Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One

by Jason Bilicic

  Grey light hit his eyes, forcing him to wince at its brightness. “Not dark yet,” he breathed though the snow no longer fell. Heavy grey clouds still blocked the sky, parts of them greedy and black with snow. Kelc slowly peeked his head out further, trying to see all the way around himself without giving his position away.

  He looked north first but there was naught but a great expanse of white as far as he could see. He sat up straighter and slowly turned his head left and right. Left, to the west, nothing. East…

  He heard a slight grunt just before the black steel bashed into his forehead, blowing him onto his back in the snow.

  The large priest stepped over him as Kelc’s vision swam.

  “You’re patient,” he said, his tone indicating both respect and irritation. “And you killed my men.”

  Kelc struggled to let his spirit sense fill him. The priest’s eyes grew larger, alarm filling him. Kelc found and grabbed the souls of the two dead men that now lay buried in the snow only fifty paces away. One of his hands shot up to aid his mind in forcing the spirit energy towards him.

  The priest stepped back and with one quick slash, cut Kelc’s right hand from his arm, a trail of blood streaming off of the razor edge of the black steel.

  “Aagh!” Kelc pulled the spirit into him, drawing it to the skiver as he fought to bring it out of its sheath.

  The priest figured out what Kelc wanted, or close enough, and he darted in with his sword, getting it over Kelc’s left wrist. He lifted a heavy iron shod boot and stomped, driving the blade through Kelc’s flesh, blasting through bone.

  Kelc brought both arms before his eyes, each a red stump, blood pouring freely from each.

  “No spells from you,” the priest growled as he bent down, using the flat of his blade to smack each of Kelc’s arms to a side, the shots enough to cause him to scream out. But as he did, the large priest forced one hand into his mouth.

  He pinched Kelc’s tongue painfully and proficiently drew it out of his mouth even as Kelc issued another horrified scream. As soon as he had a knuckle’s worth of flesh stretched out of Kelc’s mouth, he drew his blade across it, removing that too.

  Kelc howled as blood permeated his senses. All he saw, coated in blood. The bitter stink of iron consumed him and now, filling his mouth and throat, caused him to choke on his own gore.

  He coughed as he screamed, writhing on the ground before the apathetic priest, coating the snow with hot steaming blood. After a short time, his blurry vision began to darken.

  Black eyes loomed before his as the priest leaned down just before his face. “I won’t let you die,” he hissed, his pointed teeth bared. “I need you.” The priest backed away, or stood up. Kelc couldn’t tell. “Until later.” The last swing of his sword caught Kelc on the side of the head and drove him into darkness.

  “…because he can’t work spirit anymore doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything about him.” The voice belonged to the big priest, his voice little more than a forceful growl.

  “Something about him,” said another. “Think you should just shave his head off of him now, save yourself the trouble.” A short silence followed this suggestion. “At least take his weapon from him. A black iron dagger? A rogue’s skiver no less?”

  “Take it then, Errit.” Smug.

  “It’s invested, Kyn?”

  “Very much so,” said the large priest, Kyn. “With more spirit than even I could force into such an item. That’s why I kept him alive. More importantly, he claimed all the souls of our dead faster than even I could interrupt.”

  The ensuing quiet allowed Kelc to realize exactly where he was. Tears leaked from his eyes as the full weight of his situation returned to him, the measure of his failure, the damage to his body.

  Though pain came to him from the stumps where his hands used to be, it felt distant as if someone or something intentionally shielded him from it.

  His mouth felt full, but after a single motion of his tongue and the ensuing wave of pain, he realized that the remainder of his tongue had swollen to the point that it filled his mouth and most of his throat.

  When he breathed in, only through his nose, air scraped past his inflamed tongue and struggled down to his lungs. His gag reflex responded and the heaving motion caused intense forks of pain to drop through him.

  “Seems he has awakened,” Errit said over Kelc’s noisy fit.

  Kelc’s eyes popped open, red-rimmed and panicked. He couldn’t stop himself from swallowing and each effort racked him with pain, forcing him to gag. His arms dumbly rose to his throat though he had no hands with which to feel his flaming flesh. When he did incidentally bump one of his freshly wounded arms into his neck, razors of pain ripped back through his arm to his shoulder, nearly knocking unconscious again.

  The men watched him lazily, none of them laughing or weeping on his behalf, no one rising from where they sat on oiled tarps in the snow. They simply looked at him while he suffered.

  He felt blood rush to his face as he began to suffocate. Desperate to allow air into his body while he gagged on his own swollen tongue, Kelc stood. His head bashed into something and he dropped flat on his back.

  Iron bars that arched over him in a dome crisscrossed the grey sky. “Hhhhhhhnnnnnnn,” he gurgled, helpless to save himself.

  “Keep him alive,” Kyn commanded.

  The third priest lifted himself from the ground and brought a long thin tube over to Kelc’s cage. “Open your greeching mouth, filth.” He poked the tube at Kelc’s face, jabbing one end into his cheek. “Open up, damn you.”

  Kelc stretched his mouth open and the priest, a portly fellow with an unkempt brown beard and moustache jabbed the tube into his mouth and then blew through the other end, closing his scornful brown eyes to do so.

  Liquid light as water filled Kelc’s mouth, causing him to cough and choke, pain raining through his body. After a time, however, the coughing stopped, because the pain stopped. His mouth grew completely numb. He could still feel the pressure of his tongue filling his mouth, but the pain did not register and neither did his gag reflex.

  Kelc’s breathing blasted from his nostrils as he struggled to regain his air after the pain abated. Dizziness caused the world to teeter before his eyes and he felt disoriented, as if he’d been unconscious for weeks. He let his eyes close and focused on just breathing, willing himself to slow down, to find some measure of calm.

  Once Kelc settled down, the big priest with the blackened eyes climbed to his feet and made his way to Kelc’s prison, lowering himself onto his haunches. “Sit up.”

  After momentarily considering disobeying the man, Kelc rolled to a side and used his body and legs to get into a sitting position against the sloped back wall of his cage. He looked into the obsidian eyes of his captor, terrified and alone, but with a certain understanding that he was not far from death.

  “How in all the greeching hells does a mage of your power end up here in this skeesh-heap of a nation?” Kyn asked. “I saw your eyes. You’re a mage.”

  Kelc had little energy to respond, but his expression was enough.

  “You don’t know. In Reman there are those that can wield spirit, but not quite like you. They have to build little charms and prepare incantations and things. They need time to prepare even the simplest of their abilities. You create the incantations at a whim. That’s why the hands and the tongue.” He smiled, his serrated teeth adding to his beastly appearance. “Can’t have you shredding any more of my men like wicker dolls.”

  “Kyndron, look at this farmer’s issue,” the portly priest said, “…he doesn’t have the faintest clue what you’re talking about.”

  “Be silent, Kerrig, before I shave a few stones of fat from you so we needn’t starve.” Kyndron’s black eyes narrowed as he looked to his follower. “If this ‘farmer’ knew nothing then how did he fall in league with a vampire and how did just the two of them, two creatures we are trained to overcome, kill four of our seven men before any of you so much as l
ifted a weapon?” The black-eyed priest returned his gaze to Kelc. “He is defeated, yes. But he is not to be disrespected. We have things to learn from this one.”

  “Fah!” said the other priest as he walked out into the snowy plain, his hand fumbling with his belt and trousers.

  “Kyn, you know I wouldn’t disagree with you, but this mage…” Errit shook his head. “Maybe Fat Kerrig is correct.” The stout armored priest gestured at the out-of-shape priest where he now created steam in the snow. “Maybe we should have this fellow’s head and be gone.”

  “I hear you, Errit, but think. If we could simply glean power from the spirits around us as he does…” Kyndron raised a hand and flexed it before his mouth. “If we could do that, then every single thing in Reman would be a resource if needed. We need to leave him be for a time, maybe even heal him a bit.”

  “And transporting him?” Errit asked, his unease plain to see.

  “We won’t. We’ll just sit here.” He looked intently at Kelc. “Maybe we’ll even spare him if he cooperates. He knows his place. Don’t you?” he asked. He wrapped his knuckles on the iron bars of the dome-shaped cage to get Kelc’s attention. Kelc felt the lie in his words where his survival was concerned, but he offered a shallow nod. No sense angering them now. Angering him. “So we just sit here and figure out his means. He has no hands, no tongue and he’s behind black iron.” The tall priest turned to look at his henchman.

  Errit nodded. “Fine. But let’s have some haste about it. Ten priests from the first group got slaughtered at the border of this damned place and now seven of our ten have been killed by these greeching Vanguards and now…this bastard. The third group…who knows?” The priest stood up and brought his mace into his hand, the black iron club enhanced with steel blades that stood out on four sides like an axe. “The sooner we are back beyond the divide, the better.”

  “I agree.” A bubble of anger gusted from Kyndron’s mouth in the form of a dreary chuckle. “Believe me, I agree. Heal him. Give him the curative.” The priest looked back at Kelc. “It will make you sleepy but when you wake up, your pain will be less. Then,” he said, “we will talk about what you do and how you do it. If you give me enough to work with, I will leave you here to figure your own way out rather than killing you. You may survive yet.”

  Kelc nodded again. He wanted the curative. He wanted to be unconscious.

  As for surviving, that part of Kyndron’s message need never have been uttered. For the second time since meeting the fearsome priest, Kelc could feel the lie.

  As Kelc woke up snow tumbled off of his face as he recoiled, his eyes shut tight against the freezing crystals. Icy air bit his ruined skin causing his forehead, lips and cheeks to burn. He brought his arms up and cautiously brushed the remaining accumulation from his face, cursing each time he raked his flesh with his blood-stained shirt sleeve.

  As he slowly allowed his eyes to open, he looked into a pale yellow sky. The sun threatened to rise but hadn’t done so yet, casting its hue ahead of it into a grey space vacated by what had seemed to be a constant tumult of dark storm clouds.

  His breath rose over him in air cold enough that his throat felt swollen and inflamed. Hells, he thought, suddenly realizing that his tongue did not riddle him with pain, or feel as if it had swollen up bigger than his arms. Even his wrists seemed to be in better shape, though they still ached.

  Kelc turned his head, wincing at how stiff and sore his neck felt, to see where his captors slept. The fat priest, Kerrig, slept on his back under a lean-to with two low-burning heaters near his head. Errit sat propped up against a mound of snow, his hands crossed in his lap and a leather hood draped over his eyes.

  Kyndron sat upright on his knees, head erect, looking away from camp. Perhaps he is praying, Kelc thought, watching the statuesque priest. Or perhaps he is just another unnatural creature of Reman and requires no rest and he sits waiting…watching.

  Kelc swallowed hard, trying to bring succor to his throat, as his eyes settled on something in the snow. “Wha…” he whispered, before struggling to sit up. His mouth still worked but his tongue left him inarticulate, to say the least.

  He gritted his teeth as his breath came faster and blood rushed to his face. In the snow, only two paces past the bars to his prison, blue and preserved by ice and snow, lay his hands. And is my greeching tongue underneath, he raged in his mind. Greeching filth! Skeesh-eating dogs! You know nothing but torture and evil. His eyes bore into Kyndron where he sat motionless, looking peaceful.

  One day, Kelc vowed to himself, either in body or spirit, I will have my revenge on you. There is no reason something like you should walk Oerhe.

  His chest heaved as his angry breath gusted out of him, only to float before his eyes, lazily passing through the bars that held him. Damned cage! Damn it all.

  He looked around to see what held the cage, and discovered foundation spikes, one every half pace, driven into the ground around the perimeter of his cell. About a dozen of the greeching things, he thought. And they’re probably spaded and go a full reach into the frozen ground. Hells! I won’t even budge this greeching thing.

  He shifted his gaze back to Kyndron, who still sat unmoving in the freezing light of predawn. He watched the tall priest for only a few moments before he reached his left arm back and pressed the tender skin there against the hilt of his skiver, letting his physical senses give way to that of spirit.

  Immediately, tendrils of spirit twined out of the blade, called by Kelc’s angry will. They rose like flames, caressing his back and spreading across him, crackling with potency.

  Kelc’s head turned slightly, his purple eyes looking at Kerrig where he lay asleep. His handless arm raised slightly as he sent a thin tendril of spirit out of the cage between the bars to the fat priest.

  “Sssss,” Kelc hissed quietly as the tendril rapidly broke down, practically inhaled by the bars of his prison. But it had been outside, he thought. It escaped and was then choked off. Maybe…

  He pooled spirit into a cylinder, adding to it until it felt like molten earth, the amount of spirit hovering before his eyes nearly too intense to behold. Then, once ready, he elongated it like a spear, his eyes and mind focused on Kerrig.

  The bolt of spirit erupted past the bars and bore into the sleeping priest’s skull like a punch. Almost faster than thought, the bars of the cage began absorbing the spirit energy of the bolt. Almost.

  Using it as a bridge, Kelc wrenched Kerrig’s soul from his now-dying body, passing most of the energy to himself before the shaft of spirit winked out, cut off suddenly by the voracious appetite of the iron bars. He passed the essence into his skiver, feeling it heat against his backside.

  Kelc allowed himself a grim smile as he released his spirit sense for a moment to look at Kyndron, but he still sat motionless.

  I can’t do a thing to the prison, he thought. No matter how much greeching spirit I possessed. The damned thing drinks it like a horse. As his frustration rose, it felt as if his tongue swelled in his mouth, again threatening to choke him.

  “Ult,” he gagged. His eyes shone purple as he again grasped spirit from the skiver, feeling like an imbecile for not trying to do so sooner.

  He fell into his blood and dived through the infinite vessels woven through his flesh, racing through his body. He arrived first at his left wrist, finding immense damage and inflammation there.

  He could reduce the inflammation and by using already open holes in his flesh, push it out, allowing it to ooze from the ends of his arms through rough blackened scabs that wept pus and blood as they grew moist with it, but the tissue was so damaged that he couldn’t simply replicate and repair as he had before with wounds. He did what he could to ease his pain before allowing himself to be swept up to his tongue.

  There he found much the same situation except that the tongue would reduce and practically heal, so responsive was it to his efforts at reducing the inflammation and swelling. He forced out the damage and, what looked to him like pa
rasites: Tiny active specks, smaller than the eye could see, that surrounded the inflamed areas and seemed to worsen them.

  Once he finished there, he also eased the skin on his face, forcing his flesh to renew itself there beneath the corrupt and painful skin that the icy weather had decayed.

  Then he did what he could for his right wrist and released spirit. As his eyes dimmed, it seemed that the first rays of the sun struggled over the horizon, spreading weak golden light across the snow-blanketed plain.

  He felt good enough to appreciate the sunrise for a moment, something he’d neither seen nor enjoyed for some time.

  The land looked serene, quiet beneath the weight of days upon days of snow. It shimmered as if a godly horde of gems had been sprinkled across it, the sun reflected up by innumerable crystals of ice, creating a mirage of warmth on a clear day that would see no temperature above freezing.

  Kelc blew out his breath, sending a heavy cloud of vapor to float away and hover between himself and the golden land.

  “Hmmm.” If things were different. If only…everything was different. Imbecile. Might as well wish I had wings and could walk through walls. Or iron bars.

  The thought brought him back to his current dilemma. Kyndron still rested and Errit slept upright. Fine then, Kelc thought, gritting his teeth, liking neither his need to act nor the actions he took.

  His eyes again filled with spirit as he drew Kerrig’s essence out of the skiver, again forcing it into the same cylindrical shape. He positioned it in Errit’s direction, using his supernatural sight to aim it. Once he felt that all was ready, he released it, driving the spirit forward like a spear.

  Kelc snapped backward into the bars of his cage as if he’d been kicked in the chest. “Haugh!”

  Errit’s face seemed to simply disintegrate off of his head, blood steaming into the air and greyish white bone visible. Part of Kelc’s spirit attack reflected off of something, reflecting out into the snow, plowing into the ground and whatever lay there.