by Deck Davis
His blight was gone. His nose felt numb, and he didn’t want to even look at what Studs’ knobkerrie had done to his face.
Everything seemed to wash over him then; the explosion, running through the alleyways, pounding on the church door. Witas and his arm, first hanging by tendons and then being torn off.
The necromancer, Kortho, Trout…it all whirled into winds in his head and made him want to close his eyes and just sleep it all way.
It wasn’t the way a necromancer should be. This wasn’t strength; it was weakness, a human weakness that the academy had spent years training out of him, but maybe no training in the world could prepare a man for everything he’d been through.
But even in the darkness, he remembered a voice. He remembered what Mancerno had said to him when Studs was trying to smash in his skull.
Fear is just a truth. It isn’t pathetic to feel fear; only if you let it stop you. I am with you, shade brother. You won’t die at the hands of this man.
Had he chosen the right shade after all?
Was having shade bothers, having one of the Three in his head, a good thing?
He didn’t know, but it had given him strength when he needed it. And now, he was going to need even more because this wasn’t done. It wasn’t even close.
He looked around. The healing crypt, with its incense smells and gentle lute music that he couldn’t see the source of, had a calming effect on him. It was a peaceful place, one where he wished he could spend more time.
Time was something he didn’t have. Studs had told him that Hackett was taking his stolen glyphlines to Bendeldrick, who could transplant them onto his people, those who believed in all the uprising shit he peddled.
“Where’s Witas?” said Jakub.
“He’s upstairs, talking with Mossaraya.”
“You healed him?”
“He’s alive and he can walk, but he isn’t in a good way. It’s best he rests up here for a while.”
“I need to see him. Thank you, Hosandra. Listen, I’m sorry that I never sought you out. It was selfish; I knew that you and the others were rescued from camp, but I didn’t want to find you. I didn’t want to look at you all; I just wanted a break from it all, to cut you out.”
“We found each other when it mattered, Jakub. That’s all anyone can ask.”
Then, Jakub did something he rarely ever did, something that went against who he’d grown up to be.
He reached for Hosandra and pulled her into a hug, and he felt her settle her weight against him. With her so close, smelling her perfume, feeling her hair against his cheek, he felt tears well inside him.
He pushed them back, and he moved away from her.
“I need to speak to Witas.”
He walked out of the crypt and up the stairs and into the church. There, he saw that the floor was covered in blood, and the suitcase was where he’d let it, with deceased Trout and with Studs trapped in its artificed depths.
To his left, Witas and Mossaraya were sitting on a pew, speaking in hushed voices, their faces close. Mossaraya had smeared white paste on his cheek to try and heal where the morning star had torn his flesh.
Witas was pale, covered in blood and dirt, his clothes ripped, his right arm gone, but mercifully not gushing blood anymore.
Jakub felt a tremendous gratitude seeing him even in that state, because it meant Hosandra had called the divines, that they’d answered her and let the Black Cleric live.
As he walked toward them, he heard footsteps behind him, and soon Hosandra joined him.
The necromancer, the two clerics, and the priest gathered on a pew.
CHAPTER 84
“Holy Hells,” said Witas. “You look worse than me.”
The normality of Witas’s voice broke Jakub, it shattered through his reserve and he felt his emotions mix inside him. This got stronger when Witas stepped away from the priests and hugged him, squeezing him tight and slapping him on the back, before breaking away.
Two hugs in two minutes. Shade brothers.
It was quite a change in his life, different from the reserve he’d kept up while he was in the academy, where instructors taught him to bury his feelings.
But it was that same training that he’d need now, because there was a road ahead. Things to do.
“Mossaraya told me what happened in here,” said Witas. “He saw you deal with whoever killed Henwright.”
“Studs Godwin. He was working with the necromancer and with Hackett Lee.”
“Hackett lee?”
“You’d know him as Baron Moneyfingers.”
“And Studs is in the suitcase?”
“Alive and trapped. We need to find your brother.”
He told Witas what Studs had told him about Hackett, about Bendeldrick, about the glyphlines. It sounded even crueller in his re-telling; that these bastards were torturing the magic out of academy students, wrenching their gifts from them and then cutting out their glyphlines, so they could transplant them into others, into people who they didn’t belong to and who hadn’t earned them.
“I need to get to the academy,” said Jakub. “You’ll need a place to hide.”
The priest touched Witas’s shoulder. “Witas can stay here. I was wrong to banish him. I didn’t see what this all means; I was so focussed on what he was, that I forget who he was. I abandoned you, Witas.”
“Show me a man who thinks clearly every second of his life, and I’ll call him a god. I don’t blame you.”
“Good,” said Jakub. “You’ll be safe here.”
“I would be,” agreed Witas. “But I think it’s time that I saw Ian. I’m coming with you.”
“Out of the question. You need to rest.”
“And you’re a picture of health? I’m not going to hide here. If what you said is right, the academy will need all the help it can get.”
Jakub was going to protest, when he heard the sound of voices.
He rushed to the church door that Studs had smashed through, and he saw dozens of guards advancing toward the church from the far end of the Mussand district.
“This way,” said Hosandra, pointing at the crypt entrance. “There’s a way through the Rats’ Palace, and one of the tunnels leads to the edge of Dispolis. You can get a carriage.”
“That place again,” said Witas. “If there’s one place I’m never going to go after this…”
“I will speak to the guards,” said Mossaraya. “Go.”
They hurried down into the crypt. Hosandra approached one of the walls and felt around it with her fingertips, before pulling open a secret doorway.
“Down here,” she said. “The tunnel runs straight, and then forks three ways. You’ll want to go left.”
“Thank you,” said Jakub. “When all of this is done…”
And then he stopped talking, because something occurred to him.
Something he’d missed, and that they needed to do.
“I hate to do this,” he said, “but I need to ask you for something.”
“A girl calls on the divines for you, and that’s not enough?”
“I wouldn’t ask, but it’s important.”
“I know, Jakub. I’m kidding. Whatever all of this is, you’re in deep. Tell me.”
“The guardship aren’t coming here for you. Once Mossaraya talks to them, they’ll leave. When they do, I need you to do something for me.”
Hosandra touched his shoulder. “What do you need?”
“When the guards leave, I want you to go out and send a mana-message for me. It needs to go to…”
“Those things are expensive,” said Witas.
“You can have all my gold,” said Jakub.
Mossaraya shook his head. “The church will pay. If it helps you and Witas, it is the least I can do.”
“Thank you,” said Jakub. “Now, the message needs to go to a mage. His name is Wyrecast…”
CHAPTER 85 – Hackett Lee
For the first time in his life, Hackett felt lost in the crowd. He’d always been a
solitary guy, even to the point where he felt nervous in social situations. He only really spent time with Ella and Studs.
Now he was one of fifty people, all of them advancing into academy territory where they would set up camp, with Bendeldrick on horseback at the front, gripping the reins with his liguana claws.
Of the fifty, twenty-eight of them had glyphlines on their forearms - foreign skin grafted onto their own. Hackett had delivered thirty-two of them to Bendeldrick, but not all the transplants had been successful. Four died instantly, their bodies not only rejecting the tattooed skin but burning up and melting away, killing them and destroying the glyphlines.
It doesn’t matter, Bendeldrick had said. We have enough. The academy will not expect us, and they will not expect our powers. We advance now, strike sure and swift.
What the plan was after that, Hackett didn’t know. His part in it was almost done, and he was here only to see if through to its conclusion – to when they had taken the academy, killed the instructors, and recruited any willing students to their ranks.
Bendeldrick’s schemes went much further than that, he knew, but Hackett was too tired to even consider them.
All the pain he and Studs had caused, all the deaths, they were weighing on him in a way he never thought they would. He was tired, dazed, ready to rest.
He just hoped that when this was done, Bendeldrick didn’t need him anymore.
It’d take them a few hours to get to the academy, and Hackett decided he was going to spend it working out what to do with his life.
Ahead of him, Bendeldrick stopped. He turned his horse and addressed his new glyphline army.
“Remember,” he told them all. “The spells you have are not yours, and they may resist you at first. With strength of will, you can tame them. I have faith in you all.”
CHAPTER 86
Jakub and Witas were sitting in the compartment of the wagon with the suitcase on the floor by their feet. Neither of them had spoken in a while and similarly, they knew that the wagon driver wouldn’t talk, either.
He would never tell anyone who he had given a ride to and where he had taken them, but it had cost the rest of Jakub’s coins to buy that silence.
Soon, he saw familiar terrain through the compartment window. There was the Well of the Damned, close to where he and Mason D’Angelt had fought the gwarflock and the mud golems.
Then he saw Old Teller’s Tree, where a lot of the students used to sneak to at night, creeping out of their dorms so they could share illicit bottles of Firejack and get drunk.
He thought that coming back would stir things in him, but he felt nothing; just a removal from it all, as if he hadn’t spent his formative years here, as if he hadn’t grown up and studied in its boundaries.
The academy was nothing to him now; the only thing that drew him back was Bendeldrick and Hackett, and the knowledge of their glyphlines and what they planned to do.
The instructors and students needed help. He might have been expelled, but he was human. He could have left the Church of the Brightlight and gotten a carriage to the Racken Hills and forgotten about all of this, but he could never bring himself to do that.
He just had to see this through, and then he’d think about the rest of his life.
Right now, all of that seemed far away.
The carriage jolted to a sudden stop. Horses whinnied, and Jakub heard the driver’s footsteps.
The carriage door opened. The driver was from the Fielden mountain ranges in the west, and he spoke with the trademark brevity of the people there.
“Far as we go. Get out. I turn back.”
“We’re a few miles away from the academy and we’re both beaten to hell. Come on.”
“Academy don’t let no wagons near without trader license.”
Jakub and Witas climbed out of the carriage. It was night-time now, and the land in the academy boundaries was silent. Few travellers would think about using the road to the academy at this time – at least not any honest ones.
It was then that Jakub saw the academy building again. It felt like it had been years since he’d been here, so much had happened.
Again, he felt nothing. He’d heard from other students that when they were in the academy they missed their family homes, and when they were in their homes, they missed the academy. Even further, people who graduated and started to work in the field thought back to their times as students with nostalgia.
Jakub felt no such thing. He had no family home to miss, and the academy had turned his back on him.
The driver grabbed their suitcase from the passenger compartment and threw it on the ground. He climbed back into his seat and spoke to his horses and then, with a whip of the reins, he headed back to Dispolis.
“Well, let’s get going,” said Witas. “We just need to talk our way past the front door, but I don’t think two expelled ex-students are going to get much of a welcome.”
“I know a better way to get in. We call it the Path of Returning, and it’s around the side of the academy. But we’ll do it tomorrow.”
“Leaving it a little late, aren’t we?”
“Nothing can get near the academy at night; close to the academy itself, they raise a mana field that stops anyone with permission from sneaking around. They pour all their mana into it at night and leave it off during the day, since it’s expensive to maintain. They aren’t worried about attack when it’s light and there are dozens of magic users walking around.”
“I saw a tavern half a mile back,” said Witas. “We can go there.”
CHAPTER 87
The tavern was softly lit and it smelled of ale, manure, and sweat. A couple of guys were sitting at a table in the corner, and one kept glancing over his friend’s shoulder and at Jakub. He thought he did, anyway; right now, he’d have flinched at his own shadow.
“Evening lads,” said the barman, with a nod.
“We’ll take a room,” said Witas. “Two single beds. Two. I’m not sharing with this guy.”
“And some food and beer, please,” said Jakub.
They took a seat in another corner of the room, opposite the other men and away from the bar itself, where the barkeep was leaning on the counter with a book open in front of him. Across, the barkeep’s wife was sitting on a chair with a lute on her lap, picking at the strings with her long nails and humming a song.
“This is a quiet place,” said Witas.
“It’s between Dispolis and the academy. The academy doesn’t let traders deliver at night, and the only students who go out after dark are scouts.”
“What about our friends in the corner?”
“They’re holding hands under the table. See? This place has a reputation for keeping secrets.”
“The strangest thing happened when we got off the carriage,” said Witas. “I looked at the academy, and everything started flooding back. The place hasn’t changed, and you know what? It got me in the gut a little. Even though they kicked me out, I had some good times there. Like, how we all used to have every meal together in the common room. Thirty kids laughing and joking together.”
“I thought it’d miss it when I graduated. I thought that when I went out on assignments I’d wish I was back in my room, but I don’t,” said Jakub.
“I don’t know about you, but they were right to kick me out,” said Witas. “Seeing it now, thinking back to the poor kids they take in, a place like that is worth protecting. I wasted my chance.”
The barkeeper loomed over them then, holding two glasses in one hand, and two plates of pie and mash on his other hand and forearm.
“Enjoy, lads. I brew the beer myself. I call this Hoppers Hop; I powder grasshoppers and use them for flavour.”
“Thanks,” said Jakub.
He tasted his beer, grimaced, but then relaxed when the alcohol hit his stomach and spread warmth through him.
Witas drank half of his in one gulp, and it was only while he drained the rest that Jakub saw a change in him; his eyes darkened a li
ttle, and this clued Jakub into the reality of how he was feeling.
The cleric was putting a brave face on it, but the guy had lost a damn arm. Sure, the divines had healed the wound, but he’d lost part of himself. Literally.
He was probably working on adrenaline now, and when this was all done, he’d drop.
“What’s the plan when we get to the academy?” said Witas.
“We’ll lay it all out to instructor Irvine. We have Studs and Trout in the suitcase, and we have names to give him.”
“It’s probably best that I sit that one out.”
“You’re going to come all the way out here and then not see your brother?”
“I want to…but on the other hand, I’d rather stick my cock in boiling mercury. Besides, now’s not the time for that. We’re here to warn the academy and get them on side, and me being there is only going to distract things.”
“You’re hiding.”
“The opposite, actually. I was expelled from the academy, then banished from the church. It’s the opposite of hiding when people force you out.”
“No,” said Jakub, “It’s hiding. When I was expelled, that was the first thing that came to mind – to go and hide in the Racken Hills. I know what hiding feels like. The academy treated us both like shit, and here we are coming back to help them because that’s the right choice to make. If we can do that for the academy, then you can face your own flesh and blood.”
“And if they don’t believe us?”
“Then in a day or two’s time Bendeldrick and his men will show up, and they’ll have no choice. Only then, they’d have lost the chance to prepare. If we get Irvine on side then he can inform the guardship; it’ll have weight when it comes from a respected academy instructor, rather than an expelled necromancer and a black cleric who are both wanted for murder.”
Witas stood up. “I’m gonna hit the sack. We’re leaving at first light?”
Jakub nodded. “You head up. I’ll have another drink.”
CHAPTER 88
One drink turned to two as he listened to the barkeep’s wife play her lute and hum a tune. Soon, Jakub’s bladder was crying for release, so he went to the latrines outside. They were by the stables, and the barkeep’s mule was standing in one of the pens.
