The D'Karon Apprentice

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “The beast of the cave? But as I understand it, there is no beast of the cave.”

  “Lain was through the cave many times. Myranda was through it once. Deacon lived with the people of Entwell his whole life. None had seen or heard the beast. It doesn’t exist. Her sister must have been killed by the cave.”

  “Unless she survived.”

  “I don’t know. She’s… hundreds of years old. She lost her sister… I think Deacon said Entwell is… maybe four hundred years old? I think her sister went through before that… I don’t know. The years back then were different. The fifth year of this queen or the seventh year of that king. None of them make sense. I really don’t know how long ago any of these things are. There are long periods of just sitting in the mountains in the north, or sitting in a cave in the south…”

  “The cave. That is what we’re after. Do you remember anything about it?”

  “It was dark. It was filled with animal bones. She almost never left it. She…”

  Suddenly Ivy gasped and her eyes shot open.

  “What is it?”

  “Teht… I saw her.” She was almost shivering at seeing the face of one of her keepers. “Teht visited her so often. Turiel adored her. Took her instruction to heart and was so hungry for more. In my… in her memory there is such affection for her.” She squeezed her fists tight, subtle flares of red and whispers of black sparking around her. “I can’t stand it. To have those feelings inside of me. That face in my head…”

  Celeste gripped her hand. “They aren’t your thoughts. Set them aside. You need to focus. Where is the cave?”

  Ivy squeezed his hand tightly. “She… I can’t… every time she steps out of the cave, it’s just… dry and cold. The horizon is flat. There aren’t even any plants. And I… wait…” Her hands loosened and she reached out. “The pad, give me the pad!”

  He quickly handed her Deacon’s pad and the stylus, and instantly she began sketching, never once opening her eyes.

  “I can see it. She looked back upon it once, when she left to begin this. I can see the cave, and the cliffs.”

  The tip of the stylus sketched madly at the page, tracing out with remarkable fidelity a cave-riddled cliff side. When she was through, though it was no doubt a perfect representation of what the true cliff looked like, there was nothing terribly distinctive about it, and she knew it. She opened her eyes and looked over the drawing critically. The page was very small, but she realized there was one feature that stood out. She circled it and flipped to a new page.

  “This, back here. It’s a pointy mountain, or a spire. Very tall and narrow, and beside it there is a tree. Even taller than the spire, and with very few branches.” She sketched the spire in greater detail as she described it. “You can probably see it from a long way away.”

  When she was through, Celeste took it and looked it over.

  “Short of a point on a map, I believe this is as accurate as we can hope to have. Is there anything else you can tell us?”

  “She won’t hold anything back. Anything that she can do to bring her closer to her goal of vanquishing the beast is justifiable in her eyes.”

  “A beast that does not exist. Do you believe she might stop her quest if she were to learn the truth?”

  “I don’t think so. She’d never believe it. It would be like telling a monk that his gods did not exist. Her belief goes down to the core.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She’s… gleeful in what she does. Eager. And she is resourceful. If she has the remains of a creature, or if she senses that someone has died in a place, she can turn that to her advantage. She can… recruit the dead in the same way that you might recruit the living. The more violent and tragic their deaths, the more easily she can use them. And she…”

  “She has greater power where someone has died violently?” Celeste interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “… She is in New Kenvard. She has the whole of the Kenvard Massacre to feed upon. And she is a stone’s throw away from the front, where generations of lives were lost.”

  Ivy’s eyes widened as the depth of the realization struck her. “Gods… You’re right…”

  The fire flickered and then dimmed, swirling and wicking together as Ether shifted back to humanity.

  “Then there is no more time to waste restoring my energies. Prepare yourselves. Comfort will not be a consideration. We must move with speed. And we must move now.”

  #

  Turiel rolled herself painfully onto her back. Her arrival in the palace of Kenvard had been far rougher than she’d intended. Part of it was the speed at which she’d had to enter the portal. The plummeting entry had been turned into a swift sideways tumble as she passed through the conjured gateway. But if she’d understood the placement of the exit point properly, she should have arrived in a hallway. It would not have been comfortable, but she should have struck smooth ground and slid to a stop. Instead, she’d found only mounds of jagged, broken masonry. It had taken almost an hour of careful working of her magic to repair herself sufficiently to sit up, which meant she was only now seeing the nature of the devastation in what should have been a glorious palace.

  The sun had set, sending a deeper chill over the land and casting her in near-complete darkness, but that was little concern to her. Years within the cave had trained her to make do with barely the flicker of a candle. Even the rising moon filtered through the thick clouds of the north was light enough to reveal that there was little left of this place. Work had been done to at least prepare it to be rebuilt though. Here and there the most intact of the stones had been piled neatly, narrow paths of jagged brick had been cleared to allow workers to access the most unreachable or worst-damaged parts of the fallen structure, but save for scattered remnants of a spire and the crenellations atop some of the rubble, this once grand palace looked more like a quarry than the glorious symbol of a kingdom’s wealth and power.

  “No. How could this happen?” she gasped, genuine horror in her voice. “I remember Kenvard. Mother was a servant to the king here. I… I learned my first incantations in these very halls.”

  She stood and paced unsteadily to where her staff had landed, or at least to where the head of it had landed. The long fall and sudden stop had a similar effect on her staff as it had on her. Its white body was broken and splintered, revealing its hollow, red-stained interior that suggested her staff did not merely appear to be bone, it truly was. The gem was feathered with fractures, held together only by the staff’s clawed tip. With it in hand, she began to conjure tendrils, but they withered and faded. She sighed lightly and focused instead on conjuring just one thread. It wove down and pierced a fragment of the broken staff, drawing it near and stitching it back in place before a new thread replaced it and sought out the next piece.

  Her eyes still sweeping over the castle and the city around it, she set the staff beside her to continue its task on its own, then turned to the twitching heap that had been Mott. He had been in poor shape even before diving off the side, and now he was hardly recognizable. It was a grotesque sight, and but for his lack of blood, it would have been gory and hideous. Instead it looked like a demented taxidermist had grown weary of his latest project and thrown the scraps in the trash.

  Turiel reached out for him with her right hand, but instead held forth only the cloth-draped remnant of Ether’s attack. Again she sighed, more disappointed than in pain, and instead reached with her left. Mott’s form shook and twitched, then began to crackle back into shape. As soon as enough legs were whole enough to carry him, he dragged himself over to Turiel and heaved his head into her lap.

  “This place was glorious. Its walls were impenetrable, Mott. Look at them. Even now they stand. The one part of the city that doesn’t seem to have been patched at all. … I know there was a war, and they say it was because of the D’Karon. It certainly seems they were at least involved. But even if there was a war, this could not have happened. Not Kenvard. Not this glorious ca
pital. I need an answer, Mott.”

  Her familiar looked up to her and chittered.

  “I know they will be coming for me, but this… this requires an explanation. Let us see what we were able to pluck from that dear misguided child’s mind. Perhaps she knows more of what happened.”

  Turiel shut her eyes, her remaining hand idly stroking Mott’s head while she sifted through recollections that were not her own. Like the staff, and for that matter like the city of Kenvard, she could feel that Ivy’s memories were badly broken. Winding backward through them, she could see the battles the creature had fought, her many clashes with the D’Karon, and the way the other adversaries had treated her. Turiel’s face became pained. She saw only kindness and dedication in the actions of these monsters she’d been told were the hated adversaries… True, the shapeshifter was brash, foolish, and arrogant, but there was no doubting that at every opportunity, the D’Karon had done harm while the adversaries had healed or prevented it to the best of their power.

  These could not be lies… They were memories, pulled directly from Ivy’s mind. These were the things she remembered, as she remembered them. It could only be false if the memories had been inserted or twisted by another. She dug deeper into the memories. Some of her training had come from the skills mastered by the one called Epidime. He was a master of such manipulation, and having learned the beginnings of his tactics, she at least knew how to recognize when such things were at work.

  “Ha! Here! Her mind has been manipulated,” she said, triumphant in the belief that she’d found evidence of the adversaries’ treachery.

  Quickly she realized she was mistaken. The hallmarks of manipulation did not come in the form of pleasant memories inserted, but in other things. Raw, blunt training and understanding, forced unwillingly into her mind. And this was done not by the adversaries, but by the D’Karon themselves.

  “She… she was an adversary first… It was the D’Karon who changed her…” She gritted her teeth. “This was not what I was after. That is a concern for another time. This is Kenvard, once great and now ruined. That is the riddle at hand.”

  Turiel brushed these discoveries aside and delved deeper. She saw flashes of a terrible battle Ivy had been a part of, and a brief imprisonment within the very castle that now stood in ruins. It was whole then… but not as she remembered. Perhaps the greatest damage to the place had happened after, but there was something before it. The sorceress plunged deeper, pushing beyond the manipulations and erasures at the hands of the D’Karon. She found her way into the haziest, most distant memories Ivy had. And there she saw it. The city she remembered. In fact, if anything, it was larger, more glorious, more thriving and vibrant… and then she saw the gates fall, and the people scream. She saw the red uniforms, Tresson soldiers… but no. This memory was vibrant in the way that only great tragedies can ever be. Every detail was burned deep and true into her mind. Turiel knew the living, and she knew the dead. She knew how a proper thing moved, how a proper thing looked, and she knew such things in a way far more intimate and detailed than most ever would. These soldiers moved wrong. They were flooding the city, razing homes and slaughtering locals, but they were not Tresson soldiers. They were not even humans. Not proper humans anyway, or elves or dwarves. These things were created. Concocted. They were made expertly and efficiently, controlled by unseen hands. And there was only one group who could have made so many, and so well.

  “The D’Karon… the D’Karon did do this. No… no, I refuse to believe it. This must be the manipulation of the adversaries. If they were strong enough to banish the D’Karon, then it stands to reason they may have ways to twist minds just as Epidime could, but in ways that I cannot detect. I need someone beyond their influence. … I need the true eyes that witnessed this massacre. And in that, at least, I’m spoiled for choice…”

  The sorceress stood, her bones finally mended and both her staff and her pet whole again. The strength was flowing quickly into her. She blinked her eyes a few times and let the forms felt on the edge of her mind flicker into being. There were spirits, hundreds of them. They wandered what had been the halls of this fallen castle. They traced the lines of the streets and drifted like dry leaves through the air. As one so deeply connected with the dead, Turiel could have called upon each of them to tell the story of his or her final moments… but there was no use in doing so. She knew how to read the souls of the departed, and it took the merest glance to know that most of these lingering spirits were those taken quickly. Their lives ended in sudden sparks of fear and confusion. They would have little to add. She needed someone else. Someone with a steadier mind, a sharper recollection. And so she continued on her way.

  Turiel could feel the influence of the D’Karon deep in this place. It had been their stronghold for some time, but like Castle Verril and unlike Demont’s coastal fortress, attempts were being made to reclaim it. She could feel that the gems and enchantments that her D’Karon masters always set down were being gathered up and scrubbed away, but such things could not be disposed of without care, and it took time to do so properly. As such those most dangerous things, the most mystical and mysterious, had been gathered up and locked away. So much power concentrated in so small a space made it easy to find, despite attempts to the contrary by whoever had placed them. She paced along the narrow, excavated pathways through the ruin until she came upon what appeared to be the largest mound of intact stone in the whole of the wreckage of the castle. It was clearly placed there purposefully, and yet it seemed to have been piled atop a portion of the floor that was quite intact.

  She angled her damaged staff toward the mound and, with great effort, began to shuffle the stones. Blocks from the center of the mound slid forward. Blocks to the side slid farther out. Piece by piece she constructed a crude arch to hold up the rest of the stone such that the core of the stack could be cleared away. When the final few bricks dragged themselves free, they revealed a well-secured trapdoor. Not only was there a stout lock of complex design, but there were at least three warding spells, each quite potent. Though lifting one of the stones with her will and dropping it upon the lock a few times rendered it useless, the spells were another matter. She would not be opening the door while they were in place.

  Her knees and hips crackled uncomfortably as she lowered herself to the ground and set her staff down to spread her hand against the cold wood of the trapdoor.

  “… Yes… I can feel you inside, both of you… This magic may keep me from opening the door from the outside, but the fool who cast it must have been fearful that a poor innocent might be trapped, because from within it is undone quite simply… Rise for me… Open the door so that I might ask you a few questions and set my mind at ease.”

  She focused all of her will into conjuring a single thread and wormed it down through the cracks of the wood. Piercing the protective spells, even in this tiny and precise way, took every ounce of mystic focus she could muster, but finally it was done. She probed about with her tendril in search of flesh. It took time and required that she slip her influence past what felt like a closed crypt, but finally the seed of her spell found purchase, and from within, there was motion.

  Turiel stepped back. Below the trapdoor heavy, plodding steps approached, followed by the long, slow ring of steel. The door shuddered once, then slowly opened. Whatever figure opened the door chose not to reveal itself, so Turiel instead marched down the steps. Mott trudged after her, still not fully recovered or, at least, not fully empowered by the necromancer’s magic. He fetched her staff and descended into the darkness.

  As she stepped into the blackness, familiar violet light began to flicker and flare. At the same time she found herself weakening. Rather than fear or horror, this sensation brought a grin to her face.

  “Ah… thir gems… Remarkable that whoever locked them here managed to keep them from drinking their fill.”

  She closed off her strength to them to spare herself further drain, then looked upon what their light reveal
ed. The trapdoor led to a sort of storeroom. Crates were packed with assorted broken artifacts from the time of the D’Karon reign in this place. Quite a few shattered gems shone from within their crates, but one or two whole ones flickered there as well. She selected one and fitted it in place of the fractured one in her staff. Then she turned to some of the other artifacts. Carefully sealed, ornate metal boxes were stacked against one wall. Mounds of partially shredded spell books joined them, as well as bundles of scrolls and bolts of cloth. Most chilling, however, was the pair of caskets set upright against the far wall. One was still firmly shut. The other lay open.

  “Ah, of course. My apologies. Where are my manners?” Turiel said, turning back to the staircase. “I thank you for your aid.”

  Standing beside the door was a figure who seemed to be more armor than man. The equipment might once have been gleaming and pristine, but no longer. Now it had deep, shining scars from where stone had scraped across it, and many plates were dented or bent almost beyond recognition. A helmet with a mangled faceplate hid the face, but two eyes shone from within with an unnatural light. At his hip hung a sword, its grip dripping with jewels and its blade and pommel bearing a familiar insignia formed from a curve and a point.

  “My name is Turiel. I do not mean to interrupt your slumber, but there have been some matters of great importance. If you will stand ready, I believe your crypt-mate may be of equal or greater aid.”

  She turned to the remaining casket and pointed the head of her staff. The lid slid aside, revealing a frail young woman with pale skin. Every inch of her was crisscrossed with faint scars, and here and there her skin glittered with embedded crystal. There was something unnatural, eerie about the wounds though. The scars were pure white, save the gem-bearing ones, which were pure black. None were faded, each fresh and new, as though they’d all only just healed. Her clothes were relatively fresh. She wore dark funereal garb. Under the influence of Turiel’s will, she stepped out, far more steady and whole than the armored man, and took her place by his side.