“Smells good, Erick,” he offered.
The man made a grunt that could be construed as gratitude while he added a healthy pinch of salt to the pot. He then got up to go to the wagon, gave Dramus an odd look, then moved on.
Dramus frowned and sat upon an empty box he had been using for a chair. He gazed into the firelight as night stole in, lost in his own thoughts. He was vaguely aware of the headmaster harrying poor Erick as the aide set about chopping carrots and potatoes for the stew, badgering him about doing everything wrong. As time went on, and more wine was consumed, the comments got louder and nastier.
“I’ve told you a hundred times if I’ve told you once, you put the carrots in first, ya dolt.”
There was a bit of slurring to the man’s speech, and his face was blotched. Dramus had always suspected the man was a drinker, but it wasn’t until this trip that he’d had the “pleasure” of witnessing it personally. His sympathy for Erick increased.
For his part, Erick let it pass. He’d been taking insults from the man for years, and it took more than some drunken comments to get his ire well and truly raised. He dropped the potatoes into the pot, having already chopped and added the carrots. He smirked at the headmaster’s lack of perception.
“Don’t you laugh at me, you son of a scullery maid!” Colius nearly rose from his chair, which would have been momentous, but he sagged back and took another swig.
Erick reddened slightly. He was used to being called names in the privacy of the headmaster’s chambers, but not in front of other monks. Plus, he didn’t like having his mother spoken about, especially by the headmaster. Dramus looked away quickly, hoping to assuage the man’s embarrassment.
Colius seemed to catch on to his aide’s discomfort, “That’s right, ya peasant. You couldn’t cook your way out of an oven!”
He was particularly pleased with that and let out a chortle that was punctuated with a belch.
“You seem to suck it down readily enough, Hogmaster!”
Silence followed Erick’s outburst, with only the crackling of the fire to mitigate it. The headmaster blanched, and Dramus stifled a giggle; he couldn’t help it. Erick seemed struck dumb by his own comment.
Just as Colius seemed to have recovered enough to speak, Erick rose stiffly, made some comment under his breath about needing a piss, and walked out of the firelight. Dramus put his hand over his mouth and kept his gaze purposefully fixed on the fire.
As seconds dragged on, he became increasingly uncomfortable in the silence. Finally, the headmaster spoke in soft tones.
“Damned ingrate. Shoulda left him at that inn, I say,” he pulled a haul off the wine bottle and cleared his throat, “Goddamn idiot, that’s what he is…an idiot.”
Dramus shifted uncomfortably. He disguised the motion by standing up and moving to crouch by the pot. He stirred the soup with the ladle, and looked back at the headmaster.
“I think the soup’s done, Headmaster,” he said, keenly aware to pronounce the title with respect.
Colius was staring at him, shadowed by Dramus’s body. His eyes were heavily lidded, and all the young page could see of them was a glint in the dark folds of the sockets. The headmaster didn’t say anything, and Dramus got a chill.
He turned back to the wooden bowls that Erick had set out and began ladling out a serving for Colius. He pinched in some salt and pepper from the small sacks of spice they’d brought, then grabbed a spoon and proceeded to bring the steaming bowl to the headmaster.
The man stared at him some more. There was a strange quality to his expression, one that Dramus had noticed off and on after they’d begun their journey, and something started to loosen in the back of his mind. It felt like his gift was rising to some challenge, as if he was deciphering a complex code, but he was just looking at the headmaster. It made him queasy.
Just as he thought he was getting a glimmer of some feeling in his mind, Colius grunted and slammed his bottle to the sod. He reached up and took the bowl, as if insulted that it was offered. The feeling immediately left Dramus and he quickly turned away.
What just happened?, he wondered. He’d never gotten the urge to use his gift when interacting with people, and the experience frightened him. He couldn’t quite sort what it had been trying to tell him, but he got a feeling of dread from it all the same.
It was as if the headmaster had been a completely different person for a moment, like he was hiding something sinister from Dramus.
Could it be that his power was growing? He couldn’t be sure, and any further examination of the feeling was cut off by the return of Erick.
The shade of Malavarius Drejth cursed as it withdrew from Colius’s mind. The young monk’s gift was getting stronger, and he reminded himself to be more careful in the future.
The young man immediately set to filling the other two bowls. Dramus could see that he’d recovered some of his composure, although he also noticed that Erick never actually looked in the direction of the headmaster.
Dramus thanked Erick as the aide brought a bowl to where he was now sitting, and let the warmth of it seep into his fingers. The chill of the night was coming on, and even though spring was moving along, there was still a bite to the wind in the morning and at night.
Erick sat back on a rock and did the same. Both younger men stared into the fire, while the sound of Colius’s slurping filled the air. The meal passed this way, with the headmaster punctuating the silence with a prodigious belch now and again.
As Erick made ready to wash up, Dramus mumbled something about being tired and made for the wagon. He’d started to climb into the back when the headmaster spoke.
“Enjoying the book?”
Dramus froze. Fear paralyzed him for a moment. How had the headmaster found out about the book? He’d been exceptionally careful to hide it from the two other men.
Other than breaks to relieve themselves, the three were never out of sight of one another. Finally, he mustered the courage to speak.
“Uhh, book, Headmaster?” He immediately cursed himself for sounding the fool. Still, he looked around the corner of the wagon at Colius and assumed an innocent expression.
The headmaster was looking at him in that way he’d done before; the hairs on the back of Dramus’s neck began to prickle. He worked hard to maintain his look of puzzlement.
The cloud over Colius’s face seemed to pass suddenly, “Oh, I’m sure you’ve got some damn book squirreled away in there. You’d be a piss-poor page if you didn’t have something to read on this trip.”
He waved a pudgy hand dismissively, chuckling at his choice of words. “Piss—poor page. Heh. Pisspoorpage…”
Frowning, but glad that the man had lost interest, Dramus heaved himself into the back of the wagon. He moved over Erick’s bedroll, which was closest to the opening, skipped the headmaster’s pillowed resting place, and scooted around some crates of supplies to find his meager bedroll near the front.
For a moment, he just sat down on the blankets, subdued. Colius was definitely acting stranger than normal. The feelings he’d been getting from the corner of his mind that worked his gift made him uneasy.
Could the headmaster have found the book Gwyneth had given him? He knew it was practically impossible, but the feeling remained.
Eventually he was forced to shrug it off. If Colius had somehow learned of the book, he obviously didn’t mind Dramus reading the thing, or he’d have just confiscated it.
In a bin that rested against the front of the wagon were several books that the headmaster had deemed of enough value to trade with, but which were not very precious to the Temple. Neither Erick nor the headmaster had touched the crate since they’d left. Dramus opened the loose lid and carefully began removing the books inside.
At the bottom, exactly as he’d left it, was the book of radiation, as he’d come to know it. The actual title was Warhead Maintenance and Protocol. It was as fascinating as it was horrifying. Even as he delved further into its pages, Dramus suppress
ed a chill at the idea that such things must have existed.
What exactly had he stumbled upon? It made mention of strange things, things that Dramus had never even heard of, such as starships, reactors, computers…the list went on. His mind began to buzz as he started in where he’d left off.
In the dark behind him, invisible to human eyes, Drejth grinned.
Chapter 17
Looming over the dull lavender dust that coated the moon of Valia was the Castle Drejth. Its black pillars and minarets reached up from the surface like the burnt bones of some half-buried skeletal hand. No light escaped from it, no movement could be seen from the outside.
It was the bastion of Malavarius Drejth’s followers; a legion of undead wizards bent to one purpose: the utter domination of Valia. They had been isolated to the moon following the cataclysmic events of the War of Gates.
Unable to return to the world, they awaited the instruction of their master and namesake, constantly refining their dark magic and heinous rituals.
It had been Kalvin Van Uther who had led the king’s army, with the support of the lord mages against Drejth and his followers, systematically destroying the gates with which they traveled back and forth to the moon. It was the final battle on the plains of Corrumung that saw the explosive end of Drejth and the final destruction of the Gates.
Since then, a small group of lyches had been trapped on the moon, casting their hateful eyes toward Valia, biding their time for the day when they’d be able to exact their revenge, and bring the Realm of Men to heel.
They were not idle.
Deep within the bowels of the obsidian keep, a ritual was underway. Keening the likes of which would drive the living mad reverberated through the halls. In a chamber carved out of the bones of the moon, the thirty lyches that made up the legion of Drejth twisted and gyrated, summoning the perverted energies of their dead version of the Arcane.
In the center of the circular hall was a plinth of purple-black rock. It writhed with green lightning, sometimes arching out to touch an outstretched skeletal claw. The very air warped and puckered, forces beyond the ken of men pulled and stretched reality itself. Finally, the keening dulled, and the plinth hummed to a crescendo.
It blazed with a green glow that would have burnt the eyes out of living sockets, before fading to be replaced by a scene of a wooded glen. The lyches ceased their rhythmic movements, and all turned to gaze into the scrying device.
The scene moved to display a small town, a frontier town. As the device showed more of the village, the lyches could see that it was being overrun by goblins.
Smoke billowed among the crude buildings as dark shapes ran through the streets, hacking down any human that was unlucky or foolish enough to be caught in the open. There was a throng of greenskins gathered around a squat stone building, an inn, apparently, where the majority of the town’s folk had holed-up.
Many of the lyches ran dusty tongues over broken black teeth in anticipation. The plinth had been tuned as not only a scrying device, but as a conduit to the world below. The undead inwardly quivered with anticipation of what was to come.
Finally, something gave in the battle below; the wall of the inn’s common room collapsed under the onslaught and in poured the goblin army. The scene in the plinth swelled, zooming in to give the Drejth a close-up view of the carnage that erupted.
Blood flowed, screams rent the air, and death stormed the last survivors of the town. Energy, sweet horror, pain, and death flowed through the magic conduit and into the wretched bodies of the lyches. A vast psychic sigh blew through the chamber, as thirty dark eye sockets bloomed with green light.
As the scene of murder died down, the plinth showed a man in earth colored clothing holding the remains of his intestines in with blood-soaked hands. Nearby, a brutish hobgoblin moved in for the kill. The man’s blue eyes glowed feebly for a moment, and he looked directly into the chamber at the Drejth, across the gulf of space.
One of the lyches, a truly ancient corpse with a skull that actually floated above the molted robes that covered its torso due to the total disintegration of its spinal column, reached out a stick-like hand and rested it on the plinth. A ripple flowed through the scene, and the dying man let out a silent scream.
The hobgoblin froze in confusion, while its intended victim writhed in agony. As the man shuddered to stillness, the beast merely shrugged and moved on to join its companions in looting the inn’s ale stores.
The disembodied skull of Hinjer, most powerful of the lyches, became wreathed in an eldritch glow. Around the chamber the other corpses looked on with undisguised hunger. To have consumed the life-force of a mage was ecstasy, momentarily allowing the lych to remember joy.
It only had a moment to lord its prize over the others, for the plinth crackled and sparked with green energy again, before obscuring the vision portal. The lightning changed to a reddish hue, and all the lyches turned their attention back to the plinth. The coming of their master erased all distractions.
“Hinjer!” the voice of Malavarius Drejth boomed through the chamber.
My Lord, the lych responded, bowing in reverence to the image of Drejth in the plinth. Malavarius appeared as he always did, as he had in his prime. He wore rich velvet robes of rust, trimmed in gold. Several bejeweled rings adorned his long-fingered hands. His hair and goatee were trimmed immaculately.
“Meet me at the construction site, immediately,” he commanded in excited tones, “The time draws near!”
With that the plinth went dim and the chamber was filled with inky blackness, speckled with the glowing emeralds of the lyches’ eyes.
Hinjer glided through the baroque halls of the keep, eager to please his lord. In life, he’d been Drejth’s right hand man, and his service extended into undeath. He was also eager to report on the progress they’d made.
He phased through the outer gates and began to fly across the moon’s barren surface. Several miles out, he came upon the lens.
Rising out of the lavender sand was a large skeletal structure, nearly thirty meters in height. It was made of black marble cannibalized from the castle. It resembled an iron-wrought lighthouse, with a warped glass plate at its apex. Gears and cables twisted through the housing, allowing the Drejth to adjust the angle and direction of the lens from the base of the tower. Beyond, hanging in the black of space, was Valia.
At this distance it resembled a green and blue marble, shot through with milky streaks. Hinjer knew the site well; he’d spent many a year gazing in impotent rage across the gulf of space at his old home. Soon…soon he would return and exact his revenge, along with the rest of his compatriots.
Drejth hove into view at the top of the tower, before descending to meet with Hinjer at the base. His shade was slightly transparent, and Hinjer could see stars through it. The spirit wore and excited grin.
“The warhead makes its way to Galloway, in the charge of three unwitting fools. In less than an orbit, the city will be consumed in a white-hot conflagration and we will have enough life-energy to manifest fully upon Valia!”
The ghost rubbed its spectral hands together in anticipation.
Hinjer wondered how the man had retained any of his emotions from life. As the centuries had passed in undeath, the lych found it impossible to summon any emotion other than rage. Even then, it was only after he’d supped on the life force of dying souls that the edge of his ire became sharp. Still, he nodded to his master.
The descendents of Van Uther shall tremble before us, he droned, in a voice made of liquid misery. His eye sockets blazed green with the thought.
The lens is nearly complete, M’Lord. Only minor adjustments remain. Once we have the final coordinates upon which to focus, we can capture the departing life-energy of Galloway. All that will remain is the Ritual of Breaching.
Hinjer moved past his master to tilt his skull up and gaze at the tower. Even this close to their goal, he found it difficult to summon anything resembling hope. Just the same, hunger remai
ned.
“Excellent,” Drejth moved to float beside his lackey, “Should the nuclear gambit fall through, we still have the goblin slaughter to aid us in our need.”
He pivoted to look the lych in its blazing sockets, “And, of course, I have another contingency should those fail…”
Hinjer cocked his skull at the shade. Drejth only cackled and floated up to the top of the tower. With a thought, Hinjer rose to join him. The two looked through the warped glass at the bloated and distended form of Valia that shone through it. For long moments, silence reigned. Finally Drejth spoke.
“I’ve found one,” his voice was a hushed whisper in Hinjer’s mind.
“I’ve found a Dragon.”
All at once a shiver ran through what remained of the lyche’s bones. His skull snapped to the side, but Malavarius had vanished. All that remained was an echoing laughter in his mind, a laughter that spoke only of insanity.
Suddenly, the undead thing found it was still quite capable of feeling fear.
Chapter 18
The city of Vizerburg was not the largest that Hade had seen, but it made Ormery look like a collection of outhouses. Fully fifteen-thousand people lived and worked there.
It was built into the walls of a canyon that had been cut by the lazy water of the White River. Balconies, arced bridges, and stairways connected the along the floor of the canyon. Buildings of faded stone rose to the sky, like plants stretching for an errant ray of sun.
The White curved through the center of the city, under multiple bridges. Further toward the west it would become riddled with the rapids that gave it its name, before snaking past Freehold and on to the sea. Small gondolas dotted the wide blue snake, and nearly the entire stretch that wound through Vizerburg was lined with docks.
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