by Lisa Shearin
“I don’t dispute your account, Mistress Benares. I am merely attempting to gauge the extent to which Sarad Nukpana has regenerated.”
The bottom dropped completely out of my stomach. “It’s possible, then.”
“Oh, yes. Most of my colleagues still consider such an accomplishment to be theory. But a very few have actually witnessed the phenomenon; unfortunately, I was not one of them.” He flashed his teeth in an anticipatory smile. “It appears that’s about to change.”
“If you ran across Sarad Nukpana now, I hardly think he’d want to chat over drinks.”
Mychael’s expression was hard. “If he’s not completely regenerated, how do I stop him from going further?”
I spoke. “Better yet, how can we make him go back?”
“You can kill him, Mistress Benares,” Kalta told me point-blank. “According to the notes of one of my colleagues, Sarad Nukpana will become almost corporeal every time he feeds. But as his regenerating body absorbs the life force of his victims, he will fade again.”
“Feeding and digesting,” Mychael concluded.
Kalta nodded. “And then hungering once again. Though each time he feeds, the fading will become less, until he has consumed enough life to qualify as a living being himself. Only then will you be able to kill him like any other mortal.”
Mychael glanced down at the general’s corpse. “Nachtmagus Kalta, I can’t wait until Nukpana gorges himself on the citizens and guests on this island, so there’s enough of him for me to kill.”
“You may not have long to wait for that opportunity,” Kalta said. “If he has been free for nearly three weeks, and was strong enough to drive a team of horses, then General Aratus was hardly his first victim.”
“To get the strength he needed to kill someone like General Aratus, he probably began with people he thought wouldn’t be missed,” Mychael surmised.
“A correct assessment, in my opinion. A weakened predator consumes whatever it can to become strong enough to go after the larger game it truly desires.”
I snorted. “People whose deaths would cause an inter-kingdom incident.”
“You said that Sarad Nukpana consumed the general’s memories,” Mychael said.
Kalta nodded. “That is correct.”
“Would Nukpana retain those memories?”
“His memories, as well as his abilities and talents.”
Oh hell.
That meant Sarad Nukpana knew everything a top elven general knew, meaning Aratus’s military strategic ability and any secrets he was privy to by being in close contact with elven intelligence. Only now they were Nukpana’s secrets. He could use them, or he could share them with the goblin secret service. Their highest-ranking officers had been arriving on Mid along with their counterparts in elven intelligence. Give it another week and Mid would be seething with spies.
All of them wanted to get their hands on me. Any of them would be perfect victims for Sarad Nukpana.
I blew out my breath, steeling myself for what I knew I had to do next. “Mychael, I know I’m stating the obvious here, but we have to find him. Now.”
I looked down at General Aratus. He used to be an elven general. Now he was all that was left of one. He was an object who had been killed in one of the most repulsive ways I’d ever heard of. As a seeker, I could pick up impressions from inanimate objects touched by someone I was looking for. I grimaced. Yep, the general was about as inanimate as you could get.
Mychael knew exactly what I was thinking. “Raine, no. If he intended the general’s remains as a gift, it’s almost certainly a trap.” His tone said no arguments.
I had to give him one. It might be the only chance we had.
“He probably left something for me, but it’s not a trap. Nukpana’s just starting his game; he’s not about to end his fun before he’s even gotten started. And Nukpana touched the general for . . .” I turned to Vidor Kalta. “How long does this ritual take?”
“An hour, probably longer.”
Shit. Sarad Nukpana sucking your life out through your mouth for an hour or more.
“Yes, it would be quite appalling,” Kalta said.
I told my body to stop shaking. It almost listened to me. “That’s a lot of contact, leaving a lot of residue.”
“I forbid it,” Mychael said. “There are other ways we can do this.”
“Name one.”
Mychael couldn’t and we both knew it.
“Believe me, the last thing I want to do is touch that thing,” I assured him. “Yes, he used to be a person, but right now, he’s a thing—a really disgusting thing. But if there’s any chance that I can find out where Nukpana was when he turned the general into what’s on this table, I have to take that chance.”
“It’s exactly what Nukpana wants you to do.”
“Maybe, maybe not. A dead elven general tossed at my feet is trouble enough; maybe that’s all the trouble he needed to cause. Mychael, we’ve got the elven ambassador parked outside with a hearse, and his boss is ‘out’ somewhere in the city right now. If we don’t have trouble already, it’s brewing. The quicker we find out where Nukpana did this, the closer we could be to finding out where he is now.”
Whatever Nukpana had done to him, any magical residue would be gone soon, if it wasn’t already. The goblin said he’d be doing this again, and I believed him. Oh yeah, I definitely believed him. That meant I had to touch his handiwork.
On the lips.
I grimaced at the thought. “You’re here. Vegard’s here. Nachtmagus Kalta, will you help pull my ass out of the fire if necessary?”
“Of course.” The inquisitive sparkle in Kalta’s eyes told me he’d love to see something bad happen just for the academic interest.
I turned to Mychael. “I’m as safe as I’m going to get.”
Mychael’s sea blue eyes narrowed in disapproval. I took that to be a “yes” but under extreme protest. Protest noted. And if what I was about to do worked, that protest wouldn’t matter. Unless, of course, it was a soon-to-be-fatal trap, in which case it still didn’t matter what Mychael thought because I wouldn’t be around for him to yell at.
I quickly muttered my personal shields into place. Get shielded and get it done. If I truly thought about what I was going to touch, I’d probably run screaming from the room. Touch him, find out what you can, and get the hell away from him. I was going to do this. I might be sick afterward, but I was going to do this.
I laid my hand across the corpse’s mouth.
The connection was immediate, but not what I expected. It certainly wasn’t the type of connection I usually got. I smelled musty air that had been closed up for way too long. Traces of mold . . . and something else. Something familiar. I’d smelled it before, but couldn’t place it now. I stood absolutely still, doing my best to block out that I was getting this from my hand on a corpse’s mouth.
That was all I got. Smells. No noise, no screams, no final moments of life about to be extinguished, no sense of General Aratus or Sarad Nukpana. No life at all. None. I breathed in and slowly out, trying to relax, to open myself to whatever was there.
Nothing.
The corpse’s hand snatched my wrist in an iron grip.
I shrieked. Mychael’s magic flared behind me and Vegard drew steel.
“No!” I told them both. I sucked air in and out through my teeth. The corpse’s grip tightened, dry and cold. I shivered all the way down to my toenails.
“It is but a programmed response, Paladin Eiliesor,” I heard Kalta say. “A message. The corpse is but a vessel.”
Dried eyelids drew back to reveal empty sockets, and the jaw dropped open in a sick parody of speech. I heard a squeak; I think it was me. Then Sarad Nukpana’s silken voice filled my head. No sound came from Aratus’s leathery lips. Nukpana’s words were for me alone.
“I knew you could not resist, little seeker. As you can see from General Aratus, I have taken your enemies as my enemies.” His voice dropped to a low purr. “And
I very much want to take your friends. I will meet all of them one by one, and I will grow stronger with each one I take. Their knowledge shall become mine, as will their power.” The goblin’s onyx eyes appeared to glitter in the depths of those dead, empty sockets. I knew it wasn’t real, just another illusion, a really sick one.
“Remember the promise I made to you when you refused to help me escape the Saghred?” The goblin’s voice was as hard and cold as the corpse’s withered hand that clutched me, and just as unyielding. “I always keep my promises. You betrayed me, seeker. I warned you what action I would take, but you chose to ignore me. You will ignore me now at your peril. Attempt to find me. Use all of your skill, all of what you call cunning; I will stay one step ahead of you. And while you’re hunting me, I’ll be hunting those you love. And after I’ve taken them all, and your pain and loss has become too much for you to bear, then I will come for you. And when I take you, your soul and the Saghred’s power shall be mine.”
Chapter 3
The corpse’s hand went limp, severing the link between us. The contact break was too quick, and the room spun around me, bringing a wave of disorienting nausea. I snatched my hand from the corpse’s grip and tried to remember how to breathe. I thought my lungs knew what to do, but apparently they didn’t. I was gasping, but I wasn’t getting any air. A dim corner of my mind calmly informed me that I was about to pass out, like I didn’t already know that.
Mychael’s arm went around my waist, lifted me off my feet, and carried me out into the hall. There was air in the hall, blessed air, cool and fresh, and best of all it didn’t smell like dead elf general. Mychael set me on my feet and I bent over, hands on my knees, gulping air in great heaping lungfuls.
Mychael kept his arm around my waist and put his other hand on my back, and I could feel the pull of his healer’s magic as he helped my lungs pull in air and blow it out. My head started to clear.
“She’ll be fine,” I dimly heard him tell the Guardians posted on either side of the door.
No doubt they thought that I was one of those women who couldn’t handle being in the same room with a dead body. I could deal with dead bodies just fine; it was the ones that grabbed me that I had a problem with.
A shudder ran through me, ending with a tingling on the back of my neck that felt like the featherlight touch of a certain goblin psycho.
“Well, that shot my . . . concentration . . . straight to hell,” I managed and went back to gulping air.
Mychael didn’t say, “I told you so,” but he didn’t have to and he knew it. A lot of people would have called what I’d done stupid and/or suicidal. I called it the risks of doing my job. A lot of people would call my job stupid and/or suicidal, too.
“You’re damned lucky he didn’t do more than taunt,” Mychael said.
I froze. “You heard him?” I said in mindspeak. There were a lot of things those two Guardians didn’t need to know.
“Yes,” Mychael responded. “The words were for you; the message was for me as well.”
The umi’atsu bond we had with Tam, or the other even more powerful link that only Mychael and I shared. One or both had let Mychael hear everything. Good. When a corpse grabbed your hand and a phantom goblin whispered sick nothings in your ear, it was good to have company.
“Ma’am?” came Vegard’s concerned voice from behind us.
“Fine . . . I’m fine.” I swallowed and stood up slowly. If I did it too fast, I’d be right back where I started from. I glanced up and down the hall. There was another pair of tense Guardians stationed by the stairs. Their keen eyes were focused on us, hands on sword hilts, and those hands and hilts were glowing with deadly spells at the ready. All they were waiting for was word from their paladin that there was something inside that containment room that needed killing.
What needed killing wasn’t in that room. I didn’t know where Sarad Nukpana was, and what I’d gotten from General Aratus hadn’t given me much of a clue.
Or who he was going after next.
Even with only four Guardians, the hall was way too crowded. To Mychael, they were his trusted men. To me, they would be witnesses to questions I needed to ask out loud, but didn’t want them to hear.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” I asked him.
“My office.”
It was private, warded, and had a well-stocked liquor cabinet. I wanted all three.
“Perfect,” I told him. “I could use a—”
The bottom dropped out of the temperature, and bone-numbing cold flowed up through the stone floor. The long muscles of my legs convulsed with cold; the shock of it sent a spike of pain through my body.
I’d felt it before.
“Oh no,” I managed through chattering teeth.
Mychael knew what was here; he’d fought on enough battlefields, seen more than enough men die.
And knew that Death always sent Reapers to collect.
I’d never seen a Reaper, but I’d felt one before. I’d been attacked by one. In the pitch-dark tunnels under Mid, it had come for me and for once I’d been grateful for the dark. What I’d felt was horrifying enough without having to look at it, too. The Reaper had attacked me, but it had wanted to go through me to get to the souls the Saghred held prisoner, using me as a straw to slurp them up. The Reaper had come too close to getting what it came for, with my soul as a bonus. Reapers were indiscriminate diners. The dead, the dying, and those who shared their bodies or minds with more than one soul—we were all fair game to creatures who acted more like a pack of starving wolves than anything else. Prey was just food they hadn’t eaten yet.
I was most definitely prey.
“Vegard, get Raine out of here,” Mychael ordered. “In my office, behind the wards, and seal them.”
“Yes, sir.”
I didn’t move. I felt the cold flowing down the hall on one of the floors below, flowing away from us. “It’s not after me.” I focused my will and found them. “Two Reapers, one floor below.”
“The mage’s ghost,” Mychael growled.
Damn. The exorcist was working to separate it from the body it had possessed. One body, two souls, both weakened. Would the Reapers be able to tell which one belonged? Would they care?
A scream from below said they didn’t.
Mychael shouted commands and the Guardians stationed at the stairs charged down them, Mychael and Nachtmagus Kalta right behind them.
Vegard’s hand locked around my arm.
I didn’t have time for this, and neither did the man downstairs. “Vegard, let me go.” I tried to be reasonable, but I was prepared to be violent.
“Not this time, ma’am.” He’d been there for my first run-in with a Reaper. He knew how close I’d come then to being taken.
Shouting joined the screaming, and I felt more cold spots blooming below.
“There’s more coming,” I said urgently. “They’re outnumbered down there.” I could have done any number of things to get Vegard to let me go, but I was counting on his loyalty to Mychael, not to Mychael’s orders. If Mychael tried to stop those Reapers from feeding, they’d turn on him like a pack of wolves. “I can help him. I can sense Reapers, so I can probably see them.”
And probably no one else could. Just like the specters. I didn’t need to say it; Vegard knew it.
“Dammit,” he snarled, releasing my arm. “Not three feet from my side. Not. Three. Feet.”
We got downstairs and at first glance there were only four Guardians in the hall. I didn’t have to look much closer to see what else was there.
I could see them. Hellfire and damnation, I could actually see the things.
“Raine, get out of here!” Mychael shouted.
“I can see them,” I said. “And there aren’t two of them.” An insubstantial form slipped through the stone wall not ten feet from Mychael as if the wall wasn’t there. “Now there’re five.”
Nachtmagus Vidor Kalta stood utterly still in the middle of the hall, as if listening to someth
ing no one else could hear. “With more on the way.”
The terrified screaming continued from inside the containment room. It ended abruptly.
“Clear!” Mychael’s hands were glowing incandescent white, and I felt a tightly focused, controlled surge of power as he put his hands on the door.
And the door—four-inch-thick wood, banded with heavy iron—simply vanished.
I felt something cold closing in behind me and spun to face it. “Make that six.”
A Reaper floated there, mere steps away, watching me. At least I assumed it was watching me; the thing didn’t have any eyes.
An up-close look at a Reaper was something I never wanted.
Vegard took up a guard position in front of me, his glowing sword waving slowly back and forth. “Where is it?” He obviously couldn’t see it.
“Right in front of us.” I didn’t move; I didn’t want to give the thing any ideas.
Vegard’s pale blue eyes darted back and forth, seeing nothing, but alert to anything. “What’s it doing?”
“Waiting for something.” I knew we didn’t want to find out what that something was.
Reapers were only visible to the dead or dying. My connection to the Saghred made me a special case. The rock held thousands of disembodied souls that were not truly alive, not entirely dead. To Reapers, they were shining beacons, irresistible lures, prizes they had been created to capture. As the Saghred’s bond servant, souls could pass through me to the Saghred, so souls could pass out of me into a Reaper—and my own soul would probably be taken right along with them. Slurp. Gone. I didn’t know for sure, and I sure as hell didn’t want to find out.
I’d heard that if you saw a Reaper, you saw what you expected to see, what you thought the agents of Death would look like. Personally, I wanted to see little, fuzzy pink bunnies, but apparently my subconscious visualized tall, scary, and skeletal. My subconscious and I needed to have a long talk.
Roughly man height and shape, the Reaper had the translucence of a jellyfish, with filmy tendrils flowing gently around it like the ragged edges of a long, tattered robe. I knew from experience that those tendrils turned into constricting coils when they touched you. Yes, those tendrils could be soft and soothing, but a Reaper was also death in its purest form, eternal cold, and I do mean eternal. Its touch made you want that cold more than you’d ever wanted anything, to step into it with open arms, eager to embrace the darkness. Reapers used that lure to draw the souls of the wandering dead into themselves.
