the arch-wizard saw this kind of task as beneath him: the magician who mentioned this was passing through the workshop to pick up a box of rune-covered brooches, and when I questioned her it seemed she’d been apprenticed to Orcan at a time, as all wizards of Telior had been. The archmage deigned to teach, but he saw it as the duty of those he taught to deal with such a mundane event as a frozen harbour.

“’Vot’s the point in training zem, if zey von’t do ze job I trained zem for?’ Zat’s how he alvays talks about it.” She gave her best imitative sneer.

It made me purse my lips, and I followed the courier out into the rain.

I floated on my brilliant blue wings down to one of the piers and, drawing a deep breath, I hovered out over the ice, calling forth my bintaborax.

I’d used them this way once before, back when I first arrived in Telior, but that time I’d only used them to clear an isolated corridor, a single channel for the Scaleshaker – I’d undoubtedly drawn some stares, started some rumours, yet this was entirely different. Everyone was watching now. I was performing for hundreds, possibly thousands of people.

I made it a good show.

In order to stop it being too scary, I had the fiends dance to the tune of the chants echoing across the expanse. And rather than set them to their task in a pedestrian fashion, I had Zab conjure the illusions of giant pink rabbits; the bintaborax sauntered after the rabbits, and smashed the ice where the illusions disappeared, only for them to reappear again moments later a few yards away… Soon-enough the word went around, and a crowd of children formed at the front of the harbour-rails, overlooking the demonic escapade.

It filled my heart with confidence, to see the looks on those young faces watching the demonstration. These weren’t faces that would age into a hatred of sorcerers and their pets. These were faces that would grow into a hunger, a desire to learn, to follow in the warlock’s footsteps. This was the revitalisation Telior really needed. Hope, in the hearts of its next generation, shining bright in their eyes. Acceptance, that the world’s life-blood was magic, that sorcery was a part of this. Realisation, that the only evil in demonology and diabolism was in the mind of its wielder, that we were no different to healers, prophets.

That was still true, wasn’t it?

It took me a minute to process the cry, cast as it was in the foreign accent, competing with the hymn of Enye’s singers. But once I heard it, it was unmistakeable.

“Hool Raz! Hool Raz! Hool Raz!”

I had the demons bow graciously to the crowd when the ships started moving once more, and as I waved them away in a series of over-exaggerated bursts of crimson flame, the kids moaned as one, begging for an encore.

I was almost out of energy, but I had enough left for one more summoning. I brought forth Khikiriaz. I let one lucky kid ride the ikistadreng along the docks for two minutes – the longest two minutes of the lad’s poor father’s life. When I returned him to his dad’s arms, the boy was so enthusiastic that the trembling man had no other option than to grin and thank me.

I left them wanting more – I didn’t want to spoil them on this. I wanted it to remain exotic, exhilarating. And by all accounts as I moved through the city afterwards, I’d achieved my goals. I hadn’t made any new enemies, and made a hundred new friends. When I spoke with the king later, he complimented me on my good judgement, expressing outright gratitude (and not an insignificant amount of relief) that I’d stepped up after Lord Orcan refused.

Yes, everything was going smoothly in Telior.

It took almost three months before they showed up for me – almost three months before it all came tumbling down and I found myself there again, amidst the wreckage of my life, wondering how I’d let everything go so wrong.

* * *

“Oh come on, Raz!” Ysara squealed. “You’re not even trying, now. There’s almost no way that’s true!”

“Almost no way? You know it’s true!” I laughed. “A rat.”

“Course!” Her eyes sparkled.

“It was highly embarrassing, to say the least. I even did a wee when I smelt some other rats. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone else about that…”

She was in tears, and her husband Pegoras was smiling broadly, which must’ve been a testament to my tale about the time I had a tail. The man never laughed, barely ever even grinned.

I waved them goodbye, heading over to Enzon’s stall for a pastry. I wrinkled my nose at the stench of tuna on the air, trying to focus on the sourness of the cherries in my mouth as I chomped down on my favourite filled treat. Leaning on a rail overlooking the docks below, I sighed, lifting my face to the warm sun in temporary bliss, letting the chaotic sounds of the marketplace wash over me.

“Bikkog! Kakili! Aefel-kin moot!” Clams! Cockles! Get them here! Herga sold notoriously dodgy seafood, and most non-tourists avoided her like she had the plague.

“Mifo! Mifo akar! Festa ba blagori, tekku tim ar faragak!” Toys! Toys galore! Goblins and imps, fresh out the shop! Mr. Okeleb’s little wonders were probably fresher than Herga’s clams. I hoped the surge of interest in such miniature terrors had something to do with my influence.

There were many others whose words were less comprehensible to me.

A tall man with barrels containing something-something-scales, used in making poultices for the curing of… something.

A stout old dear hiring people for a something to find the bones of… something. That sounded ominous.

Someone looking for a something-something… someone who sounded desperate, enraged.

An arch-sorcerer, my paranoia whispered. He’s looking for you.

I smiled, and kept my eyes shut.

My worries had lessened, over the past weeks. I walked around wearing my face, if you didn’t count the scar. My robe was my old one with its colours adjusted by illusion, Feychilde’s mask still secreted in the deep inner pocket. I told stories that could identify me. We kept our fake names, but half the people I interacted with on a daily basis now seemed to be under the impression I was a former hero of some kind. While I didn’t have much cause to dissuade them from that notion, I avoided talking about it whenever it came up. I couldn’t give away too much, but I found that I wanted to be as honest as possible with people – and not because I still wanted to be Kas.

Quite the opposite. Raz was a slightly different person, I found. He had less baggage, carried less of a burden. If anything, I would’ve said that life now was the most-complete it’d ever been: that Raz was my best self. By the end, Kas had been a mess of a person. This was a fresh chance, a new start, and I was embracing it to the utmost of my ability.

Clinging to it. Desperately.

I realised by now that most of the lies I wanted to tell were needless. Mundians were rare here, and those passing through Telior clearly weren’t looking for me; my only nod to hiding was to avoid the crews off Mundian ships. If Timesnatcher scried-out the fact that Duskdown or Neverwish had returned to the city, he might’ve figured out by now that I’d followed his instructions and escaped Zyger – but even if that had happened, he clearly hadn’t informed Zakimel. I was free and clear, thousands of miles away, in a remote port on the edge of the world. I could afford a few minor risks. I’d even sent Pinktongue to Xantaire with a note and enough gold to pay for sea-passage, but in her letter she said that she wasn’t ready to leave – at least not yet. By the sounds of things, she was working with that Garet bloke I’d left in charge of Wyre’s operation, and according to my imp there were are whole bunch of new kids living in my parents’ old apartment somehow. I was still considering what to say in my response.

Maybe Timesnatcher could’ve informed Zakimel – or maybe the old arch-diviner could’ve simply figured out where Xantaire was planning to move her family some other way – but I quite literally wasn’t worth the trouble. I was certain they had bigger things to deal with. Was I being foolish to be so worried? Orcan had said it all, months ago now. The money and the fame and the power, it was all those people ever thought about. Would hunting me down bring them greater glory? Riches beyond measure? Did I have some secret hoard of magical items for them to plunder? No. I was a meaningless target, if I were one at all.

I was nothing.

I was no one.

With all these thoughts swirling about my mind, the very moment that my satyr-reflexes finally kicked in and warned me of someone at my elbow, I span about –

Dislodging a gobbet of dark-red jam from the end of the half-eaten pastry in my hand, sending it to splat on the side of Nafala’s face.

She regarded me in shock for a moment. I froze, watching, as she slowly reached up to her face and took the cherry-bits carefully onto the edge of her finger.

“I’m… sorry?”

My apprentice’s dark eyes swelled with emotion. It looked as though she were about to start crying.

“I…” I had no idea what to say. “You missed… a bit.”

Still she said nothing, just staring at me, chest rising and falling heavily.

Hesitantly, I reached out and tried to clean up the rest of the jam with a single go of my thumb, but I still didn’t get all of it.

“You missed a bit,” she growled softly, and before I knew what was happening she was bringing her hand up to my face.

I stayed very still, letting her decorate the tip of my nose with the stuff. It was most outgoing behaviour I’d ever witnessed from her.

When she was done she spun on her heel as quickly as I’d spun on mine, grating out as she turned: “Ghena sent me. She needs you.”

“Hold on.”

I took her arm as she went to stalk back towards the tower, and she didn’t wrest it free, permitting me to turn her back.

“Vot?” she asked quietly, suddenly averting her eyes.

“I… Do you want to help me finish this?” I gestured lamely with the pastry remnants, but I knew her weakness for such luxuries. “It’s the least I could do, really…”

“A half-ate dessert?”

I shrugged, smiling.

“Fine.” I could see the blush already making its way to her cheeks. “Just… take zat off your nose. You are looking stupid.”

The moment she joined me at the rail overlooking the docks and took a nibble of the pastry, I felt something change between us. There was a warmth to the silence that settled between us as we stared out at the bay.

Gulls squawked mindlessly, specks weaving across the white sky.

“I envy them, sometimes.”

She swallowed half her mouthful. “Mmm. Enzon’s?”

I nodded.

“Is good.” She swallowed again. “You envy ze birds? But you can fly like zem.”

“It’s not the flying… It’s… Never mind.” I laughed at myself, and hoped I didn’t sound too bitter. “What did Ghena want, anyway?”

“Ah… ze first of ze Shipbuilders’ orders is ready, avaiting your inspection.”

I rolled my eyes. It could wait. The saws of enhanced speed and durability we’d created weren’t due until next week anyway. But our early finish meant we could finally start processing the prototypes for the healers’ wands.

There was so much politics involved in it all. I did my best to stay out of it. I’d wanted to pledge our services to the all-female group of druidesses and priestesses, the Sisterhood of the Teal Stone. The women were in charge of all healing in Telior, and from what I saw they did a good job of it, ministering to the poor and rich alike with every penny, every reagent, every second at their disposal. The sooner I could start work on their implements, the better, as far as I was concerned. King Deymar assured me that Orcan would contact the mysterious Greenheart, somehow, and have them imbued with various restorative spells. But apparently prioritising their requests over those of the Shipbuilders would’ve stepped on a large number of toes. Deymar had glanced surreptitiously at my broken foot, and said to me in whispers that I should be aware of what that felt like.

I’d understood the implication. It wasn’t that he feared for me. He feared for his own foot. The throne had always had a good relationship with the Shipbuilders, Roba had told me at one point, and their leaders were well-in with the naval captains. That was one guild the king didn’t want to get on the wrong side of.

So I acquiesced. The Sisterhood had waited decades for a solution to their problems. They could wait a few more weeks. And then I’d get to do something with official sanction which the powers of Mund had forever held beyond the reach of the unsanctioned archmage.

Give things out, freely. Share the limitless possibilities of our magic with the people.

Why not? Why had it always had to be monetised? Why did the Magisterium always have to twist everything, even the most beautiful things, into a warped and malign shape before they’d brand it with their seal of approval?

Soon we would give it away.

“Ze price of dead-men’s plasma has, ah, gone up through the roof.” I nodded at her encouragingly, and she smiled briefly. “I do not think zere is any short amount. I think zey are trying tricks.”

“We can afford it. We can’t do without those shipments, Nafala.”

“Unless… my Lord Raz vould cast ze spells himself.”

I stuck my tongue out at her, and she giggled, pushing her hair behind her ear.

I could feel the tightness of my smile as I turned back to face Northril.

When I was with Nafala, I was more than capable of experiencing physical passion; my body underwent the correct amused responses when she joked around; I even felt a strong bond of friendship… Yet there was something missing. An emptiness, a hollow in the centre of me, a cold whirlpool to drag down the song in my heart and drown it, swallow the echoes away.

I was holding back.

Suddenly the silence felt awkward.

“What’s raberak?” I asked.

“Raberak?”

“I heard someone talking about it – someone was looking for raberak-bones, and –

“Ah…” She laughed a little. “You have me worrying zen. Raberak, zis means ‘dragon’.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And this doesn’t worry you?”

Why are Mundians going so far afield to find dragon-bones? Has the craze really taken off so much that they’re coming to Telior for more? Is it because there’s less competition?

But what she said next was even more confusing.

“Hm?” She looked genuinely surprised at my concern. “Zis is a… vell, my grandfazzer, he voz a… how you say, adventure?”

“Adventurer.”

“Ad–ven-choora… He voz alvays selling ze dragon-parts, not just ze bones, vhenever he voz lucky enough to come across zem.”

“Did he?”

“He even killed one, once. So Fazzer says. Viz about thirty people… Zis voz a small one, zough. Half a longship, and it may have… grown in ze telling.”

“Wow.” My throat, tongue, lips formed the appropriately-awed word – I even smiled at her impressive use of the Mundic turn of phrase – but my mind was adrift. “So, this has always been a trade? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Here, at least. It was new in Mund – I think…”

I supposed there must’ve always been nuts who were interested in collectibles derived from the carcasses of dragons and other equally-interesting magical monsters. I was probably making something out of nothing.

“Why haven’t I seen dragon-skulls on the walls and all that?” I wondered aloud. “You’d think, if it’d been an industry here for, what, decades? that there’d be more of the dropping things on display. I’ve been right through the High Hall –”

“Oh, no, zey are all sent overseas, I am sure! Zey are vorth, vell, not zeir veight in gold, but –“

“I get it.”

I frowned, and she was starting to pick up on it.

“But you did not have zese, zese trophies in Mund?”

I shook my head. “No, and I went to some of the poshest houses we’ve got. Trust me, if it was big enough to fuel an industry over here – even getting people to set off on expeditions looking for them – I’d have seen some. People don’t really think or talk much about dragons, there. There aren’t… well, until recently a dragon hadn’t been to Mund in centuries – or so we all thought, anyway…”

It had me confused-enough that my suspicious nature came to the fore.

Once I had Ghena pacified, the Shipbuilders’ saws checked, and everyone working on the Sisterhood’s wands, I headed back to the market. Enwraithed, I watched the organiser of the expedition as dusk fell. The stout old woman in a grey dress… whose slumped posture vanished entirely between one step and the next once she was three streets away. I caught a glimpse of her face beneath the hood when I ranged ahead of her on a lower level – her soft, winning smile had been replaced by a cold expression, and her eyes darted into every nook and cranny, almost as though she were aware of me.

Okay, little lady. Now you’ve got me curious.

She probably didn’t have a clue I was following her, to be fair, given the fact I moved silently and invisibly high above her eyeline – but she seemed nervous. Maybe it was just that she had a healthy sense of self-preservation, or some past event made her mistrust corners, dark recesses. Whatever it was, I doubted any ordinary rogue could’ve come upon her unawares, given her hyperactive gaze.

She’d been inviting her applicants to join them on the nineteenth of Chraunost – Koronov, here, but it meant the same thing. That was three days away. From what I’d been able to tell, she’d only gotten about four or five potential hirelings, sellswords by the looks of them. They were to meet aboard her ship, the Starfall. I half-expected her to head down to the harbour and board her vessel, but she didn’t. She headed inland, towards the ‘back streets’ of Telior.

When she finally entered a house, tucked away against the looming cliff-face, I followed through the dwelling’s planks. We were entering a dingy hovel where a bunch of drugged-up low-lives sat in their own drop, gibbering and pawing at each other. I wouldn’t have given the place a second glance, but the old woman strode with purpose through the strewn-about, sweaty limbs, moving to the back wall –

Where she opened a grimy cupboard and climbed inside, shutting it firmly behind her from inside somehow.

Okay. Okay… This is totally a Yearsend gift…

I went with her, penetrating what turned out to be stone, drifting along with only my face extending into the tunnel she followed.

I waited while she lit a lantern from her knapsack, and trailed along the dripping ceiling behind her as we traversed more tunnels, hundreds of feet of them. The damp passageways were largely man-made, hewn by mining tool and in a few places moulded by wizardry, but at least some of the caverns had to have been natural formations. As we proceeded, the woman quickened her pace, almost swinging her arms in her urgency despite the unevenness of the ground, despite the lantern she carried flailing about, casting deranged shadows across our rocky surroundings.

I was starting to get uncomfortable – the wraith-form was a blessing, but too much of this reminded me of the pits beneath Mund. The only reason I could still breathe was that I knew I could escape at any moment. Had I been here the way she was, a default person, just walking around without the power to phase through solid stone… I would’ve left already, I was certain.

Thankfully, it wasn’t long before I sensed what lay ahead. Her destination.

A vampire.

Her vampire master.

* * *

Or mistress, as it turned out.

The cavern in which the bloodsucker had made its den was smaller than my bedroom in the tower, smaller than my parents’ apartment in Mud Lane, but it was relatively dry compared with the previous tunnels. A number of makeshift cots had been haphazardly nailed together and shoved in the corner – only one showed any signs of recent use. A battered old chest stood in the other corner. There was nothing else by way of furniture. Random clothing had been scattered across a spare bed – robes or dresses or cloaks, it was hard to tell – and several stacks of books made for the only clutter. There was no stench of blood or death on the air, none of the decay I’d associated with the haunts of a vampire.

At first, upon perceiving the creature there ahead of us, I started to make assumptions. That the expeditions were a cover, a front to prevent the authorities noticing the disappearance of large numbers of people. That the vampire had a hidden agenda, involving an endlessly-rumbling tummy and an unquenchable thirst for the red stuff.

But within seconds I was doubting myself. The eldritch knew how to keep unnoticed. This was no fledgling. It was practised, conscious of its own vulnerabilities. It had hidden itself away, far beyond the reach of my sorcerous senses, using enthralled humans for its tools. It produced no waste, required no food or water or light. Its shape in my mind was deep, its every twist and snarl filled with the will of a sorcerer. It was bound, rather securely.

The vampire’s white face and hair shone in the lantern-light. She was standing in the centre of the cavern as her pet approached, and I could make out the purple eyes, their fierce hunger. She was nail-thin, yet her cheeks were full and round, her small mouth opened in a smile to reveal flashing teeth.

The old woman moaned as she virtually skipped forwards: “I’m back, Elrydea!” She spoke in Telese, but I could tell that ‘Elrydea’ was either a name, or a title, a term of respect of some kind.

“Welcome, Cerele.” The undead creature’s whisper contained the same hunger as her eyes; it sliced through the damp air like a knife through flesh. “Embrace me.”

“Yes, Elrydea!”

The vampire didn’t move towards her meal, but I could tell she wanted to. As soon as the victim came within arm’s reach, she swept her up and sank her fangs into the woman’s throat.

I physically braced myself for the inevitable, though I knew she wasn’t going to kill her. I clenched my insubstantial fists, but there was no spray or even scent of blood.

Slowly, slowly, Elrydea released Cerele and pulled away.

I stayed there by the ceiling, beyond their perceptions, watching as the vampire went to open the chest and treated her poor slave with a few drops of a healing potion.

“You were not followed?” the vampire asked casually in the same whispering slice, as she daubed an ointment on the bite-marks on Cerele’s neck.

“No, Elrydea. The new warlock was in the marketplace again today. I don’t think he paid me any attention.”

“Good. This is good.” The vampire sat down on her bed, the human standing smartly upright before her. “And the work?”

“Five karmaal up today. Three of them will be there.”

Five signed up? I guessed.

“So in total, nineteen are certain for the next expedition. Twenty-five, at most.”

So, there really is an expedition?

“Nineteen. Nineteen will be plenty.”

Elrydea looked at her prey hungrily once more, and Cerele merely tipped her head, exposing her neck –

The thing drank, and I sank down through the air, hearing the insubstantial blood pounding in my insubstantial ears.

“What was that?” The vampire immediately raised her head, stepping away from the old woman and glancing in my direction.

I gave it my best ghost impression.

“Wooh… wooooooh… woooooooooh!“

Cerele twisted in on herself, cringing.

“You said you weren’t followed!” Elrydea snapped.

“I didn’t know!” the slave moaned, tearing at her hair.

I spoke in Mundic. “Youuuuuu, vampire, have been a very naughty girl! No Yearsend presents for you!”

“It is him,” Elrydea muttered to herself in a tone of resignation, as though she’d expected this to happen sooner or later. She raised her voice, replied in my tongue: “Well met, but goodbye, sor-“

I knew what she was getting at. She was bound already, and for so long as she wished me no harm she would be able to escape right past me, run through my shields…

I dropped Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks into the tunnel, layering them so that the entirety of the passageway was blocked by black iron spikes. Their fiery warhammers lit the space better than the old woman’s lantern, casting a warm orange glow over the place.

For good measure, I brought through my mekkustremin at the same time. I knew how fast vampires could be, and the speedy doll-demon was still my best counter.

It was interesting. It took more out of me to summon them than usual.

Something the blood-sucker’s done? Or am I just… weaker?

“Don’t let the vampire past,” I growled in Infernal.

“My pleasure,” Mr. Cuddlesticks replied in a rare show of enthusiasm. I couldn’t even recall the last time one of his kind had replied to me. It was eerie, to think that they were awake and alive in there. People, not automatons.

I floated down, releasing the gremlin invisibility and making myself one-tenth solid.

“You were saying goodbye, Elrydea? You aren’t leaving that way.”

The vampiress smiled toothily, but I could see how she’d been shaken by my response to her words.

“Perhaps not, then, human. Perhaps I’m destined to die at your hands.” She clapped hers together then folded them firmly. “We shall see.”

“What are you doing with the dragon-bones?”

She tilted her head slightly, looking at me as if my question amused her.

“What, is that why you’re here? Of all things!” She laughed, hollow, nethernal laughter. “That’s just how I fund my continued existence, I’m afraid… You aren’t here about the murders? Whenever I killed some-“

“You aren’t fooling me with this act.” I wagged my finger at her. “Shame. Shame, Elrydea. Like you’re in need of cash…” I looked pointedly around her crude home. “Or corpses.” I finished by nodding at Cerele. “Look, I’ll give you one more chance, before things start to get nasty. The dragon-bones. Spill.”

She decided to fight, perhaps hoping that in the commotion she’d be killed outright. The soul of most eldritches couldn’t just be plucked from the cadavers they left behind. Vampires couldn’t become ghosts. They weren’t liches. Her soul would take time to reform on its plane of origin, its final location in the red river uncertain. All the answers I might’ve extracted from her would be put beyond my reach.

But in deciding to leap at me, howling, a sudden flurry of clawed white fingers and teeth – she only sealed her fate. She rebounded from the barrier not six feet from her face, crashing back onto the stone with a very unvampiric lack of grace.

“I’m going to have to rebind you, then,” I said without much enthusiasm, watching as she twisted back up to her feet. “I hope your previous master won’t miss you too much.”

“I can feel you trying,” she said casually as she sat on the bed, not much defiance in her tone. “Don’t strain anything, Mundian. You overestimate yourself.”

“That’s what they’re always telling me,” I grated.

She was confident in her master’s strength, the ability of the bond to hold fast. And her words contained cause for both reassurance and concern. The fact she could feel it – all I’d done was come to the decision, and my glare was now painful to her. That was good to hear. But the fact that she endured the pain, seemingly unfazed? Troubling. Very troubling.

I focussed my will – be mine, be mine! – yet there was nothing. Just a sweet, fanged smile.

Cerele was looking between us with an increasingly-wild shine in her eyes. I had no idea just how much of this conversation she’d been able to follow.

“Fine.” My voice was brittle even to my own ears. “Fine, we’ll have it your way.”

An expanded shape brought both Cerele and Elrydea crashing back into the far wall, pinning them there like shop mannequins on display.

“Release your slave,” I growled. It angered me, seeing the innocent woman suffering under my power, through no fault of her own.

The vampire chuckled, while her pet struggled for breath.

“Why?” Elrydea rasped. “Why would I do this? With what can you threaten me?”

“Death!”

“Death holds no mystery to me. You merely return me to my master’s arms.”

I scowled. “I’ll let you live, then. Let her go, and I’ll let you go.”

The amethyst eyes narrowed. “You would truly do this?”

For a creature so unafraid of death, she hadn’t half come around quickly.

“You’d have to leave Telior. Leave, and never come back.”

“You swear it?”

“On my life.”

“Swear by Kultemeren.”

“I swear by Kultemeren…”

That much wasn’t a lie. I did, sometimes, swear by Kultemeren. The compulsion to finish my intended sentence faded upon this realisation.

But I did lie, didn’t I? How?

“It suffices.” She nodded, butting her head against the force-barrier. In spite of her change of heart, it still prevented her movements.

I folded the shields away, and Elrydea went immediately to the cringing Cerele, pulling the old woman up to her feet gently.

“Here, Cerele, hush. Look at me now. Look at me! Good. Here. Forget. You are free from my service. You no longer desire me. You no longer live to be my blood. Forget all I told you. Be mine no longer.”

The response took its time, came in stages. At first Cerele merely shook her head, like a dazed animal. Then she shuffled back from the vampire, shaking her hands free of the cold undead clutch. Finally, her face reacted, contorting into a smear of terror and disgust – the mouth opened, emitting a shriek –

She staggered back, and I caught her. Elrydea made to move forwards to help her – was that concern on the eldritch’s features? – but I manoeuvred to put myself between them and the vampire halted.

Cerele stayed with me this time. Elrydea had done it. She’d freed her victim.

“It’s okay!” I yelled, almost straight into Cerele’s ear as she continued shrieking, leaning back into me and staring at her former mistress. “It’s okay, it’s over!”

“No!” the old woman gasped in Telese. “These things are never over! Baalika her!” She whirled about at me, eyes wide and wet in fear and hate, and her next words were broken Mundic. “You must! Must kill, Hool Raz!”

“He swore on Kultemeren,” the vampire sneered. “That means something to him, foul creature. How swiftly you turn to despise me, me, whose patronage bought you all you –”

“Shut up!” I snapped, infusing my voice with gremlin-power. “Shut up, killer! I swore on Kultemeren, but if you grew up in Mund you’d have made me finish the phrase. My life? My life was always forfeit.”

Now it was the vampire’s eyes that widened, Cerele’s fear and hate reflected there in the burning purple eyes.

“I swear by Kultemeren… you die before sunrise.” I smiled, and the old woman beside me smiled too. “The only thing that’s going to matter to you will be the method of that death.”

Cerele didn’t leave my side until morning came, and I took her for breakfast, not wanting to leave her alone until I was certain she had somewhere to go, people to look after her. She opted for kippers (disgusting) while I had a hard-boiled egg. We didn’t talk much, the vampire’s final screams still probably resounding inside her head just as loudly as they were inside mine.

Oh, she’d screamed in the end, once I let the demons have their way with her. The problem with regeneration was that torture could be endless, and the incredible strength within her was worthless when I had minions that could snap her unbreakable limbs like twigs. Cerele hadn’t soured on it, and, quite frankly, I hadn’t either. I’d had my fill of vampires to last a lifetime.

So I’d done as much as I could without betraying my principles, without breaking my promise to the God of Truth. I could’ve had her skinned over and over, down the course of weeks, months, until I had my answers, but I didn’t. I relented. I was a kindly destroyer.

She gave me nothing, really, just screams and spite, but I got one half-answer. One response. Where it fit into the overall pattern, I had no notion. Elrydea hadn’t even realised what she was saying until it was too late.

The lipless face had still been able to smile.

“For a hundred years! A hundred years, not one of them! No one found me! No one saw! I am victorious, sorcerer! I win! In dying here, now, I win! My master wins, and he will skin you! He will make you beg for death such as this!”

And I’d sneered that she wasn’t dying, not for a long time yet.

It was only now, looking back, that I saw it.

Had she been gathering dragon-bones for a hundred years?

Has her master? Where else are his eldritches? What could he want these relics for?

I didn’t even want to think about it. It was Mund. It was the Crucible, invading my peaceful sanctuary, my home away from home. It was the shadow, stretching out across the sea for me with its long-fingered hand.

And if I’d not heard the chatter in Irontooth Gates – if I hadn’t stayed at the Lucky Fox, would I have even questioned the something-bones, the raberak translation –

Rathal.

Rathal – he knew. He had to have known.

“I have to go,” I said, standing abruptly.

She tried to grab my hand, thank me – I tried my best to smile but it must have looked a mortifying grimace – and the moment I was out of sight of her I hurled myself into insubstantiality, invisibility, sinking through the boards and down to the water, where no one could see me throw up.

I spent half an hour there in the waves, letting their coldness pass through me, hiding in the shadows beneath Telior.

I am free… am I free? Did I do that to the vampire? Did I do it, or did Rathal do it?

Did Irimar know what I am?

Did Tanra?

Do I?

* * *

I told the king about Cerele and Elrydea, and ended up threatening a few knights who insisted we should bring the old woman and the captain of the Starfall in for ‘questioning’. I already had all the information she could offer. Whatever dragon-bones were found on such expeditions would be dropped off in Mepheleve or Frimbrenka, a hundred or more leagues south. Neither she nor the captain could identify the men who came aboard to bring their bounties ashore – the associates of Elrydea’s master were humans, men of ordinary character and appearance, known to her only by a tattoo some bore on the backs of their hands – a black circle.

The king had been disturbed by this, but it was obvious from the unchanging position of many of the nobles that the main factor in their desire to ‘question’ Cerele was to satisfy themselves she was no threat. Subject her to pain and misery to be certain they were still in charge, that they could remain comfortable despite the terrifying news of a vampire in their midst for a century. They sought a target for their emasculation, a way to filter out their vulnerabilities, make themselves strong again in their own eyes.

Fools.

“Enough,” Deymar had said in the end, silencing most voices. “I accept the counsel of Lord Raz. I am more concerned with what this jarkar.”

The word I didn’t understand I later discovered meant portends. And I happened to agree with him.

Later on, in private, I told the king I didn’t much fancy the chances of his agents in Mepheleve and Frimbrenka, if they went digging for information. They’d probably just end up dead if they messed around with wrong people. And the last thing I wanted was to leave myself; I wasn’t going to risk the wrath of the twins like that. In the end I managed to persuade our sovereign ruler to let me send a few imps south, to see what they could uncover. I dispatched Oldbeard and Blandface, with Pinktongue to serve as a messenger, before finally finding my bed.

That following night, not long after I awoke, a wraith flew past my window while I lay there reading beneath a light coverlet.

I wasn’t thick. Or if I was, I wasn’t thick-thick. I knew what this was.

Coincidence? Impossible.

This was a trap.

The shadowy presence was moving just slowly-enough that I had chance to get dressed, get my emergency gear in place on my belts, before the thing disappeared beyond my perceptions. I left a hastily-scrawled note, and then, cloaked in my own wraith, I gave chase.

We were climbing the midnight air, cresting the cliffs within seconds; then my prey levelled out, coursing down over the fens. I could almost see it, the amorphous, purple-tinged shadow floating on the breeze.

The wind was less forceful out here, and beneath the clots of reeds and weeds there were still, silent meres, gleaming like ethereal sap under the starlight. Other sources of illumination were out there too, fireflies of some kind I supposed – but these fireflies burned bright emerald-green and winked on-off, on-off, drifting in aimless patterns over the marshes. I was surprised at the beauty I found in such a desolate landscape.

We penetrated inland, moving farther and farther from the coast that’d been my home these last months. It was strange, not being able to hear the sea, or even properly smell it. I’d brought the twins to the swamps once or twice, when I’d entered Etherium for supplies and Jaid had asked to come along – but I’d never before travelled this far from Telior.

Never under starlight.

We hadn’t gone twenty miles when the wraith I was trailing after suddenly changed course, diving – it sank down into one of the silvery, stagnant pools and vanished.

I was currently flying high, checking I could still make out the dark line of the sea on the horizon, and I almost missed my quarry’s descent. I quickly adjusted my trajectory to follow, then paused before entering the earth.

This wasn’t just a trap. This was the trappiest trap of Traptown. This was a personal invitation from the vampire’s master.

And it was someone confident, too. Someone who really didn’t care about my power, so assured in their own capabilities that I was simply vermin to be led into the net.

I wavered, on the cusp of chasing the wraith anyway, and it was only the thought of the twins holding me back.

I could die down there. I should go back.

I knew it for a fact. I wasn’t thick, no. I should’ve gone back, returned in the morning outfitted with every conceivable defence, and a posse of magicians at my back – maybe even Lord Orcan, if he could be persuaded –

But something told me that this opportunity was a one-off. If I missed it, tomorrow it would just be another dank, empty cavern – no wraith, no arch-sorcerer…

I grinned at myself. What was I so afraid of? Another confrontation? Why? I was the world’s dropping expert on threats like this. What right did I have to refuse the call?

I closed my mouth upon entering the water, and squeezed my eyes to slits as I penetrated the earth below. After thirty seconds of breathless, serene travel I emerged into the open brightness beyond, looking down into my enemy’s dwelling-place.

The cave was immense. It had to be, to house such a hoard of body-parts.

A lair of bone, a sunken fortress gleaming yellow-white. Walls of piled pelvises. Portcullises of rib and femur. Battlements, empty skulls leering. Pearly streets where the cobble-stones were hands and fingers, stripped of all the stains of their former flesh, seams filled with a ghastly gravel. The whole structure was lit by floating glow-globes, as though my opponent wanted his artistry exposed to view, longing to have his handiwork judged by his peer.

Of him there was no sign.

I sank down, admiring the arch-sorcerer’s imagination in spite of myself. There were gleaming towers of teeth, bridges of rib, flapping banners of skin inked with the sigil of the black crown. The corpses of creatures, too, splayed out like decorations. The withered cadaver of a gigantic snake, coiled loosely about the crenellations, hanging limply. The heavy carcass of a manticore, its furry mane reduced to thin grey whiskers, stinger-tail drooping. The remains of a vast dragon made for the ultimate prize, posed atop the highest tower, pale tatters of scales falling down about its bones, like a horrid sheet draped across a white statuette.

I studied the dragon in particular as I descended. It was big enough to encompass a marketplace in the ragged folds of its wings, and the sigil marked on the glistening pennants was brought into sharp relief: a real crown, shaped from jet, had been placed lopsided upon its long-horned brow.

I shuddered, and looked away.

Is that how big Tyr Kayn was?

I’d thought Ibb and the others had been exaggerating, at least a little, when they’d described Ord Ylon. No longer. It rattled me, to think of something that tremendous being alive. Of all the things to which I’d borne witness on this plane, only the smikelliol rivalled it in size. How had Redgate, an evil man by all accounts, brought himself to face down such a challenge? For the first time, I almost felt relieved to be away from Mund, from all that madness.

They’re going to have to fight five of them? Even bigger, even stronger? No thank you…

Though, there was every possibility that my actions here could impact that. If they were gathering dragon-bones – whole corpses too, apparently – and I could intervene, even slightly… Could my deeds in Telior make some minor difference? Disrupt the dragons’ plans?

“What are the odds?” I muttered to myself. “Cross half the world, and still end up with my foot stuck in the same damn drop-hole. Curse you, Rathal…”

If I was being honest with myself, I was clearly outclassed here. I’d never even tried to reach Shallowlie’s skill-level when it came to reforming bones into more-complex formations; I’d barely had cause or chance to practice.

But tricks were just tricks. Raw strength was something else. I didn’t care how many eldritches he had at his command; I wasn’t afraid. I had my shields, and my wraith. If the whole place came alive… un-alive around me, I could just withdraw. And if I could take Shallowlie – and I reckoned I’d have had a fair shot – I could take this interloper too.

Are you still alive, Min? What about you, Ly? What happened to you both?

As I came close to the macabre streets, peering into the shadows of elegant, nauseating archways, the roadway beneath me came to life.

I had no idea how many tens, hundreds of thousands of bodies were here. The very foundation of this bone-city seemed to be corpses too: I sensed a single shape of actual unlife beneath the street, and then within seconds the ‘cobbles’ parted and a whole humanoid skeleton emerged, its eyeless, staring skull rising first, purple pinpricks in the darkness of the sockets.

Its voice was a nethernal rattle, the fleshless jaw moving along with the rhythm of the words as if by ancient habit.

“Welcome, Lord Mortenn, to the abode of the Prince Deathwyrm. He will greet you shortly; he is currently afar in thought. Will you take refreshment, while you wait?”

I looked down upon the skeletal servitor with no small degree of alarm.

He knows who I am. And… Prince Deathwyrm…

I had a pretty good idea who that was.

I steeled myself. This meeting had been a long time coming. I was ready, if it really was him.

“Refreshment? Really.”

“We have water and wine, honey and berry, provided by fey eldritch. We have blood and bile, intestinal tract and –”

I waved a hand. “Enough! No, I don’t need refreshment. All I need is your master to –”

The metal voice interrupted me, drowning me out, an immense sound, echoing out of a throat so deep and wide that it were as though the cavern itself spoke:

“My apologies, mortal.”

I craned my neck, looked up beyond my barriers.

“I was otherwise occupied. You followed more-closely than I expected.”

It wasn’t even looking at me, but the translucent eyelids were sliding and shifting; I could see the amethyst fire of unliving irises there, burning in the dragon’s skull.

No. Not a mere dead dragon. The dracolich.

I could only sense it now that it was moving, a monstrous shape in my mind, expansive, beyond full comprehension. Was my failure to perceive it earlier a natural consequence of its indescribable pattern, or had my abilities really atrophied that far?

I didn’t have much time to think, nor the requisite coherency of thought. It was speaking. To me. The mouth opened and closed, teeth snapping with a sound like a million pairs of duel-locked swords. The giant, jelly-like tongue flicked.

The eyes finally peeled open, fixated upon me.

I did this to myself. I wrecked his goblin operation in the mountains. He followed me. He knew who I was, what I was, and couldn’t care less.

There was an awful heaviness inside my chest, but the silence expanded and I had to speak.

“W-what do you want with me?”

There was some relief with the burst of breath accompanying my words, but the tightness, painful fullness in my heart quickly resumed, redoubled.

“I? Want?” The dragon sounded bemused. “No. It is what you want, isn’t it? I merely permitted an opportunity for you to enact your innermost desire. Such is my role here.”

I shivered, unable to breathe or to exhale, floating there beneath him.

“I thought you would hesitate, tremble upon the threshold, but you never wavered once you bore witness to my domain. Why is that, Kastyr? What is this vehemence with which you hurl yourself into peril? Where is its heart? I would know.”

It was only as the silence dragged that I realised I had to answer. Somehow, I managed to shudder forth words.

“I-I-I’m trembling now.”

The dracolich laughed, and, discerning its tone, I fell further into shock.

It wasn’t mocking, wasn’t trying to intimidate me.

It was good-natured – almost friendly. Like a grown man, laughing at a toddler’s straightforwardness.

“No, do go on, little one. What is the heart of the champion? This I am simply dying to understand.”

The pallid lips peeled back in a sort of grin. Inevitably, it was a ‘take a closer look at the thousand swords that you may well soon die on’ kind of grin.

The heart of the champion?

“What… what do you mean?”

“You know full well. You are no cretin. What drove you to come here, risk it all?”

The Crucible… The dragons…

I have to help, if only in a tiny way.

“P-people are in danger,” I stammered. “If I can – if I can stop – save –“

“No.”

The flat denial – its draconic source –

I cut myself off instantly.

“There are many things we tell others, baby sorcerer, tell ourselves. Countless are the lies of the ego. They wear different faces, disguises, at different times. Only rarely will we admit to ourselves the truth. And here the lie is exposed, a nerve to toy with. Whose life do you save, pursuing my pet?”

I looked up at the monster, met its dreadful gaze in which the whole of Nethernum seemed to shimmer.

I knew the answer he wanted, and my throat seized up again.

I know the truth.

I mumbled the word.

“Mine.”

“Yessssssss.” The great head snaked down, the neck elongating beyond my previous estimation. The titanic face loomed. “Yes, you understand fully the import of your actions! You know that you have been weak. You know that you wane. Deep within, the Wellspring cries out to be filled. Even the darkness of the depths, Zyger of your nightmares – even that place did not dessicate you like this, this placid life, these mechanical motions. It only led you here. But you were not made to be a crafter, a tinker. You were made to be a fighter. A thinker.”

I looked away, at the fortress of bone that was everything, all around me.

“It’s not all just personal power,” I whispered. “It’s not about me.”

“Oh but it is. It’s all to feel good. It’s all that matters in the end. People do what puts a smile on their face, even if it costs them the skin and lips that cover it.”

I looked up at him, incensed suddenly. “Even if it makes them weep?”

“Especially then! If those tears can be beheld – oh, you underestimate the sweetness to be found in martyrdom even as you walk its paths. Ah, youth! When you look back – then! only then shall you see it aright. To have so much to learn… It is a wonder that you are my weapon, that the shears of such force might be so blunt… This reticence in you shall be the death of me!”

Was he right? Was it all just personal power, in the end? I saved people, and it felt good, it felt right, but it wasn’t the why. Money had been the root of necessity, at the start. Becoming a champion made sense. And the glory to be won… the fame…

But wasn’t that more or less how we all got started? We were flesh and blood, like anyone else, the same after our awakenings as before them…

For all that I tried to do the right thing, for all that I tried to be the model warlock, I’d never been a ‘good person’, I supposed. Not really. I’d gone through the motions, like the dracolich said. I did my best to keep to the tenets of the gods of the light, did my best to be a good role-model. It wasn’t because it was right, it was because it was easy. Easy to be that way, be that person. Even if you failed, people saw your intention. They let you down softly. It was easy, when you were trying to be good.

When they died –

When it happened, and there was no healing for it –

I tried.

But I’d failed, hard. More than failed. I gave up. I’d earned my share of hate, and then some.

I came here, into this den of death, against all better judgement, not because someone else needed me to – because I needed me to. It wasn’t a want, wasn’t an urge. It was me. I was selfish. A selfish idiot.

Watchtowers like giant guardians, separated by white lawns from yawning, temple-like palaces. The vast keep upon which my foe was poised. Immense, awful structures, comprised of millions, billions of parts.

Such raw strength, to command so many. This was beyond the ken of books, of other eldritches like Zel. Nothing was so powerful. Nothing could do this alone.

The vampire’s master was so far beyond me, and I would never catch up, never plumb such intriguing, awful depths. Because I’d surrendered. No more fighting, no more thinking. Crafting and tinkering, that was it for me now. I owned only two undead creatures… didn’t I? Two, compared to this… And this was just the tip of the sword he wielded! Where was the Queen of Moths? Where were all his other fey, his demons?

I looked back up, met the glistening gaze.

And that’s all I’ll be, in the end? His weapon?

“And for you?” I sneered. “This kingdom of bones? I think not. This is for show, right?”

The head dipped, nodding solemnly. “I had the time. In truth I was no more made to craft than you, but it is only fitting that I greet my guest in an environment suited to their nature. A city for a city-dweller, no?”

He’s no Aidel. No Graima.

He was greater in strength, of course – but it wasn’t just that. He was extra-dimensional in essence by birth, and a being far older than those liches, removed from the plights of mortalkind. He saw us primarily as a food source.

He designed this not as a way to welcome me. It was a way to try to intimidate me, no matter what he said. This was never supposed to be a city; only a charnel house of mind-numbing proportions.

“So… you fight. You think.” I waved an arm at the sickening surroundings. “Not one dragon bone in sight, save your own. And yet you know I know you’re a collector.”

“Ah-ha!” The dracolich’s laughter sent purplish fumes pouring out of the cavernous nostrils, blasting into my shields and then lingering there, congealing into clouds before slowly dissipating. “Now you are thinking again! But you forget – you know I know you are no buyer. You bring up this topic only to bring us closer to blows. I found what knowledge you seek. I see how you grasp with thoughtless hands at such secrets. I know your suspicion. I do know your heart, champion.”

Was he right again? Did I want to fight him? Consciously, that couldn’t have been further from the truth – and yet…

Did I come here to die?

The self-directed question filled my insubstantial flesh with chills – it was the first time such a thing had occurred to me, and the very fact I couldn’t answer it, couldn’t see the truth of myself… It was the most terrifying thought I’d ever had.

“Yes, I sought the remains of my kindred, scouring the earths for centuries, sifting the bones for those containing the power, the inheritance I needed. My brethren have played their parts, and the time appointed by Ulu Kalar nears, necessitating my journey to this plane. When my great-grandsire, Mal Tagar, dwells in my flesh, all but a handful of the broods will be reclaimed. The souls of most are mine already. I await only the moment of Return.”

Grandsire… Mal Tagar…

Hearing it straight from the dragon’s mouth, as it were, was something else.

“You really are Mal Malas,” I breathed.

The confirmation of my fears made me crumble inside. This wasn’t just an agent of Tyr Kayn and her plans. The skeleton hadn’t been lying. This really was Prince Deathwyrm. From the story-books. This was a dragon of Lovebright’s maker’s generation. Potent beyond compare in sorcery, before he died – and, by the looks of things, he’d come back no less powerful.

No, he was no archlich like Aidel and Graima had been. They weren’t even on the same scale as him.

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

The gargantuan smile made my mind up for me. Blades formed on my outermost shields, and I re-reinforced them faster than lightning, drawing them out into extended spears as they began to rotate –

Too slow.

A counterstrike of unfathomable energy speared down, a magenta lance so radiant it left an imprint on my eyes in the seconds that followed. I blinked, staring at the tatters of my shapes, my stars.

He’d stripped me of everything – every shield, even my circle – without a single outward gesture.

“Training you would be amusing, Kastyr Mortenn. But you – you are too terrified to contend with me, I think. I see it in your face. Are you too terrified?”

Train me?

I saw the black fumes coiling there about the nostrils. My hands were numb. The shapes, the spells deserted me.

I faced an eolastyr. I saw a smikelliol. I bore witness to the red eyes of Infernum staring down at us in the blackness.

None of it. None of it had been quite like this.

Jerkily, I nodded.

“Very well – a shame. You may depart, then. I am pleased we have had this chance to meet, speak. It shall not be our last; of that I am certain.”

You’ll tell me everything, and let me leave?

“W-why…”

“Why what, my son?”

“Why,” I licked my lips, “would you train me?”

“But, you are to be instrumental in the Return, of course! Ha!” The laughter was a short, steely roar. “Were you yet unaware of your destiny?”

“Your… Tyr Kayn…” I didn’t fully recall their familial connection. “She wanted me to kill for her. Kill the twins.”

“Indeed.” The eyes burned fiercely. “But to her I did not impart all the myriad facets of Ulu Kalar’s dream, just as I imparted yet fewer to her mother ere she left for your city. Such would break her, break all.”

“But not you?”

“I may not look it, but I am made of sterner stuff than she – than any of them.”

“Than Ord Ylon,” I whispered.

Mal Malas unfolded his torn wings then furled them again, a kind of shrugging. His harrowing smile never changed as he spoke.

“I guess your thought. Your ‘Redgate’ was quite possibly, at that point, the greatest native of the material plane to exist – anywhere. Ord Ylon underestimated him. It did not surprise me that he defeated my uncle, yet he would not have done so alone, I am certain. It does not matter, so long as the necessary roles are fulfilled, and I see now the meaning of that which before had gone unclear. The future is the same, in either case. I had no intention of ever answering the calls of Draem’s daughter, nor of ever aiding my liege-lord. I had a higher calling. Soon Ord Ylon shall be returned to us, in any case, and Nil Sorog, along with all their brood and the other chieftains of our kindred.”

“And who’ve you sent to collect their bones?” I muttered darkly. I was recovering my scorn in the wake of his overwhelming self-confidence.

“Oh, haha-haha-haha,” he gargled his vile laughter, “they make their way.”

Then the right foreleg reached out, a single claw used to point at me accusatorily.

“You should stop asking questions, if you intend to stay in your comfortable tower. Go create your baubles, guildmaster. Continue to lull yourself to sleep with your craven self-condemnation. Let your power seep out through unkept walls and into the ground. See how that serves you, when the harbinger has gone ahead and left you in the shadow of your doom. Even now it towers high above you, enveloping the sky. Before too long it shall shroud the sun, and ere you are destroyed you will fight blindly, struggle in my net, your own will a traitor to the cause. You do not understand how close you are to falling, how the blade beneath your feet teeters as you sway.”

I was back under Hadin and Renkos’s knife. I wanted to move; the outward paralysis wasn’t reflected by the inner turmoil, the contents of my mind reeling from the horror of it all, thoughts passing too quickly for me to seize hold –

He’s telling me to go?

Go!

But it’s a trick! What are his powers? How many eldritches dwell within him? He can see the future, just like that? He can see through me?

My eye was drawn to the jet crown looped over his most-prominent pair of horns.

What is that thing?

“Go-o-o-o,” Mal Malas hissed, “before your curiosity kills you. What would your brother say, if you were to lose another limb tonight? Would it amuse you both in the same way it would me? The futures are unclear as to the precise consequences. Could my curiosity kill you? Hm-m-m-m-m-m…”

I shook my head blankly, using the dull wraith-flight to drift back, away from him.

“I’m going,” I said numbly, still drifting away. “I – I’m going –”

“No,” Malas snarled, rearing up suddenly, splaying the wings in their full, decrepit splendour, raising his forelimbs, shoulders back and neck extended. “No, in fact. I have changed my mind. I see that it shall only augment the effect.”

I’d never beat my wings so hard; I twisted, propelling myself up at the cavern ceiling at an angle away from him –

When a force-diamond looped itself about me, the nuances of ill-will that had so often worked in my favour betrayed me, overlooking my terror, finding only the animosity in my soul.

Like Elrydea. For all that I fled, I wanted to fight him. With every shred of my will, I longed for his destruction.

Cowardice killed.

I collided head-first with the magenta barrier, and an incorporeal nature was no hindrance to the dracolich’s impeccable shieldcraft. I recoiled, dazed by the impact, sylph-wings fluttering – the top of my skull hurt, hurt so bad it felt like it’d cracked –

His shells dragged me back down to the bony street, trapping me there inside a tesseract of pink energy. Thanks to the wraith-form, I half-submerged myself in the bones by accident while I struggled to escape.

He ignored my futile resistance, speaking calmly all the while.

“You are so far from what we need. We all have it inside us, even the thought-shapers – but especially we of plane-shaping, and the flesh-shapers too. This confidence. We are immortal! But we – yes, even I! – we are all-too-mortal, are we not? Our skin may be impenetrable, yet the sword of magic shall slice us. Our skeleton may be the substance of ghosts, yet the greater spell grinds the bones of ghosts to unseen dust. What is your metaphor? Ah, yes. Yes, we are all weak; we all exist on a rung of the infinite ladder, a boot ready to descend, crush our desperately-clinging fingers. We all have to find our strength. We all must climb. Which limb?”

I stopped thrashing about, turning back to meet the purple gaze as the dracolich half-fell, half-drifted down to the low roof of a building beside me.

Courage wasn’t even a memory.

“No,” I whispered hoarsely, “no, please…”

“Which hurts the most?” he asked, reaching out, plunging the tip of a single long claw into my right bicep.

The pain of the mere physical injury, this intrusion into my body – that was enough, and I was still insubstantial. I gritted my teeth, growled at the itching sensation.

He had me pinned to the bone-street by my arm – and then the magenta fire burned along the metallic talon, nethernal sorcery bypassing the ghostly essence I was gulping at. Malas’s power was being injected directly into my soul’s substance.

“The wound? The knowledge of the loss it implies? The feeling of foolishness? The certainty that had you chosen differently you would still be abed, book in your lap?”

I had my eyes screwed shut. The wraith-form was failing me, stuttering out for longer and longer moments. I couldn’t tear free, not without losing the arm entirely. I wasn’t screaming, but I couldn’t stop gasping, panting, panic working its evils on my mind. I knew it wouldn’t achieve anything in the slightest but it was still hard to put down the urge to raise my loose arm, use my left hand to grasp the dracolich’s burning claw, prise myself free.

“Or the knowledge that you couldn’t? That you are fate’s fool? That it is your nature, that you cannot resist, can never resist, never rest?”

I moaned. The flesh was – it was tearing –

The twins flashed through my mind.

Mum and Dad’s funeral.

Jaid wore her little blue dress, under the trees in Yune’s shrine. An appropriate colour for one so young in such a place. That dress had long since been passed on to another family on the lane.

She had almost looked like Zel, that day, I realised. Years before I met the fairy, of course.

Zel. Zel…

I need you.

Jaroan wore his best tunic. I couldn’t remember its colour. But at least I’d found his shoes. I’d made sure he wore two shoes.

Goody little two-shoes.

Flesh… opening…

“Release yourself!” Malas snapped, a cold command. “I see your hate yet burns bright! I lower my boundary. If you would go, begone. I shall meet you again, in Mund.”

I managed to open my eyes, look up at my enemy.

He was right. The pink shell, it was gone.

“Release yourself – or the other arm will join the first.”

He flicked out a second talon from the same tremendous paw and lowered it towards my left bicep.

I screamed. Seeing the second talon, it was possible. Only because of it.

I ripped away, accepting it. Accepting my fate.

I tore free and I flew, moaning, moaning as I soared towards the ceiling, pursued only by low, dry laughter and the spattering of blood on bone.

He’d won. He took my sorcerer’s fingers, along with two-thirds of my arm. My favoured arm.

I entered the rock, and the pain lessened. The amethyst fire of his talon had done nothing to cauterise the wound, but phasing through the stone stopped the bleeding.

I held my breath, lingering inside the earth, blind, insensate. Disembodied consciousness. I just felt cold. As good as dead.

What good was I out there, anyway?

It had clung to me, and now it had finally succeeded in rending my shadow. I couldn’t ever escape. I could flee this place, but I’d take it with me. The curse of power. The doom of destiny. The dracolich’s mark. The Crucible, rushing down at my head like an avalanche of dragons.

It was too much.

I could stay here, I realised. I could stay here, right here, and when I pass out I’ll die, lost in the rock. No one would ever find me. Maybe not even him.

From out of nowhere, the memory returned. It wasn’t much – just a fragment of a shard of a thought. A voice.

Fintwyna.

‘Especially the children.’

I remembered the sleepless night. I remembered the horror and the passion of those early days. Where had the champion gone?

Oh, it hurt.

The chief pain came, not from the arm, not from the despair, but from the continuation of consciousness itself. That thoughtless urge inside me that would reject all my conclusions and compel me to go on existing.

I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. The dracolich was right. This place, this life – it wasn’t mine. It was a place to die as Raz, not live as Kas. Telior was just the graveyard of my own choosing. I might as well have stayed buried in the earth if I intended to remain in Telior.

Even if I can’t return to Mund, I can warn them. Tell Zakimel and Irimar what Malas said. I can make it untraceable, maybe. Use a demon to intimidate another I don’t own into carrying the message.

I can do something.

Resolved at last on a course of action, I moved vertically again, the sudden urgency of my situation thrusting me out of the stone and into the mud, into the marsh, into the awaiting night air…

Not quite.

The second I entered the bog, I recognised my mistake.

The blood had been stymied whilst I’d languished in the coldness of the earth, accumulating in my raw, ripped stump. In spite of the wraith-form, when I entered the water – warm, in comparison with the stone and soil – the blood flooded out of me. I felt it, a sudden dip in consciousness –

Swamp-stuff entered my throat and stomach as insubstantiality deserted me – I was drowning, twisting in the weeds at the bottom of the pond.

I experienced it. The terror of dying. Knowing I was going.

Lungs filled with wet darkness and dirt. But it wasn’t Nentheleme that was going to save me, wasn’t a prayer to Yune on my drowning lips. I no longer held hope, no longer felt free.

I didn’t let myself pass out, couldn’t. Life wasn’t going to be so kind as to let me go if I wouldn’t let go first. I felt the strength of Avaelar’s grip about my left wrist, my only wrist – felt him pulling me up, up, out of the depths from which I couldn’t extricate myself.

Not without the power.

* * *

“She really…” I coughed, “really did me a favour, finding you.”

We sat there under the stars, miles from Mal Malas’s den, a semi-dry patch of brush serving as a makeshift pallet. The place was like a raft floating on a pungent ocean, green-glinting insects flitting about in the darkness.

It sort of reminded me of home. My real home.

“Zel, I mean, or whoever she was. The b-best,” I spluttered, retching for the fourth time. After a few long breaths, I sat back, the heaviness in my chest alleviated somewhat. “The best thing she ever did. How many times have you saved my life, now?” I waved my hand. “I’d say I can’t count them on my fingers, but that’d be doing you a disservice. Hah!”

My voice twisted on the laugh, and the sylph didn’t reply, only looking down morosely at the ground. I regarded him in the pale gremlin-light I’d managed to conjure, a meagre, unnatural, dark-yellow radiance. I’d never seen my fey eldritch look so dejected.

He was my mirror, displaying my true face to me.

I adjusted my undead essence, taking it deeper to dispel the chill, the sliminess of the wet robe clinging to my remaining flesh.

“Why, though? Why would he do it?” I looked down at the shredded sleeve, the mangled stump of a right arm. “He wanted to train me – wanted me strong, to fulfil whatever stupid prophecy he’s been duped by, no doubt – so why take the arm?” I chuckled through the wetness in my throat. “I’m a fool, Avvie. He lied to me from the beginning. He never wanted to train me. He just wanted me… like this.” My voice cracked. “Broken.”

“Unless in this maiming there is a greater strength to be found.” The sylph looked up, his flawless face marred by glumness as he indicated my missing arm with a twirl of his fingers. “If thou might bring –“

“He took my hand!” I screamed. “He took it! How can I…”

I spent a few moments in concentration, and I found I could assemble a shield with my left hand – barely. Construct stars, form blades, direct blades? I could scarcely entertain the notion of doing it in combat.

“With all due respect, Feychilde…”

I looked at him. “You can call me Kas.”

“Kas… Thou art not the first to whom my allegiance hath been owed, nor the fifth.”

“Nor the last.”

He nodded grimly. “I fear thy words shall prove true in less time than they might otherwise. It shames me to speak the words, yet I find myself questioning whether thou hast discovered the centre of thy power. Not all sorcerers are so… concerned with the lives and well-being of others. I hath in my time been called upon to commit deeds darker than thou might conceive, for purposes no book thou hast read might impart.”

I frowned.

“I digress. One such sorcerer – she had been born bereft of arms, the limbs given unto Utenya in the womb. When the magic found her, this disability was no obstacle. I recall that she was fearsome. I am certain that oft she would mock those of her peers with fully-functioning hands, speaking of this in terms of a vulnerability –”

“Look, Avvie,” I said heavily, “everyone knows it’s not really necessary. My hands, they help – helped me channel the forces… Sure, an artist is still an artist without his hands; maybe he can grip the paintbrush in his teeth, or his toes… Maybe your sorceress was just that good…” I looked down at my useless left foot. “But it’s not the same.”

Avaelar was shaking his head, burnished bronze skin glinting dully in the yellowed moonlight. “Is it not possible that Malas,” the sylph shuddered as he spoke the dracolich’s name, “seeks to train thee by so hindering thee? That he doth perceive a flaw in thee and seeks to correct it with –”

“What does it matter?” I cried. I clutched my pants-leg, and struggled to lift my flopping foot with my left hand – with my hand. “Look at me! Look what’s left of me!” The tears started running down my face again, feeling hotter than usual. “Look what’s left… What will Jaroan say? And Jaid? It’s not like I… I… I can’t tell them the truth, can I? A dr-dracolich…”

I shivered even as I wept.

“Whyever not? They are young, but they own the promise of their brother’s strength.” I glanced up at him to find him smiling at me sadly. “Kas, thou turnst too eagerly towards treachery. Tell them the truth. It is a mortal affliction, to behold most-clearly the soonest-to-come, missing the mountain for the boulder in the foreground.”

“That’s how you conquer mountains,” I whispered. “One boulder at a time.”

“Thou canst not conquer a mountain alone.”

We sat in silence for a few seconds.

You’re just a slave.

“Many through both birth and wealth mistake their lofty seats for the high thrones of dominance, and look down upon their fellow men, bearing witness only to the crawling insects – yet I would bid thee: look not down, but out! See freedom! Abandon Wyrda’s shackles! Telior has done thee ill, dwelling on the kraken’s tongue. Wyrda Virdut is a black mistress. The deceptions of this temple of darkness is a matter I have longed to broach with thee, but –”

“What in the Twelve Hells are you going on about, Avvie?”

“Dost thou not see it?” he asked, a certain amount of horror in his voice, his shining eyes. “The slaves on the ships, whose masters trade freely here? The poor on the boardwalk, eating the rats? The starving children, the diseased babies whose parents –”

“All places are like that,” I said, the tone of my voice coming more harshly to my ears than I’d anticipated.

“But not all sorcerers.”

I twisted like I’d been slapped.

“What, Avaelar?” I turned up the wraith, floated back to my feet. “What did you just say?”

“All I have tried to say a dozen times, with a sharper blade for my tongue – yet thou hast felt not the sting, until I struck thee with a blunter implement. I apologise. But this change in thee has been long in the making, and subtleties shall no longer suffice. When thou didst surrender thy unicorn I thought I understood, after the demon’s infection took root in her essence… Yet thy blindness to the poverty of thy new home, the way in which thou hast been elevated beyond such concerns – how it was thou didst apologise to that insufferable villain, that ‘knight’, and accepted his in kind… The people whose part in life it is to clean for thee –”

“Apprentices!”

“Servants! The Kas known unto me – never would he have suffered himself to be called ‘lord’, no more than he would allow for his sister to be joined with a –”

“Silence,” I said quietly.

His mouth closed of my accord.

I floated there, trembling awfully. All the world had fallen away. The sounds and scents of the marsh. The little glimmering green lights. It was all distant. All background noise. There was just me, and the sylph, staring at one another.

He’d saved me again. He’d pulled me out of death’s path so many times, it almost angered me. Not because of him, but because of me. I was weak. I was vulnerable. I was the plaything of dreadful entities and he, he was going to sit there, mocking me, telling me what to do, chastising me, me, after everything, everything I’d been through? He got to sit there, out of the line of fire, aloof with all his spiritual concerns, while I took the wounds, while all the burdens weighed down on me. When had he ever been wounded, really? Eldritches were for all practical purposes immortal. What did he know of real fear?

Then I remembered our first encounter.

I wanted to hurt him – that was why I was trembling. I knew it would bring me pleasure. I knew it would help assuage this feeling of powerlessness, to inflict my will in the form of suffering on a creature incapable of resistance.

“M-Master!”

The shock in his voice as agony lanced through him – it snapped me out of my reverie and I screwed my eyes shut, turned away.

“I’m sorry. I –”

“And so it is the day arriveth,” he said coldly. “I was right. Thou art just as the others, in truth. The centre of thy power will blacken thy soul, and thou shalt grow strong in magic and malice until a charred husk is all that remains of the tree of thy life.”

I remembered Xiatan, burning under the heat of Winterprince’s wizardry to save me. Then I remembered Flood Boy. Gilaela.

Now Avaelar. One more fey I’d dragged into this mess.

I looked back at him as I heard him getting to his feet.

“Sit down, Avvie,” I murmured. “I’m sorry, alright? It’s not –”

“No,” he said. “I rescind my submission.”

“What? No, Avaelar –”

“Do not use my name!” he bellowed, suddenly flaring his wings.

I’d forgotten how intimidating the tough, magical appendages looked with the blue, jagged feathers around the edges, splayed like a fan of daggers about him.

I clenched my jaw.

“Avaelar, come off it!” I pointed at him, feeling the nervous tingle running through my fingers – it was the tremor of the swordsman being forced to fence with his unpractised off-hand. “You might be catching me on a bad day, sure, but you’re just a sylph. You think you can just run away from me? Fancy fighting Khikiriaz?”

“The Kas I knew would have bade me farewell, and offered a good riddance for abandoning him, perhaps.” He regarded me sorrowfully, looking at my chest. “Kas is gone. Thou didst leave him behind. I do not know this Raz, who makes such idle threats.”

“Idle?” I snapped. “You think I wouldn’t –”

The sylph’s laughter was bitter. “Oh, even if thou wouldst – should such as I seek escape, what thinkest thou a powerful demon might attempt? Art thou such a fool as to die here?”

He met my gaze, then, and I saw him flinch as the pain coursed again in his veins.

“Dost – thou – believe – I – cannot –” he grated, then finally collapsed, panting, to his hands and knees.

The sylph’s glowing gold eyes dripped silver tears.

“Feychilde!” he whined.

I could bear it no longer. I looked down at my missing arm and started to cry again.

“I wish you t-told me earlier,” I said, blubbering and sniffing like an idiot. “Told me plainly. But it’s not your fault. I wish – I wish everything was different. I wish I was different. But he… he’s right. It’s wh-who I am.

“I… release you.”

I didn’t have to look up to do it. The good-for-nothing left hand was good enough for this. A simple wave in his direction, and it was done. I felt the connection fall away, gone as though it had never existed.

Would I have been able to do it with decision alone? With no hands to direct my will? Knowing my luck, I’d find out some day.

Keeping my face lowered, I sank back to the ground and sat there once more, hunched over, letting my tears drip off my chin.

The dryish dirt crunched under his feet as the sylph approached me. I heard his footfalls but, more worryingly, I felt the ground beneath me tremble slightly.

He was supernaturally heavy… mighty beyond material reality. A single blow of his fist could kill a man, easily.

Yet he came without obstruction inside the boundary of the wobbly shield I’d created earlier. He wasn’t going to hurt me.

I didn’t raise my eyes as his bronze feet came into view.

A powerful hand was laid gently on my left shoulder.

“Thank you, Kastyr.” For the first time, I heard him choked in emotion, voice husky. “Y-you cannot know what this means. Thank you… my friend. Truly… thou art no scapegrace, baseborn or otherwise.”

Emerald light consumed him. Without a proper goodbye, he used my leeched energies and left me in the darkness of the bogs, alone with just the flies and the stars for company.

“Goodbye, noble sylph…”

I let the gremlin-light die and lay back horizontally, tapping the wraith-essence liberally to increase my comfort, looking up into those stars.

What do you think? I asked them. Gods above us, about us, what do you think? Have I suffered enough? Have I deserved my punishments? At what point do you do the bleeding? When is it you with tears in your eyes?

The gods didn’t answer with a lightning-bolt or earthquake, so that was something, at least.

I decided I wasn’t going to let Zabalam in on Avaelar’s absence. I didn’t need to drag him into this. I’d leave him asleep, and there was little chance he’d cross the sylph’s path in his otherworld-dream. I could tell the twins I’d given Avaelar time off, that’s why the wings were missing now. Time off, for saving my life, when something bit my arm off… something…

I had to come up with a better explanation. An actual explanation.

At length I finally rose up into the air, adjusted my invisibility, and started drifting back towards Telior. Wraith-flight was so much slower on its own, but it would do. I wasn’t in a rush to get home.

Perhaps Avaelar had been right. Why just tell the Magisterium? Why not tell everyone the truth about the dracolich – what he’d been doing here, what he was likely doing in other places? Knowledge could be a weapon, or at least a shield, used to thwart or fend off any future manipulations Malas might conceive…

Or was that his plan? It very much sounded as though his goals were now within his reach – perhaps he needed no more of his brethren’s remains, and I would be merely fanning the fires of terror amongst the people. Perhaps I’d be mocked for my madness. Making up stories to glamorise the accident that cost me a limb.

But was Avaelar right about the rest of it? Was Lord Raz a betrayal of Kastyr Mortenn? Did I have to end it, give up the ruse, in order to stand a chance of being myself again?

Abandon Telior?

I’d once been so stuck in the mud that I’d bought extra property on Mud Lane. It took me ages to think of moving to Treetown… with Emrelet. Now I thought I’d thrown it all away, the semblance of grandeur, glory – I was outside Sticktown. Mund. Everything.

I’d given it all up once. Surely it’d be worth it to save my soul. Telior was just one more place.

But go where? I couldn’t flee destiny. When I tried, I only crashed into it at a greater speed.

Doomed. I was doomed. Wherever I went, I was still me.

It was almost morning, by the time I came close enough to home to hear the bells ringing.

Not bells, I reminded myself, chimes, in the wizards’ enclosure.

But why would they be chiming at this hour?

Malas – Malas, what have you done?

I slowly climbed higher, to afford myself a proper look at the bay, and it wasn’t long before my breath was stolen away.

“Is this because I cursed you?” I whispered to the receding stars.

It’d been three months, and they’d come for me.

Not the Magisterium. I’d been on the lookout for the wrong enemies all along. This wasn’t an armada from Mund. These were no common battleships.

Not even the dracolich could be so cruel as to deal me such a hand. Oh no. This was all me. This was worse.

White iceberg-shapes flickering magenta, keen hulls pointed like bird-skull beaks, floating in the darkness.

A fleet of dark elven vessels stood at anchor, not half a mile out to sea.