by Sam Sykes
“No,” he whispered back. “Call me ‘northern boy.’”
“I can’t today.”
“Of course you can,” he murmured. “This is a dream. We can do anything.”
“I wish it were, Dreadaeleon.”
A long sigh. Warm, humid, ugly. And her voice was suddenly too real.
“But I need you to get up now.”
Dreadaeleon blinked and suddenly realized that his eyes hadn’t been closed. He hadn’t been asleep. That became abundantly obvious once he tried to rise and felt his body protest. Muscles stiffened, skin tingled as he hauled himself out of the comforting numbness of the silken sheets.
Around him, at the corners of his eyes, the golden pillars and empty seats faded from view as wispy tendrils of broodvine smoke sighed out of his nostrils.
He couldn’t remember when he had even lit up a seed, much less when he had succumbed to the dream the broodvine created. The Venarium had warnings about this: Broodvine addiction had sent enough wizards into hallucinatory madness to warrant the extreme cost and difficulty of acquiring the seed in the first place.
Mind-altering substances were particularly dangerous to altered minds, after all.
Dangerous for lesser wizards, anyway, Dreadaeleon thought.
For they were lesser, the ones who had disappeared into their own dreams and become gibbering lunatics. He was stronger. He controlled the substance. And he knew this anytime he looked into her eyes and whispered her name.
“Liaja.”
Because anytime he did, he saw in her eyes, felt in her fingers, a great need. A hunger, a desperation only he could satisfy. A lesser wizard could not.
And just as he knew her hungers, he knew her despairs. And when he looked into her frown, those honest lips unable to hide her fear, he knew why she had stirred him.
“They’re back, I assume?” he asked, voice croaking.
She nodded. He sighed, leaned forward, and clutched the back of his pounding head. His hair felt greasy; when had he washed last? He could have sworn he had just emerged from a splendid tub of marble and brass moments ago.
“Which?” he groaned.
“The Karnerians this time,” Liaja replied.
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Three?” His eyes flashed. A burst of crimson light swallowed iris, pupil, and white. “You woke me up for three?”
Her lips pursed. “You promised.”
You did, old man, he reminded himself. Stupid to do it in the first place, but there it is.
And so he sighed, ignoring the groan of his body as he disentangled himself from the sheets and scavenged up his discarded trousers. He hauled them up over his legs, secured them lazily, and walked to the jug of water on the nearby nightstand.
“Shouldn’t you hurry?” Liaja asked, watching him all but ooze across the elegant room. “Or at least dress more?”
“We’ve been through this at least a dozen times already,” Dreadaeleon replied, pouring himself a cup. “They know I’m here and they know what I can do to them.” He guzzled the water, tossed the cup on the floor. “If they want to continue throwing their lives away, they can damn well do it at my leisure.”
Liaja looked away, pulled her robe a little tighter about her body. “I wish you could find another way to deal with them.”
“As do I, I swear,” he replied. “But they’re idiot barknecks who bark at an invisible man in the sky. Who could reason with that?”
At this she fixed him with a glare. “I also wish you wouldn’t talk that way about the gods. It’s not right to go blaspheming so freely.” She shuddered, looked out the window. “Especially when it comes to Karnerians.”
He walked to her side and took her gently by the chin. “Karnerian, Sainite, Khovura, or Jackal. So long as I’m here, you’ll never have to worry about them again.”
And the look she offered in return made him realize just how cold the morning was.
“Worry is in abundance lately,” she replied. “How could I, in good conscience, keep it all for myself?”
He rolled his eyes.
Poets.
Without saying anything further, he slid the paper-and-wood door to their room open and stalked out into the hall of the bathhouse. Once this hall had been filled with steam, giggles from the girls mingling with the breathy slavering of their wealthy clients. Today, though, the only things emerging from the doors were the girls’ unpainted scowls.
As though it were somehow his fault that business had dried up.
They did not debate this, of course. They slid back behind their paper doors as he walked past. And the opinions of prostitutes were low on the list of trifles that plagued him. More pressing ones awaited him as he emerged from the bathhouse into the bright light of the city square.
This had once been a charming little area catering to those nobles and merchants too wealthy for street prostitutes but too poor to have their own personal ones. Once. Its neatly trimmed hedges and fig trees had been stripped bare, and small shanties dotted the square.
Dirty, tired faces peered out from those shanties: refugees who wore fear and reverence plain in their eyes, at once terrified of and grateful for his presence.
And who could blame them? In a city as war-torn as Cier’Djaal, the only places where soldiers feared to tread were the places where wizards slept.
“Dreadaeleon Arethenes!”
Most soldiers, anyway.
Dreadaeleon stepped forward, shielding his eyes against the glare of the morning as he did. Soon enough, their uniforms pristine against the grime and dust of the shanties, the Karnerians came into focus.
Three of them, as Liaja had said, standing well away from him and armed with nothing but a scroll. That was new. But thus far, all the spears and shields they had brought against him had produced nothing more than corpses and molten metal.
He slowly raised his arms, spreading them half in invitation, half in challenge. His ribs showed through his skin. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten.
“Sirs,” he said flatly, “you have business with me?”
They exchanged nervous looks before the one in the lead approached. He removed his helmet, revealing a youthful, narrow face.
“Dreadaeleon Arethenes,” he repeated in a quavering voice. “Your crimes, too numerous to commit to paper, have forced this meeting. By order of the High Command of the Karnerian Occupying Force, you are hereby commanded to surrender to atone for your crimes.”
Atone, he reflected bitterly. As though the people huddled around here, the people he had saved, were not just an inconvenience to brutes trying to kill each other, but some sin that he should answer to an imaginary god for.
“I see,” he said. He looked at the scroll in the Karnerian’s hands. “That is a hefty piece of parchment, sir. Does it perhaps list how many of your compatriots I have killed for threatening this bathhouse?”
The Karnerian stared at him flatly a moment. “It does.”
“And how many is that?” Dreadaeleon asked.
Another moment of hesitation. “Eight.”
“Eight,” he repeated. “And is that list big enough to note how many Sainites I have killed, as well?” His smile was bleak and humorless. “Just so I’m not accused of favoritism.”
“Seven,” the Karnerian growled.
The smile faded and Dreadaeleon’s voice went hard. “And is there any room left on that scroll to tell you how I killed them?”
The Karnerian did not answer. Dreadaeleon felt his eyes flash, spoke his next words through clenched teeth.
“Say it.”
“Electrocution,” the Karnerian replied, slowly at first, “incineration, decapitation, freezing, shattering… and crushing.”
Dreadaeleon was silent for a moment. He let those impressive words hang in the air. For the soldiers threatening him, for the refugees cowering behind him, for the girls who scorned him.
Half-naked, unwashed, underfed, and alone, Dreadaeleon
stood still and silent, the most dangerous man in Cier’Djaal that morning.
“Then tell me, with all that death, what made you think you could get the drop on me with the pathetic disguises you’re wearing”—he spit the next word—“concomitant?”
All three recoiled as if struck. The lead one stepped up to answer, but Dreadaeleon’s eyes were on the two at his sides. Just beneath their helmets, he could make out lips twitching, eyes flashing red.
“The fuck do you mean?” the lead Karnerian demanded.
“Please,” Dreadaeleon said with a sneer. “Vulgarity sounds as natural coming from a wizard’s mouth as poetry does coming from a pig’s. Have some dignity and drop this charade.”
“What evidence do you have to—”
“Plenty,” Dreadaeleon interrupted. “For one, the Karnerians don’t have a High Command of Occupiers, they have a Holy Order of Liberators.” He pointed to the two other Karnerians. “For two, your two silent companions have been casting the spell to uphold this pathetic glamer the whole time. And finally, your face looks remarkably like that of the soldier who came to make these very same demands to me two days ago.”
He narrowed his eyes to thin, burning slits.
“Right before I performed items one through three on that list.”
The Karnerian cringed and exchanged brief glances with his companions before his eyes began to glow an eerie crimson.
Suddenly his body shimmered and became transparent as light bent around him. The dark-skinned features of a Karnerian soldier faded, replaced by the dark skin of a Djaalic. The black armor twisted and dissipated, revealing a slender body in a clean brown coat.
A glamer. A simple bending of light and shadow to make something appear that wasn’t there. Even without the idiotic oversights of their disguises, such a feat of magic gave off so much energy he would have sensed it a mile away.
His fellows followed suit, shedding their disguises like shadows in sunlight. They slowly pulled their coats aside to reveal tomes attached to their hips by thin bronze chains.
Spellbooks, Dreadaeleon noted. Thin, with only a hundred pages or so, their bindings without creases and their chains clean and shining. So unlike his own book back in Liaja’s room, beaten and dust-covered and—
His eyes snapped wide at the realization.
“Apprentices?” he spit. “They sent apprentices for me?”
“You refused to answer the Venarium’s summons,” said the lead man—more a boy, really, trying to summon up a reasonable facsimile of authority. “This was the only way.”
“I have nothing to answer for.” Dreadaeleon sneered, sweeping his gaze across the three, each one as young and callow as the last. “Not to apprentices, at least.”
“Apprentice or Librarian, concomitant or Lector,” another of them said, stepping forward, “we all swore the same oaths to the same laws. The Venarium’s authority over magic is absolute.”
“Not over me.”
“No one is exempt,” the third apprentice snarled. “You violated our most sacred law. You turned Venarie upon foreign powers.” He gestured to the shanties and the beggars therein. “This is not what it means to be a wizard. You involved yourself with this war and so involved us all. The Lectors demand answers.”
“Then give them this one.” Dreadaeleon drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes. When they opened again, his power flooded out in bright-crimson rivulets. “If the Venarium has words to trade with me, they can do so without petty disguises and they had damn well better bring more than three.”
He breathed out. Within him something welled up, some terrible fever-heat that he clenched within his throat and loosed from between his teeth. The barest hint of his power, of what boiled within him, and he saw the apprentices shrink away.
He thought that would end it. He saw the calculations working upon their faces as they mentally compared their own strength to his. He saw the despair tug at their lips as they found themselves lacking.
What he did not see was their retreat. Just as he did not see why they had bothered putting up such a flimsy illusion to disguise themselves.
Not until the lead one spoke.
“We did.”
He caught it then, subtle as a breeze on a summer’s day: a slight change of temperature, a gentle pressure upon his temple. His left temple.
He whirled, saw the flash of crimson eyes, the crackle of electricity upon outthrust fingers as a fourth apprentice standing high atop a nearby roof shouted a word that was painful to hear and split the sky apart.
It took only a moment for the bolt of electricity to reach him. But Dreadaeleon needed only a moment to recognize the weakness in the spell and to step exactly half a pace to the right and let the wild electricity go flying past him to strike the cobblestones and sputter out.
Undisciplined stance, Dreadaeleon noted, glancing up at the apprentice. Hasty chant. He reached a hand up. Unsteady fingers. He felt the air ripple between his fingers. No control.
“And this is what they sent against me?” Dreadaeleon thrust his hand out and watched the sky tremble, an unseen force snaking up to the rooftop. “Who the hell do you think you’re dealing with?”
He snapped his hand shut and saw the apprentice buckle as an invisible vise closed around him.
He snapped his arm back and the apprentice came with it, hauled off his feet, off the roof, onto the ground, and across the cobblestones. The unseen force tore the boy across the cobblestones, screaming to his companions for aid and leaving bloodied smears where he struck.
To their credit, the noise that came out of their mouths might have been a cry of concern. Dreadaeleon couldn’t tell: It was hard to hear over the sound of a frail, coat-clad body caroming off a lamppost and skidding to a halt upon the cobblestones.
The pressure left him in a long, slow breath and he knew the flicker of Venarie within the apprentice had gone out.
Stupid, he cursed himself. If you had any control, you wouldn’t have killed him. He shook his head. No. NO. It’s their fault. The Venarium sent children to fight me. Weak children. Stupid children!
And children who, apparently, could not take a hint when it lay broken and bloodied on the stones before them.
He felt the spell forming before a word had left their lips. He whirled on them, saw the lead one whispering a chant behind his fellows, who stood before him with their hands outstretched and eyes alight with expelled Venarie.
Dreadaeleon’s snarl twisted on his lips and became a word of power. He thrust his hands out, heat boiling behind his palms.
And then he showed them why the Venarium was right to fear him.
In a great, cackling torrent, the fire came. It sprang from his hands like a living thing, reaching across the square to grasp at the apprentices with red-hot fingers. It found instead the shimmering air of an invisible barrier as the two boys spoke louder, intensifying their wards against the flames.
They were disciplined, Dreadaeleon recognized: studied all the right books on wards, listened to their masters’ lectures on defensive magic, knew how to hold back flame for a time. He almost hated to teach them that discipline could take one only so far.
But harsh lessons taught best.
He spoke his word louder and the flame responded with a peal of crackling laughter. A torrent became a pillar, a great serpent of flame that drove against the apprentices’ wards, forcing them back a step, then another. Their faces contorted with the effort of holding back the flame. Then there was that fleeting moment of recognition, that single horrified breath when they opened their eyes and knew they had nothing left to give.
Then there was only the flame sweeping over them.
He wasn’t sure what they felt at the end. The air being burned from their lungs, perhaps, or maybe the reek of their own fat popping and sizzling. Or maybe they just went from boys to the blackened chunks smoldering on the ground too quickly to feel anything.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, he cursed them, the Venarium, and himsel
f.
And when it came to the final apprentice, standing over the bodies of his companions and trying desperately not to look, he had no more curses left to give.
A final word escaped the boy’s lips. His hands thrust skyward. The light bent between his hands, forming a bright column of red that shot into the sky. Dreadaeleon prepared himself, awaiting the fire that would inevitably follow. Yet only after a few moments of nothing happening did he realize what had just occurred.
“A signal?” Dreadaeleon asked. “Why? Why the hell would you call more of your fellows here?” He gestured to the corpses staining the cobblestones. “Why do you let the Venarium use you like this?”
“We all knew the risks when we volunteered,” the apprentice replied. His duty fulfilled, his spell cast, he allowed the pain to show in the clenching of his teeth and the tears in his eyes.
“Volunteered?” Dreadaeleon’s face screwed up in a failure to comprehend. “Why?”
“We are the Venarium, heretic,” the apprentice replied with a coldness that belonged to a much older man. “We all have our duties.”
Dreadaeleon had no response to that. A response would have required a presence of mind that was suddenly robbed from him as he felt the distinct sensation of his head cracking open.
Pressure, viselike and unrelenting, bore down on him, felt in his very bones. He felt feverish, then frigid, fluctuating back and forth. He felt it first from behind, then from above, then all around.
And then he saw them.
On the rooftops, in the mouths of alleys, at the gate leading to the square they appeared. Tall, stately, clad in long brown coats, cleaned and buttoned all the way up. Their collars were drawn up around their faces, obscuring everything but the cool, passionless eyes through which they surveyed him.
Librarians. The special agents through which the Venarium’s will was done. At least a dozen of them, all watching him, unmoving, unblinking.
He suddenly felt aware of the chill across his naked torso, of the tremble in his knees, of the quaking in his hand as he swung two outthrust fingers from person to person, electricity dancing upon their tips. They did not so much as blink at his threat, nor did they make so much as a move to intercept him.
