Under a Veil of Gods

by R. Anthony Giamusso

  It took a few moments for Bolo to gain back the strength to speak again.

  “Despite what you all think of me, I am a man of my word and I promised my master I would never repeat his name. But I will tell you this; he is a very high lord. One of you, yet I don’t see him here with you at this hour,” Bolo said, holding back tears.

  Montague swallowed hard. His gut felt like it had spikes. The speaker immediately thought Bolo was referring to Demitri, even though Ikarus’s master mason, the new head farmer, and the two priests from The Temple were also absent from the council. But they were not required to attend emergency meetings.

  “Who? Tell us!” Alexandal screamed. He held the sharp end of his blade against the man’s groin.

  “He is not one to do manual labor. This lord wouldn’t dare lower himself to work the fields, or hammer wood and stack stone, or pray at the altars of temples,” Bolo said.

  There was a gasping choir of shock. Now everyone knew he was referring to Demitri.

  Montague’s suspicion was confirmed. He knew his old friend was the host of the Nekrums and it was time to tell the queen everything. But how and when the possession of Von Cobb took place, he didn’t know.

  “Take him away to the dungeons,” Alexandal ordered. “He will never touch another child again.”

  Olivia’s eyes were lidless. Montague could tell that the queen was distraught.

  Ikarus guards bound the prisoner’s feet then dragged Bolo out of the room by his chains. A trail of blood and tears followed.

  OLIVIA VOLPI stood frozen in light of Bolo’s confession. She felt nauseated, knowing that a dear friend had been plotting against her under her own castle roof. All this time she had been in danger.

  These attacks were the first under the rule of the new queen. She began to doubt herself. Am I strong enough to be the leader of men? Would all of this have happened if my father was still alive and king? Would Demitri have been able to fool him too? She missed her father and her mother.

  The queen was dazed, but she knew this revelation wasn’t a delusion. Thanks to Montague, her hallucinations and migraines had been held at bay.

  She saw Montague leaning in, talking to her, but she couldn’t hear him. The pounding of her heart was too loud. Flashbacks of Demitri’s generosity and kindness consumed her thoughts. His enthusiasm was contagious when he would present new discoveries that could help the world. The fact was Demitri had saved her life and contributed much to society. How could he be the one responsible for all of this? she wondered.

  Then, in the middle of a sentence, Montague’s voice reached her ears. He was huddled in close to her, looking concerned. The ambassadors walked around discussing aloud the events on each other’s homelands while Alexandal stood, waiting for new orders. Maids mopped up the bloody pool and spotty trail around him.

  “I’ve seen it. We’ve got to find him,” Montague finished in a soft voice.

  “Seen it? Seen what?” Olivia was confused.

  “His blood, my dear, it was blue. Weren’t you just listening to what I was saying?” Montague asked. “I know Demitri saved your life during the attack on Illyrium, and believe me, I thank him for doing so, but he was playing us just to get close to you. We need to act now.”

  The queen was still dizzy from disbelief.

  Montague kindly repeated. “At the celebration during Demitri’s speech, his bandage had blue spots. It wasn’t ink splatter or dye. The source of the stain came from inside the wrapping. It was his blood.”

  “So what are you saying?” Olivia asked.

  “I believe Demitri is the host of the Nekrums. The host has blue blood. Demitri has blue blood. We thought the host was destroyed long ago with farmer Paddett. But it seems as though we were wrong,” Montague muttered.

  The scribe came in again and handed Montague another letter.

  Olivia studied her appointed speaker’s reaction, but he wore a stoic face.

  “Your majesty, a message from Faux Tower. They are holding Von Cobb. Children were found tied to posts in the back of his wagon. He is also with suspicious company,” Montague finished.

  “Alexandal!” Olivia impulsively shouted.

  Alexandal looked to his guards. “Gather the horses! We’re riding!”

  “I’m coming with you,” said the speaker.

  “Be at the gates in ten counts,” Alexandal said. The captain and his men rushed out the door.

  “This session is closed,” Olivia announced.

  The rest of the attending council members left the room.

  Montague held Olivia by the arms. But even her own healer’s hands couldn’t comfort her. The truth shook her bones. The queen remembered Demitri always telling her that people were evolving, and science was evolving. In his speech, he even referred to children’s blood.

  “Demitri recently told me that children can unlock abilities that adults cannot. He claims that children have a stronger connection to memories of our ancient history,” Olivia said, hoping that Montague would know what that might have meant.

  The queen watched Montague’s face flush with realization.

  “I don’t know what he wants with the children…but…‘connection to our history’,” he repeated, his brows pinching. “Gabriel’s Diary is like a library that documents every event that ever happened on Naan since Gabriel came to this planet, down to the most precise detail. The diary records only truth,” he said. “But more importantly, we know the Nekrums are after you, your blood. You’re the only Volpi alive.” The speaker turned pale. “You have never given him blood, have you?” Montague asked, almost shouting.

  “No,” Olivia confirmed. “You are the only one I trust with my health.”

  “Good.” Montague breathed out a sigh of relief. He closed his eyes and dropped his head, then continued, “Burton wrote passages throughout the original document. They can be the key to discovering what the Nekrums want with the children.”

  “Those poor, innocent children, they’re probably scared to death,” Olivia said.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” said Montague.

  For a reason Olivia couldn’t explain, his words fell short of comforting her.

  “The diary!” she suddenly said. “Before you came here, you saw Demitri at the library?”

  “Yes,” Montague said. “But I assure you, the contents are safe.”

  “Safe? If Demitri is the host, he knows the diary holds great knowledge. You said that retrieving the divine history of Naan chronicled in Gabriel’s Dairy was important to the enemy. They want to remove the information from us.”

  “My queen, trust me.”

  Olivia couldn’t understand why Montague was so calm. “I must see it for myself.”

  Montague silently led her to his chambers below the library. And when they arrived, the diary, like Montague had said so certainly, was safe, sitting on its glowing pedestal.

  “It doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t he try to take it?” Olivia asked.

  “The diary has a protective spell cast upon it. It repels copper. And even if he could take it, the Nekrums can’t read angelic writing. Unable to access the information, the diary is useless without my translations,” Montague said.

  “A spell…cast by Burton Lang?” Olivia asked.

  The ex-farmer had confessed to her that he was taught by the infamous mage who had been exiled from the kingdoms years ago. “Yes,” he said.

  “And where are your translations?”

  Montague pulled out three scrolls from his robe. “Let me assure you, my queen. My work is safe. I never let it out of my sight.”

  Olivia took a breath.

  Montague continued, “My sensei told me that he had one last card against the enemy. That card is hidden in the diary. As soon as I return with Alexandal, I will find it. It is my mission. But first we must interrogate Demitri.”

  Even though her confidence in Demitri, the headmaster of science, was shattered, she still trusted Montague with her life.


  “Bring him here to me,” she said.

  “Your highness,” a maid interrupted, entering the room. A small boy behind her stepped in from the doorway with the queen’s personal handmaid, Gretchen, by his side. He wore a glum expression and held a gnarled travel bag close to his chest.

  “Indrid Cole of Grale is here,” said Gretchen.

  Against his will, Demitri Von Cobb painted his face with the blood of the Faux Tower guards. He’d slaughtered them all. Through his own eyes he’d watched himself spear them like fish and rip them apart with his bare hands as if he possessed the strength of a giant. But he didn’t want to do any of it. His body moved as if controlled by another force while his mind was held prisoner in his subconscious, unable to operate his own vessel. Now, the scientist only existed as a thought form.

  The energy Demitri felt coursing through him couldn’t be quantified by any equation he’d ever devised. He was sure of it. It defied natural law. This was the power that Burton had warned him about; a power so great its theory hung on the fringes of science. He was beginning to understand why Burton had been so strict with developing new discoveries.

  The Ikarus headmaster walked around in circles in the cellar of the tower as a dry wind piled leaves under his feet. Demitri struggled to control himself. The voice that haunted him grew brassier, and its influence spread. He had asked this controlling force many times what it wanted with him, who it was, and what it was doing. But it never gave any answers, only commands. The voice was deep and harsh, with a wet gurgle layered underneath.

  When the possession first happened, Demitri was able to reclaim his body every now and then when the force seemed to tire. But the longer he lived with this demon inside of him its control became stronger and stronger. It used visions to occupy his attention while it controlled him. A scene of his wife standing in a field of flowers would emerge from the darkness of his mind. Their relationship had been wonderful once. But his unfaithful behavior since they lost their five-year-old child made him feel guilty. Secret affairs had eased his pain. He had tried to reconnect with his wife for years after, but she turned him away at every attempt, blaming him for not knowing how to save their sick son, who suffered from an unusual, bacterial infection.

  Although he shed no tears, he wept inside. The only way to cope with losing his son had been through science. So he’d buried himself in his studies so much, he vanished from her life. She’d almost forgotten who he was.

  Demitri’s life had taken a strange turn back in the heart of Illyrium’s royal gardens. The little marble that farmer Paddett had dropped glistened and stared right through him, calling his name. The moment his eyes had met the strange sphere, Demitri couldn’t move. He’d heard a muffled voice chanting whispers in his head. Take me, the voice had said, dripping with seduction. Touch me. His curiosity had been so great it overrode his primal instinct to run. Instead, he’d picked up the marble and cupped it, staring deep into a white mist swirling through a sea of blackness. When it had blistered his skin, the pain was excruciating. Demitri remembered shaking his hand furiously, in a panic, but the marble had melted into his palm. It had boiled down into a liquid that seeped through his pores. He’d felt his mind being pushed aside as something else took control of his motor functions. He’d seen the image of a dark face gliding past him, smirking as it took the helm of his body. His emotions had escaped and the heartbreak he felt began to morph into anger. The feeling of love: to love, to be loved, everything he’d once cherished, was now confined to a vague memory.

  Ever since he became possessed, the muddy voice kept on with its deceptive lecture as an abundance of hatred emptied his heart. He was turning into something he never thought he could be—a cold, emotionless beast.

  The first time Demitri ever killed someone, he did it to protect the princess from a mage who was influenced by the same entity that possessed him. That was the last of his fleeting control over his body. He remembered walking up to a gasping offender, whom he’d hit with a dagger to knock her down, and pointed an arrow straight at her forehead. She’d gazed upon his face, saw the evil that lurked behind his eyes, and smiled with bloody teeth. “My lord,” she’d said to him in a low voice. It was then that the controlling force made him release his arrow through the center of her head. Shut her up, it had said. And without his doing, his finger released the bowstring.

  But there was another act he’d unwillingly committed that hurt him more than any of the tower guards he’d killed or the mage at the sack of Illyrium. For as much as he resented Burton, he’d never imagined ever doing anything to hurt him. How could he? The man from the sky had given him more knowledge than any human, book, or journal. Although he felt awful for kicking his former sensei into the Illyrium oubliette, the addicting power excused his shame. The entity fueled his anger toward Burton’s berating, intensifying it so much that any love and respect he’d ever felt for him turned to abhorrence.

  Demitri began to enjoy the scientific information he was learning from this horrible intelligence, thirsty for death. New compounds and mixtures using material he’d never come by before amazed him. They shared with him the blueprints of devices and machinery that people of Naan didn’t yet dream about.

  “The world would be a much better place without Burton Lang in it to suppress our quest, isn’t that so, Demitri? The voice said.

  His dark inhibitions were no longer contained. “Yes,” Demitri bleated.

  “Gather the mages and the rest of the exiles. Go to Rottin’s Cave, deep within the Eire Mountains. There are bodies there, centuries old, that your predecessors have preserved and collected for us. Wake the dead from their slumber and assemble an army. We now have children from all three islands…Test them.”

  The fact that Demitri held children captive mortified him the most. He thought of his late son. He knew how it felt to lose a child. But at least, Demitri thought, he had been with his boy before he’d passed, holding his hand, telling him that everything was going to be okay and that daddy would make him feel better, even though the scientist knew that his efforts would be futile. The parents of these children didn’t know where their sons or daughters were or if they were alive or dead. Demitri wanted to take the children home, but he knew that he couldn’t. He’d been ordered to test them. Why and for what? He didn’t know.

  Rottin’s Cave, he repeated. Demitri knew the infamous place; a place of dark worship where Burton had told him mages performed sacrifices to appease their Nekrum gods. The southern mountain was still volcanically active and was believed by some to be the gates of the abyss.

  Demitri knew it was a prime location to organize and plot against the three kingdoms. The civilized world didn’t dare venture there. It would provide an uninterrupted work zone. And with the heat of the molten lava streaming through the mountain’s deep caverns, he can easily forge tools and weapons for the Nekrum army. But the Nekrums wanted him to build something much more terrifying than an army of armed mages.

  When talk about building an army of monsters began, Demitri’s fading consciousness became alert. Bodies? Centuries old? What could they possibly want with corpses? he wondered.

  “Reanimation,” the dark voice answered.

  If awakening an army of corpses wasn’t startling enough, the lecture that followed was madness. The voice gave instructions for bonding the various internal and external organs of different animal species. It included directions on how to crack bones so as not to damage the marrow within, how to sew together skin of different textures, how to transfer muscle tissue, how to amputate appendages and attach them to foreign bodies, how to re-connect brain tissue to new nerve endings, etc.

  He was also given plans to create machines equipped with functions that could calculate and analyze the contents of blood down to a microscopic level—functions that he couldn’t even understand.

  The possibilities of what Demitri could create with this information were endless. His scientific mind began to daydream. What if the venom of a
spider, the teeth of a panther, the claws of a bear, were combined with the body and mind of a man? The possibilities gave him goose bumps.

  “You want to impress Burton Lang?”

  Demitri hesitated. But it was too hard to deny. “Yes,” he said, accepting the revolting mission.

  A HEAVY fog congested the land. Montague La-Rose joined Alexandal and the stampeding Ikarus army and rode hard for twenty minutes to Faux Tower at the tip of the plateau. A pack of hounds led the way.

  An open field leading up to the gates was sprayed with blood and strewn with bodies of men torn to pieces. On Alexandal’s signal they relaxed their charging steeds and cautiously approached.

  The tower was completely dark. Its tall, slim column disappeared into a rising fog.

  To the sound of two dozen men-at-arms unsheathing their swords, Demitri walked out of the smoky stillness holding the reins of a white horse with red glowing eyes. His face was streaked with blood.

  Dear God, Montague said to himself. The pretentious, clean-cut man he once knew now resembled a starving, rabid animal. Demitri was no longer in control of his actions. “I know this isn’t you, Demitri. I know that thing inside is controlling you. And I believe you can still hear me.”

  “You know?” Demitri laughed bitterly. “What do you know? Are you accusing me of being some kind of monster from your fantasy books? These men, our own men, attacked me!” he yelled.

  “Monster may not be a strong enough word for what you’ve done, you sick son-of-a-bitch. Where are the children?” Alexandal demanded.

  “The children are just there,” Demitri said casually, pointing to the wagon tied to two horses. “I saw the fires. I feared another invasion and attempted to take them to safety. I meant them no harm.” He flashed a sinister grin.

  “You stole them! Why would you think that taking children against their will, without permission, would be acceptable?” Alexandal asked.