“How did he manage to kill it?” Milo said.
Gunner was about to answer when Owen, who had not appeared to be listening, suddenly broke in.
“Well, you know how tickbears wear those shells, right? I was huntin’ one day, just me and Sarry—that’s what I call my bow, I’ll show it to you sometime—when up comes this beast out of the woods, waddling on four legs like a giant turtle but with a furry snout and these long, fur-covered arms and legs. So I’m standing there waiting to see what happens, with my bow slung across my back, and I knew at the time that if I made any sudden movements—I’ve read all the books about tickbears, by the way—that I’d be takin’ a serious risk. Then again, I knew that if I didn’t hit the weak spot along the creature’s neck, I’d be takin’ another risk—of being the beast’s evening meal, right?”
“This is the best part,” Gunner said, shoveling food into his mouth as he spoke.
Owen got up and pushed his chair back with his legs, giving himself room to act out the scene. The dining room had become his stage. The other orphans were watching now, some of the younger ones not moving at all, their tiny mouths open, full of bread and meat.
“Obviously I couldn’t just stand there,” Owen said, “So I took a deep breath, to calm myself, and then I reached back like this and unslung my bow—like this!—and then all of a sudden the tickbear’s barreling toward me, so I do the only thing I can think of…”
“You dived,” said a small boy with a high voice.
“You killed ’em,” said a rosy-cheeked girl who could barely see over the table.
Gunner frowned at them. “Let him finish, will ya? Geez!”
“I got out of his way, obviously.” Owen pushed aside the chair, toppling it, and rolled to his right, almost kicking another orphan’s chair. He rolled across the floor three times, mimicked pulling an arrow out of a quiver, and then got back up again. “I readied my bow, and right as the tickbear was runnin’ by me—because he missed me the first time—I pulled the arrow back. Time seemed to slow down ’cause I was so fired up, and just as the big hairy critter was about to turn back, I let go of the bow and sent the arrow straight into its neck, releasing a fountain of blood…”
“Ew,” the little girl squeaked.
“Mighty,” the small boy said, pumping a fist in the air.
“—and the tickbear just fell over dead as a rock. It all happened pretty fast, actually.” Owen cleared his throat, picked up his chair, and sat back down at the table.
The dining room exploded with applause and loud hooting. Some of the girls tore off bits of bread and tossed them at Owen, who had gotten up onto his chair to bow before his audience. He was almost as small as Milo and didn’t seem especially strong or quick—but he sure could talk.
Owen introduced himself to Milo with a handshake.
“Owen,” he said.
“Milo Banks.”
“I know who you are,” he said, then winked at Emma. She rolled her eyes.
The applause died down and everyone went back to eating and chatting with their friends. Now and then, thunder crashed against the windows.
“I think we’ll fit in just fine here,” Emma said, drinking from a glass of what appeared to be apple juice. It smelled like lemons, apples, and some kind of spice.
“I think so, too,” Milo said, grabbing a nearby jug and pouring a cup. It was called Nectarberry juice, and as soon as it entered his mouth, it turned into a cold, sweet mixture of liquid and vapor that electrified his teeth and sizzled coolly on his tongue.
He was halfway through a second cup when a loud bang filled the room.
“What was that?” Emma said.
Everyone had turned to look at the door. Another bang, closer than the first. It was the sound of a large door being slammed shut against the storm.
Ascher stood up and watched the door. The dining room was silent, and the orphans sat perfectly still. Pellets of rain broke against the glass. The windows were squares of black that flashed a moment before each growl of thunder.
Ascher got up and crossed the room but hadn’t gone far when the double doors burst open, letting in the earthy smells of soil and rain.
A girl screamed. The orphans shifted in their chairs. A few rose, ready to flee, as two men in leather armor, each soaking wet, boots covered in mud, dragged a third man into the room. He was either dead or unconscious and left a wet streak on the floor behind him.
In his immense, bustling way, Ascher ran to the men. The room was so quiet aside from the rain that his booming voice seemed to fill every square inch of it.
“What happened?”
The men took ragged breaths. They carried bucklers and wore studded leather vests. One of the men had his sword out, and the blade, like the rest of him, gleamed with moisture from the rain.
“We’re not sure,” said the one with the sword. “We saw a man. It happened fast. We ran after him, following Renzo’s lead”—he indicated the unconscious man, whose eyes were wide open and blank—“and then we saw a burst of white light. I thought it was lightning at first, but it was too close to the ground. The light came from the man. He—he was a powerful magician. The light burned my eyes, and when I opened them again there he was, touching Renzo’s forehead. Then he disappeared—another burst of light—and Renzo just—he just fell over.”
“We have a team on patrol now, do we not?” Ascher said. “We have men outside, am I right? Answer me, man!”
“Poncros and his team are searching the grounds, and Ferragut’s on patrol with his men. All points of entrance are covered.”
“Good.” Ascher turned his attention to the unconscious man and studied his frozen expression. Many of the orphans had gotten up from their seats and were watching from across the room. Milo and Emma stood side by side and gawked.
Ascher reached down and felt the man’s neck for a pulse.
“He’s been stunned, but he’s not hurt.”
The two soldiers watched Ascher like children listening to a ghost story. They kept their hands on the hilts of their swords.
“How did it happen?” one man said. “Was it magic?”
“Of course it was magic,” the other one said. “What else would it be? Nectarwine?”
No one laughed. Ascher slapped the unconscious man’s cheeks.
“Wake, man. Come back.”
The man remained frozen. It was difficult to see with the others standing around him, but Milo managed to catch a glimpse of the unconscious man’s paralyzed face.
“What is that?” Emma said.
Her voice sounded strange. Milo looked at his sister and was shocked to see that her eyes had blanked out as if she, too, had been hypnotized.
“Emma?” Milo nudged his sister. “Hey. Em. What is it?”
“It’s a message.”
Emma walked forward, drifting across the room like a sleepwalker.
“Emma, wait.”
“Let her go.”
The voice was Sevarin’s. He had come up next to Milo and clamped his hand around Milo’s wrist. Sevarin’s grip was strong, unnaturally so. Milo winced as pain filled his arm.
“Okay, okay,” he said, pulling away.
Sevarin looked down at Milo with eyes that spoke of a grave seriousness.
“She’s aware.”
“Aware of what?” Milo said, frowning.
Ascher and the two soldiers went silent as they watched Emma cross the room.
No one spoke, not even Ascher. The soldiers stepped aside to allow Emma, who appeared small and fragile among them, access to the stunned man. Ascher’s face drew tight with worry.
“Emma, sweetheart, what do you see?”
Emma crouched by the man’s side. “He wants to tell us something.”
“Who does?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. It’s inside the man’s head. Inside his—his mind.”
She examined the man’s face. One of the soldiers began to speak, but Ascher shushed him.
Emma touched the man’s forehead, then got up and took a few steps back. The man jerked. His shoulders and head lifted off the ground, followed by the rest of him, until he was sitting up, staring straight ahead, oblivious to the world around him.
Emma jogged back until she was at Milo’s side.
“What just happened?” he said.
Emma shrugged. “There’s something inside his head that wants to come out. I don’t know what, exactly. I just—feel it.”
The soldier, no longer frozen, looked around, distant, still not aware of his surroundings.
“Hear me,” he said in a monotonous voice. “The emperor’s mages cast their vision across the land. Only the beacon crystal of Sargos can hide you. Find it or perish.”
A moment later, the man’s body gave a single, violent jerk, and he blinked.
“What’s wrong?” he said, looking up at Ascher. “What happened?”
Ascher put his hand on the man’s forehead to soothe him.
“It’s okay. You were in a trance.”
Ascher gave the twins a look of utmost seriousness. “Do you remember where you put that crystal your father gave you?”
“Why did he call it by that name?” Emma asked before Milo had the chance. He’d been thinking the same thing.
“Apparently, the crystal your father gave you was the one he’d been using for thousands of years. They grow more powerful with age, especially when used by a demigod. Now, I need to know—”
“I remember,” Milo said, stepping forward. The room had gone silent. Everyone was staring at him. “I left it near where…” His eyes searched the floor as he remembered. “Near where my dad died.”
Ascher approached Milo with heavy, bearish steps.
“I’ll search for it tonight,” he said. “In the meantime, get some sleep. You’ve been through a lot.”
“No!” Milo said.
The orphans gasped. He had spoken forcefully, like this was the most important thing he would ever do.
“I’m going with you,” he said. “I know exactly where I left it.”
CHAPTER 27
I n one of Castle Leon’s tall, twisted towers, an Acolyte woman wrapped in chains awoke with a start.
She listened to what sounded like a crowd of people in the distance. The noise had pulled her from a dream she couldn’t remember, though she knew it had been peaceful, and that her husband, Max, and her twins, Milo and Emma, had been with her.
Alexandra winced. She had been sleeping on the cold stone floor, using her broken wings as blankets, and the act of pushing herself up a few inches caused a burst of incredible pain. Violent memories filled her mind, as vicious as the pain. She recalled watching Max die, being captured, losing her frightened children to a world they barely understood.
She pushed those thoughts aside to better focus on the present. Biting back moans, she crawled across the tiny cell toward the window, her chains clattering against the floor as she moved. The window was a mere slit in the stone that had once allowed archers to safely fire arrows at enemies lurking below.
She poked her head out. Today, the people gathered in the courtyard were not there to draw blood; they had gathered—thousands of them, dressed in the tattered clothes of poverty-stricken commoners—to watch one man who had not yet appeared on the regal balcony of the castle’s main keep.
He finally did, and Alexandra cringed at what she saw. She drew back into the cool darkness of the tower. She would need a few moments to prepare. The faces belonged to men she despised—and no, hate was not too strong a word; she hated them, hated with every feather in her wings, every cell in her body. They were the men intent on destroying her family.
She imagined the emperor speaking to the crowd, motioning above his enormous belly, his lips glistening like the insides of a fish. She pictured the emperor’s cousin, Kovax, gripping a blood crystal to keep afloat the swirling ball of light serving as the emperor’s microphone. That magical sphere would carry his voice to every corner of Lethargis. Not a single man, woman, or child would escape his words.
“Finally,” the emperor said, “our magician’s efforts have paid off. Look what we have accomplished!”
Alexandra got up from the floor and ran to the window. She poked her head out again, blinked against a sharp wind that slapped her face, and tried to see what was going on. A line of people dressed in silk garments stood on the castle’s main balcony, overlooking the crowd. From this distance she couldn’t make out their faces, but she knew exactly which one was Emperor Corgos Leonaryx. He stood a few paces before the others, fat and purple as a plum in his fur-lined robe, epaulets glinting on his shoulders.
Standing next to him was a young boy dressed only in rags.
Could it be?
“No,” Alexandra said. “Milo!”
She looked more closely at the boy, saw the tail rising up from the small of his back, and realized that it was not her son at all. This boy, however, couldn’t have been much older than Milo, and he had the same shaggy head of hair.
Except that his coloring was all wrong—not human at all, in fact.
He looked as though he’d been drawn with a soft stick of charcoal, more a ghostly rendering of a boy than the real thing. A black-and-white shadow of a boy who could have been her son but thankfully was not.
The emperor shouted into the purple orb floating down by his belt. Nearby, his cousin Kovax made the necessary hand-motions to keep the aural amplification spell going.
“This new weapon will allow us to draw luminether from these beastbloods, who have no right to be here in the first place.”
The crowd roared its approval. The emperor used one of his stubby arms to indicate the Feral boy standing next to him.
“Witness this young Feral’s transformation. Once, he was a normal-looking boy with rosy skin and beautiful blond hair—and a tail, of course—beastblood by all appearances. Had he cut off his tail and used colored lenses to hide his orange eyes, no one would ever have identified him as the beastblood that he is. That all changed when he came into contact with our newest creations, the Towers of Light and Dusk!”
The people in the crowd lifted their fists into the air and roared. Most of them wore dirty cotton shirts and tattered pants.
“Now, now”—the emperor made a dropping motion with both hands and the crowd quieted—“do not think of these towers only as weapons. They can be used to store the blood ether taken from each and every beastblood we put inside. We will use this power for the war effort, to finally rid Astros of those scientist-magician traitors to the west, as well as all the others who have kept us down.” He clamped his hand on the boy’s shoulder. The boy flinched. “His sacrifice will be our victory!”
The crowd opened up and poured forth a roar of approval. It sent Alexandra tumbling backward into her cell, where she slid down the wall and stayed that way for a long time.
“Oh, gods,” she said, and her broken wings twitched beneath her weight. “He’s talking about genocide.”
CHAPTER 28
K ovax couldn’t help but smile as the crowd lifted its magnificent voice.
Corgos turned to him and flashed that gluttonous smile of his. The emperor’s lips were never still; he was always licking them, smiling, or snarling.
“When she wakes up, she’ll think she’s still dreaming,” he said. He swept his right hand over the crowd. They were thrusting their fists toward the sky and chanting, “To-wers! To-wers! To-wers!” Corgos winked at Kovax. “What do you say, cuz? She’ll fall in love with you all over again. And the boy? He’ll worship you, and rightfully so. We’ll be the rulers of every last quarter of this realm.”
He let out a grizzly laugh. Soft blue light illuminated his face from below. It went away as Kovax let the sphere fade to nothing.
“Don’t talk about Samara,” Kovax said, giving Corgos a stern look. “Or my son.”
Corgos peered at his cousin with a suspicious half smile. Though a head shorter, he weighed three times
as much as Kovax. His hair fell to his shoulders in silky brown curls, the result of daily treatments with rare oils and essences imported from Ayrtoros. Emperor Corgos loved his hair and his beard, which he kept perfumed and powdered, but not as much as he loved women, drinking, and gambling.
He put his hand on Kovax’s shoulder. When he smiled, as he inevitably did, his eyes twinkled as if he were drunk—but there was something cruel in them as well.
“Don’t be so glum, cuz. With your Tower of Light, you’ll wake that wife and son of yours, and with my Tower of Dusk I’ll get my superweapon. Then we’ll have it all. No one will ever stand in our way again.” His lips curled into a snarl and his hand tightened on his cousin’s shoulder. A violent gleam came into his eyes. “All you have to do is find a way to get more of those crystals. How hard can that be?”
“Harder than you think,” Kovax glowered back. He was not intimidated. He remembered when Corgos had been a fat, pimply faced Humankin who had begged his older Savant cousin to mix some sort of potion, or weave some sort of spell—anything!—that would get him a date to the Theus Academy Ballare.
“Now, now, cuz. You’re the most powerful Savant in the empire. I believe in you.”
Kovax found himself gritting his teeth. If he could get his hands on those Banks twins, he could use their blood ether to become as powerful as a god. Things in the Leonaryx family would certainly change after that. But he needed somewhere to store all that power, and crystals of that variety were hard to come by.
“I need more resources,” Kovax said. “The mining process is killing too many of our men. We’ll need to build machines.”
“No,” Corgos said. “We’ve done enough to keep those blasted Ayrtorian machines off Taradyn. I’m not going to give in now. Besides, we’re stretched thin as it is. You’ll get as many men as you need to mine those crystals. And once my Tower of Dusk is operational, you can start with your precious Tower of Light. How does that sound?”
Kovax gave a stiff bow. “Of course. I am most grateful, Highness.”
Corgos patted his cousin’s shoulder, turned and stepped out onto the balcony so he could gaze over his adoring crowd. He lifted one stubby arm as high as it would go, then made a tight fist and shook it. His laughter could be heard over the deafening cheers.
Savant & Feral (Digital Boxed Set): Books 1 and 2 of the Epic Luminether Fantasy Series Page 17
