Obviously, he had passed his own knowledge on to Keegan. Rexol had suspected as much and allowed it, up till now. At least the prince’s knowledge would not be wasted. For while Vaaler had neither the Gift nor the Sight, Keegan was strong in both. Like Cassandra had been, long ago. She had been taken from him, lost to the Order before he could fully explore her power and potential. This time Rexol had no intention of letting anything come between him and his pupil.
Which was why he had would have to send Vaaler away soon. The prince was a born leader, intelligent and charismatic. He would make a fine king, should the Danaan ever chose to accept his rule. But he was no wizard; he had no place in Keegan’s future training or life.
Over the past two years his apprentices had become like brothers; each would give anything to help the other. But an apprentice’s only allegiance should belong to his master. It was time to make Keegan understand this.
The world had taken on a haze, as if seen through a cloud of cerulean smoke.
Keegan recoiled as the blue flames licked at his skin: an instinctive reaction only, for the fire didn’t burn. But even though he flinched, he continued the mystic chant flawlessly, the strange words tumbling effortlessly from his lips.
The talisman burned hot in his hand, but he dared not let it go. He could feel the Chaos spiraling around him, through him. It seeped down into his pores; his blood began to tingle, then boil.
But still he felt no pain. The Chaos was his to control, bound by the strength of his will and the power of his words. Slowly, he raised his head, still reciting the arcane litany. His eyes pierced the blue haze and focused on the small stone pedestal across the courtyard. He could just make out the twigs and tinder piled on its surface; they blended in with the runes inscribed across its surface.
Keegan lifted his hand. The Chaos swept around his arm, climbing up and shooting out from his upraised palm. It arced across the courtyard in a single bolt of heat, striking the kindling just as he uttered the last words of his spell. For a brief moment he saw the wood burst into flame and felt the heady rush of accomplishment. And then his world exploded in agony.
Rexol smiled to himself as the Chaos leapt from Keegan’s hand across the courtyard to its target, knowing what the outcome would be. But his smile vanished when the flames engulfed the rune-covered pedestal. The dry sticks vanished into ash; the stone cracked from the intense heat, then began to sag and droop as the fire turned the slab into molten rock.
The glyphs of warding echoed the power of Keegan’s spell, shooting a blast of fire back onto the young wizard, enveloping him in the searing blue flames. He screamed and dropped to the ground, tumbling out of the rune circle … which should have been impossible.
Rexol thrust his staff to the heavens, shouting out a desperate counter-spell of his own. The fire leapt up in response, twin columns ascending from Keegan’s crumpled body and the bubbling pool that had once been a stone pedestal. The surging flames crashed together above the gorgon’s skull, then dove down into Rexol himself, instantly snuffing out the fire wrapped around his apprentice’s unconscious form.
The wizard staggered back as the Chaos slammed into him. He felt it raging inside, tearing him apart. Never had he felt such pain; never had he felt such power! Only decades of training allowed him to focus his will in the face of such blissful agony. He spat out harsh words to batter the flames, yanking them out of his body and hurling them into his staff. The eyes of the gorgon’s skull blazed with unholy blue light; the staff trembled and shook, the Chaos trapped within threatening to burst it into splinters and dust.
Spinning the staff above his head, he shrieked out a spell to unleash the Chaos upon the world. It poured forth like a great wind, rushing up to disappear high above the clouds. For an instant all was still; then the sky exploded in a storm of thunder, lightning, and rain. Within seconds Rexol was soaked to the bone, but he ignored the downpour as he rushed over to kneel beside Keegan’s huddled form.
He was unconscious, but not seriously injured. Rexol cursed himself as he picked his apprentice up and carried him back inside the manse, showing far more strength than anyone would have expected from his lean frame. Even after a year of studying Keegan, of subtly pushing and testing the limits of his power, he had underestimated him. The Chaos had reflected back from the pedestal as he had intended, but instead of a brief and painful flash to scare his apprentice, it had become an inferno.
Keegan had nearly died today; they both had. A second more and Rexol himself would have been consumed by the surging Chaos; he had been forced to unleash the unbound magic out upon the world to survive. Who knew what consequences the backlash of that savage storm would bring?
With hardly any effort, he climbed the stairs to the servants’ quarters. Disaster had been narrowly averted, but all was not lost. The lesson had been far more harsh than he had intended, but it was a lesson Keegan was not likely to forget. The Chaos had nearly devoured him, and only the intervention of his master had saved his life.
Outside the storm still raged.
Chapter 22
Scythe studied the small one- and two-story buildings of the town with disdain as the storm pelted them with cold, stinging drops. Her horse walked with its head down, beaten into submission by the relentless rain, plodding slowly through the thick mud of what passed for the main road in the hamlet.
“There.” Norr’s deep voice cut through her thoughts.
She glanced in the direction he pointed at the faded sign of the Singing Dragon Inn and simply nodded. They had eaten just after dawn, barely two hours ago. Had they known this town was so close they would have ridden on last night instead of making a rain-soaked camp in the surrounding forests. But this burg was too small to even warrant a mention on the map they had purchased at the last town they had stayed in.
The weight of their recent breakfast was still heavy in Scythe’s stomach, but at the sight of the inn Norr was ready to eat again. She had come to realize in their year together that he ate whenever the opportunity presented itself. The barbarian was at least three times her size, so it was only natural he would eat far more than she—and far more often. And she didn’t expect him to change. Norr’s girth was as much a part of him as his long red hair, bushy, fiery beard or perpetually sun burnt skin. Her lover was a tribesman of the Frozen East; a savage, a barbarian; wild, free and given to lusty appetites—in all things.
She had learned this their first night together, after she had rescued him from the Enforcers in Callastan. Hidden safely away in Scythe’s secret refuge beneath the city streets their coupling had been primal and furious, raw animal heat. But Norr could be gentle, too. Later he had entered her again with an almost shy tenderness, his beard scratching softly against her neck as his parched, cracked lips kissed her scarred shoulders. His callused hands had caressed the marks left by the whips and knives on her back and thighs, and his wide blue eyes had welled up with tears.
Norr never asked her about her wounds, the deforming scars that marred her naked beauty. He hadn’t even asked her name that first night. It was she who had offered it, though why even now she couldn’t say. He was not the first stranger she had lain with, not the first exotic foreigner to share a night of pleasure with her. But he was the first she had ever given her name, whispering it like a profession of love into the darkness while he had slept beside her: “Scythe.”
Between his heavy snores he had grumbled “Norr” in return.
Maybe that was why she was still with him. He accepted her for what she was now, in the present. He cared nothing about her past. He had never once asked her about it, as if it didn’t matter. As if she had been born again, freed from her own history by their first night together.
The barbarian’s own past was as much a mystery to Scythe as hers must have been to him. He had told her once he would never return to his homeland but hadn’t elaborated. She was briefly tempted to ask him why; she suspected it had something to do with the fact that he never wore a weapon
at his side. But in the end it didn’t matter. They were together now, and life was good.
Good, but not easy. Their partnership was not without its trials, though Scythe had never considered leaving her lover. She was irresistibly drawn to Norr: his great size, his exotic appearance, his unknown past. But it was more than curiosity that drew her to him. Around Norr, she didn’t always have to be on guarded edge. When they were together she could feel the tension in her shoulders slipping free and the sharpness of her ever-alert gaze giving way to half-lidded eyes of dreamy contentment.
It wasn’t that Norr made her feel safe; Scythe could take care of herself. She had done so ever since she had escaped the brothel she had been forced to work at on her arrival in Callastan. If anything, Scythe felt she was the one who had to protect Norr when they were together: He seemed so innocent, so naïve about the often ruthless culture of the civilized Southlands and its people. Scythe was tough and strong and hard and she didn’t need any man to make her feel safe. But Norr didn’t make her feel safe, the barbarian made her feel … soft.
Scythe had been given her first glimpse of what future awaited her and Norr while still in Callastan. No one had died in the brawl in the streets but the Enforcers had been humiliated and they were determined to apprehend those responsible so they could make a harsh lesson of them. The reward for Norr’s capture had been substantial, and his description had spread quickly through the city. Even in the cosmopolitan culture of Callastan, the big man was impossible to overlook.
The darkest, dankest corners of Callastan’s underworld slums couldn’t keep him from being discovered. With the reward being offered Scythe knew the thieves and cutthroats she counted as her friends wouldn’t think twice about betraying the savage’s location to the authorities. The unspoken trust among those who operated on the far side of the law in Callastan didn’t apply to Norr; he was a stranger, a foreigner, an interloper.
And so they had left, together.
A tip from a young harlot Scythe had once saved from the hands of three drunken soldiers on leave gave the pair just enough warning to pack some meager belongings, steal a pair of horses, and ride out under the cover of night before a score of guards had descended on the hidden sewer sanctuary they had been living in beneath Callastan’s market square.
There had been no regret in leaving the city behind, not on Scythe’s part. And Norr had been eager to move on, too. He had arrived seeking work as a guard or hired mercenary and instead had been assaulted by civilians and the authorities alike. They had ridden off side by side, laughing together at the rush of adrenaline as they escaped into the concealing mantle of the night, determined to make a new start somewhere else in the Southlands.
But their new life had been much like their old. Scythe was afraid the Callastan authorities would send messages via their court mages to the Seven Capitals and any other city of note, so they had avoided the larger metropolises of the Southlands. But the smaller cities came with their own dangers.
Everywhere they went she and Norr were treated with suspicion and mistrust—it was impossible to hide her Islander heritage, or his Eastern blood. Thinly veiled prejudice and not-so-thinly veiled hatred often greeted them. In smaller towns their presence was tolerated for a few weeks at most before stores and inns simply refused to serve them. In some cases they had been driven out by threats or armed vigilante mobs eager to rid their tiny community of the barbarian in their midst. Once or twice things had gotten ugly, if more so for the townsfolk than for Norr or Scythe. Even though he carried no sword or axe the barbarian was more than a match for as many as dozen untrained farmers and store owners wielding wooden planks, farm implements, and other makeshift weapons.
Usually Scythe would stay back and let Norr have his fun with those mobs foolish enough to take him on—the fighting seemed to take away some of the big man’s sting at being driven out like a diseased beggar. Yet on those few occasions when Norr found himself overmatched or overwhelmed through sheer numbers Scythe would have to intervene—much to the ultimate dismay of the vigilantes.
Norr fought with his fists and bare hands; to him it was little more than a roughhousing game. Scythe fought with weapons, her razor-sharp daggers used to injure and maim, though Norr had asked her not to kill anyone if possible. So far she had been able to fulfill his wish, though the price of an ear or an eye had been paid many times over in the small farming communities Scythe and Norr had passed through.
The larger towns were better. Cities where strangers were many and travelers were common allowed Scythe and Norr to blend into the transient population—as best Norr could ever hope to blend in, anyway. People in the larger cities tended to mind their own business, with few of the residents going out of their way to make trouble for the odd pair walking their streets.
Often they could stay several weeks in such a place. Norr would seek work as a laborer, a soldier, a mercenary, a bodyguard; all in vain. Nobody respectable would hire him, convinced he was little more than a beast; an animal in human form. Scythe knew the intelligence behind his brutish exterior. He had learned the common language of the Southlands in only a matter of months, though he still spoke with a gruff, thick accent. And she knew how it tore at his insides to be rejected day in and day out, denied a chance to earn his living, barred from earning his way through honest sweat.
At least Scythe could find work in the cities. She would work the crowds of the local markets, deftly removing purses and pouches from unsuspecting marks. Norr had once suggested he work with her but like all the others she had refused him.
His mere presence would draw attention, make people suspicious, and put them on guard. He had pointed out he could provide protection in case she was ever caught in the act but Scythe was never that careless. The only protection he could give would be against the groping, grabbing hands of the dirty old men who sometimes pawed at her from the anonymity of the crowd. And even these Scythe preferred to handle on her own with a sharp chop of her fist that could easily numb the fingers or break a thumb.
Besides, Scythe suspected Norr wasn’t comfortable with her chosen profession. Barbarians had little use for theft, constantly surrounded by the members of their own tribe. The tribe was family; you didn’t steal from your family. The possessions of other tribes, Scythe imagined, would be the spoils of war. You earned your claim by right of the sword, not by stealth and cunning. Theft had no place in such a culture.
So she would support them with her ill-gotten gains while Norr tried in vain to find legitimate employment. She knew he hated that life, but Norr never complained. He never turned his frustration or anger toward her.
Eventually, Scythe would draw the attention of the local operators. Sometimes they would give her a warning: Join them, or leave town. But she knew the cut the established operators took from newcomers was in itself a crime. She had paid her dues long ago, and even though that counted for nothing outside the borders of Callastan professional pride wouldn’t let her hand over four-fifths of her take like some green cutpurse.
Sometimes the local underworld wouldn’t give her the courtesy of a warning. The first attempt on her life was inevitably sloppy, an amateur sent to earn a reputation by disposing of the troublesome newcomer. Scythe was a survivor; she had an instinct for traps and danger. It was only because of her promise to Norr that the would-be assassins managed to escape with their lives to report back to the higher-ups.
Scythe was brave but she wasn’t foolish. She knew better than to stay in a city long enough for a second, well-planned attempt to be made on her life—or on Norr’s. And so inevitably they would be forced to leave the larger cities just as they were always forced to leave the smaller towns.
It had been that way ever since that night they had fled Callastan together, but Scythe wouldn’t have traded a minute of it for anything. In Norr she had found something she hadn’t even known she was missing, and the travel and the danger only made things more interesting. And if Norr didn’t like it, at least h
e didn’t complain.
They were nearly at the inn when a matronly woman poked her head out of a nearby door to get a better look at the strangers riding through the storm and into town. Scythe, ever aware of her surroundings, turned in her saddle to meet the townswoman’s eye with a challenging gaze.
To Scythe’s surprise the woman didn’t duck back into the safety of her home, but instead met the challenge with a smile.
“A wet and goodly morning to you,” the lady called out cheerily, “welcome to Praeton.”
“We’re just passing through,” Scythe answered quickly. “Trying to ride out the storm. Do you know if there’s any room at the inn?”
“Always room for guests at the Singing Dragon,” the woman replied. “Good food, clean rooms, and fair prices.”
When Scythe didn’t bother to say anything in reply, Norr chimed in with his deep baritone. “Your kindness is much appreciated.”
“Think nothing of it. We have a saying in Praeton—Kindness is free and plentiful, so spread it around.”
Scythe struggled to keep from rolling her eyes, but Norr laughed heartily.
“A fine saying.”
“One we take to heart,” the woman assured him. “Hope you find Praeton to your liking. Could use a strapping lad like you around here during harvesttime, if you decide to stay awhile.”
Much to Scythe’s surprise, Norr said, “Maybe we will.”
Chapter 23
A heavy crack of thunder woke Cassandra. She lay motionless on the thin sleeping mat in her otherwise empty room, peering up at the ceiling through the total darkness with her mystical second sight as the rain fell and lightning split the sky above the Monastery.
This was no ordinary storm; at its heart she could sense the sinister echo of the Chaos that had spawned it. The dark clouds had swept across the Southlands, causing massive flooding. Like many of the other Seers, she had seen the cataclysmic aftermath of the storm in her dreams as it approached—crops and even homes washed away by rivers that had jumped their banks; bloated corpses of drowned livestock left rotting in the fields as the waters receded. But tonight her sleep hadn’t been plagued by visions of the flood. Tonight she had dreamed of her old master and a wondrous crown.
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