Mother of Heretics: Bastards of the Gods Dark Fantasy (Enthraller Book 2)

by T. A. Miles

  Korsten began to wonder if they’d ventured into an area not meant to be traversed—an incidental passage, but then they came to an opening which abruptly broadened onto a shelf with a very deliberately fashioned balustrade. The balcony surrounded another cylindrical space, this one much larger than the last with torches arranged to mark entries like the one he and Merran had come through. Those entries were low rectangles adorned with carved emblems. Water streamed in narrow, crystalline threads through the center of the room.

  Walking to the stone railing, Korsten looked up at a ceiling of what appeared to be tangled roots. The water dropped threads of the moisture it collected from various places, along with thin shafts of light. Some of the longer roots ventured down the walls of the space, boring into the stone and wrapping around the balcony like a hatched nest of serpents. The finer roots dangled as if unbrushed locks of hair.

  His gaze followed the water down to the circular floor below. A pattern of light and shadow gave it dimension and depth that made Korsten want to search it, but his eyes found nothing save for the odd deposit of bramble probably fallen from the ceiling.

  He looked to Merran, who had wandered a few steps away, looking the place over himself. “What do you make of it?” Korsten asked.

  Merran didn’t answer immediately. He was frowning in the way that he did when he was verging on discovery or revelation.

  Korsten stepped closer to him, and that was when he heard what Merran must have been hearing; a whisper under the sound of falling water. The voice was scarcely to be discerned from the crackle of dried bramble beneath the incessant prodding of raindrops. It was low and hoarse, shaping words Korsten could not decipher.

  “Where is it coming from?” Korsten asked quietly. Now that he’d heard the voice he didn’t want to disrupt it, or alert whomever...or whatever was speaking.

  Merran shook his head, looking around the balcony. “Stairs,” he announced and moved away from the railing, toward a shallow archway with steps spiraling downward.

  Korsten followed. Neither of them bothered with Lanterns on the way down, though the stairwell was enclosed in its own darkness. They focused on what light sifted across the floor below and made their descent both quietly and quickly.

  At the bottom, they ventured only a few paces from the stairwell before stopping to take in what they could visually. The voice carried on, and it was nearer.

  Scanning the mottled patchwork of light and darkness, Korsten spied what was either a rise in the floor, or the illusion of one. He looked closer and eventually made out that it was a mound. A mound of what? Dust and bramble...a misshapen stone?

  Korsten took slow steps forward, bending a little to look closer at the shape. He paused and caught his breath somewhat sharply in his throat when he descried a face. He glanced away and then looked back to clear his mind of any details his imagination may have sewn into a hodgepodge of debris, but the face remained.

  The longer he looked at it, the clearer he could discern features—high-set and narrow, drawn heavily at the cheeks...eyes set deep beneath a sharply protruding brow with almost no eyebrows. The nose was close to the face and broad, an arrowhead pointing down to lips that were dark and cracked...and moving.

  The figure sat hunched beneath layers of dusty fabric and coarse, gray hair that was thickly matted in some places. Gender was impossible to discern, but scarcely seemed to matter in light of the sheer age of the individual. Dark skin bore deep crevices that ran the length of the face, forming spidery hatch patterns across the chin and forehead. The hands that were just visible from beneath overlong sleeves produced long, knobby fingers thin as bone with long, chipped and slightly curling nails resting in the individual’s lap.

  The briefest instance of feeling repulsed by the state of this person fell remarkably to the side of realization that this figure was as much a part of the environment as the roots collected overhead, or the water streaming down the walls...or the walls themselves for that matter. He was looking at nature and with a sudden, snapping flutter of thin eyelids, nature was looking back at him through sharp yellow-green eyes.

  With eyes locked on Korsten, the chanting continued. It was such a strong gaze—grasping insistently—that even when Korsten glanced to Merran for his response, he felt as if the individual had come forward, taken his face in spidery fingers, and insisted he look at them. For a moment, it seemed that the indecipherable syllables were meant for him, that the individual was putting them urgently on him...that he might listen and respond in some way. At the same time, the words and the person felt remarkably detached and in no way concerned with or answerable to any forces outside of their nested perch upon the cave floor, wrapped in sheaves of shadow and errant twines of water and light.

  I am the Mother.

  The words slithered out from beneath the gravel of the chanting, not actually spoken but heard all the same. Korsten looked upon the figure anew; a crone, ancient in the way that many of the Superiors were and aged as none of them would ever be. It was fascinating to look at her, but also somewhat intimidating. He could feel the ancient weight of her aura the longer he looked at her. He could feel it leaning toward him, again with the sensation of her overly thin fingers reaching.

  Korsten drew himself back from her with effort. Noticing that or feeling her imposing presence himself, Merran laid a hand on his arm.

  “She said she’s the Mother,” Korsten told him.

  “I heard,” Merran replied and Korsten was glad of that.

  You cannot stop us, the crone continued. They came before you, and now it is too late. Too late to escape the fate of the corrupters. The tide will wash the stain of your violation from our shores. Die, consorts of shadow.

  The crone’s wizened lips spread broader and a laugh cracked to life beneath her chanting.

  Die.

  Aspects of the room seemed to shift in that moment. Korsten felt as if he could see bodies in the corner of his vision and instantly considered the Vadryn. Were there still more of them? With what the crone had conveyed it would make no sense for them to be aligned with her. It felt different than demons, though.

  Merran pulled Korsten physically out from beneath the crone’s overbearing aura, in the same instant something thick and heavy whipped through the air and drove sharply into the floor. The tendril of wood now between himself and the crone was close enough that he could smell the damp earthiness of it. Finer strands dangled limply, streaming water and bits of dirt.

  This was what the coven had left in these caves. How connected were the witches in the city above to this ancient woman?

  Korsten suspected it was more than any of them would care to realize and he feared also that surrounded by what empowered her—wrapped and thoroughly inundated with the magic that channeled through these caves, through nature—she was generating a mass flow. Korsten had felt that since entering above, and so had Merran. These caves...the water coursing through it and the elements within the rock itself were the source that the witches of Indhovan drew from, and which sustained this old woman beyond natural years, and which more than likely was being worked in her incantation.

  Another root took on life, gliding toward them as if the forearm of some giant creature. Korsten cast a Barrier reflexively, covering his face with both arms when the limb splintered wetly against the slightly lit air in front of them.

  “Let’s go,” Merran decided and as Korsten lowered his arms again, he saw what may have prompted the decision; spikes of wood pushing up from the cave floor, everywhere except where the crone sat.

  Korsten hopped backward before one of them rose through the bottom of his foot and he and Merran both ran to the stairwell. Merran ushered Korsten past him in the entry, then cast Fire onto the floor at the bottom step.

  A low layer of heat and flame slid across the floor several paces out from the entry. The oversized thorns in the spell’s path caught fire
and shriveled to limp black coils. New ones tried to crop up aggressively, but were caught in the lingering heat and withered or became as spent torches. Merran’s and the crone’s efforts combined had succeeded in putting a barrier between them.

  “I feel that if the Vadryn were loose again it isn’t us they’d be after,” Korsten said, watching the chamber blanket with a layer of steam as the water and fire mingled.

  “I think you’re right,” Merran said.

  “So, they’ve been here combatting the witches. Perhaps that was the inspiration behind the attempt to possess Dacia Cambir.”

  “As a way inside,” Merran replied, giving more attention to their environment and undoubtedly their next course of action. “Maybe.”

  Of course, there was no reason to believe that only the priests had been opponents of the Vadryn. It may have been that the demons didn’t anticipate a defensive response from a group of people who gave off such an air of harmlessness. Or it may have been that they did, and they had come here to eliminate the obstacle, to clear the way for their Morennish allies and be better grounded for the inevitable arrival of priests. They were better informed in this than the Vassenleigh Order had been it would seem, though Korsten believed that the miscommunication between Vaelyx Treir and the Vassenleigh Order had been more vital than anyone realized at the time. They could have known about this sooner. One or both sides didn’t want them to.

  “We have to know what she’s doing,” Merran said. His gaze moved between the crone, the steam hovering in the air, and the stone surrounding them.

  “She doesn’t want us anywhere near her,” Korsten said. “That much is obvious. And at the same time, she’s not attacking us further.”

  “So long as we remain at a distance,” Merran considered aloud as well. “The tide will wash us away...”

  As his partner quoted the crone, Korsten could only nod. He should have been better at riddles, all things considered, but maybe her words were no riddle.

  The silence between he and Merran grew very deliberately in that moment, as each of them held back their thoughts. Korsten could tell by the nature of the silence that they had come to the same or very similar thoughts in the same moments. It inspired him to wonder when they might begin reading one another’s mind.

  Merran looked at him, their eyes meeting since Korsten was already watching his partner, waiting for the inevitable. “She’s Summoning.”

  Not quite what Korsten expected to hear. It had him pause a moment longer before responding. “Summoning? The same as casting?”

  “No. In this sense, it’s more literal. At Vassenleigh, we ceased the practice some centuries ago. The spells were far too complicated, requiring long hours and immense amounts of energy from the priest. The labor wasn’t worth the end results, which could be singularly catastrophic if done wrong.”

  “In error...or without the right frame of mind?” Korsten didn’t have to ask it. They each knew the answer and what they may have actually been witness to.

  “If she meant the tide literally, she has to be stopped,” Merran said.

  Korsten agreed. However, “She said it was too late. My intuition tells me that she wasn’t bluffing.”

  Merran nodded, his frown deepening. “We have to stop her.”

  If Korsten hadn’t known that, the weight in Merran’s words ensured that he did. They knew that they’d already lost time through the confusion and drop in communication between Indhovan and the Vassenleigh Order. Just how much of that time was irretrievable? Before the thought could flare chords of panic, Korsten steeled his determination. He did so by reaching across the stairwell and taking Merran’s hand.

  “What do we have to do?” he asked without breaking their gaze.

  It was Merran who found another focus briefly in their joined hands. And then his attention went to the crone and the surrounding chamber. “Damn.”

  In the same instant, Korsten felt a sudden shift in the air, or in his mind...through his blood.

  Merran didn’t have to announce that the Barriers had dissipated or been broken—something he must have felt, like the snapping of a thread that had previously been pulled taut; Korsten could feel the Vadryn themselves, leaving their temporary prison.

  When Dacia arrived home, the cats all slunk into the shadows and as quickly out of sight as was possible. A part of her found that odd, maybe even disturbing, but a more adamant side of herself—the part that currently seemed to be driving her—dismissed their actions.

  Her route had not been very direct from the forum; there were times she felt lost, almost pushed away from where she wanted to be. But that shouldn’t have mattered. Ersana would be too busy to follow…too busy with poor Stacen. Maybe the useless fool was dead.

  Dacia felt giddy for a moment, thinking about that possibility. Immediately afterward, she felt cold, verging on panic that fell away as her attention beckoned her elsewhere. It was as if a hand had touched her face and guided it in the direction of what she was meant to see.

  She looked toward the balcony and stepped past the threshold of the house, where a sensation of pressure or resistance caused her to hesitate. The glowing pattern on the wall, cast by the crystals hung in the window, glared in the corner of her vision.

  A sudden, irrational rush of anger came over her. She lurched into the house and shrieked at the prismatic shapes as if they’d been small creatures nipping at her incessantly for days, or for years. She hated those crystals. She hated seeing them, touching them...being in their warding light.

  They weren’t impassable, but how they agitated....

  She forced it from her mind, crossing the front room, passing through the archway to the right and into the small library. Short shelves of fewer books than old scrolls and artifacts occupied the walls except where a deep, but low window looked out at the stairs running past the building and opposite that where a tight, spiraling metal stair offered passage to the room above.

  It was Ersana’s room, the one room in the house Dacia had always been told to stay out of. Ersana had only brought her into it a few times, always during rituals that had to do with remaining a pure attendant of nature and the Malakym.

  Ritual was communion with the Ancient Mother, the keeper of their greatest source for magic. It was she who had always guided them and she who would protect them by appealing to the gods. She had been a conduit for generations...perched on the brink between the world as the gods would keep it, and the world as people existed in it. That was what Dacia had been taught. It all seemed very trite to her just now, and irritating.

  Looking up at the open entryway at the top of the stairs, Dacia placed her hand upon the scrolled railing and walked up. I’m coming, she thought and felt a tiny smile come to her lips.

  At the top of the stairs, Ersana’s simple bedroom was laid out in two adjoined squares. In one compartment was the bed and Ersana’s personal affects. In the other—the larger—there was virtually nothing. A plain floor surrounded by plain walls. But there was an engraving on the ceiling, one in the same shape as the crystals when they were bound together to mark entryways, and to protect them.

  Dacia stepped across the floor feeling as though she were stalking an animal. Her eyes never left the engraving. When she began to mutter under her breath, she also felt a strange excitement move through her blood. It grew the nearer she came to the markings. When she was standing beneath them, they began to light along the edges and she almost became giddy with anticipation.

  “I’m coming,” she sang, and held her arms close to her body, spinning around once and giggling. She sucked in a breath afterward and held very still, her gaze lowering from the ceiling. “So is he,” she said with sudden realization.

  The ancient boy. The one with the golden hair...the one who had come with the others...

  She dropped to her knees, feeling panicked. She wanted to scream and cry in her sudden
, overwhelming sense of frustration.

  The room around her seemed to darken while the engravings overhead continued to glow, like stubborn embers refusing to catch fire. She stared at the floor below her as it lit, as if it were water pooling beneath her. Several shapes formed beneath its shining surface. She locked her vision onto them, watching them form limbs and hands that reached up.

  Unconsciously, Dacia’s hand lowered onto the floor, overlapping one that was ruddy and misshapen. Tears had gathered in her eyes, but she smiled.

  “I’ll get you out,” she said to the figure hovering below her. The creature’s amber eyes opened and blinked, and she whispered at it excitedly. “I’ll get you out.”

  “Dacia!”

  She almost jumped at the voice, looking toward the stairs. Inured habit almost had her get to her feet and hurry down to Ersana, but another instinct—one that was much more primal, more natural...more her, had her grin instead.

  Dacia threw her head back to look at the ceiling again and shrieked words that were at once foreign and familiar. The engraving lit spectacularly and she extended her arms out as the gateway fell down around her, taking her from the house and the voice of Ersana, who was not her mother.

  A vision of blackness poured into the chamber and over the railing. It was a tide of bodies, flooding in through the opening with a solitary focus that made their motion uniform.

  Ready for them or not, the crone responded with vigor that was demonstrated in the sudden shifting and flailing of aspects of the room itself. Tendrils of wood took on life and also new shape in order to literally beat away the Ancient’s would-be assailants.

  Korsten watched as several of the heavy roots formed an intricate dome over the crone, while others batted away the Vadryn, at times spearing through them. The vessels the demons inhabited remained as resilient as they had when under the assault of multiple Blast spells. Displacement of a limb through incidental means had been the only way to damage them so far, and the value of that, he and Merran had yet to learn.