She crossed to the orb, her heavy red robes whisking across the stone floor, and took the riding cloak from the relic. Mag peered inside, but saw nothing. She traced a finger over the surface, and it felt cold, lifeless.
She rubbed her fingers together, feeling like a film covered them. Mag instantly didn't like the orb. Taking it in her hands with the use of the riding cloak, she crossed to the open box, and dumped the Orb of Aldaras into the velvety interior.
She could barely believe what she had seen. In fact, as she closed the lid on the box, she wondered if she had even really seen it. She shook her head and went back to the desk, the hem of her rob sweeping the parchment further under it. The movement of yellow paper on gray stone drew her attention down.
Mag kneeled and picked the parchment up between thin fingers. She set it on the desk, and as she was turning away she saw there was writing inside.
She looked around, as if someone was going to catch her doing something she shouldn't, before flattening the paper on the desk and seeing an unfamiliar handwriting within.
Age and sloppy writing made it hard to read, but she sat down in Sara's chair, and opened the drawers one at a time until she found some parchment and a quill. Fervently, she started transcribing what was inside.
At some point Van brought the tea in without her really noticing him, and took it in to Sara before leaving once more. He didn't bother to ask what she was doing. By the time she was done translating what was written on the old parchment, a light snow had started to fall, like sugar across the window panes behind her.
Mag leaned back and read over what she had written.
“Twelve, Andray Flestra; twenty-one, Sranda Inia; eleven, Alestra Vellen; fourteen, Erenes Haten; seventeen, Lleon Feliays.” She pressed a hand to her stomach when it jumped painfully. She moaned a little, waiting for the pain to subside. Eventually it did and she looked at the script again.
“It has to be a code,” she said to herself. “Alright, the numbers and the words correlate somehow?” she asked the paper as if it would answer. She pulled out more parchment and started scribbling. “First number is twelve, maybe it marks the letters of the names they go with? Alright, A is the first letter, and F the second?” She started writing the letters down according to that theorem, but that didn't make any sense, because the second age was twenty-one and she already had a letter in the second space of the first word. She scratched out her work and started over.
Again and again she tried different patterns, all the while the pain in her stomach growing, and now an ache in her head accompanied it. Had she ate something that was bad?
She thought for a moment on that to clear her mind, and felt the slightest pulse of energy in the office, but since it was coming from Sara's room, it was probably just the Realm Guardian giving off a bit of wyrd in her sleep.
She bent back to the paper, and then saw what she had missed.
“Yes, if I use the names in the order they were given, and take the names, then I would say the first name would come first. Ok, twelve: one comes first, so A is the first letter of the first word. Two is the second number of twelve, and the second letter of the last name is L, so the first letter of the second word would be L,” and so she went to work, talking to herself as she worked.
Once finished, and proud of her work, she looked down and instantly stood, knocking the chair over.
“No, that can't be right,” she whispered, looking down at the words written before her, taken from the code of the ages and names.
A.R.A.E.L. L.I.V.E.S.
It made sense, though: the image of the Beast in the orb, the recent attacks.
“The Well of Wyrding — that was one of his tricks last time. All the chaotic wyrd in recent months,” Mag started talking to herself, pacing back and forth. “And I wouldn't be surprised if an alarist was the one that put a bug in the ear of the chaos dwarves.”
A wave of energy from Sara's room nearly took Mag to her knees. She doubled over, vomiting bile on the floor as the malignant power sang through her blood. She cried out, felt her muscles spasm and then release.
She sunk to the floor, gasping in the relaxation that only comes after crippling pain. Mag breathed for a few minutes, looking at the door to Sara's room.
“What's going on?” she wondered. Was Arael inside her Guardian? How would that even be possible?
The power she felt before was still oozing from the room, and Mag made her way tentatively to the door to Sara's room. She pushed open the door, and the chaotic energy was almost tangible in the air.
The power was coming from in here, somewhere.
Mag closed the door behind her and shut her eyes, leaning against the embrace of the doorframe. She felt with her wyrd, searching every surface with the other sight until she saw a point of blackness in the room, like a cancerous energy drinking in all light. She opened her eyes, staring right at the area the chaotic power was coming from.
“The tea?” she wondered out loud.
She crossed to the bedside stand, and as she reached for the tea, the malignancy grew.
Mag didn't waste any time. She went to the window, threw it open, and tossed the tea and cup right out the window, barely missing a passerby below, who squawked and glared up at her.
She didn't apologize, because just then she heard the door whisper open behind her, and the thudding of feet coming toward her.
Mag spun, lashing out with a tendril of green wyrd, rendering the person immobile. She wasn't surprised to see Van.
“You were supposed to be helping her,” Mag said, sending a crippling wave of intent down her wyrd. She watched it thunder into him, and he cried out. Vanparaness's knees went weak beneath him, but the wyrd wouldn't let him crumple to the ground.
“Kill me then,” he said.
“That isn't my job,” she said. “I can't deny that I would love nothing more than to spill your blood across the snow, but then you would win. I will let Annbell decide what to do with you.”
With the intent of her wyrd, she pushed Van back against a wall and bound him there. She cupped her hand to her mouth, and as she whispered her message, a bright green orb formed in her hands, words swirling over the surface. Once done, she tossed the orb out into the snowy air, her mind hurtling the message orb to Annbell.
Cynthia scuffed the cobbled street with the tip of her boot. In the rainy night the cobblestones of the Ivory City were dark gray, nearly black, and her light gray constable’s boots stood out like mist on the dark surface. She smoothed her red hair back into the required bun, and tugged on the hem of her jacket lower over the top of her fitted skirts.
She looked over at Garrant, the other constable on duty with her tonight. Behind her, through the bars to their dungeon home, the verax-acis hissed like snakes.
Cynthia shivered. She never could understand how the pasty white creatures, which had no voice of their own, were able to make any noise.
"I don't like this," she said, barely audible over the patter of rain washing over the ivory buildings around them. The entrance to the verax-acis pen was deep in the city, but because of the haunting noise they made, the only entrance was on a back street where few boots outside of the constables’ ever trod.
Children on a dare, Cynthia thought. Children would come down here occasionally.
It had taken them months to arrange their schedule without drawing undue attention, fixing it in a way that they would both be on duty so their employers could make the escape that much easier.
Cynthia shifted nervously, looking around. She was sure they were being watched.
"Don't be so nervous," Garrant grumbled. He was older than her by ten years, which would make him in his early to mid-thirties. She was newer to the force, and while he might be respected, she wasn't. "People know me, no one suspects."
But Cynthia wasn't so sure. Guardian Aladestra had come around in the last few days, when Garrant was off guard duty of the verax-acis, and Cynthia manned the cell with Paul.
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sp; She had checked the bars better than any inspector could have, testing even the bricks where the hinges rested. Aladestra had surveyed the constables on duty with scrutiny, like she didn't trust them.
And why should she? Cynthia wondered. Several verax-acis had come up missing in the last month. But that wasn't anything Cynthia had a part in; if Garrant did, she didn't know.
A blast of light behind them brought a shout from Cynthia's lips, and she turned to see the growing light over the tops of houses from several streets away. The reverberation of the wyrded blast sent a shock wave high into the sky. The buildings shuddered around her, and Cynthia looked up in time to see several windows overhead blast out from the force of the attack. She covered her head, backing away as glass rained down around them, but all the debris missed her and Garrant by several feet. Her partner hadn’t even bothered protecting himself.
"The Ivory Tower," she said.
"A suicide mission," Garrant said. "That's our cue."
Cynthia felt sick to her stomach, hoping the Guardian was alright. When she turned back to her task it was to see two figures materialize out of the shadows of another alley directly across from them.
"Blanch," Garrant addressed the haggard-looking woman who stepped forward. Her brown hair created a greasy wreath around her head. It made Cynthia crinkle her nose just imagining what the other woman smelled like.
"Are they ready?" Blanch asked, her soothing voice belying her outward homeliness.
"They know something's up," Garrant said, tossing a look behind him at the bars containing the verax-acis.
"They feel him rising," Blanch replied.
"Who?" Cynthia said, surveying the clean-cut man that came with Blanch. He stood back, his hands tucked behind his back, watching the constables as if daring them to move. Cynthia didn't dare.
"It's time to do the Master’s bidding!" Blanch crooned. With an outstretched hand, she launched a volley of black wyrd at the bars of the cell. They clanged loudly in the night, and Cynthia stepped back, sure someone would hear that despite all attention being drawn to the suicide attack at the base of the Ivory Tower, the seat of power in the Holy Realm.
She should really go check on that; at least it would get her away from here. Her nervous feet stepped further away from the group at the verax-acis cell. But she stopped, frozen in dread, when the first of the black-robed, milky white figures stepped out of the darkness of their dungeon and took his first whiff of freedom.
Like maggots, she thought of the verax-acis as more and more of them spilled out of the darkened depths and into the cleansing rain.
The first turned and looked at her, cocking its head as if listening to something only he could hear. His mouth distended, popping the joints of his jaw and unhinging them in a way that was more snake than human.
Cynthia stumbled back. Her boot caught on a curb and she fell into a pool of lamplight. The verax-acis shambled closer and into the light. His bald head reflected the lamplight like a small moon come to perch over her head.
From within his gaping maw came a gurgling noise, like he was choking on his own blood, wheezing through phlegm. When his fingers sought purchase on her scalp, Cynthia screamed out. The feeling of worms and bugs skittering through her brain blocked out all other thoughts as the verax-acis fed.
Cynthia's voice was plucked from her throat, but it still sounded in the night, her shrieks of terror issuing forth from the mouth of the verax-acis as it drained her of all life.
Mag was no stranger to deceit. She had, for some time, been a devout alarist. That had all changed with the death of Pharoh and Sylvie and the Splitting of the World. She realized she had been nothing more than a child, playing at games, knowing nothing of the repercussions.
To be honest, she hadn't thought much about the immortal soul. Since she knew she was going to live forever, she thought there was no reason to really worry herself about what would come after death. So, Mag honestly didn't think anything came after death. The votaries were charlatans to her thought, and the Carloso was written by a regular man, not someone in the grips of religious ecstasy.
Furthermore, she didn't fear death, and she didn't fear dealing death either.
But standing there when the world split, watching the Shadow Realm go dark with a deafening silence, the stigmata branding on the smoking palms of everyone around her, she knew true fear of the religious kind.
Mag broke her gaze from the snow falling outside Sara's bedroom window, and looked down to her own palms, the green dots marking her as one from the Realm of Earth. She rubbed at them, as she did now and then, wondering if maybe they would ever wash off, but they didn’t.
Despite the pain that had come with the branding, and the feeling of the Goddess rolling through their minds, making them feel her displeasure emotionally, Mag had thought maybe it was all a delusion.
She had seen Pharoh fall from the Ivory Tower, and when her body impacted on the unyielding ivory streets below, Mag had felt something break inside of her, and more than fear poured from her eyes.
She had been part of that. Mag had been part of the fall of Pharoh, the fall of goodness. She had retreated to hiding, and when she came out to Sara and Annbell, she had told them honestly of her past.
They listened, and gave her a chance to prove that she truly had changed her ways. Since then she had served them in whatever way she could, earning their trust as if she were dying of thirst and they were the only people in the world who had water. So she felt they were also the only people that could absolve her of her past sins against the Twin Flames.
She stood there, Van pasted to the wall with her wyrd, a guard watching over Sara in case by some odd chance Mag's wyrd didn't hold the traitor, waiting for Annbell to arrive.
An hour after the green orb had floated over the land and down the mountain passes, the ground glowed green in the courtyard of the Guardian's Keep. Mag stirred from her contemplations of the past, and watched a black maple grow from the ground, rapidly unfolding and blooming before melting away to reveal Annbell, dressed her in black furs.
Annbell opened her arms and her apprentice, Maeven, the boy who’d learned about Sara's illness, stumbled away, obviously not yet used to traveling through the ground.
With a word to the guard, letting him know where she was going, Mag left the Guardian's bedroom, lifted the skirts of her winter robes, and sped down the stairs. She met Annbell and Maeven halfway down the stairs, the two of them making their way up to Sara's room.
“How are the towns?” Mag asked Annbell, falling into step beside her. Mag gave Maeven a nod and a smile, thankful that he had alerted them that Sara's illness was what poisoned the realm. She had never thought the realms and the Guardians were so linked.
“Not good,” the Guardian answered, her face an unreadable mask. Annbell often looked like that, but Mag could tell there were emotions warring under the surface.
“Chaos dwarves?” she asked her ruler.
“No, malignant wyrd,” Annbell told her, pushing through the office door. She hesitated before the door to the bedroom. “He is still being held here?”
“Yes, he is bewyrded against the wall, and a guard is posted there in case. I wanted him to see what he had done to her while we waited for your return,” Mag told her, unsure how this news would settle with Annbell.
“Good,” Annbell said simply. Tension Mag hadn’t known she was harboring eased from her shoulders.
“Whatever he put in the tea, he had to be getting it from somewhere outside the keep.”
“And where he got it is among the answers we intend to find out. You will be charged with getting the answers from him, are you up to that?” Annbell asked without looking at the sorceress she had left in charge while she was gone.
“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Guardian.”
“Good, wait here,” Annbell told her and Maeven, and stepped into the room. Soon after, the guard came back out, and the door shut heavily on a muffled shriek. Mag didn't bli
nk, only nodded to the guard as he left the office.
Maeven looked a little green around the edges, but Mag wasn't sure if it was because of his recent traveling, or if it had to do with what could be happening behind the closed doors. They would never truly know what Annbell was doing in there, since the door was wyrded against eavesdropping, and it was thick enough that no noise escaped the chamber.
“Come, let’s sit for a moment,” Mag said, turning him to the chairs set before Sara's desk, where she would audience with guests or officials. They both took a chair, Mag turning her back to the wooden box where the Orb of Aldaras rested. “Annbell said something about malignant wyrd?”
“Yes,” Maeven said, glancing back to the door. He rubbed his hands over his head, where the stubble he had arrived with had grown in thick and stuck up at odd angles around his head.
“I don't like the sounds of that,” Mag said. She looked at the desk where she had decrypted the message on the old parchment. “Malignant how? Chaotic, or do you think it had to do more with caustics?”
“Annbell didn't seem to think the caustics had anything to do with it,” Maeven confirmed Mag’s fear.
The door to Sara's suite opened up, and Annbell came to rest behind the large desk. She pressed her fingers together and tapped them against her chin, as if in thought.
“I think he will talk easily enough,” Annbell said.
“Even if he doesn't want to talk, I have ways,” Mag said.
“I'm sure you do.”
“This wyrd,” Mag started. “I think what you told me about Azra is right.”
“Oh?” Annbell asked, leaning forward, resting her arms on the desk. “What makes you think that?”
“Well,” she looked behind her toward the box with the orb.
“Have you felt this gathering darkness to the west?” Annbell asked her.
“No. In fact, when I came in here, when I learned about Van, Sara had been sitting where you rest now, staring into the Orb of Aldaras.”
“But how? She's been too ill for days to even move out of bed.” Annbell looked toward the box as if she could glimpse what lay inside through the green embossed wood.
A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) Page 18
