Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One

by Jason Bilicic

  Kelc’s link with the spirit he used snapped as he toppled to the side, reeling from his impact with the bars. He desperately reached out again with his senses, aided by a thin strand of spirit, and found the bars again, instantly losing the spirit to them and feeling as if his whole body pressed against a lightning bolt. “Eht.” For the briefest time, every muscle contracted as hard as it could.

  His chest seemed immobile inside of his ribs and his legs and arms pulled in close to him, the largest muscles forcing them to fight for every fraction of a knuckle as they strained his bones near breaking.

  Still, he struggled to regain his attachment with the spirit he used in his attack, finally finding the rapidly diminishing trail of energy. He reached through it and tore Errit’s spirit back through, getting most of it before the bars finally severed the channel, drinking the power into their inert cold depth.

  Once he released the spirit, his body fell limp, allowing him to draw air into his searing lungs.

  Kyndron rose, sword whipping into an upright and ready position. “Flame-blasted fools!” he roared, his voice jarring on the calm morning, as Kelc continued recovering the breath that he’d lost when accidentally allowing the spirit he controlled to directly touch the iron bars.

  The tall priest pushed Errit over with one foot, the heavily armored priest’s face still issuing steam into the freezing air. He then moved to Kerrig and inspected him, the hole punched through his head obvious. Kyndron stared at the portly priest for a few moments, his jaw working from side to side. Slowly his black eyes turned to Kelc, who struggled to sit up, his muscles fatigued and aching.

  “How?” He took a step toward his captive, but froze as something skittered across the snow, straight to the cage. Kyndron leapt forward like a striking snake, digging the tip of his sword into the snow and flinging it upward, sending whatever darted through the snow into the air. He then easily snagged the small creature from amidst the falling clumps of snow where it flailed.

  Kelc’s mouth fell open, a strange feeling of excitement and pure revulsion a mixture too potent to ignore.

  Kyndron, too, seemed stunned, looking at what he held, keeping it away from himself though he clutched it tightly while it struggled to escape his grasp, its appendages like those of a spider, pressing against his flesh to draw its mass out of captivity.

  “How?” demanded the tall priest, his black-on-black eyes stretched open wide. “How?” He looked to Kelc for an explanation as he extended what he held.

  Kelc shook his head slowly, at a complete loss, his eyes riveted to Kyndron, to what he held: His prisoner’s severed hand.

  It moved on its fingertips as if they were feet, struggling to “walk” in Kelc’s direction. Still grey with death, the nails now blackening, Kelc’s hand strained against the leash of heavy string Kyndron used to restrain it. A tight loop secured the leash around the hand and the dark priest had fastened it to a spike driven into the frozen ground.

  Now he sat behind it, keeping the hand between himself and Kelc, watching it intently, his glossy black eyes unblinking. Occasionally, they would flick to Kelc for a moment before resuming their vigilant observation of the animated hand.

  Kelc, likewise, watched it. He tried to sort out how it had happened, but that was something that neither he nor Kyndron seemed able to explain.

  Kyndron had inspected both Kerrig and Errit minutely after tying the hand to the stake, seeking to better understand the situation. Kelc felt certain that the priest understood his attacks, more or less. Spirit had been harnessed and hardened to blast Kerrig and Errit while they slept.

  Yet in one case it had been a simple, quiet attack, and in another it resulted in a man’s face getting immolated while part of the spirit reflected away from him, striking the ground where the hand lay, or near enough.

  Perhaps, Kelc thought, Kyndron understood how spirit had been changed into fire, but it seemed that neither of them could explain the now-living hand that struggled to return to its owner.

  Kyndron had asked Kelc, but he didn’t know. He shook his head, accompanying his answer with a helpless shrug.

  Now the two sat watching. They watched the hand fight to be free of its bond and they watched each other, the only difference between them, at the moment, that Kyndron could leave.

  The black priest sat all morning, his attention locked. Kelc shifted his body frequently, but never let his attention away from either Kyndron or the hand. Kyndron simply sat on the ground, Kerrig’s dead body serving as a cushion for him to lean against, unmoving. To Kelc it didn’t even seem as if the tall priest breathed. He never adjusted himself or worked his jaw or blinked. Nothing. He just watched in still silence until the sun towered over them though it stood deep in the southern sky.

  “Errit had a protective rune etched into two false teeth,” Kyndron announced suddenly, his head upright, his lightless eyes on Kelc. With thumb and forefinger, he busied his chin. “Coppered teeth. When your considerable power overcame the strength of the runecaster, it burned its way through the rune. But the copper was yet copper and sheared your power, casting part of it aside.” He nodded to the still-struggling hand. “Into your severed hand.” Though its nature left it raspy and sharp, his voice was low, conversational, trusting. “That is why Kerrig’s wound is simply a puncture and Errit’s resulted in such devastation.” Kyndron climbed to his feet, pushing off of Kerrig’s bulk to get there, plucking his long black sword up as he did. “Care to tell me how a bit of redirected spirit resulted in the animation of your dead flesh?”

  Kelc looked at the man, if a man he was. He carried himself easily, like a veteran of many battles, and yet now he offered no contention. He sought only knowledge. He seemed to bear Kelc no malice despite the last of his followers losing their lives at Kelc’s hands.

  “Not going to tell me?” Kyndron laughed, a corrosive sound. “How could you? Had we not met as we did, we would have been allies…” he mused. “In Reman those like us tend to band together in order to survive. Share knowledge. Here, we met as enemies and you destroyed my whole band and I took your hands and tongue.” The priest turned away from Kelc. He stared out over the snowy grasslands for a time before he returned his gaze to Kelc. “I can kill you, Symean. Kelc Varrlson. I can. But I don’t want to now. Now, I want to learn about your power.” He paused while Kelc considered the fact that he sensed no untruth from the priest. “I cannot wield spirit as you do. Perhaps no one can. But if I could learn about this,” he said, waving to the undead hand, “I could do things…I need to get done.”

  Kelc struggled. He hated this priest. Only fear and pain had come to him from encountering Kyndron, yet he felt something else now. Understanding. He’s telling the truth, Kelc told himself. He is willing to compromise, not that I know the answers he wants, but I might find something. Give it to him to gain freedom and when I am ready, come back and kill him. I will kill you, Kelc thought, staring at Kyndron. I greeching will.

  “So…” the priest stated as he tossed his onyx sword to the side where it stuck tip down in the snow, standing upright, “…I will try to earn a measure of faith.” His own comment elicited a quiet laugh from him.

  He snatched nine heavy iron rods and a heavy sledge from the ground behind Kerrig’s body. Creating an oblong pen around the hand he made a sort of fence that reached Kelc’s cage. Every forceful blow of the sledge on the iron made Kelc wince. Dozens of times he cringed as Kyndron worked.

  The priest pounded on rod after rod for almost a glass, drilling them into Oerhe’s icy skin though he neither exhaled nor sweated from such exertion. Once he drove the last rod into the ground, like the others, standing about two reaches above the snow, he addressed Kelc.

  “I will make it so your power is less hindered by your prison. These rods absorb spirit and drop it straight into the ground where it is dissolved, or cleansed some say, by nature.” A smile of filed teeth followed his words. “I am going to remove two bars from your cage so they will eat less at your effor
ts, but do not try to exceed the rods. It would…hurt. If you and I can arrive at some accord, I am willing to let you live.”

  Kelc nodded. Kyndron spoke the truth.

  The priest reached over to Kelc’s domed cage and tapped one of the bars with a black rod and the bar simply vanished, accompanied by a low humming resonance. He did this a second time, removing another segment of iron, leaving a path perhaps three times wider than before, aimed directly at the still-struggling hand.

  “Find out what you can. I will leave you to do so. If,” Kyndron said, arching his black eyebrows. “If you find out how you did it, and will share it with me, I will spare you.”

  Without further comment, the priest raised his hand. His sword, which had been standing in the snow, appeared there. He turned on one heel and stalked away from Kelc, moving off several hundred paces where he dropped from his sight, presumably into one of his motionless states, resting on his knees as if in prayer.

  Kelc wasted no time. He drew spirit out of the skiver, feeling it to make certain that he did not draw the soul of his father. Strands of gauzy energy leapt forth on command and Kelc sent them, like probes, to the hand.

  They darted in and writhed around the moving hand, drawing from it, feeling it. It seemed to Kelc that it yearned to come to him, that the rotting flesh knew it belonged to him.

  “Huh!” It’s not rotting, he realized as one of his spirit probes dropped inside of the hand. In fact…

  Kelc looked at the wrist area of the hand and found that the flesh was knitting, working to heal by recreating the tissue around it. But it’s remaking grey flesh, he saw. And the flesh is not closing over the open wound. What the greeching hells!

  He poured his spirit sight into the hand, falling into it the way he might his own body, moving within the hand. He looked at the flesh of the wrist, drawing it closer and closer, looking at it with as detailed a sight as he could. A patch of flesh looked to be an interconnected network of smaller pieces. Each smaller piece looked to be an almost crystalline arrangement of even smaller pieces. Each of those bits housed still smaller parts. And each of those parts…

  Kelc checked what he thought he saw, what he felt resonating from the minute particle of his severed flesh. Hells and dogs, he thought. He checked again.

  Every piece of the body has the full instructions within it to grow the entire body. This flesh isn’t knitting to heal. It is weaving a copy of me.

  He withdrew his spirit and it slammed back into him, jarring him as if it had been forced from the hand. He rolled his head, unsure of what was going on. One moment he’d been at ease looking at the flesh, finding that it had a full schematic of his entire body inside and the next, as he tried to ease out, it seemed to fling his probes back as if it had will.

  Can it, he thought? Is it aware? Kelc rubbed his temples. How can it not be? It’s headed right at me and weaving tissue to mimic my body. But dead, he added. Then another thought took him.

  It has a full map to reknit my body! Gods! He drew spirit and fell into his own flesh, riding through his body at the speed of thought. He found his left wrist and sunk into the tissue there, dropping in deeper and deeper, moving into the bits that comprise the particles, dropping into smaller and smaller elements of his body until again, he found that these kernel pieces had the same feeling. They had it within them, every tiny mite. They all knew how to rebuild his flesh.

  He directed a spare filament of spirit into the tiny cell and accessed the stalled growth there, instilling it with will and power to regrow his body, to push toward his hand, recreating the flesh. It seemed to respond, pleasing Kelc, but as he withdrew to look at it from the outside, he realized how very small the impact would be. Therefore, he began accessing more and more of the same particles, driving them all with his will and separate strands of spirit. Thousands of times, he attached power to the kernel cells, drawing from them the sense of reconstructing his body and the innate mechanism to do so, powering it with raw spirit.

  He then did the same for his tongue which seemed far more responsive, the overall structure much easier to motivate into action when compared to his wrist and hand. It responded more quickly. In his wrist he felt nothing but in his tongue, he felt a tingle or an itch as his body corrected the damage.

  It was hardly noticeable and yet when he looked at his tongue from within it looked like a bustling city, miniscule workers finding and stacking materials in perfect lines that then bridged to each other, the organization and efficiency of his body leaving him awestruck.

  He worked on his right wrist, plugging thousands of strands, thinner than hairs, into the flesh there to try and rebuild.

  As he released his spirit sense, he realized how exhausted he now felt. It can’t be a glass later, he thought, but he felt more exhausted than if he’d just dug four graves in the same day. No time for rest.

  He reached back out to the hand, but this time it seemed to recoil. He probed at it again, but once again it leapt away, jerking on the string that held it.

  Kelc finally stabbed his probes into it, sinking them into the hand, passing into the flesh to feel the spirit.

  Rage. As if the thing somehow screamed in his face, the sense of anger and loathing for Kelc washed back along his probes, knocking him from his sense. “Ah!” He felt a little shocked, but worse still, he began to understand what had happened, or why.

  Besides his own spirit, which knew it belonged to him and knew how to repair itself, the hand also possessed some of Errit’s spirit, which despised Kelc and sought his destruction.

  It’s trying to return to me, he thought, looking at the hand, and it wants to strangle me. Skeesh! How damned long before it remakes itself into a second me and comes to thrash me? Will it know what I can do with spirit, be able to wield spirit itself, and just throttle me with an unseen attack? Wield a blade? The negative outcomes seemed limitless to Kelc.

  He pulled a deep breath and let it wash out through teeth. He could destroy the hand at any time, he thought. The thing was invested with spirit, to use Kyndron’s terminology, and so he could syphon the spirit back out, reduce it to raw energy and store it any time he wanted. But Kyndron wants to know how I did it.

  So I send a spike of spirit at Errit, mostly created of raw energy, but directed by me. Is it invested by my spirit then? If so, a bolt of mixed spirit hits Errit and his teeth have a rune. I am stronger than the creator of the rune so it immediately burns through the rune but still hits a couple copper teeth which split some of the spirit off and deflects it. It hits the hand…and now the hand has both mine and Errit’s spirit invested within it.

  My intent was to blast Errit. So instead, I blasted my own hand and brought it to life. I wanted Errit to die, he thought. I wanted…

  Hells! I wanted Errit’s spirit! As soon as the bolt stuck, I wanted to draw him back, but I was blown from my spirit sense.

  Kelc had it. Part of the effort to pull his spirit back along the beam had been an immediate success, but without my will to pull it, it simply followed the deflected spirit to the hand and now the hand is… He thought about what his mother had said to him about driven spirits. It seemed like years ago. A revenant. He looked at the hand. It is a revenant. It is flesh possessed of a spirit that hates me.

  Kelc laughed. He knew. He knew how it had happened. And he’d created it, as odd and terrible as it was. Kelc had animated a dead hand!

  Now, he thought, his mood sobering, can I ever do it again?

  Kelc stared at the hand, thinking about what it took to possess it with his and Errit’s spirit. If I am correct about how it happened, he told himself. But it seemed to make sense.

  The day seemed slow to pass, time seemingly frozen along with the air and ground while the pale sun hung still in the southwestern sky. And no sign of Kyndron. Kelc sighed with the thought.

  The tall priest would return soon to demand an explanation, an explanation that could earn Kelc his life, whatever that may be. How Kelc could tell him, he wasn’t even
sure. He couldn’t talk, though his tongue still itched and labored in his mouth. He couldn’t write. Damn it all, he thought.

  He brought a tendril of spirit from the skiver, making sure that it was not that of his father, and thrust it forward, his arms unconsciously reaching out before him, a somatic aid to pushing the spirit.

  As they did, they felt tight, swollen. Kelc’s probe touched his hand only momentarily, immediately sensing the fury still investing the unliving flesh before he recoiled, settling his spirit sense back into his own body.

  He coursed through his body, following the zillions of tiny little blood particles, gliding at the speed of thought through his own flesh until he arrived at his left wrist.

  The tissue smashed against itself, glutted on new material created by the many cells Kelc initiated and cramped by dead blood cells that created tight glossy pustules that ached as the growth of new cells pressed against them.

  Kelc slithered past, to the end of his wrist, seeking to alleviate the pressure, to release the puss and permit the growth to continue unimpeded, but he discovered as he moved, that the tissue, the many many tiny bits of tissue that capped his arm, were damaged.

  It felt as if they were warped or corrupted, somehow closed off from the organic collective of his body. Something had…welded them, melted them.

  Greech! Kelc fumed in his mind. Kyndron cauterized the damned things. Of course!

  He knew what he needed to do and released his spirit sense. Once he did, he looked down at his arms, swollen reddish black stumps, the skin and meat disfigured and burned. His stomach turned, not only at the sight of his own abused flesh but at the idea of what he needed to do.

  He sucked in a few deep breaths as he prepared himself. His skiver, which he would need, rested in its sheath, still attached to his belt, behind him. Kelc scooted forward a little, reaching back with his arm, fruitlessly batting at the knife.

  Hells. He climbed to his knees and drew again on spirit, his eyes purple. He looped a thread of energy around the knife and tried to solidify it as he willed it upward, but the black steel simply drank the spirit, reclaiming it. Damn it all, Kelc thought. Of course it would absorb the power, imbecile.