Taiana glared at the man. “You’re supposed to be working on the Chamber of Sustenance. Tell me you’ve gotten it open.”
The Hunter froze at her words. Sir Danna had mentioned “Chambers of Furtherance” with her dying breath. Was this something related?
“Just about,” Cerran said with a nod. “Just waiting for you to get here to open it, as you insisted.”
The redheaded Bucelarii treated Taiana with the deference shown a commanding officer. Clearly there was a hierarchy among them, and Taiana was at the pinnacle.
Cerran raised an eyebrow and shot a glance at the Hunter. “I take it he’s the reason you’re late?”
Taiana nodded. “This is Drayvin. Drayvin, Cerran.”
“Drayvin, eh?” The bearded man’s bushy red eyebrows shot up and a small smile played at his lips. “The Drayvin?”
“One and the same.” Taiana fixed the redheaded man with a hard glare. “But we’ll discuss him later. At this moment, we’ve more important matters to deal with.”
“Right you are.” Cerran turned and strode across the room. “If you’d do the honors?”
For the first time, the Hunter saw the object that provided the blue glow that filled the room. Shaped like a casket, it was as tall as his chest and five paces long, with a base of white stone and a lid of the same blue, glowing glass as the walls of the towers. Long tubes as thick as the Hunter’s wrist and made of a strange soft, flexible, transparent material ran from the far end of the blocky object into the floor. Even from this distance, he could feel the power thrumming from what Taiana had called the Chamber of Sustenance.
Taiana gestured around. “This is our mission, Drayvin. This is why we cannot confront the Elivasti yet.”
She inserted the tip of a spikestaff into the crack between base and lid, took a deep breath, and pushed hard. Something gave a loud crack and the lid opened slowly with a loud hiss, like steam released from the mountain vents in Kara-ket. A tremor ran through Taiana’s hand as she pushed the lid open.
The white stone base of the Chamber of Sustenance had been carved into what the Hunter could only picture as a bed or cradle, but sized for an abnormally tall human. Strange strands of metal, glass, and more of that flexible, transparent material coiled in the depression where the occupant’s head would have rested.
Where the occupant’s head had rested before it was turned into a charred, withered corpse.
The Hunter grimaced at the sight of the desiccated flesh, yellowed teeth, and white bones. It could have once been human, though man or woman, he couldn’t tell. The stench of rot wafted up from the Chamber, twisting his stomach.
“Damn.” Taiana let out her breath slowly, and her shoulders drooped.
Her reaction surprised the Hunter. Who had she hoped to find?
The redheaded man rattled off a stream of words in a language the Hunter didn’t recognize. By the way the color of his florid face deepened and his midnight-colored eyes blazed, they had to be curses.
Taiana turned to Cerran. “Have you gotten any of the others open?”
“No.” He shook his head, which set his long red braid flying. “We’ve gone through nearly thirty spikestaffs just to get the tunnel dug here and get this open. I wasted another spikestaff trying to get through the door, but those Serenii bastards knew how to build.”
The Hunter’s brow furrowed as he took in the details around him. “Where are we?”
He’d never seen any human construction with this precision and elegance. Three of the walls were smooth, unbroken, made of the same blue glass as the Serenii towers. The fourth wall had two unique features: a tall, rectangular-shaped pane of glass that had to be a door, and a fist-sized square of what looked like a transparent gemstone set at his chest-level. By the light of the glowing Chamber, the Hunter could see a few faint scratch marks on the door as well as on the wall beside it. Three dulled, cracked, and bent spikestaffs lay abandoned on the floor.
“The Northwest Keep,” Taiana replied. “Base Echelon.” Her voice was heavy, her lips pressed into a tight line. The discovery of the empty Chamber seemed to bother her a great deal, though why, the Hunter couldn’t understand.
Her words took a moment to register. “Wait, we’re inside those huge towers?”
She nodded.
“And you dug your way in?” he asked. “Surely there’s an easier way.”
“There certainly is.” Cerran gave him a too-sweet smile. “You can just walk in the main door right from the street. But, oh wait, that’s right, you need the right bloody resonator stone to open the bloody thing.”
The Lectern in the Vault of Stars in Vothmot had spoken of resonator stones—stones that vibrated at specific frequencies. When two such stones came in contact, they harmonized and triggered a reaction.
“If only we had thought of trying to find another way in, rather than wasting our time digging through hard-packed earth and stone.” Cerran slapped his forehead in mock incredulity. “How foolish we’ve been. It’s good you’re here to solve all our problems for us.”
The Hunter scowled at the man’s tone. If all Bucelarii were like Cerran, no wonder the humans had hunted them down.
“We’ve tried,” Taiana said with a sigh. “We’ve done everything we could think of, but we’ve found nothing else. Digging under these towers is the only way we can get into the Chambers of Sustenance.”
“Which are what, exactly? I have heard mention of the Chambers of Furtherance, though I don’t know what they are. I have never heard of the Chambers of Sustenance.” The Hunter raised an eyebrow. The fact that they bore blue-glowing runes meant Serenii magick powered them, but their purpose wasn’t evident at first glance. The only thing he knew they could do was turn bodies into charred husks.
“They are one and the same. Only a select few of the Cambionari insist on calling them the Chambers of Furtherance, though no one understands why. Their purpose is two-fold. They are designed to sustain life while at the same time feeding off the energy of their occupants.” A shadow flashed in Taiana’s eyes. “They are the final resting places of many of our fellow Bucelarii.”
The Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “What are they feeding?”
“The city itself,” Taiana said, and shook her head. “I cannot say to what end, but Enarium was built by the Serenii to harness power. These Chambers are clearly their design, so it must be that the energy they harvest from their occupants is intended to fulfill whatever purpose the city was created for.”
Dread sank like a stone in the Hunter’s gut. He had no idea what that purpose was, but the fact that the Sage had come here, now, meant it couldn’t be anything good. Or, at the very least, the Abiarazi would turn the Serenii’s handiwork into his tool to unleash Kharna onto the world once more.
“Our mission is to free as many of our brethren from these Chambers as possible.” Taiana fixed him with a searching gaze. “We have spent the last years evading the Elivasti’s notice so we could continue our efforts unhindered.”
“Until today,” Kalil put in. The smaller man had remained silent all this time, but now he spoke in a voice heavy with sorrow. He glared at the Hunter. “Until you.”
“What?” Cerran’s fiery red eyebrows shot up, and his black eyes snapped to Taiana. “You fought the purple-eyes?”
“Yes.” Taiana’s shoulders straightened and her jaw took on a stubborn set, one the Hunter knew so well. He’d seen that unyielding iron will in his memories. “If we hadn’t, they would have captured him.”
“So?” Cerran snapped. “You know the purple-eyes won’t let those deaths go unpunished. They’ll come looking for us even harder than they have been.”
“They haven’t found us yet.” Taiana met his gaze without hesitation. Though only a hand’s breadth taller than the man, she seemed to loom over him, as ferocious as she’d been when fighting the Elivasti. “We were careful coming here, and we’ll be careful returning to our base. They will continue to hunt us in vain, as they have all these years
.”
All these years. How many had it been? His memories of her dated back centuries, maybe more. Has she been here in Enarium all this time? Hunted by Elivasti, digging through dirt on a mission he didn’t yet understand but which seemed of monumental importance to her. All the while, he’d lived the life of an assassin half a continent away, not even knowing of her existence.
“He doesn’t look like much.” Cerran was speaking again, and he seemed to be sizing the Hunter up. “If you had to save him from the Elivasti, he—”
“I saved him from iron,” Taiana said in a hard-edged voice. She gestured to Soulhunger hanging in its sheath at the Hunter’s hip. “With that.”
Cerran’s eyes narrowed, then went wide. “Bloody hell!” His hand seemed to reach instinctively for Soulhunger. “Can it be?”
The Hunter stepped back before Cerran touched Soulhunger. “Don’t even think about trying to take it.”
Cerran’s eyes darted from the Hunter to Taiana. “One of the Im’tasi, returned to us after all this time.”
“Indeed.” Taiana nodded. “For too long, we have been forced to hide in the shadows. The arrival of Drayvin and Thanal Eth’ Athaur means we will no longer need to cower from the Elivasti. They have their Scorchslayers, but they are no match for us.”
The Hunter felt as if he were missing something. According to the First, all of the Bucelarii had received a similar weapon from their Abiarazi ancestors. They had been intended to feed Kharna, the Destroyer, the power required to break free of his eternal prison. Yet none of these three carried theirs. Indeed, they spoke of Soulhunger with the same reverence humans spoke of Serenii artifacts or the Lost City of Enarium.
“With the Withering so near,” Taiana was saying, “he could not have come at a more perfect time.”
The Hunter’s ears perked up at the word. “You know of the Withering?”
“Of course.” Taiana’s eyes darted to his, and a mixture of curiosity and confusion mingled in her gaze. “Isn’t that why you are here?”
“I know it’s important to the Sage’s plans.” The mention of the demon sent anger flaring through the Hunter. He’d come to Enarium to put an end to the Sage’s machinations and stop him from freeing Kharna. “But beyond that, I have been unable to find any more information.”
Cerran and Kalil exchanged glances, and Taiana’s brow furrowed. A long moment passed before she spoke.
“The Withering occurs every five hundred years,” Taiana explained in a slow voice. “The sun darkens and the sky turns crimson. The Abiarazi, our fathers, called it the ‘Blood Sun’ when it occurred during the War of Gods many millennia ago. But the Serenii named it Er’hato Tashat, which means ‘Flames of Heaven’.”
Her gesture encompassed not just the room in which they stood, but the entire city.
“Enarium was built to harness the power of the Er’hato Tashat.” The quiet tone of her voice seemed somehow ominous in the silence of the blue-lit underground chamber. “When the Withering comes, the city will come alive!”
Chapter Four
The Hunter’s brow furrowed. “Come alive? What does that mean?”
“Think of Enarium as a giant dam,” Taiana said, “but instead of filling with water, it fills with magick. The Serenii found a way to harness the power of the Er’hato Tashat, and Enarium is the conduit that will channel it. You saw the way those towers were arranged, yes? Eight Keeps made of Serenii crystal, one at each corner of the compass.” She raised three fingers. “Three Echelons, all pointed toward the Illumina in the heart of Enarium.”
The Hunter nodded.
“Once the power is collected, it can be controlled from the uppermost chamber in the Illumina.” She thrust a finger in the direction of the heart of the Enarium.
“So what are we doing grave-robbing the Northwest Keep instead of heading up to the Illumina and taking control?” The Hunter raised an eyebrow.
“What a brilliant plan!” Cerran said, again in that mocking tone. “If only we’d—”
Taiana cut him off with a chop of her hand. “We lack manpower, and weapons. The Elivasti wield their Scorchslayers and spikestaffs, while we have nothing but our bare hands and what little we have stolen or scrounged. With Neroth’s death, only four Bucelarii remain to fight.”
“Five,” the Hunter said without hesitation. “I’ve come all this way to put an end to the Sage, so I will do whatever it takes to stop him.”
Cerran gave him a sardonic smile. “Even if it means fighting through an army of blue-armored Elivasti?” There are at least three hundred between us and that tower.” He flicked a finger toward Soulhunger. “One Im’tasi won’t be enough.”
“Which is precisely why we are, as you said, ‘grave-robbing’.” Taiana’s expression was hard, edged with something deeper than anger. “Those of us the Cambionari did not kill were locked away in these Chambers of Sustenance, imprisoned forever and drained of our life force. As you saw, some of our brethren did not outlive their captivity. Others…”
Her jaw muscles worked, and she shot a glance at Kalil and Cerran. “We are the strong ones, the survivors. We search out these Chambers of Sustenance in the hope that we will find others like us to join in the final battle for Enarium.”
The Hunter’s eyes went to the shriveled cadaver nestled in the glowing Chamber. That was once a Bucelarii? A strong, near-invincible creature with the blood of the Abiarazi flowing through its veins reduced to ash. He shuddered at the thought of the slow, inexorable death that Bucelarii had faced, and now he understood the shadow in Taiana’s eyes. How long did she spend locked away in a Chamber of Sustenance?
“You can join us, too, Drayvin.” She took a step closer, and the scent of her filled his nostrils. “Your armor and weapons speak of a life of battle. Your skill and strength, with Thanal Eth’ Athaur at your side, could give us a chance of not just survival, but victory.”
For a long moment, the Hunter held her gaze. A pleading look filled her eyes, a desperate hope ringing in her voice. He wanted to help her, wanted it more than anything. If the Elivasti were the enemy, it was almost certain the Sage was the one controlling them. Helping Taiana and the other Bucelarii would inevitably lead him to confronting the Sage.
But that was only half of his purpose for coming to Enarium. He had come in search of a cure for the Irrsinnon, the madness that plagued all descendants of the Serenii. Hailen’s purple eyes marked him as Elivasti—as Melechha, a pure-blooded offspring. In Vothmot, Father Reverentus had said Hailen was the hope for the future. His blood would lock Kharna away forever.
Or free the Destroyer from his eternal prison. The thought sent icy feet dancing down his spine.
If, as he feared, the Sage controlled the Elivasti in Enarium, the purple-eyed men that captured Hailen and Kiara would take the boy to the Abiarazi. The Sage would either order Hailen’s death or use the power offered by his blood. The demons had shown unfaltering willingness to use any means to achieve their ends, regardless of how many were left dead or suffering in their wake. The Sage would slit Hailen’s throat without hesitation.
He had sent Hailen ahead to Enarium in the hopes of saving him from the Stone Guardians, only to place him squarely within the Sage’s reach. He had to rescue the boy.
“I will aid you in your war,” he said in a slow voice. “I will lend my skill and Soulhunger’s power to your cause.”
Relief filled Taiana’s eyes, and her shoulders relaxed.
“But not until I am certain the boy is safe.”
The lines of tension returned to Taiana’s face, but the wary look in her eyes took on a thoughtful edge.
“You would put the wellbeing of one human child over the fate of the entire world?” Cerran snapped.
“No.” The Hunter shook his head. “But I swore to protect the child with my life. Surely you can understand the value of such an oath.”
“Certainly,” Cerran began, “but—”
“There is no ‘but’.” The Hunter cut him off with
a chopping motion. “Those are my terms. Help me find the boy and ensure his safety, and I will do everything in my power to help you win your war.” He shot Cerran a sharp smile. “Even if that means carving my way through an army of purple-eyes.”
Cerran’s sour expression softened, and a glint of approval flashed in his eyes. That was clearly the sort of thing a warrior like him could respect.
“You have a deal,” Taiana said without hesitation. “We will help you find your boy, and you will help us save the world.” For a moment, her hand twitched, reaching toward him. A hint of sorrow shone in her eyes, but there was something else there as well. He had seen that expression in his memories…when he spoke of protecting their child.
Thoughts of their child sent his gaze back to Kalil. Though he saw no resemblance, he couldn’t help wondering if the young Bucelarii was truly his son. He ached to ask Taiana but something held him back. Fear, perhaps, that he’d hear the answer he’d been dreading in the back of his mind—the answer that his child had died. He had lost too much in the last months. Farida. Bardin. Master Eldor. All the others that had been almost like friends to him. He didn’t know if he could endure another heartbreak. He would ask her, but not yet.
But her hand fell back to her side and the emotion faded from her eyes. The commanding edge returned to her voice as she turned to the smaller of the two men.
“Kalil, get to the dead drop and let Garnos know we want to talk to him.”
Kalil nodded, turned, and crawled into the hole in the wall. The sound of clattering rocks and scraping dirt echoed for a few moments, then faded as the smaller Bucelarii clambered through the tunnel.
“Cerran,” Taiana continued, “what of our progress on the other Chambers of Sustenance? How is Arudan doing with finding out more about the tunnels?”
“Slow work.” The red-haired man stroked his thick, braided beard. “But these spikestaffs should go a long way toward speeding up progress.”
Darkblade Savior Page 3
