Contents
CHAPTER ONE True Names
CHAPTER TWO Eye of Svyn
CHAPTER THREE Risen
CHAPTER FOUR Rest in the Mud
CHAPTER FIVE Outskirts
CHAPTER SIX Sagemont
CHAPTER SEVEN Something Fishy
CHAPTER EIGHT Scars
CHAPTER NINE Once an Assassin
CHAPTER TEN Grains in a Cup
CHAPTER ELEVEN Pretty Men
CHAPTER TWELVE Podge
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Dark Arrival
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Embers
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Path Less Followed
CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Proposition
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Apprentice
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Gone
CHAPTER NINETEEN As the Crow Flies
CHAPTER TWENTY Red Skull
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Trouble Brewing
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Solstice
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Congratulations
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Separating Silence
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE A Plan That Exists
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Positions Vacant
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Branded Men
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Morwynne
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE A Day in the City
CHAPTER THIRTY Coming Together
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Hobart
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Troubled Waters
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Harvest Festival
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Reception
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE A plan into action
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX The Chair
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Crooked Eagle
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT A Step in the Right Direction
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Illusions
CHAPTER FORTY Another way
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Blood of my Blood
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Barrels of Fun
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE Journeys Ended and Begun
To the Reader,
Dark Legion
Blood of Blood - Book 1
Paul Kleynhans
I would like to thank the love of my life, Rachel, for encouraging me to write this book and for putting up with the many late nights I spent at the keyboard. I would like to thank Nevani for the hours she spent reading the many versions of this story that lived and died. I would like to thank Eliza and Ella for their magic ways with words. Last but not least, I need to thank coffee.
This book is a work of fiction. Any characters, incidents, cultures and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Content Warning: Contains graphic depictions of violence.
DARK LEGION
All rights reserved.
Published by Insomnia
Copyright © 2014 by Paul Kleynhans
First Printing, 2014
CHAPTER ONE
True Names
I held the dagger to my master’s throat, and time stretched—measured by a dozen slow-drawn breaths. I wanted to savor the moment, but as much as I’d dreamed of it, when it came it was an empty thing. He wasn’t even conscious to see me exact my revenge. It made for a hollow victory, but that was just life, wasn’t it? I took a deep breath and released it as I slit his throat.
The door to the torture chamber slammed open as if pulled by the magnitude of my action. Framed in the doorway stood a red-robed Inquisitor, his skin covered in tattoos that reflected light as if they were drawn with silver. A cold dread surged through me at the sight of the man, grinning, and displaying less than the optimum number of teeth as his uneven laughter filled the room. His watery eyes flicked between the corpse and me. He was a sorcerer of the Inquisition and well beyond sight of sanity.
He took a slow step forward, and I a step back. “Apprentith,” he said with a lisp. “What have you done?” I did not reply, it was obvious enough. People often used the phrase “caught red-handed,” but rarely in a situation as fitting as this. I stood in front of my master’s corpse, the dagger still in my hand and blood pooling at my feet.
I looked past the Inquisitor, expecting to see his minders. Sorcerers were too far gone to be left alone, and two minders stuck close to each of them like shit to a shoe. He appeared to have shaken his—or killed them, which happened often enough.
He stood there, laughing like the mad bastard that he was. It turned my bones to water, that laugh. For all that my mind raced to find a solution, an excuse, anything at all to get out of the torture chamber, I came up with exactly nothing. In the end, I settled on my standard response to a bad situation. I attacked, throwing my dagger at him. He pressed a finger to one of his tattoos, and the dagger stopped in mid-flight. The air shimmered around the blade, and the tattoo he’d touched glowed with a bright blue light. He touched another tattoo with his thumb, and the floating knife rotated, stopping when he lifted his thumb, pointing right at me. I gasped, and my eyes settled on a cleaver hanging from the wall beside him. Before I could try for it, the knife flew at me. I dived to the side, but it cut deep into my shoulder. I roared with pain as I clutched at the wound. Warm, sticky blood soaked through my coat and ran between my fingers.
“Oh no,” he said between laughs. “You’re cut! Thlit open, coming to pietheth. You know the dangerth of infecthion. We need to cauterithe it.” He touched two tattoos at the same time, and a ball of flame shot from his hand. Pain enveloped me as it slammed into my shoulder. I screamed, rolled on the ground, and slapped my shoulder when I could. In time, and I’m really not sure how long, the flames went out. But the burning sensation persisted. I lay on my back, panting, and stared up at the ceiling with blurry eyes. Above me was my shelf of chemical encouragement. An idea occurred to me.
“Stop,” I croaked. I sat up against the wall, my body shaking with shock. “Inquisitor,” I said. Well, that’s not what I said, but it’s what he heard. “Are you here for my potion?”
“What pothion?” he asked as his laughter stopped for the first time.
“Never mind,” I said in a quiet voice. He touched his fingers to his tattoos again, and another blade rose into the air. I felt a cold creep down my spine, as it did for me when magic was used. “Okay, hear me out,” I said quickly, holding my hands up in surrender. “I thought you came for my potion, Inquisitor. The one that grants magical abilities.”
“That can’t be,” he said, the knife clattering to the floor.
“Inquisitor, I assure you it’s true.”
“Where?” he asked. I looked at the shelf above me. He walked to it and scanned the jars and vials that lined it. His eyes widened, and his laughter shook him once more as he snatched a small vial from the shelf. “Not very thubtle, are you, apprentith?” The label on the vial read “magic.” I shrugged, wincing at the pain it caused. His laughter faded away again as he stared at the vial. He narrowed his eyes at me.
“I can drink it for you,” I offered. “To show it’s safe.”
He took a quick step back, holding the vial in both hands. “No,” he yelled. He held the vial against the light of the lone torch, then burst into laughter again. I cringed at that laugh as it echoed around the stone chamber. “You think you’re tho thmart. Think I’ll hand it to you tho you can gain thith power?” He flicked the rubber stopper off with his thumb and tipped the contents down his throat. The sorcerer stood in anticipation for a long moment, then opened his mouth to speak. Before a word passed his lips, his legs buckled beneath him, and he collapsed to the floor. He lay there, unable to move, his face the very picture of rage.
My vial of magic had seen plenty of use over the years, but it did not work in quite the manner I’d implied it did. Most knew it as “Liar’s Demise,” a poison that ca
used the recipient to speak the absolute truth and which paralyzed the limbs. In my job as a torturer, it worked like magic. It had a downside, however. Within a minute, the body began a series of convulsions that increased in frequency and severity until the spinal column snapped. It was always fatal, so your questions had better be fast, and good, but I had none for this man.
I stood, my jaw clenched against the pain and walked to the door to shut it. I threw my patched coat, now in tatters, to the floor. A large hole was burnt through on the shoulder. No patch would mend that, and not surprisingly, my shoulder was a mess. The cut ran deep, but it was the least of the wounds. The burnt skin was mottled black and red in some places, orange in others, and blistered all over.
I knelt over a bucket in the corner. The cold water was a great relief on my burnt skin. It felt… Gods above, it felt good and stung like hell, both at the same time. When my shoulder was clean, I cast a glance over my shoulder to see the first convulsions take the Inquisitor. I expected he would scream, but the man was quiet. He stared at me as he shook. His eyes looked sane for the first time, and all the more frightening for it. Sorcerers were evil bastards, and the world would be better with one less of them tainting it. Though evil, there was no doubting their power. I was lucky to be alive, and owed it to two things: poison, and magic.
Liar’s Demise was a useful poison, but I doubted I could have convinced him to drink it without using his true name. Naming was a complicated matter, but in simple terms, by using someone’s true name you could gain power over them. This shouldn’t be confused with the power clever words could have over not-so-clever people. True names held real power.
While I still considered myself a novice, it took me many years to learn what I had of the magic, in no small part due to my misunderstanding of the term itself. You see, true names weren’t really names at all, but an expression of the person, of their ego, put to magic and wrapped around their name. Their name was but the key. It was accepted, comfortable, and lets the magic slip in with the name to unfold within their mind.
The power of the magic was directly proportional to the namer’s knowledge of their victim. I had read that with enough skill and knowledge, you could command someone to die by using their true name. My own skill paled in comparison, but I’d learned to use it in more subtle ways. I created a name for the sorcerer with what I knew of the Inquisition and used it to add a compulsion to the words I spoke. To nudge him toward taking the poison. The power behind such a sliver of a name was fragile at best, and it was hard to say if my compulsion had had any real effect. Perhaps it hadn’t even been necessary. But I was still breathing. There was that.
I sat down on the side of the torture rack to apply a salve and bandage my shoulder. Fortunately, my medical cabinet was well stocked. As a torturer, I found myself healing my victims as often as hurting them. Sometimes because I went too far, too quickly, but more often as a different form of torture. Some of my victims were strong of will, but that strength crumbled like ancient walls when offered comfort and hope. Hope that the pain had come to an end, and that release was imminent. When the pain started again, that hope was crushed to dust.
The mighty fell just as hard as any other man and names offered little in the way of protection. Take as an example my master’s corpse. He lay strapped and chained to the rack, stretched out of proportion, his limbs pulled from their sockets. I called him Master, but to others he was known as Angus. Head torturer of the empire. As important and powerful a man as he was, in the end, his name had lent him about as much protection as mine had when he took me as his own. Master, Angus, head torturer… these were just words, and words were ever a poor shield.
My name? According to the empire, I had none to call my own. I was nameless—all slaves were. But I was more than a slave, even by their reckoning, and just saying a thing did not make it so. Prince Saul Baz Sharmoun had been my name in times past, and it was the name I took back this night. I was done with being a slave.
CHAPTER TWO
Eye of Svyn
I rummaged through a small chest in the corner. It held all of my worldly possessions, being two tunics, a pair of boots and a heavy satchel. A sound behind me caught my attention, and I turned to see that the Inquisitor was dead. He lay like a snapped twig, and a red froth covered his mouth and nose. I pulled a rough tunic over my head and bit back a series of curses that sought to escape, the pain in my shoulder reawakened. I looked again at my discarded coat, charred and tattered, and put on my master’s instead. His coat was several sizes too large. Anything sized to fit Angus’s fat arse made me look like I’d gotten myself tangled in a curtain, but it provided some much-needed warmth, though, and it was a nice coat.
I dragged on my boots, slung my satchel over my shoulder, and took a last look at the torture chamber, my home for the past decade. A smile tugged at my lips as I looked at the two corpses. “Two for the one who waits,” I said in offering to my god, and opened the door.
The heavy bolts slid home as I turned the key. I took a deep breath and regretted it immediately. The dungeon’s bouquet of old sweat and shit assaulted my nose, and I could taste it at the back of my mouth. It would not be missed.
My fingers ran along the cold stone wall as I climbed the steps from the dungeon. When I reached the top, I saw the two guards at the door but kept my eyes on the ground. I concentrated on walking naturally, hiding my pain.
Two guards may not seem like enough to protect against escape. But in the decade I’d spent in the dungeon, there’d been no escapes. To my knowledge, no one had even tried. Even if a particularly clever prisoner managed to get out of the dungeon, they would still find themselves within the walls of the fortress Castralavi. A hopeless cause for most, but my situation was different. While I was a prisoner of sorts, my master’s orders regularly took me beyond the gates.
“Ah, apprentice. What a fine evening to be about.” the guard on the left said.
“Yeah, he’s off to feed the reptiles,” the other said. “Full load tonight too, on account of all the customers he’s been attending. Gonna have a hell of a time keeping it all in that cart of his.”
I flinched when he mentioned the cart and hoped that the dumb bastard didn’t give it more than a cursory glance. But a bottle of spirits peeked out from behind one of their shields, propped against the wall behind them. Their shields were embossed with the swooping eagle of the empire. But these men knew nothing of swooping; they were the chaff of the legion, too stupid and lazy to be on the front lines of the ever-expanding empire. No, they wouldn’t notice if I walked past with a sign that read, “Goodbye, arseholes, I’m escaping now.”
“He’ll probably get that nice coat a bit… messy,” the guard went on.
“Hey, isn’t that Angus’s coat?” the first guard asked.
“Now that you mention it,” the second said. I looked up at him. Clearly they were more attentive than I’d given them credit for. “How did you come to wear your master’s coat, apprentice?” he asked as he took a step closer.
I stopped, met his eyes, and did not look away. He seemed annoyed that someone of my station dared to do so. “I have a meeting with a noble later this evening, Master Chad,” I said, trying to keep my voice level. While he heard me speak his name, the sound that left my mouth was not quite that. The mind had no way of discerning when a true name was used and instead heard only the word the magic was woven around. So naming again, but what I said could have been true. Angus used me as an assassin as well as a torturer, and the guards knew it. “I needed more pockets to conceal the presents I bring the noble. My master lent me his coat for this purpose, Master Chad. He mentioned it was getting snug.”
Chad burst out in laughter and the other guard, named Dirk, joined in a moment later. I felt relief wash over me. My grip on naming was tenuous at best, but I was on a roll tonight. “Angus is getting fatter by the month,” Chad said through his laughter, and he pushed the door open. “Out with you.”
The door s
lammed shut on my heels, and I stumbled forward. I could still hear their muffled laughter through the closed door, but they were soon drowned out by the pelting rain. It was a very cold night, but I was grateful for it, as my shoulder still burned with heat. I pulled my hood closed as I walked to the rear of the building, toward the horse and cart that waited for me. I secured a loose corner of the heavy cloth covering the cart. It was flapping in the wind, and steam rose from its edges.
“Let’s go, you old nag,” I said to the horse as I took her reins. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure nothing was falling out of the overfull cart. The irregular surface of the cobblestone caused its contents to shift about, which made it look as though creatures were stirring beneath the cloth.
As I made my way down the dark path, a sense of relief started to build within me. I regularly left the fortress on my master’s orders, but this time was different. This time I would not return.
Only the occasional lamp burned along the road, and the old fortress looked deserted. It was dark, but I made my way with relative ease. I was a servant of Svyn, the god of death, and darkness had come to be my friend. I felt at home in its embrace.
Castralavi was a fortress in more than name; only a fool would mistake it for anything else. It was a miserably dreary place, not well-known for its architectural achievements. It served as the training ground for the legion, where the empire’s young men were broken in. It had a darker purpose, too, acting as headquarters to the Dark Legion, as the Inquisition was also known.
As I approached the gate, I heard a shout from the top of the wall. Shielding my eyes against the rain, I made out the silhouettes of six archers at the top. Two legionnaires emerged from a room recessed within the high wall, responding to the call from above. I brought my cart through the gate regularly, and the gates were opened without a word passing between us.
The town that surrounded the fortress shared its name. These streets, too, were empty. It was an hour past curfew, and no one dared step outside once the bell was rung—ever the obedient sheep. In all the years I’d made these trips, I’d rarely seen anyone breaking curfew. Perhaps the occasional whore sneaking about, and once, a man chasing a burglar from his home. Mostly though, it was a ghost town after curfew, and I liked it that way.
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