“Why does it look so scummy?” Basher asked.
“Something is interfering,” Querrigan said, sounding more confused now than excited. “A warding spell, perhaps. But… No, that doesn’t make sense. Who would have cast it?”
“I don’t like it,” Coscoros said. “Is it the mineral? Maybe we’re using it up too fast?”
Querrigan shook his head frantically. “No, no, no. It’s something else. I also have a bad feeling, but we cannot stop now.”
Coscoros drew back, as if the stone were a ticking time bomb. “I still don’t like it.”
“Let’s keep going,” Basher said, leaning in. “The boy might drop some clues.”
They all stared into the stone. What they could see, just barely, were children fighting behind a building made of red bricks. A boy with a layer of tough-looking fat on his body was holding a skinny girl up against a wall. Behind him, two lanky boys held a smaller one back.
“Wait,” the smaller boy said. His voice came out high pitched and warbled from the interference. “She has to catch her bus. If she’s not on it, they’ll come looking for her, and you’ll get in trouble. So just let her go.”
The bigger boy spoke. He kept his eyes on the girl, who looked ready to cry.
“The rock. Toss it over, or I’ll find your twin sister, and I’ll hit her, too. I’ll hit her so hard you’ll feel it.”
“It’s in my pocket,” the smaller boy said, grunting out every other word. He was clearly in some pain. “I can’t reach it like this.”
One of the lanky boys reached into the smaller one’s pocket. He found what he was looking for and held it up.
The words erupted from Querrigan’s mouth.
“A beacon crystal!”
With an earth-shaking boom, the sightstone exploded.
Coscoros managed to wrap himself in his wings just in time. The blast flung him backward nevertheless, sending him rolling across the grass. He jumped to his feet and looked around wildly.
Basher stood his ground. The Berserker’s massive body had handled the impact with no problem, though he couldn’t help getting some of the shards in his eyes and nose, sending him into a fit of coughing and eye rubbing. The scorpion was fine; its shell had absorbed the explosion.
Querrigan had been standing right over it, defenseless. The explosion had sent the low mage flying backward to slam against a tree.
“What was that?” Basher yelled, pulling out his warhammer and swinging it blindly.
The clearing had gone dark except for the orange flicker of the dying torch, which lay several feet away from where it had been standing. Coscoros grabbed it and ran to the Knight-Captain.
Querrigan sat slumped against the tree. The hood of his cloak had been blown back, revealing his pale and hairless head. His face was a ghastly sight. The blast had scraped off most of the skin, and knocked out almost all of his teeth. One eye remained, the other probably lost somewhere in the woods.
Querrigan gasped and shuddered. Coscoros tried healing magic, his hands already burning with the red-orange glow of a spell.
It was too late. Querrigan sputtered out a final command.
“Find… twins…”
His head slumped forward, blood leaking from his ravaged mouth. And then, he was still.
Coscoros flung the spell at the nearest tree to his left. On living things untainted by the Dark Ritual, it had the opposite effect of healing—the essence infused the tree with its poison, causing it to wither and shrink, its leaves turning black and dripping down like oil. Within seconds, the entire thing was little more than a diseased and empty shell.
“What in the name of the absent gods just happened?” Basher said, approaching Coscoros in a heated stride.
“Somehow, that boy got his hands on a beacon crystal,” Coscoros said. “I think we’re looking at a truly unique situation here.”
“So we should notify the emperor, right? We should go back up to…”
“No. We go to Kovax. He’ll know what to do. But first, we’ll search hospital records all over town for any mention of twins born between eleven and sixteen years ago. A boy and a girl.”
“Twins?” Basher said, squinting at him.
“Yes, twins, damn it! He mentioned the boy’s twin sister. Weren’t you listening?”
“So—you want me to search hospital records?”
Coscoros slammed the heel of his palm against Basher’s chest armor. It had little impact on the giant, who didn’t even blink. “Of course not, idiot! You’re a walking mountain. I might as well go in there, wings and all!”
“That’s an even worse idea,” Basher said, scratching his beard with the head of his weapon.
Coscoros shook his head and began to pace. “It’ll require another trip, performed in utmost secrecy. I’ll get some of our Humankin agents to infiltrate the hospitals. Then I’ll speak to Kovax personally, bypassing the Emperor, whom we all know,” he glanced meekly at his surroundings, as if the man could hear him from all the way inside his castle, “is a complete idiot.”
“Indeed,” Basher said. “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”
Coscoros had bent down to fish Querrigan’s beacon crystal out of his robes, the one calibrated to protect them from sightstones. It was their only way in and out of this realm. Without it, they could be stuck here for gods only knew how long.
He wondered if the boy they had seen in the sightstone had any idea what his own crystal was capable of. Probably not.
Gripping the crystal, he stood watching the dead Knight-Captain’s corpse. It had begun to disintegrate into pulsing, red-black magical waste. A side effect of dying in the human realm; luminether and blood ether particles were not particularly fond of this place and tended to self-destruct. No corpse to send back to the priesthood, but at least there would be no remaining evidence to alarm the humans, either.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Sounds good to me.” Basher slid his warhammer back into its harness. “I hate this place anyway.”
Coscoros aimed the beacon crystal at a spot on the grass several feet away. He recited the phrase Querrigan had linked to it—the command that would take them back home.
“Astrican swan to the blackness swam.”
A rift tore itself open.
CHAPTER 14
F ar away from Dearborn, New Jersey—in another world, one could say—a sprawling castle sat in the heart of Lethargis, capital city of the Empire of Leonaryx, on the continent known as Taradyn. The castle had been through many rulers and almost as many names. For now, it was called Castle Leon, after its current king, Corgos Leonaryx.
A riot had broken out in one of the city’s poorest sectors, a place of hard little shacks and dirt roads. The castle’s massive gates opened, and a stream of soldiers poured out, wearing purple vests over their armor and carrying metal crossbows with electrified bolts that buzzed in the rain.
Thunder growled and lightning flashed. The sky had opened up, dropping sheets of cold, stinging rain. The smell of wet gutters soured the air. From one of the emperor’s towers, a heavy bell filled the night with urgent clanging.
Men shouted and women screamed as the soldiers came into the slums, shooting. Children ran barefoot across the muddy streets, wild little phantoms in the flashing light. There was no electricity at this hour, in compliance with a citywide measure to save resources. Mothers and fathers shouted for their children in the dark.
Blood mixed with mud and ran down the gutters. Children hid in nooks and watched the soldiers run up and down the muddy streets. They watched men and women dressed in simple cotton shirts and torn pants—people they knew, their own neighbors—fall to the soggy ground, convulsing as the bolts electrocuted them.
There had been a shortage in ration slips that week. The people were accustomed to trading their slips for meals, used to having the emperor’s men toss sour fruit, spoiled meat, and stale bread at them twice a day. Without them, they were faced with empty stomachs and nights
that were longer and more painful than usual.
Whenever the shortages happened, the streets became battlefields.
COSCOROS COULDN’T HEAR the screams from inside the castle, but he could feel them in his feathers. A pleasant, tingling sensation that promised the sort of political fallout he enjoyed when he wasn’t immersed in some mission.
Flanked by two Berserker soldiers, Coscoros walked along the red-carpeted corridor toward the castle’s library, where the emperor’s cousin spent most of his evenings. The torches along the walls, fueled by low magic, radiated a blue light that gave off no heat. Their morbid hiss chilled Coscoros down to the stems of his feathers—not because he feared that kind of magic, but because they were Kovax’s trademark. The low mage hated fire and chose these lifeless torches to light certain parts of the castle he was known to frequent.
The low mage was also about as cold as the blue flames he so admired. Arriving at his destination, Coscoros took a deep breath and knocked three times on the massive wooden door.
“Come in, Lieutenant,” Kovax called out, and his voice sounded frail. “And tell those two brutes to wait outside. I can tell by your footsteps you have something urgent and private to tell me.”
Coscoros glanced back at the two Berserkers. With nods of their enormous, bearded gray heads, they took up posts on either side of the entrance.
The inside of the library was well lit. Orbs of light floated around the bookshelves, and when Coscoros looked up, he saw a central shaft surrounded by eight floors of shelves. One could easily fly up to any level—if one had wings, of course. But the sprawling library was cut off from the rest of the castle; Kovax used it as his personal space.
Coscoros turned a corner into a section containing rows of tables and a massive fireplace. When he saw Kovax, he stopped and stared. He knew he should look away out of respect—Kovax was the second most powerful man in the empire, after all, and should not be seen in such a state—but he couldn’t bring himself to avert his eyes.
A group of Acolyte nurses in white suits tended to the low mage. They had been shorn, which meant their wings had been cut off and the stumps fused together over the spines so they could not grow back. It was a common practice in some parts of Astros, and a mandatory procedure for any and all white-winged Acolyte slaves residing in Castle Leon. It gave them each a strange-looking bump behind the shoulders that reminded Coscoros of a hunchback he’d seen down in the levathon stables once.
He shuddered at the thought of being shorn. Luckily for him, his wings were black.
“Ah, I see you haven’t slept,” Kovax said, smiling despite the solemn frowns on the faces of his nurses. One was fumbling with a tube running into Kovax’s arm, a tube that was dark red with his blood. She was frowning more than the others.
Coscoros bowed. “I have some—disconcerting news, my lord. Good and bad.”
Kovax motioned for the nurses to back away. There were three of them, all middle-aged women with sad, lined faces. They glanced at Coscoros and his black wings. He detected a hint of jealousy.
“Give me a moment, Lieutenant.” Kovax struggled to stand up. A nurse reached out to help him, but he hissed at her and pawed at her hand. Coscoros saw Kovax’s staff leaning against the wall and went to grab it. He gave it to the low mage, who took it with obvious relief.
“There we go,” Kovax said, using the staff as a walking stick. He looked frail these days, and he wasn’t all that old. His hair was still mostly black—only a few saltings of gray overall—and despite the wrinkles on his papery face, his eyes were a vibrant, electric blue.
Coscoros took a moment to study the mage’s staff. Made of golden Hyathean metal with a red blood crystal at one end and a blue luminether crystal at the other, it was famous throughout the empire. It even had a name: “Duo.” The red crystal stored blood ether, which was the reason Kovax was so sickly. Blood ether, like so many temptations, had terrible withdrawal effects for those who used it to power their magic. That probably explained the blood transfusion he had been undergoing a moment earlier.
“There’s been another riot in the Guttersmoke sector,” Kovax said as they walked, his staff tapping the floor. “These people, they don’t understand how to be part of a self-sustaining system. They’re like parasites that cling to the skin and fall off when they get too bloated. And they blame us, saying the blood is bad, the blood is bad.”
“My lord,” Coscoros said, trying to hide his interruption with a soft clearing of his throat. “We really must speak about the mission.”
“Yes, of course. I feel we’re getting close to finding them.”
“Them?”
Kovax smiled at him, a bit condescendingly. “Demigods are a dying breed. The only ones remaining are, let’s just say, of the notorious sort.”
They walked past windows that showed nothing but darkness outside. Lightning flashed, and, for a split second, the rivulets of rain running down the glass became vibrant, wriggling snakes.
“The sightstone you gave us…” Coscoros said as they walked. “It contained kronolith mineral. Much too expensive for a standard hunt.”
“You’re smarter than I thought.”
“Thank you, my lord. But I have a feeling you already know what I’m going to tell you.”
“I can sense it in your voice. You found what you were looking for, but you’re not entirely satisfied. Tell me what happened.”
Coscoros recounted the events of the previous night, up to the point where his Humankin spies found what they were looking for in the hospital records. He left out the part about Querrigan dying. He was almost too afraid to share that part right away.
“Twins,” Kovax said, looking pensively down at the floor. “Unbelievable.”
“Yes. The boy who cast that spell, the one who led us to the school… His name is Milo Banks. His sister is Emma.”
“The offspring of Maxwell and Alexandra.” He stopped walking and looked thoughtful for a moment. “Maximus, son of Sargos, and Zandra, daughter of Aliara, my worst enemies. I didn’t expect them to risk having children. But it makes sense. They felt safe, isolated from,” he gazed around the library, “all of this.”
“Alive,” Coscoros said, shaking his head. “After all this time. I heard they had perished.”
“A convenient lie.”
“But the boy! He was able to cast a spell without the use of a luminether crystal.”
“He had a beacon crystal. What makes you think he didn’t have a luminether crystal in his pocket?”
“True, my lord. The chances of him being a sorcerer, and not needing one, are slim.”
“Infinitesimally slim. They rarely survive past adolescence. The first spell usually kills them off, splitting their little brains in half. Even demigods. Unless they receive Academy or priesthood training at a very young age.”
Kovax resumed his walk. “Smart of you not to go to my cousin first. The emperor wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to handle this. You’ve performed admirably. I’m promoting you to Lesser Knight-Captain. Have Querrigan report immediately—”
“My lord, Querrigan is dead. He was standing too close to the stone, when the boy—”
“Milo,” Kovax said thoughtfully, as if the matter of the Knight-Captain’s death was of no importance at all.
“Yes, my lord.”
“Querrigan was a fool. He should have anticipated something like that. Even looking back in time using the mineral, a beacon crystal should have been considered a possibility.”
“If we had feared that,” Coscoros said, forgetting himself, “then we might not have looked in the first place.” He added quickly, “My lord.”
Kovax chuckled. “Do not fear me, Coscoros. I’ve already praised you for your work. Clearly, you’re tougher and more clever than the other blackwingers in my cousin’s employ. I’m surprised you weren’t promoted sooner.”
Coscoros noticed they were walking toward the doors through which he had entered a moment ago. Kovax was kicking
him out already. Of course, there was no time to waste. He hadn’t slept in two days, but a mission of this gravity called for every minute of his time. It might even result in another promotion.
“Now that Querrigan is gone,” Coscoros said, “I assume I’ll be reporting to—”
“Never assume anything around me,” Kovax said, stopping at the door. “I don’t concern myself with tradition or politics like my cousin. I see talent and strength, and I allow it to rise. You are now a Knight-Captain of the empire and will take Querrigan’s place as my right hand throughout this mission.”
Coscoros dropped his entire body in a sweeping bow. To be promoted from Lieutenant to Knight-Captain was unheard of.
“Thank you, my lord. I am not worthy.”
“If you are not worthy, then you are calling my judgment into question.”
Coscoros almost took a step back in fear. “No, my lord. I only meant—”
“I know what you meant.” Kovax raised a hand to stop him. “Now shut up and listen to me. Gather a team. Don’t make a move until I say the word. I’m going to take care of Maximus personally.”
Coscoros tried not to let his surprise show. Had he heard the low mage correctly? Kovax was going to confront Maximus, son of Sargos?
“Don’t look at me like that,” Kovax said. “I’m stronger than you think.”
“Of course, my lord. I’m ready for your command.”
Kovax used the blue crystal on his staff to cast a spell on the door. It spread across the surface in a thin, gleaming layer. Then, as if struck by a better idea, he cast another one that sprang all around them, connecting with the first. It was like being inside a giant soap bubble.
“So no one can hear us,” Kovax said. He lowered his voice anyway, and Coscoros felt a surge of pride at being involved in such a secretive conversation with a man of his status. “I don’t want my cousin to hear a peep about this just yet. He may be emperor, but in matters concerning demigods and sorcery, he always defers to me—even when he makes a display of being in charge. Understood?”
“Yes, my lord.”
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