“You practice mind sorcery. I know because I gave those vials to you willingly, but looking at them, at that bag… I feel a twinge in my mind, as if a thought is buried and desperately trying to free itself. Now, if I wasn’t a sorcerer myself, then I wouldn’t know what was happening, but I am and I do.
“I’ve done things in my life I’m not proud of. I want to forget them. You’ll make it happen.”
Catali didn’t mind providing therapeutic services when necessary, so long as she was rewarded. “You’ll need to tell me what these things you’ve done are. I’m not clairvoyant, and searching for them in your mind will take longer than I care to spend.”
“I’ve lived ’em. Telling you about them shouldn’t be too damn hard. So you agree, then?”
“I agree.”
Gram tongued his cheek and nodded. “Start stepping westward, you’ll reach Fennis Valley. Conclave reclaimed an old, dusty city there. Made it their own. As far as what they’re plottin’, I couldn’t tell you anything real precise or exact. All I know is that they’re creating an army.”
Body language is vital to deciphering meaning during a conversation, and so too is pitch and tone. But what often goes overlooked, somewhat ironically, is the choice of words one uses. Catali had never been a general or a commander or a recruiter of soldiers, but she knew you did not create an army. You gathered an army. You mustered an army. You formed an army. But create? No.
“What, exactly,” Catali asked, “is the Conclave creating?”
Gram jerked his chin at the bag hanging from her shoulder. “Somethin’ out of those, and that’s all I know.”
It could always be worse, Catali thought. She enjoyed that axiom. It had gotten her through some tough times, knowing there were worse places she could have been. But at some point, you reach bottom. Eventually, you’re in the thick of it, and the monsters and demons don’t get any bigger or any meaner.
She feared she’d reached that point. Or, perhaps more concerning, that point was soon approaching.
CHAPTER NINE
It was here that a god had died. More or less.
The cramped cavern welcomed Gynoth in by stealing the sight from his eyes. He chuckled at the irony. His laughter ceased as a voice slithered into his ears like a centipede.
Come to take the life from the soul you’ve already stripped? said the voice, wispy and raspy and cold.
“Get out of my mind,” Gynoth said. “It’s unsettling when you do that.”
Not the voice of evil. Nor the temperament.
Gynoth started down a broken and busted staircase. “It would be a shame if I’d spent all my life being evil. It’s rather boring sitting at either end of the spectrum. Wouldn’t you agree?” He pushed into the wall to steady himself. It felt like ice lay as thick as mud behind it, percolating the surface. “I prefer the middle. It’s enjoyable there. Dare I say… even fun?”
Men are arrogant, the voice hissed, but not so foolish as to test the will and mercy of a god.
“Then I’m no man. And I’m not evil. What am I? There’s a riddle for you, Quarth.”
Gynoth felt the god’s presence weigh heavier in his mind. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, but he’d had worse.
The steps fell away into a landing of crushed rock and earthen shards. Gynoth stepped over them and continued on down a narrow path that twisted and turned under a low ceiling. He had to duck at points, crawl at others.
He wondered how much longer he had to go. It’d been centuries since he visited this dilapidated, sorry excuse for a cave. Somehow, almost impossibly, the conditions had since deteriorated even further. Soon only a malnourished child would fit between the choking hallway and collapsing ceiling. Thankfully, this would be the final visit Gynoth would ever pay the god of wisdom.
I sense a heart that pounds with fear, said Quarth.
“Then your senses are dull, and I’ve wasted my time coming here. Let’s hope for both our futures this isn’t true.”
Finally the path tumbled downward, sharply at first, then at a more palatable degree. Losing his footing and snapping a leg, or shattering his skull, would spell a sobering end to Gynoth’s resurgence into the living world.
There was a warmth to the air now. A wetness, too. Gynoth could feel it sticking to his face like a hot summer day, wringing the sweat from his pores. Soon he’d smell—there it was, the unmistakable and wholly unpleasant scent of mold spores swimming on the currents of moist air.
Gynoth coughed. He brought his shirt up over his nose, pinched his eyes, and pressed forward. Soon, the hollowness of the cave ended, terminating abruptly into an oval room hemmed in by stalagmites. Water danker than any swamp could muster, and greener too, puddled in an expansive pool. Gynoth’s eyes had adjusted well enough to see things floating in the water. They were not things that brought him joy.
He shook his head disgustedly and looked beyond the pool, at the carcass lying limp against the wall. It wasn’t actually a carcass, mind you, but no other word could better describe the current state of Quarth, god of wisdom. He had let himself rot and waste until only a thin layer of meat remained on his bones that jutted out from his abdomen like veins on a leaf.
“Seeker of wisdom,” Quarth said, now speaking aloud, “show me your sacrifice. Let me hear your sacrifice. Allow me to see your sacrifice.”
Gynoth stepped up to the water’s edge. He stuck the toe of his boot out and waited for one of the hundreds of floating eyeballs to careen off it. It took only seconds.
“Evil,” the god shrieked. He thrust one of his cadaverous arms into the air. “He does walk here. He does come here with the intention to kill me.”
Gynoth had discovered scores of gods in these lands, all of them oddly in caves and caverns, bounded by chains and iron. Only Quarth was free from the chains, and only he had provided an answer for why he had withdrawn deep beneath the earth, into the abyss.
Simply, madness had seized him.
Quarth saw in his great pool of eyes wishes for all gods to die, for people had felt their gods had abandoned them in a land that grew colder and where crops froze and lakes were buried beneath snow.
Out of these visions Quarth’s paranoia was born. He never again went to the surface, convinced men were up there with axes and bows and pikes and vats of boiling oil, prepared to kill him.
Before his voyage into insanity, Quarth had been highly sought for his wisdom. He would, as he always had, require the recipient of his wisdom to offer their eye, which he would take and peer into, gleaning the recipient’s thoughts and desires and philosophies. And from these glimpses, he added to his wisdom. So he claimed.
Gynoth pulled his boot from the water. A sappy, gooey consistency dripped from the toe. He smeared it onto the dirty cave floor. He thought about telling Quarth that no one would bother killing him because he was already dead. But he’d long ago learned the two s’s of conversation will produce far more results than sardonic wit.
The two s’s being silence and succinctness.
“I come for your wisdom,” he said. “Not your life.”
“Mm,” Quarth moaned, as if pleasured in a way that made Gynoth want to remove the thought from his mind by any means necessary. “Give to me your eye, and I will offer you my wisdom.”
“I’m not giving you my eye.”
“Then I cannot part with my wisdom.”
Gynoth had expected this. It would be unlike Quarth to present himself in a cooperative manner. “There is a reckoning coming.”
“Always,” Quarth said, pushing his head forward for emphasis. “The world is a reckoning. It has been since the war.”
“That’s not what I’m referring to.” Gynoth traced a path around the pool with his eyes, then meandered that way. “They’re coming. It can’t be long now; twenty years at most. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
Quarth sat bolt upright. Or rather, he tried. His degraded bone structure and atrophied muscles made such an attempt difficult. “You… are not an innocent visitor to my humble abode.”
And you’re not wise anymore, Gynoth thought. But aloud he simply said, “I’m not.”
“Come here. Let me see your face. Yes… yes, there you are. I see dimples. I feel—I feel—”
“A chin,” Gynoth said, offering his help. It was at this point the necromancer realized that in place of eyes, Quarth had wrinkly concave pockets of flesh. The god of wisdom who relied on looking into the eyes of others had no such eyes himself. Not anymore.
“Mm,” Quarth moaned. “Yes, I know this face. You… you are Imus, servant to Torgiss, goddess of the stars.”
Gynoth chewed on that suggestion for a moment, unsure of what to say. He couldn’t get away from the burning question of what happened to Quarth’s sight. “Your eyes, where are they?”
Quarth chuckled, then paused. He chuckled again, went silent again. This continued for several moments until he pointed a gangly finger at the pool. With his tongue creeping out between his lips like a snake, he said, “I heard a voice. It was Guvulch, the god of life. He told me removal of my eyes would strengthen my ears and my nose and my tongue and my fingers. So I plucked them out.” An unsettling orgasmic hiss filled the room. “I felt stronger at once.
“But there was more to be sensed, greater wisdom to be had. Look here.” He turned his head so that Gynoth could view the other side. His ear was missing. “I removed it. Cut it nice and slowly; the pain delighted me! I bathed the eyes, because eyes must be bathed. But I ate the ear. It was good. I wish to saw off the other one as well, but I am full, so I will wait. Soon, my senses will be more powerful than any god who has ever existed.”
Gynoth took an instinctive step back. Madness mostly did not bother him. It was usually good for a laugh, or at the very least a window into one’s battered, broken soul. But the sort of madness that clutched Quarth… there was no humor, no intrigue in that. He was farther gone than Gynoth had thought.
He’d wasted time coming here.
“Wait!” Quarth cried. He’d heard Gynoth’s retreating footsteps. “Don’t you want your answer? I have it for you.”
Gynoth doubted this. But what was a few more moments?
“Are you prepared?” Quarth asked. He was grinning; even his wrinkly pockets of flesh where his eyes used to sit were grinning. “They… they are already here.” He laughed—no, giggled. He giggled insanely and drummed the heels of his feet on the floor.
“Goodbye, Quarth,” Gynoth said. He turned to leave.
“You don’t believe me? You don’t trust the god of wisdom?”
Gynoth sighed quietly. “I have eyes watching the coast. Little birds who sing me songs. They have seen nothing.”
“Which coast?”
“North.”
Quarth’s thin, scarred brows fidgeted, and so too did his mouth. “Perhaps the colossi removed the beaks of your little birds.”
“Colossi? What are you talking about?”
Quarth pointed a sickly fingernail at the necromancer. “What are you talking about? You tell me, you say—you spout nonsense that you know they’re coming, yet you don’t know who they are? Hah!” he said, slapping his knee.
“Demons,” Gynoth said. “They are demons. They’ll arrive first, and then the colossi.”
Quarth clicked his tongue in a tsk-tsk-tsk rhythm. “Sorcery is a sin and must be purged. They were right, the Twins. They were right, after all. Sorcery is a sin, but now it’s too late to purge it. They’re coming. Colossi, demons… they’re both coming. It’s finally going to end.” He smiled, pressed both hands over his heart lovingly. “And I welcome the end.”
CHAPTER TEN
Rol belched and swirled a finger in his ear. He regarded the yellow crust he plucked out, then flicked it away from the bed. He’d always enjoyed lazy days, particularly when they began with sex as this one had. He did not, however, enjoy mornings in which sex was followed by Oriana storming out in the ecstasy of anger rather than the ecstasy of love.
To be fair, that had never happened before. He knew her frustration with Farris’s slow progress had been building for months now, but what was he supposed to do about it? Sweet-talk her, stroke her hand and tell her it’d be okay? That wasn’t Rol, and Oriana knew it.
So he told her the truth, that Farris was working on a plot to unseat Olyssi, to fortify alliances with the South, to ensure that when the time came to change the world, they would not fail.
But patience had never been an attribute of Oriana’s. If she could have found a way to turn her whelps into adult dragons by flicking her finger and muttering an ancient spell, she’d have done it, consequences be damned.
She’ll get over it, Rol thought. He swung his legs out from under the sheets, put his feet on the wood floor. And he stayed in that position. There were voices coming up the stairs; he could barely hear them through the thick emerald wood door, but they clearly belonged to a woman and a man.
Scratch that. Not just a woman and a man, but two people of far more prominence. Farris Torbinen and the big, bad man of Torbinen’s army, General Hastings. Neither resided in the small but lavish dwelling that Oriana and Rol had been given, so Rol immediately thought their arrival odd.
There were other rooms in the tall obelisk-like structure that housed Rol and Ori, but Rol couldn’t name one person of importance.
They must be here to talk to Ori, he thought. Best get some clothes on. My thighs aren’t what they used to be. He considered this for a moment. I need to work on that.
He walked to a wooden coffer, kicked it open and searched through a mess of shirts and pants and hose—the latter of which, in his mind, no respectable sellsword should wear. But Ori told him he needed to keep them for fanciful gatherings and celebrations. He chose articles at random. No need for color-coordinated or matching attire today. After all, it was a lazy day.
He stuffed his foot through one pant leg and stopped. Farris was drawing closer. He could hear her clearly now, and he didn’t like what she had to say.
“If the key does not fit,” she began, “then—”
“I’ll take a finger off of Midul until he gets it right. A blacksmith can do without his pinky, I imagine.”
“That’s not what I had in mind. If it doesn’t fit, you will kick it in. When she returns, we will tell her it was an emergency. Perhaps a fire.”
Huh, Rol thought. That sounds… ah, shit. He ripped his leg out of his pants, stuffed everything back in the chest and scoured the room. There was a closet he could hide in, but the door was old and screechy. And some of the slats were crooked; they’d probably allow full view of his face.
Footsteps thumped close by. He put Farris and her general twenty paces out.
He walked briskly to the bed and knelt beside it. It’ll have to do. He flattened himself on his belly and crawled under, scraping his back against the unfinished slats.
He winced as splinters knifed themselves under his flesh, probably twenty in all. That’ll teach you to eat pastries every morning, you fat bastard.
“Attempt number one,” Farris said. Rol pictured her saggy jowls forming a smile. She seemed a nice old lady. He knew, of course, that appearances—especially of those in power—are no more truthful than an elaborate disguise, but still… he had trusted her. And now she was seemingly attempting to sleuth around in his room.
Why? More importantly, for what?
The door handle jiggled, and the door popped open.
“My goodness,” Farris said, delighted. “She’s far too trusting.”
“I’d say,” agreed General Hastings.
From beneath the footboard, Rol saw a pair of silk slippers and a pair of leather boots. He chuckled to himself as he pictured General Hastings in the slippers and Farris in the boots, then told himself to straighten up, that this was no joking matter.
This isn’t what should happen on lazy days.
“Well?” said Farris. “Let us begin. There are twelve of them, and I should imagine they will be found together, likely stowed in a drawer or chest. That li
mits our possibilities.”
Rol got his answer for what they were looking for. Sort of. Twelve somethings or others. There weren’t a whole lot of items he or Ori kept that numbered that high. He ran through the list, counting with his fingers. Socks, shirts, shoes… no, not shoes. Socks, shirts, pants, and… well, Ori has a lot of jewelry. Farris wouldn’t be after jewelry, you idiot. And she damn well wouldn’t be willing to break through a door for some socks.
He watched Farris’s fat, veiny legs sidle up against the bed. Her calves brushed the frame as she walked toward the headboard. He heard a drawer open, and Farris clapped.
“I win the game, General,” she said. Something jangled then. And again, like wind chimes in a storm.
Rol’s eyes widened, then narrowed. Ah, shit. There are innumerable types of objects in the world that jingle if struck together, but Rol knew of only one inside the drawer that Farris opened.
“Let’s go gather us some dragons,” Farris said cheerfully. She and General Hastings exited the room, closing the door behind them.
Rol listened for their retreating footsteps. When he could hear them no more, he slid himself out from under the bed, swearing a hundred curses as he stood. His back felt like… well, like he’d just crawled beneath a bed of unfinished slats that had decided to slice and dice him with splinters.
He opened the top drawer of Oriana’s nightstand. In there she kept twelve master whistles, one for every adult dragon. Each dragon’s handler had their own whistle, but in case of untimely demise—or a case of oops-I-lost-it—Oriana had had extra whistles crafted.
Those whistles were now missing.
Rol felt sick. He dropped to his knees, stuck his face inside the drawer, hoping to spot—
Was that a glint of silver? Tongue wagging, he reached his hand in, felt the coolness of metal on his fingers. He opened the bottom drawer and saw in the very back a dangling whistle. It’d had gotten pushed too far back and lodged between the drawers.
He yanked it through, turned it over in his hands. A G had been inscribed on the side.
Well, Rol thought, she didn’t get all twelve. Still, Oriana was right—Farris couldn’t be trusted. Only problem was, he might have come to that conclusion too late.
Reign of Gods (Sorcery and Sin Book 2) Page 9
