By Blood Hunted: Kingsblood Chronicles Part Two (The Kingsblood Chronicles Book 2)

by David J. Houpt

  Indigo Runner was sluggish to respond to the rudder at first, but as the light air strengthened to a moderate breeze, the sail pulled her head around again to let them make headway, and they cut in toward the shore again. Although they’d drifted for nearly three days, the currents were well below a knot, so they hadn’t moved more than a dozen leagues since losing the wind. Still, the ship made little progress with only the small jib to pull her, a little under two knots taking into account the drag of the current, but fortunately they could run a broad reach and head southwest. Lian put their net course at west by southwest, heading further away from Kavris and the Empire, but toward land.

  That was a maddening crawl compared to Searcher, or even the merchantman herself before she lost her masts, but it was more than twenty nautical miles per day, so Lian didn’t dare complain. Tysleth of the Waves, it was said, listened carefully for such things and repaid them harshly.

  Gem and Lord Grey had worked out the song to anchor her witchsight spell onto the better quality weapons (three of Qan’s knives and a very serviceable penalirin rondel dagger they’d found in Olivia’s bags), and although Lian and Snog still kept the majority of the nightwatch themselves, the men were occasionally up and about after dark.

  Lian had grown up literally from the cradle with Gem nearby, so he was long accustomed to seeing in the dark, and Snog had been born with the ability, of course. For the four men, it was a miracle, with night suddenly become something to marvel and less of something to fear. They kept their enchanted blades on their persons at all times, and each of them, even simple Jinian, had sworn their eternal gratitude to their captain for the gifts.

  “I’m trying not to let myself become too cynical, despite all that’s happened,” Lian commented to Lord Grey that night as he stood his watch. Far forward, the four crewmen were all leaning against the forward rail, looking out at the night with effectively new eyes.

  Rula Golden had set two hours previously, along with the nearly invisible new-phase Ashira. The yellow Moon of Power was nearly full and had already climbed well off the eastern horizon, while the waxing slivers of Aliera and pale Sterath were plunging toward the sea opposite Lushran. Far above the rest of the visible moons, one-third phase Sina flew; she wouldn’t set until more than four hours after sunset.

  Even with Lushran nearly full and in the sky, the sailors wouldn’t have been on deck without lanterns before receiving the witchsight-ensorcelled weapons. Now they gazed in awe at the vista before them, amazed that they could see farther at night than they could during the day, for even the moonlight of the largest and brightest moon didn’t impart any glare to speak of. Each of them competed to point out something in the now-revealed night the others hadn’t seen.

  “How so, Lian?” the skull asked.

  “This little miracle, I mean,” he explained as he watched the men. “It’s exciting and new tonight, but in less than a week, they’ll be taking it for granted, I’ll wager.”

  “Perhaps a bit longer, but I agree,” Gem said with a chuckle. “They’re boys with a new toy, but soon enough they’ll be jaded.”

  “If I had something to bet with, I might accept your action,” the skull said wryly. “They have a lot to adapt to, suddenly being able to see into every shadowy corner, and they won’t realize all of the implications of this new sight of theirs for months to come.”

  Lian’s brow furrowed. “The enchantments will last that long?” he asked. They hadn’t said.

  The prince could hear Gem’s satisfaction in her voice when she replied, “They’ll last until they’re deliberately unwoven, Lian. Lord Grey and I outdid ourselves.”

  “I give most of the credit to Gem, in truth,” Lord Grey dissembled. “I helped her find the right song to bind the magical strands tightly, but it was her talent that sealed their ends closed. It’s a minor spell, easy enough to shatter with any of a variety of unbinding spells, but it won’t fade on its own.”

  I’ll let him give me the credit, Gem said mentally, but without his knowledge and assistance, those spells would barely have lasted a day.

  “Somehow I doubt your involvement was that minor, Lord Grey,” Lian said with a smile and a very private warm thought toward Gem. “I’m well pleased with you both, especially in the fact that you worked together so well. You and Snog are all I have left, and we need to be able to work together and trust one another, at least to the extent possible.”

  He’d started talking while Gem was still mindspeaking him and continued while sending her an emotive thought, and Gem was as pleased in his progress to hide their mental communication as she was in having woven the darksight daggers for the men. If Lord Grey can still tell we’re talking, I don’t suppose we’ll ever fool him, she thought. But for anyone we meet from now on, who doesn’t already know about me, it should be more than sufficient.

  Lian sighed. “It’s Snowbreak, unless I’ve lost a few days’ accounting,” he said. “I wonder how the winter went back home.” Dunshor usually had a very mild winter except in its northernmost counties and duchies, where the often brutal winters the western kingdoms knew reached icy fingers down through the low mountain chain that divided them from Lian’s country. But like all weather deities, Tiomara was unpredictable. Just in Lian’s lifetime, Dunshor had suffered through two viciously cold and long winters, and he remembered snow still on the ground in the shadow of the castle and tower more two months later than this, well into Vedell, the month named for Vedelta of the flowers.

  Lian also remembered that even in Dunshor’s distant beginnings, winter had played a significant role, forcing the people of the region around the capital to appeal to Krysa the White for aid against the creatures driven to attack the villagers because of the scarcity of provender.

  “If we dared open up the marble’s abilities, we could see,” the prince continued, fingering the leather pouch containing the marble-sized Key of Firavon. It hung from his neck inside the lashthirin armor he wore any time he was out of Qan’s cabin.

  “You don’t have any mage talent to do that, Lian,” Gem said, puzzled at the turn of the conversation.

  He nodded. “I know, but you and Lord Grey certainly have enough mage talent to use it, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes and no,” the skull replied. “We both could utilize it from a magical talent standpoint, especially because it was constructed to be easy to use, to be helpful to its user as much as possible.”

  “But?” Gem asked, curious.

  “But the item was also made to be used by the living?” Lian guessed, brushing his hair back out of his face.

  “Indeed,” Lord Grey replied, approval evident in his voice. He was fond of saying that being in Lian’s service was a pleasure all by itself, because he’d served—been forced to serve, Lian and Gem had understood—some truly dim masters over his long imprisonment.

  “A way exists for you to use it, though,” Lian said, glancing down at the skull’s leather sack. “You haven’t tried to use that against me, but I haven’t forgotten Elowyn’s warning about possession.”

  Normally, when Lian or Gem, or even Snog, pried at Lord Grey’s capabilities or limitations, the necromancer would be silent for a time, sometimes for minutes, apparently considering how best to answer. It wasn’t, Lian was sure, because the ancient mage needed the time to come up with a lie, because he was at least as intelligent as Lian, and probably more so. Lian suspected, in fact, that Lord Grey was as skilled at lying as even Elowyn had been.

  This time, however, the skull answered immediately. “I was wondering when you would ask me about this,” he said. “Even if I did possess someone and use the marble, it would be too dangerous to lower the protection that it keeps around you, Lian. In the tiny form, it’s nearly useless as a scrying device, but the protection against scrying is at its height. While a large portion of the protection remains in the next size, another way of saying that is that a noticeable portion of it is removed.”

  Lian nodded, a half smile on his
face. “I remember,” he said. “And in its great form, it has almost no use as a defense against scrying, but let’s talk about what you said about the marble form for a moment. You said almost useless.”

  The skull chuckled. “I did, yes, Highness,” he said. “Even in its smallest form, the marble has some utility in scrying, and while it’s too small to use as a scrying sphere, it is still a focus for such magic.”

  “So if we obtained a body for you to use, and something like a scrying bowl, or another crystal ball?” the prince asked.

  “Then I could use it to enhance my capabilities,” Lord Grey replied. “But even if you did so, I feel I must point out some limitations that will be of great importance.”

  “You mean, besides the fact that Lian won’t be your wielder anymore, so you could cast spells at him?” Gem asked acidly. “Lian, you can’t mean to allow him to go his own way, can you?”

  Lian put his hand upon the sword’s hilt reassuringly. “Not just now, no,” he said soothingly. “What limitations, Lord Grey?”

  Without any apparent reaction to Gem’s acerbic words, the necromancer said, “The largest limitation is that I’m forced to use the voice of whoever I possess.”

  Lian’s eyebrow went up and he nodded. The voice Lord Grey possessed in his skull form was exceptional, nearly the equal of his aunt Jisa’s vocal ability. Furthermore, he’d demonstrated at least some ability to create more than one sound at the same time, an advantage that Gem enjoyed as well. Given his great magical knowledge and experience, the combination of his voice and the ability to literally sing in chords was an immeasurable advantage over a living singer. If Lord Grey was limited to the voice of the body he inhabited, it would greatly reduce his effectiveness as a spellsinger. And that was assuming the body could sing worth a damn at all.

  Lord Grey continued, “The second limitation is that the subject must stay within a few dozen yards, at most, of my skull. I haven’t been able to determine what the precise boundary of that is, as it seems to be somewhat variable, but let’s call it less than a hundred feet.

  “Third, while the magic that lets me control the subject’s body is pretty subtle if my skull is in contact with him or her, it quickly becomes obvious to any magical senses if there’s separation between it and the body. I’m sure you can imagine how unusual it would be to have someone lugging around a skull on their person,” the skull added dryly. “It would be marked, of that I’ve no doubt.”

  Lian chuckled at Lord Grey’s comment, as he’d never come up with a truly reasonable explanation for carrying the skull at his hip, even inside the thick leather sack. Gem did not share Lian’s amusement. She did not approve of this line of discussion because the very idea that Lord Grey might go his own way was troubling to her.

  “I could have escaped Lian’s control many times in the last months, Gem,” Lord Grey said quietly, seeming almost to read her thoughts.

  Of course, it’s pretty obvious what I’m thinking right now, Gem thought.

  Lord Grey continued, “For example, I could have animated the corpse of some small creature and had it steal my skull for me, and I’m sure you could both come up with a dozen other ways I could have used magic to get away from you, especially in port, but even on one of the ships.”

  “Your point being?” Gem asked, a little less bitterly.

  “My point is that in the end, Lian needs us to work together, to trust one another,” Lord Grey replied. “And for that to happen, you must understand something very important:

  “I mean to see Lian on the Dunshorian throne,” he declared firmly. “I mean to see him succeed, and I’m willing to invest decades, even a century if needed, in pursuit of that goal. I have a number of reasons for this, but chief among them is that I have grown to love you both.”

  Lian smiled wryly. “I’m quite fond of you, too, Lord Grey,” he said.

  “I know, Lian, but that only makes your sword distrust me more, I think. She thinks your affection blinds you to the possibility that I might betray you,” Lord Grey replied. “But think on this, Gem my friend: if Lian is restored to the throne and has the resources of an intact Dunshor at his disposal, not to mention control of Firavon’s Tower, I am far far more likely to find a way to escape my binding than in any other scenario.”

  She snorted, a noise both prince and skull knew was only mimicry of a flesh-and-blood person’s sounds. “Someone who doesn’t know how dangerous you are would be a much better catspaw for that, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “No,” Lian and Lord Grey said at the same moment. Lian gestured for the skull to go on.

  I’ll tell you my view on that later, Gem, he said silently to her.

  “Someone ignorant enough to help me despite the threat I represent won’t have access to the kind of resources that I need to research the problem,” Lord Grey explained. “And someone with access to those kind of resources won’t be ignorant of the dangers. It’s a vicious circle I’ve experienced many times.”

  “I’ll bet,” Lian said. “You’ve been in there for a long time—ages before Naveh, you told us once, and she died five or six hundred years ago—and this can’t be the first time you’ve managed to find someone willing to cooperate with you.”

  “Even someone who should have known better,” Gem said a little more calmly than she felt. She was trying to rein in her mistrust of the skull and listen to this discussion with an open mind, but it was difficult.

  “Even someone who should have known better,” Lord Grey agreed with a dry chuckle. If he was offended at the sword’s distrust, he had never shown it. He had always, in fact, been quick to point out that he didn’t blame Gem for mistrusting him.

  “None of my previous allies have had the potential to give me access to the libraries inside Firavon’s Tower, however,” the skull continued. “It’s extremely unlikely, even if I brought them Lian’s head on a platter, that the Usurpers would give me that kind of autonomy. In fact, I think the queen would probably keep me for her own uses. She didn’t develop the affinity for necromancy needed to create the wraiths overnight, after all.” The three of them had witnessed another example of Jisa’s necromantic abilities directly, when she’d drained the life out of one of the assassins originally sent after Lian the night of the coup. The killer’s decision to try to loot the castle treasury had led both to Lian’s escape and the man’s own demise.

  “Agreed,” Lian said. “She’s obviously been a blackrobe for a long time, and you’d be irresistible as an aid to that kind of magic.”

  Blackrobe mages were rarely literally robed in black colors, except when it suited them for theatrical or political reasons. As Elowyn had once put it in Aesidhe, “S’eu el’nar iareini alell’n dw’u sharshak.” This phrase was open to a few different interpretations, but Lian had mastered the elven tongue sufficiently to know which the assassin had meant at the time. “Such wizards cloak (or paint) their souls in blackness.” Sharshak was also one of the elven words for the Dark Corrupter, which was a good indicator of their attitude toward necromancy in any form. Certainly, there were elves who practiced the black arts, but it was even more of a forbidden art to them than it was in human cultures. An elven blackrobe was both a rarity and a horror.

  Jisa certainly preferred bright colors—and expensive jewelry—in her attire, so to look at her lovely form one would not suspect that she was a skilled necromant, among her other talents.

  “Even if she didn’t decide to keep you,” Lian continued, “she’d lock you up someplace where she didn’t have to worry about you working against her. You’re too dangerous to let some other wizard end up with you, so she’d make sure that wouldn’t happen.”

  Lord Grey said, “I think you underestimate her willingness to keep me and use me as a focus, actually. Imagine how intimidating it would be to know that she had such a thing at her disposal. Given how thin her hold on the old Theocracy mages is likely to be, she’d use me to enhance her reputation as a formidable sorceress without hesitat
ion.”

  Lian nodded. “Lord Grey’s freedom, therefore, wouldn’t exactly be a high priority for her. And as for others, say across the sea in the east or in the Southron Empire, who might encounter him? Most people would lock him away in a vault once they discovered they couldn’t just destroy him.”

  “I do have that effect on people,” Lord Grey conceded. It was easy to imagine a grin on his face from the tone.

  “So you trust him because you believe it’s in his best interest to remain with us?” Gem asked Lian.

  Lian shook his head. “I trust him because he’s earned it up to this point. Gil would have eaten me without his intervention, and that’s just one way he has helped us. Lyrial’s magic influenced his actions, but he still tried to warn us despite the pressure that bastard was putting on him. And I trust him because I like him,” Lian added. “I know that would have made Elowyn swat me across the ears, but I think he’s a trustworthy man, whatever his origins.”

  The skull made no reply to that.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  To say that humankind was primitive when they first appeared across the face of Tieran is a tremendous understatement. Even the brutish lesser tribes of the goblins were more organized and more civilized than this new intruder, man. They barely used tools of any kind and communicated with each other in emotive grunts and imitative animal calls.

  But they learned fast. At that time, elven civilization had stood for countless millennia, the dwarves had long known the secrets of mining and metalworking, and even the goblins had a bronze-based technology. Wherever humans went, they watched, they learned, and the other races were too confident in their superiority to these odd creatures. Many elves felt they were somehow a mixture of goblin and elf: they had short lifespans like the goblins but were more fairly featured, even if their ears were oddly rounded.