Master of Crows

by Grace Draven

  He shrugged. “They’re often one and the same. Still, you’re more of a danger to me and yourself if I give one to you.” She watched as he bent and drew out a small dagger concealed in his boot. “Here. “Find a place to tuck it. You’re better off armed with something.” He tilted his head, and his smirk widened. “If all else fails, you can always sing.”

  Any other time, Martise might have laughed at his quip, but she only offered him a weak smile. She took the knife and empty harvesting bag he gave her. “I thought we just came for papers?”

  He looped the trailing reins over Gnat’s neck and sent the horse back up the hill to wait. “We did. And pray to whatever gods comfort you that those papers are still in the lich’s library and not used by some now-dead thief to wipe his ass.” He motioned for her to follow him down into the dale. “There may be other books, tomes you can quickly decipher as useful. It will be easier for you to carry them in the satchel.”

  Once they reached the ruins of the gardens, Silhara stopped her. “Give me your hand.” He sighed his impatience at her hesitation. “I need to touch you in order for this cloak spell to work.”

  She placed her hand in his and gasped. The vibrations of power in his fingers shot up her arm and centered in her chest. Martise almost jerked her hand free. A tightening in her ribs made her grasp her side. Something awakened, an awareness within her, yet independent of her control. The sensation surged through her body, seeking and grasping for the spell that bound her to Silhara. Before she could question its presence, the feeling winked out, as if someone had slammed and locked a door.

  A speculative gleam lit the mage’s dark eyes. “Well, well. What secret did you almost reveal just now?” His fingers gripped hers, warm and imprisoning.

  “I don’t know.” She rubbed the place above her breasts with her free hand. “I’ve never felt anything like it.” A near dead hope rose within her. “Could it be my Gift?” She squeezed his fingers, her trepidation at entering the lich’s stronghold replaced by a burgeoning excitement.

  He shrugged. “Possibly. And it couldn’t have picked a worse time to show itself.” He released her hand, leaving behind a prickling sensation in her arm and a halo of golden light on her fingertips. “Keep your focus on those papers. There’s time enough to discover what just greeted my spell when we get to Neith.”

  They tracked a winding path through the gardens, avoiding thorny black vines littering the walkways. Martise’s nostrils twitched. The scent of old death lingered here. Not the reek of a decaying corpse, but the dry, choking scent of a violated sepulcher and only the dust of the dead to greet the intruder. She shuddered when they passed a man reclined against a broken fountain. Wasted to nothing more than a scarecrow of brittle bones clothed in wool tatters, the skeleton stared at them from empty eye sockets. The jaw hung open, hands clutched to a skull, as if still in mid scream.

  Silhara gripped her arm. His whisper flowed warm against her ear. “Prepare yourself, Martise. There are more like him scattered about Iwehvenn.”

  She shadowed him after that, treading his heels a few times until he warned her off with a threatening scowl. Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth so they wouldn’t chatter. Cloaked in a protective spell and accompanied by a powerful and heavily armed mage, Martise still had to squelch the urge to run away. Gnat, safely grazing on the hillside, had more sense than they did.

  Darkness spilled like blood out of the entrance to the keep. The large doors, still bearing remnants of a carved beauty beneath their split surface, hung askew on buckled hinge straps. Silhara blew on his fingers. Three points of green witchfire rose from his hands and floated in the air before him. They expanded and coalesced, creating a vaporous torch.

  He paused at the doorway. "I suspect I don't need to tell you to stay close." He didn't look at her when he spoke, but the amusement in his voice reminded her she was practically embracing him. Martise's face heated and she backed away. "If we're separated, I may never find you, and you may never find your way out. The halls and chambers of this keep lead to more than just other rooms."

  Despite the summer heat, chills rose on her arms. They entered the keep’s interior, guided by Silhara’s floating torch and his memory of his first foray into Iwehvenn. Martise wanted to gag as the touch and rancid scent of blackest magic oozed over her skin. The witchlight didn’t chase darkness away so much as hold it at bay. This part of the keep still had its roof intact, and she saw little beyond the green luminescence hovering before them. As they moved forward, she caught glimpses of a richly tiled floor coated in dust and littered with a puzzling assortment of items—water skins, rolled blankets, a spent torch, weaponry of every kind. Supplies abandoned by long-vanished travelers.

  They passed a trio of those travelers near the stairs. Like their unfortunate counterpart outside, the three sprawled on the floor in a tangle of bones and decayed clothing. Broken toys discarded by a vicious child. Protected from the elements, their bodies still bore hints of mummified flesh that stretched parchment-thin over skulls surrounded by matted hair. The shadow of a dying scream was stamped on each withered face.

  From outside, the keep was modestly sized, but like the gardens and dale itself, all was an illusion. Inside, it expanded into an endless maze. She lost count of the number of corridors they walked or the stairs they climbed. They passed through spaces either drowning in shadow or bathed in the red light of a setting sun. Silhara never paused, never stopped to check his bearings. He seemed as familiar with Iwehvenn’s labyrinth as he was with Neith’s. Martise was on the verge of asking him how much farther they had to go when he stopped at a partially open door.

  She almost barreled into his back. At some point in their wanderings, she had grasped the back of his shirt so as not to lose him. He tugged until she released the death grip she had on his clothing.

  “The library,” he whispered. “If our luck holds, the papers are there, and we can leave before nightfall.”

  She almost shoved him aside then. Wandering through this cursed crypt during daylight was bad enough. She had no intention of being anywhere near the keep once the sun went down.

  Silhara arched an eyebrow. “My apologies, apprentice. I’m in your way.” He bowed in mock apology and gestured that she precede him into the library.

  Eager though she was to find the papers and escape Iwehvenn, Martise stepped cautiously over the threshold. The witchfire torch hovering beside her cast an emerald haze on a chamber of dust-covered opulence. She drew in a breath, awed by the sight of towering bookcases crammed with what was surely thousands of years of knowledge.

  “Don’t just stand there and gawk, woman. Unless you’ve a mind to spend the night here?”

  Silhara’s soft admonishment ended her bewitchment, and she began searching the room. The library was a shambles, with furniture overturned and scrolls spilled onto the floor. Parchment lay scattered in haphazard patterns, tucked into corners, caught between chairs and tables. Surely someone other than Silhara had been here. She didn’t think he’d be so careless with such works. Martise glanced at him, puzzled. He shrugged.

  “I’m unlike many of the thieves who’ve ransacked this place. First, I’ve lived through the experience, and second, I know wealth isn’t always measured by coin. Those who usually brave Iwehvenn are only interested in books as a source for their campfire fuel. This was not my doing.”

  He set the crossbow against a table, within easy reach, and crouched beside her to shift through the papers. “Just gather them all. I’m certain I left them in here, and from the way this room looks, whoever came after me wasn’t interested in a good book.”

  Martise stacked parchments together, her bare hands burning with the taint of the lich’s magic. As soon as they made it back to the stream by the plum trees, she was going to bathe and burn the garments she currently wore. Silhara’s instructions that she bring extra clothing made sense now.

  Her satchel was almost full and growing heavy on her shoulder. Silhara stood an
d helped her rise. “The light fails outside. We need to leave.”

  She was on the verge of telling him he’d get no argument from her when an icy fear suddenly poured over her skin, rendering her immobile. The library swam before her eyes, its walls warping and splitting with fissures. Something waited outside. Something malevolent. Ravenous. Martise grasped Silhara’s arm. His austere features, bathed in the green witchlight, were strained. “Something comes,” she whispered.

  His nostrils flared, sensual mouth flattening back against his bared teeth. “We’re being hunted.” He hefted the crossbow, grabbed her wrist and raced for the door.

  Terror gave her feet wings, and she easily matched his long stride. They stumbled to a halt on the landing. At the far end of the black cloister a phantom mist raced toward them, roiling white and blood-flecked as it climbed the stairs.

  Silhara cursed and reversed direction, wrenching Martise’s arm as he ran across the landing to the other stairway. He skidded to a halt as the risers suddenly crumbled, sending a cascade of rotting boards falling to the first floor. Martise, in full charge behind him, twisted sideways at the last moment in a failed bid to keep from hitting him. She lost her balance. A burst of pain radiated along her hip when she struck the floor.

  “No!” Silhara bellowed, crashing to the floor with her. Her momentum catapulted her over the balcony’s jagged edge, and her scream echoed in the cavernous dark below. Her knife and Silhara’s crossbow fell, the bow glancing off her shoulder before striking the ground with a clatter.

  The ache in her hip was a twinge compared to the agony bursting across her shoulder and back. She dangled midair, tethered only by Silhara’s iron grip on her arm. He sat on the floor, one foot braced against a broken pilaster to keep her from dragging him off the landing with her.

  “You don’t look like you weigh this much,” he grunted through clenched teeth.

  Martise barely heard him. The darkness below gaped like an open mouth, waiting to swallow her. The ghostly cloud paused on the landing, rolling and turning back on itself. It picked up speed as if sensing its prey’s helplessness. She could feel its hunger, a craving for the very essence of life. Her life and Silhara’s.

  Her wrist and forearm burned, chafed by Silhara’s rough palm as she slipped slowly from his grasp. “Let go,” she whispered. “You promised me a clean death.” Shattered bones on the stones below were preferable to what the soul eater planned.

  He tightened his grip, hard enough to numb her fingers. “Don’t be tiresome,” he snarled. “You’re holding the papers and the knowledge to translate them.”

  Were she not hanging midair and facing imminent death by either a long fall or a lich’s avaricious appetite, she might have laughed. Her rescuer was quick to assert his own motivations for saving her, and they had little to do with nobility.

  The lich drew closer, carrying with it the fetid scent of evil. Behind its vaporous form, the walls and landing warped and melted. Silhara cursed and recited a familiar spell, one Martise hoped he’d never use on her again. The incantation flung her upward, hard enough that her stomach dropped to her feet. She flailed in the air. He immediately invoked a descent spell, and she fell toward him in a flutter of tunic, satchel and hair. He caught her neatly, and just as quickly tipped her out of his arms.

  His hands skimmed her sides. “The satchel. You have the satchel.” Relief hoarsened his already raspy voice.

  Who cares about this bag of papers? She wanted to scream at him. They weren’t going to make it out of Iwehvenn. The soul eater was almost upon them, shrouding them in a mist of cold, putrid air. She yelped when Silhara pulled her close, his arm a tight band around her waist.

  “Hang on, and don’t fight me.”

  He gave her no time to question him. Agony ripped through her body, and her vision blackened. She arched against him, her fingers clawing his arms as he almost broke her ribs in a crushing vise. Her surroundings faded, going gray and nebulous. An enraged shriek buffeted her ears. When she regained her bearings, it was to find herself still clasped in Silhara’s suffocating embrace, but in another chamber.

  “What…” she asked before he cut her off.

  “Not safe yet. The lich is right behind us.”

  Alerted by a peculiar tone in his voice, Martise looked up. He was ashen beneath the bronze skin, lips leached almost white. Blood trickled in a thin line from his left nostril to bisect his upper lip.

  “Again,” he said.

  This time she was more prepared, though the pain and crushing weight of the spell was just as torturous. They emerged in an ante-chamber, surrounded by the husks of dead men. More blood streamed from Silhara’s nose, dripping off his chin. He stumbled, holding onto Martise as much for balance as to bring her with him through the spell’s bonding.

  “Stop this.” She wiped her sleeve under his nose in an attempt to staunch the crimson flow. Her efforts left a smear across his cheek and a red stain on her shirt. “You’re killing yourself.” She’d read of the spell he used. Half-Death they called it, part of the black arcana and outlawed by Conclave. Complex and very handy in tight spots like these, it was known to kill the mages who used it.

  His eyes were sunken in his pale face. “Better dead than enslaved.”

  The remark struck her harder than if he’d balled his fist and punched her. Martise knew he referred to the lich, but his short statement encapsulated every motivation, every reason and every justification for why she was here with him in the first place.

  He took a long breath that gurgled with blood. “Once more. I can do this once more.”

  Martise doubted it, but even weakened by his own incantations, he was far stronger than she. The most she could do was hang on and hold him up when he fell after the third time. For fall he would. Few mages had ever withstood Half-Death multiple times, and none had done so still standing.

  The third time made her scream. She might as well have fallen from the keep’s second story, the pain was so sharp. They emerged in the outer courtyard, under a twilight sky. Silhara collapsed against her. Reeling from the shock of the spell, Martise staggered beneath his weight but managed to lower them both to their knees. The mage slid lifeless in her arms, awash in blood and colder than a day-old corpse.

  Her own pain forgotten, she laid him gently on the dusty ground. Her fingers traced a palsied pattern over his stained mouth and came away wet when she pressed them to his chest and the scarlet ruin of his shirt. “Don’t you dare die yet, you bastard.” Her voice trembled as much as her hand. Only the ensorcelled silence answered her.

  Shadows swayed and slithered across the courtyard as the sun fell below the hills surrounding the dale. Instinct warred with compassion. An inner voice howled at her to run. Run hard, run fast. Gnat waited on the hillside, and Silhara’s sacrifice had bought her time to escape. Again, Martise touched his face, gaunt and lifeless in the eldritch moonlight. He might be dead, but she couldn’t leave him. Not here in this bleak pit where time and wind would reduce his body to a desiccated shell, rejected by the very earth on which it lay.

  Muscles already bludgeoned by the Half-Death spell burned in protest when she rose and slipped her hands under his arms to lift him. She dragged him past the withered gardens, keeping a wary eye on the lich’s tumbled-down lair. Silhara had said the creature was right behind them after the first time they escaped through the spell’s spectral doorway. The memory of its shrieking fury when they escaped made her shudder. She prayed it still lurked within the keep, searching for its elusive prey.

  Her prayers went unanswered. Intent on getting Silhara out of the courtyard and to the relative safety of the hillside, she didn’t see the soul eater’s ghostly haze until too late. The creature struck, hurling Martise across the path with unseen hands. She slammed into one of the dead trees, hard enough that black spots danced before her eyes. Rough bark tore her tunic and scraped her back with a serrated caress.

  She shook her head and tried to stand, staggering as the courtyar
d tilted and whirled around her. The mist encircling her transformed, patterning itself into a grotesque shape both human and arachnid. Tendrils of icy cloud spun out from the shadow of a bloated abdomen and wrapped around Martise’s ankles and wrists. She yanked on her tethers, clawing at the gossamer ropes that curled around her arms and held fast.

  Images of the last victims to fall before the lich’s hunger loomed in her mind. Martise understood why their decayed faces wore such tortured expressions. She wanted to scream as well, over and over until the effort warmed her freezing blood and reminded her she still lived and breathed and held on to her life essence. Wisps of mists trailed along her arms—fine hairs on a spider’s legs as it skittered closer to its entrapped prey. Her cries hung in her closed mouth, and she twisted her head away from the snaking line curling toward her nostrils. Her efforts were futile. The lich invaded her, pouring into her body and spirit with malevolent purpose.

  She screamed, a thin wail lost in the miasma permeating every pore. A draining sensation weakened her limbs. Were she not bound upright in the lich’s web, she would have fallen. The coldness flowed through her veins, replacing warm blood as the lich fed on her. Her heartbeat quieted, drowned out by a high-pitched keening that seemed to come from hundreds of voices. Gray, wavering shades fluttered before her vision, beating their fists against invisible walls—memories and remnants of men sucked dry of their souls, forever lingering in an eternal despair.

  “Not like this,” she thought. “Not like this.” All she had risked coming here—a chance at freedom, a life lived unbound, even possible death, but a clean death—scattered before her, lost to an immortal parasite.

  The mist around her thickened, fed on the force of her spirit and the rise of her desolation. Martise thought of Cumbria, his smug features when he held her spirit stone before her eyes, the ultimate bait to lure her into doing his bidding. The lich wouldn’t have all of her. The High Bishop of Conclave possessed a part of her spirit. An invisible and binding chain, broken only by her death or the sacrifice of the Master of Crows.