My muscles all relaxed simultaneously, and I exhaled all of the breath that had been trapped in my lungs in a single rush. A scraping sound rasped nearby, and the blue light blossomed somewhere behind me.
“You’re back, then?”
Khaine.
I tried to speak, but I could only manage a faint moan. I was exhausted beyond possibility. It felt as though I’d melted into a rather unpleasant puddle of sorcerer, liquefied by the spinner’s venom. My limbs refused to respond to any attempts to move them, and my eyes stared blankly ahead; the closest I’d ever come to being dead without actually being all the way there.
Something pushed on my chest, and I flopped over onto my back, still unable to move. Above me, a different light glimmered: pale and perfect, like a tiny cold star glowing in the night sky. It shone down on me, and for a moment, I thought that perhaps I was going to die after all.
Then it flashed down, out of my sight, and there was a pinprick of pain on my chest.
What followed could only be described as an explosion of ecstasy.
Khaine’s heartblade plunged into my chest, and I felt it as the point scraped my heart, releasing its spark of power into the core of my being. My vision sparkled and an invigorating feeling that was both warm and cold rushed from my chest to my limbs, revitalizing with every second that passed. My lungs heaved a breath, and then another, and my eyes snapped to attention. My hands closed involuntarily, clenched into fists, and then relaxed, strong and whole once more.
It was amazing.
For a moment longer I lay on the stone, letting the energy suffuse every part of my being, and then I sat up. Khaine was crouching a few feet away, watching me expectantly.
“Better?” he asked.
I stretched out my arms and flexed my hands. “You could say that.”
“I thought as much.” He nodded, and rose smoothly to his feet. Being somewhat less athletic, I clambered back to a standing position, surprised once more at how perfectly in balance I felt. “Congratulations, by the way.”
“Eh?” I frowned.
“You just survived your official induction into the Order.” Khaine’s eyes sparkled in the light from his manna sword.
“I ju—what?”
“I told you before that using the heartblade on a normal person would kill them.”
“Right.”
“How do you think we create new Arbiters?”
“I thought they spontaneously coalesced out of a burning desire to harass innocent sorcerers.”
“You are feeling better.”
A grin flashed over my face before I could stop it.
“Think about it, Edar. If the heartblade kills anyone who uses it, but it didn’t kill you, how do we create new Arbiters?”
I thought about it for a moment. It sobered me.
“They have to be prepared,” I said at last.
Khaine nodded.
“You use… spinner venom?” I couldn’t keep the sudden horror out of my voice.
“Four things must happen before an Arbiter can be created,” he explained patiently, his expression perfectly neutral. “One, the fledgling must be thoroughly suffused with manna. Two, the fledgling must die. Third, the heartblade must be used to convert the manna into its proper form. Spinner venom is the only reliable way to simultaneously infuse the body and kill it without transforming it into a fel beast. It also has the fortunate side effect of removing the inductee’s memory of the event.”
An uncontrollable shudder ran through me. I wished I could forget it.
“The heartblade worked on you because you had been prepared a different way,” he finished.
I nodded. “The vampire. When I absorbed it...”
“Precisely.”
“So… your Arbiters don’t know how they were created?” I asked.
“If they become Masters, they are told,” Khaine said. “The time usually distances them enough from the event that the horror of facing their own mortality has been diluted by many instances of doing so in combat.”
“Then why did you tell me?”
His expression was enigmatic in the dim light. “Perhaps because you may be the only one ever to remember it.”
“I’m not sure whether to feel honored or reduced to terror fits that make me scream like a little girl,” I confessed.
“Focus on the former,” Khaine said good-naturedly, but then he turned and looked down the hallway, and his expression grew grim. “Save the latter for a more opportune time. We’re not done here yet.”
His glance down the corridor reminded me of our purpose there, and suddenly my desire for further wit withered. My guts twisted and threatened to curdle.
Almost dying was going to be one of the better things that happened that day.
XIV
There was, indeed, a light at the end of the tunnel.
Thankfully, there were no gods waiting for us at the other end. Of course, when put in perspective, sometimes being eaten alive by a cosmic horror from beyond the boundaries of reality doesn’t seem so bad.
It may have been one of those times.
The pain of the corruption still flared all along my spine, making me feel like some kind of human bonfire, but it seemed less pervasive than before. Whether it was simply dim by comparison to the eternal agony of the spinner venom or some sort of protective effect conferred by the heartblade I wasn’t sure, but neither was I complaining.
Darkness slowly gave way to light, but not the comforting white of day, nor the pale luminescence of moonlight. It was a hot, angry crimson, and as it grew brighter, it cast shadows the hue of dried blood in the crevices and cracks on the walls, giving the hallway the appearance of an abandoned abattoir.
When the corridor finally came to an end, it gave way to an enormous natural cavern. The ceiling was vaulted so far above our heads that it seemed it must be only a few feet away from the surface, and suspended above us were stalactites twice as big around as my entire body.
They were not natural formations of stone.
The stalactites were formed entirely from manna crystals, and they were searing hot, nearly boiling over with corrupted power.
I sucked in a breath as my gaze passed over them and slowly to the floor.
The corridor behind us had come out on something of a ledge, perhaps thirty feet above the floor of the cavern. A ramp led down to the floor to our left, leaving us staring out over the crimson abyss like petitioners at the gates of the shattered heaven.
Directly ahead of us, perhaps thirty yards away, was the largest manna crystal I could have ever imagined. It must have weighed more than a dozen oxen and stood nearly half the height of the cavern from where it emerged from the ground like some sort of unfathomable burrowing worm. I couldn’t even begin to think how much more of it lay below the surface.
A sound ripped through the air, high and thready, with the edge of steel on steel. Gooseflesh rippled up my arms despite the heat. It sounded like the scream of a shrike, only higher-pitched… if such a thing were possible. Yet beneath the alien nature of it, a shrike was identifiable as an animal.
This one seemed almost human.
“Welcome,” Khaine said in a low voice, “To the final resting place of Yzgar the Black.”
I stared at him in open-mouthed horror, and then slowly turned my gaze back to that monstrous crystal on the floor of the cavern.
Though the crimson light threatened to blind me, I could just barely make out a small silhouette. My stomach squirmed uncontrollably. “I’d hardly call that rest,” I said in a dry-mouthed whisper. “How did he even...?”
“None of us know,” Khaine answered the question I couldn’t finish. “After he attempted to reveal the workings of his own mind, Yzgar was never the same. I do not know whether he did this out of fear of containing what he might become, or whether he saw it as some self-inflicted punishment for what he had wrought by allowing his creation out into the world. He chained himself to that manna crystal with the last ves
tiges of his strength, and the thing that took his place has never escaped.”
Power. Fortitude. Incredible, unassailable determination. That’s what Yzgar would have needed in order to perform such a feat of sorcery in the face of his own destruction, as the manna ripped apart his soul and transformed his flesh into something hideous. I only had one of the three, and even that was scant compared to what Yzgar the Black must have wielded.
“You want me to undo this,” I said. It was not precisely a question. Khaine had told me that my repayment would be to break a very old enchantment, and that it would be dangerous, but never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined something like this. The rat bastard.
“No,” Khaine answered, his voice bleak, a grimace of pain stretching his features. The weight of the corruption was bearing him down as well, and he’d had five times my lifespan to learn to deal with it. “I want you to undo him.”
XV
Standing in that cavern was like standing at the center of a funeral pyre. Somehow I managed not to spontaneously burst into flames, but it might have been easier to just get it over with.
Khaine stood beside me as we descended the ramp, and I think it was only the fact that we stood together, allowing the pure manna that animated us to reinforce the other, that we survived the blazing inferno. I hadn’t been able to see the world outside the carriage as we rode toward the tumble-down ruins that had led us here, but I could only imagine what it looked like in the light of day, far above us. Blackened, ruined, everything from the plants to the animals twisted in anguish as the corruption raged below. The presence of so many manna crystals in such a concentrated area meant that new fonts would have appeared in the forest as the red stones pushed their way up through the earth, casting their hideous light on everything around them.
As we drew nearer, I felt my step faltering. The faint silhouette in the light of the crystal grew nearer, and my heart seemed to swell large enough to choke off my throat. I could see it then, a warped and twisted parody of a human form, shrunken and misshapen, its skin—I couldn’t even bear to think of it as he—polished to shining ebony even as horrific blisters had opened up randomly, hiding searching crimson eyes beneath. Its long fingers had sharpened into talons, resembling those borne by a shrike. It threw back its head let out another scream—higher, raspier, the sound of a predator closing in on its prey—and I would have fallen, had Khaine not grabbed me by the arm and held me firmly upright.
“Do not falter now, sorcerer,” Khaine said, and the edge in his voice was almost as frightening as the spectre before us.
At Khaine’s voice, the fel beast which had once been Yzgar the Black looked up. All of its weeping, wound-like blister-eyes riveted forward, staring blankly toward us with unchecked malevolence.
The two in its head, though, those eyes which had once belonged to a sorcerer whose depth and heights of talent I could not even have begun to pretend to… those eyes looked at us, pupils and irises ablaze with crimson fire in the shining, bald, chitin-black head.
Those eyes looked, and they saw.
It was impossible to mistake the intelligence that I saw there, the calculating desire for freedom alongside the raving insanity caused by prolonged exposure to the manna. Despite nearly a century and a half of the worst-imaginable kind of incarceration, Yzgar the Black was no more dead than I. He had transformed into a creature of corruption, thoroughly given over to the black gods, his soul shattered and scattered to the four corners of the world, but some scrap of his immense mind still remained… and it wanted to be free.
Only then did my eyes catch upon the means of the creature’s imprisonment. Spectral chains wrapped around its arms and wrists, securing it firmly to the crystal behind it. Its legs scrabbled on the dusty floor when it thrashed, digging impossibly-deep furrows in the stone. It had been there so long that the stone floor of the cavern beneath it had pulverized to sand, and it now stood almost knee-deep in the crimson sediment. The chains themselves rippled blue and gray and white, the colors roiling in the half-visible links like a storm reflected in the ocean’s waves.
I’d never been so frightened of anything in my entire life.
As its eyes locked on mine, it surged forward, the muscles visibly straining beneath the jet-black exterior. The spectral chains flashed and snapped back, refusing to give even an extra inch to their prisoner. Even as I saw a jolt of energy go through it, the deadly gaze did not waver. It could smell me. It could see me. I thought that somehow, it knew what I was and what I was there to do.
Then it opened its mouth, and from between its long and jagged yellow fangs, a serpentine tongue flickered out. Words hissed past its mandibles, thin and spidery, in a language which I had only heard spoken aloud in my own voice before, when I was musing to myself over one incantation or another.
“Wise one,” it whispered.
Even though I could see the intelligence there, glittering bitterly in those horrid eyes, those words still violated the natural order of things.
Fel beasts were not supposed to talk.
They were not supposed to recognize me for what I was.
It stared for a moment longer, and then it recoiled, letting out a shrieking hiss.
“Hunter,” it screamed. “Slayer.”
The realization struck me like a bolt of lightning.
That… thing was afraid of me.
It was afraid of me.
The thought was so absurd that I nearly laughed aloud, and might have, if the situation were even marginally less terrifying. Instead, I snorted with a combination of surprise and fear and unexpected mirth, and nearly choked on my own tongue.
“Is it… talking?” Khaine asked from beside me. I sneaked a glance at him; he was staring at the thing with nearly as much horror as I was. It was oddly comforting.
“Not just talking,” I murmured back, once I got my tongue untangled from my throat. “It’s speaking Old Tellarian.” A strange giddiness fueled by fear, pain and exhaustion was beginning to impair my judgment, which is why I continued, “Do fel beasts usually backtalk you in dead languages?”
Despite the situation, Khaine snorted in what might have been a brief flash of mirth. “Not as a general rule.”
“Me neither. This has been a night for fascinating new experiences. Really, if this is the average caliber of expeditions with you, I bet you’re a real ladies’ man.”
That actually won the hint of a grim smile, and for some reason I found myself inordinately pleased. “Focus, sorcerer. How does this work?”
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to look back at the creature, which was thrashing against the chains as they flashed with lightning and rumbled with thunder. Could I possibly have constructed such a binding? Frown lines creased my forehead as I examined them, tried to understand them, but all I got for my efforts was a slight worsening of the pounding in my head.
“You realize that this is impossibly dangerous,” I said, trying to keep my tone conversational. “If I miss the targeting even slightly, I could very well undo those chains instead of the creature… or worse, that giant manna crystal. Who knows what kind of devastation that might unleash?”
“It’s not as though there are a lot of options here,” Khaine answered. “Risk is present in everything we do, from waking up in the morning to confronting fel beasts with naught but our hands and teeth as weapons.”
“Do you do that kind of thing a lot?”
“Once or twice.”
“In your life?” I asked hopefully.
He looked at me again. “A month.”
I couldn’t help it; my eyebrows went up involuntarily. He showed no signs to indicate whether or not he was kidding.
“You’re an enigmatic man, Havox Khaine,” I said, deliberately turning away from him and forcing my gaze back onto the fel beast which had taken the form of Yzgar the Black. “Now, if you’ll stop interrupting me, I really need to concentrate here.”
He snorted. I ignored him.
I c
losed my eyes and drew a deep breath, releasing it slowly. The air was hot and dry, and offered no relief, but I did my best to push away the omnipresent pain of corruption and the fear and the gibbering madness that lurked in the corners of my brain. I needed every bit of my mind at my command to pull this off. My gift—perhaps my only real gift—was my memory. If I’d read something once, I could quote it back verbatim with almost no effort, as long as I was in a relaxed setting.
Unfortunately, running directly counter to that was my pathological inability to deal with stress. Duress and tension multiplied exponentially in my head whenever I felt even the slightest hint of them, rendering me first into a smart-mouthed loon who always knew exactly the wrong thing to say, and then into a sobbing, pathetic ball of mucus and saline when it got too overwhelming. The weariness and the pain were starting to push me from the first toward the second, and I could feel it coming.
Sorcery is not a gift, it’s not a talent. Yes, it requires something of a knack to keep from getting killed by it on the very first try, but once that first stage is past, it’s all a matter of learning, memorization and careful application. It’s possible to blow oneself to splinders or permanently shatter mind or soul—just look at poor Yzgar over there—but with some caution and care, great things could be achieved.
I had never achieved any great things. I’d not lived long enough to get to them. But that day when I’d tripped over the body of a dead Arbiter on my way home from another day of selling wart remover and fake love potions had so dramatically changed the direction of my life that I was no longer certain I could tell up from down.
Only luck—good or bad, probably bad—had led me to choose Yzgar’s book that day as my way of attempting to unravel one of the oldest mysteries of the world… that heartblade that I’d stolen from the dead Arbiter, the one I’d eventually used on myself. I’d read the words written by the dark sorcerer, his greatest work: the Verse of Undoing, which would strip the layers from any known enchantment and unravel them for the seeing eyes of the speaker… and those words had committed themselves to my memory.
The Elements of Sorcery Page 24
