Ghost in the Throne (Ghost Exile #7)

by Jonathan Moeller

  “No, don’t bother,” said Kylon. “This is ghostsilver. Your wards won’t work against it.”

  “Kylon of House Kardamnos,” spat the woman in Nighmarian-accented Istarish. “The exile. The craven who could not save his wife and child from assassins.” Kylon’s hands tightened against the valikon’s hilt, but he said nothing. “It seems you did not die with the Balarigar.”

  “As it happens,” said Kylon, “you are entirely correct.”

  Armor clattered as the Imperial Guards rushed into the pillared entry hall, but no other foes showed themselves. The Umbarian magus looked back and forth with a scowl. Kylon risked a brief glance over his shoulder and saw Caina’s black-clad form hurrying towards him.

  “Don’t kill her,” said Caina. “She might know something useful.” Before Kylon could answer, Caina reached across the valikon, seized the golden medallion with the sigil of the Umbarian Order hanging against the woman’s chest, and yanked it from its chain. The Umbarian magus flinched, her cold gaze promising death to Caina. “She can use this to contact Cassander. He doesn’t need to know what happened here.” Caina tossed the amulet away with a clatter.

  The woman’s smile was cold. “It is already too late.”

  Caina did not answer. She was staring past the entry hall, towards the strange, flickering golden light beneath the dome.

  “Lord Martin,” said the Umbarian woman. “Have you decided upon folly at last? The Grand Wazir will not tolerate bloodshed in his city.”

  “Maria Nicephorus,” said Martin in a grim voice. “Given that the Grand Wazir expelled your master, I doubt he will mind very much.”

  Maria sneered. “And you bring your pregnant wife to battle with you, Martin Dorius?”

  “Aye, I’m pregnant,” said Claudia, walking to Martin’s side with Annarah. “And I’m also very annoyed. That summoning spell was simply juvenile.”

  “Next time,” said Maria, “I’ll make sure to do better.”

  “You won’t have the chance,” said Claudia in a voice like ice, her emotional sense just as cold.

  “Tylas,” said Martin, “secure the building. We will search it from top to bottom. Whatever Cassander plans, we will find the answers here…”

  Maria laughed, mocking and derisive.

  “Oh, no,” said Caina.

  Kylon turned his head, and saw Caina outlined by the flickering golden light, a stark shadow against its glow.

  “No, no, no,” said Caina, her voice soft. “What has he done?”

  ###

  Caina took a cautious step forward.

  The grand hall of Fariz Terdagan’s palace was a round, cylindrical chamber, the domed ceiling rising overhead. A wide circle of symbols had been written upon the floor, glowing with the green fire of necromantic sorcery.

  In the center of the circle, hovering in the air, was a rift between the worlds.

  It looked like a slash, a crack, carved in golden fire. The thing seemed to pulse gently, almost as if it was breathing, and Caina saw the weave of arcane power that sustained the rift.

  She had seen that rift before. On the day Corvalis had died, on the day of the golden dead, the Moroaica had used her own arcane strength and ancient relics of power to rip open a rift of golden fire in the skies above New Kyre. She had ascended into that rift and entered the netherworld, intending to move to the world beyond the netherworld, the realm of the gods, to bring them to account for the suffering of mankind.

  She had failed, and her rift had vanished.

  And now, it seemed, a smaller yet otherwise identical rift had appeared in the palace of Fariz Terdagan.

  “What did Cassander do?” whispered Caina, staring at the rift.

  “That is…unusual,” said Martin. Caina turned as Martin, Claudia, and Annarah entered the grand hall, followed by Nasser and Morgant.

  “What is it?” said Annarah. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

  “Husband,” said Claudia, her voice low and full of dread. “Do you not recognize it?”

  Martin hesitated. “Wait. Is that…no, it cannot be. It was so much bigger.”

  “It’s the rift from the day of the golden dead, the rift that filled the sky,” said Claudia.

  Caina said nothing, staring at the ribbons of sorcerous force writhing within the circle and around the rift. She had not possessed the sight of the valikarion on the day of the golden dead, and so did not know what the spells powering it had looked like. Yet she had felt it, and she was sure that this miniature version of the rift seemed…wrong, somehow.

  Had Cassander altered it? For that matter, why had he created it at all?

  “Lord Kylon,” called Martin. “If you could bring the prisoner, we have questions that require answers.”

  Caina turned as Kylon shoved Maria Nicephorus into the hall, one hand gripping her arm like a shackle, the other holding the valikon at her throat. Her brother, Caina recalled, had once been the Lord Governor of Rasadda, had nearly driven the province into revolt with his rapacity. She wondered if he had been part of the Umbarian Order.

  “I suggest that you talk, Lady Maria,” said Martin. “I am not in the mood for games…”

  Maria laughed at him. “Games? You have been playing a game with Cassander for the last year, and you have lost. Why should I not tell you everything? You have already been defeated.”

  “Why?” said Martin. “Why is Cassander doing this? Why is he trying to reopen the way between the worlds?”

  Maria sneered. “Is that why you think he is doing?”

  “No, he’s not,” said Kylon, and Caina lifted her eyes from the glowing rift to look at him. “This is…Lord Martin, I think this was already here. The day of the golden dead left…cracks in the walls between the worlds, weak points. Sometimes spirits slip through the cracks to enter the material world. I saw it happen in New Kyre and in the Kaltari Highlands.”

  “So did we,” said Claudia. “Those kadrataagu the Huntress commanded came from somewhere.”

  “Then Cassander exploited the damage left over from the day of the golden dead to make this…this thing?” said Martin.

  “No, not exactly,” said Caina as the answer came to her. “Close, but not quite.”

  “And who is this?” said Maria. “A Ghost nightfighter, I expect, but without the ubiquitous shadow-cloak.”

  Caina walked towards Kylon and Maria, and drew back her hood and yanked off her mask as she did so. Kylon frowned, and Maria’s eyes narrowed. Then a dawning suspicion spread across her face.

  “You,” Maria said. “You…you’re her, aren’t you? Caina Amalas.” Her lip curled with contempt. “The Balarigar.”

  “If you like,” said Caina.

  “You’re dead,” said Maria. “Lord Cassander killed you.”

  “No, he really didn’t,” said Caina. “He lied about that. I would wager that it makes you wonder what else he might have lied about. Like, for example…that you would survive whatever he intends to do to Istarinmul?”

  Maria lifted her chin. “The Umbarian Order does not abandon its own.”

  Claudia let out a derisive scoff.

  “Until it’s convenient, I’m sure,” said Caina. “So when Cassander leaves Istarinmul, do you think he’s going to come back for you? That he’s going to share the credit with you in front of the Provosts? I’m sure he made you promises…just as he promised the Grand Wazir that the Balarigar was dead.”

  Maria said nothing, but Caina saw the doubt.

  “It might be more prudent,” said Morgant, gesturing with his black dagger, “to start cutting pieces off her until she talks.”

  Maria’s gray eyes shifted to Morgant, who offered her one of his toothy smiles. That seemed to unsettle her more than the death of her Adamant Guards.

  “There’s no need,” said Caina. She pointed at the burning rift. “That’s an echo, isn’t it? An echo of the original.”

  “Ah,” murmured Maria. “You do have some understanding.”

  “An ech
o?” said Martin.

  “The Moroaica’s spell almost ripped apart the barrier between the material world and the netherworld,” said Claudia, understanding dawning over her face. “It left the weak points Lord Kylon mentioned, but it also created…sorcerous echoes, like the echoes that linger in a cave after a loud noise. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? A clever sorcerer could capture those echoes and use their power to make weak points of his own wherever he wanted.”

  “Weak points,” said Caina, “that would be far more amenable to control than ones that happened naturally.”

  “And when arranged and linked in a circle,” said Claudia, gesturing at the glyphs upon the floor, “they would…”

  “Feed into each other,” said Caina. “Like a ball going faster and faster as it rolls down a chute.”

  “That would…that would reopen the original rift,” said Claudia. “But only for a little while. That much power would be fantastically unstable. The whole thing would collapse after a few hours. But why? Why call that much power? Cassander couldn’t possibly control it. The entire Umbarian Order couldn’t control it. Gods, every sorcerer who ever lived, working in concert, couldn’t direct that much power.”

  “A summoning spell,” said Annarah. “That is what all this is for. A single summoning spell of tremendous power. Such a spell would not need to last long, only long enough to pull the summoned spirit into this world.”

  “But what manner of being,” said Nasser, “would require so much power to be summoned? Some sort of elemental prince? A nagataaru lord? A god?”

  Caina looked at Maria, who smirked.

  “Go on,” said Maria. “You’re very close.”

  Caina stared at her, at the wreckage of the palace’s doors, at the charred stonework and the greasy spots on the floor that marked the dead Adamant Guards. Maria had a conjured an ifrit and sent it after them. The elemental spirit had not been as powerful as the Sifter, but it had been deadly nonetheless.

  “What did you do with Fariz Terdagan?” Caina heard herself say, her mind racing.

  “I killed him,” said Maria with a faint smile. “His whining had grown tiresome, and his usefulness would soon expire in any event.”

  A summoning circle. Likely each one of the secret Umbarian houses held an identical rift echo, joined together in a single massive summoning circle. The circle was huge. Large enough to hold something enormous, but that was impossible. Spirits did not have material bodies, and were as large as the hosts they possessed. Yet elemental spirits could create bodies for themselves out of their associated element, and…

  Caina blinked.

  The circle wasn’t designed to hold one single spirit after all.

  “The power isn’t for summoning one spirit,” said Caina. “It’s going to summon thousands of them. Thousands and thousands of them all at once.”

  “Hundreds of thousands, if Lord Cassander’s calculations are correct,” said Maria.

  “How?” said Caina.

  “Tell me, Balarigar,” said Maria. “Have you heard the name of Corazain?”

  Caina’s fear got worse.

  Much, much worse.

  “Who the hell is that?” said Morgant.

  “An Ashbringer,” said Annarah. “One of the sorcerer-priests who ruled the Saddaic peoples in ancient times. They wielded tremendous spells of pyromancy, and inevitably went insane from its use.”

  “Corazain was the last of them,” said Caina, remembering her own near-disastrous brush with Corazain’s legacy. “The greatest of them…and the maddest. In the final days of the Second Empire, the Emperor Crisius defeated the Ashbringers and stormed Rasadda. Corazain waited until the Legions had entered the city, and then unleashed his final spell. The pyromantic firestorm killed him, killed Crisius, wiped out the Legions, and turned Rasadda to ashes.” She looked back at Maria. “The survivors of the Ashbringers founded the Umbarian Order…and that means you have something of Corazain’s, don’t you? Some relic, some weapon, some secret.”

  “The Throne of Corazain,” said Maria. “It has been in the hands of our Order since the destruction of Rasadda and the fall of the Second Empire. It was one of Corazain’s most potent creations, and we have mastered it to an extent he never dreamed.”

  “What does the Throne of Corazain do?” said Caina.

  “It is an instrument of summoning,” said Maria. “The spells upon it allow its possessor to summon fire elementals, the spirits the Istarish call ifriti, in prodigious numbers.”

  “How many fire elementals?” said Caina.

  “Why, as many elementals as the Throne has the power to summon,” said Maria. “I understand there is no practical upper limit.”

  “And it can draw on the circle of rift echoes for power,” said Caina, looking at the wreckage of the doors. One ifrit had done that. Claudia had stopped it, but if she had not, the ifrit would have burned down the palace and turned the Imperial Guards into piles of ashes and half-melted armor. Caina couldn’t even guess how much more damage the ifrit might have done if it had broken free of Maria’s control and rampaged through the Emirs’ Quarter.

  If Cassander and the Throne summoned hundreds of thousands of ifriti at once…

  “Gods,” said Caina, looking at the blazing rift again. “We’ve been blind.”

  “Truly,” said Maria, her voice dripping with smugness.

  “We have known that Cassander was up to something…” started Claudia.

  “Don’t you see?” said Caina, turning back to face her. “We thought Cassander wanted revenge on Callatas and Erghulan, or that he had some spell to force open the Straits for the Umbarian fleet. But he’s not taking revenge on Istarinmul. He’s going to destroy Istarinmul utterly, burn the city to ashes just as Corazain burned Rasadda and the Legions. No more Callatas, no more Erghulan, no more Towers of the Sea, no more Istarinmul. The Umbarians won’t need to force the Starfall Straits because there will be no more Istarinmul to close the Straits.”

  “A twofold victory for the Order,” said Maria. “All the world shall see our wrath and tremble at the fate of Istarinmul. And when our fleet reaches the Imperial capital and our armies seize the Imperial Citadel and dispose of the doddering old fool who calls himself the Emperor, the Empire shall be reunited under the hand of the Order, and our true work can begin at last.”

  Caina glared at the Umbarian magus, fury and chagrin warring within her. It was monstrous, as terrible as anything Maglarion and Kalastus and Ranarius had ever dreamed of attempting. At least Callatas had some grand vision of reforming humanity, however twisted and sick. Cassander would murder hundreds of thousands of people simply because they were in his way.

  And Caina had not seen it coming.

  She should have. All the pieces had been there before her eyes. She had known Cassander had been ruthless. Agabyzus had warned her about the purchase of the houses. Even Samnirdamnus had told her to beware the fire. Yet Caina had not seen the truth. She had been too preoccupied with Sulaman’s prophecy of her death, too determined to die to save her friends, too confused about what had happened to her in Rumarah.

  She had missed the truth…and a lot of people might die because she had been too foolish and too preoccupied.

  “A million people,” said Caina, her voice tight and quiet. “You’re going to murder a million people.”

  Maria lifted her chin, her expression cold and confident. “And ten million more might learn the lesson and heed the wishes of the Order.”

  Caina took a step forward, and Maria Nicephorus flinched in Kylon’s grip. She wanted to draw her dagger and plunge it into Maria’s throat. Yet that would accomplish nothing, and they might need more answers from the Umbarian magus before this was over.

  “We have to find Cassander and stop him,” said Caina, “and destroy the Throne if possible.”

  “He…will have to be somewhere outside the circle,” said Claudia. She looked at Caina like a woman contemplating a loaded crossbow. “The structure of the spell requir
es it.”

  “He will have chosen a secure location,” said Kylon. “Somewhere fortified that will protect him as he casts the spell.”

  “The Umbarian embassy,” said Maria, unprompted.

  Caina glared at her. “Why would you tell us that?”

  “Because,” said Nasser, his voice dry, “she is so utterly confident of success that it does not matter if she tell us.”

  “Exactly,” said Maria. “And it doesn’t matter. You’re too late. It’s already beginning.”

  Caina stared to answer, and then the rift echo pulsed with golden fire as arcane power blazed through the room.

  Chapter 19: Set To Burn

  Cassander Nilas circled the Throne of Corazain one final time, the fiery glow from the ancient artifact throwing flickering shadows around the solar. Outside he saw the scattered lights of Istarinmul at night, the palaces of the emirs and Alchemists and wealthy merchants glowing with alchemical light in the darkness.

  Soon the city would become far brighter.

  Pyres were always bright.

  He tried to keep his mind dispassionate as he considered the intricate maze of spells around the Throne. A single error in the spells, and the misplaced energy might blast the entire fortified dock to molten splinters. Yet Cassander could not repress a growing excitement. After a year and a half of frustration and setbacks and pain, success was in his grasp. The Provosts had given Cassander the task of opening the Starfall Straits, and his victory was at hand.

  That he would get to take vengeance upon that querulous old fool Callatas and that pompous braggart Erghulan made it all the sweeter. That he got to kill smug Martin Dorius and his bitch of a wife at the same time was a splendid bonus. That he also got to annihilate the remnants of the Ghost circle still in the city was even better.