Elias parried handily, but danced back a step to recover his equilibrium from the resounding blow. Slade lowered his left hand to reveal a shadowy band of energy coiled tight to his throat, effectively binding his wound. He smirked at Elias and purposefully lowered his second hand to the hilt of his scimitar.
“You won’t cheat death so easily this day,” Elias said.
When Slade spoke his voice was somehow raspy and wet at the same time. He said, “I didn’t know your sister was a virgin. She tasted like honey, though it is a taste no other shall ever have, now.”
Ignoring strategy altogether, Elias threw himself at his tormentor, pressing the attack without quarter. Slade proved equal to the gambit and his scimitar blurred and whined as it turned blow after blow of Elias’s blue steel. Slade began to sneak in counterattacks as he sought to turn the tide of the battle.
Elias parried in turn but he made every intercept become but another attack that redirected Slade’s blade as he continued to push for advantage, thus following his father’s central sword fighting tenets: make every movement of the sword an offensive maneuver, never break stride, and never, ever stop cutting. So it went, with each man straining to create an opening in the other’s defense in a blinding crash of steel that showered the clearing with the sizzle of arcane sparks, like a lightning storm in miniature.
It soon became apparent that the two men were equally matched in raw power and in skill. Slade had the advantage of a lifetime of survived encounters behind him, but the grievous wound Elias inflicted on him at the onset of their duel had taken much out of him, and so evened the field. Whoever could outlast the other, or find a way turn the tables would prove the victor.
Slade reached for his dark gift, bestowed on him by his masters. It was a risky move, for it would further sap his strength, but he already felt himself weaken, while the tireless and enraged distiller continued to hammer him with resounding blows. If he didn’t bring the battle to an ending soon, he would just be postponing the inevitable.
Elias’s arms burned and he felt the hot trickle of blood as his stitches opened. His stamina ebbed rapidly, but he feared pulling back, for the cunning Slade might seize the opportunity and find an opening. Even as he thought on changing his style, Slade’s scimitar ignited with dark fire.
As their blades met tongues of puce fire edged in black reached toward Elias, radiating cold, and an electric charge crept up the steel of his sword, down through the tang and into his hands. Elias gritted his teeth against the withering sensation, even as the runes on his forearm grew warm and a blue light crept out from under the sleeve of his duster. Likewise, a corona of blue energy enveloped his blade and the air hummed, pregnant with arcane energies.
Slade rushed Elias with a curse and slid in low, swinging his scimitar in a descending arc. Elias, whose attention had momentarily wavered while in a high guard, did not have the time to maneuver into an appropriate parry, so he leapt to avoid having his legs cut out from underneath him and then sprung forward to put some distance between Slade and himself before turning on his heels.
Slade’s slide-attack had left him on a knee, and while he presently remained in that position, he turned and fixed his smoldering gaze on Elias. He shivered with rage as he looked on the Dashin, held aloft in the would-be Marshal’s gloved hands. Slowly, deliberately he stood, as the Marshal looked on him with an impassive expression.
“It cannot be,” Slade said in his ruined voice. “It has taken me nigh a decade of study to learn the secrets of the seven blades and you—you…infidel…” The assassin spat the final word in a froth of blood, as he sucked air in through flared nostrils.
Elias braced himself for what he did not doubt was an impending charge from Slade and said, “This is my father’s sword and it will remain with me until the day I die, which will be long after it has drank the blood of you and every last one of your brothers.”
Blood spilled over Slade’s lips and ran down his chin as he forced words from his ruined throat. He eyes went wide and his skin paled, and still he tried to speak, coughing crimson froth onto his face and shirt. “Kaznuth Harren!” he chanted in a guttural tongue.
Inky tentacles of fell energy sprang from the earth and encircled Elias as Slade summoned every last splinter of power his dark gift availed him.
Elias retorted with a cry drawn from the pit of his stomach and swung his luminous sword at the snaking ropes of dark magic that sought to bind him. To the astonishment of all present, the animated mass of negative energy dissolved in a paroxysm of blue-white sparks. A few quick strokes later, and the tattered threads of Slade’s spell were no more.
Slade responded with a flick of a wrist and a curse in the dark tongue of his masters. A bolt of fell magic lanced from his hand. Elias didn’t have the time to dodge, so, reflexively, he raised his sword. The bolt deflected off the flat of his blade and returned to Slade who reacted in kind, but was unable to bring his magic to bear quickly enough. The bolt of energy exploded on Slade’s scimitar, tearing it from his grip and showering him with dense, sticky flames.
Before Slade could recover from the viscous fire eating away at him, Elias was on the move, charging across the ground between them. He pounced on the dying assassin, an inarticulate cry on his lips, and tackled him to the ground. With sword still in hand, Elias reared up and punched Slade in the face. A nimbus of blue-white energy enveloped his gloved fist as he continued to rain blow after blow on Slade’s face and head, screaming all the while.
The ribbons of magic that bound Lar and Bryn dispelled with Slade’s death, and they, who had no choice but to helplessly watch the exchange between the two men, their fate held in the balance, sprang to action. Elias who had surrendered to his rage still beat on Slade, though the assassin had given up the ghost. Lar and Bryn each took a hold of Elias and pulled him off the dead man.
The incensed distiller struggled against them but Lar’s arms wrapped him like iron bands. “He’s dead Elias,” Lar said softly. “It’s over.”
Elias sobbed in Lar’s arms, but soon collected himself. Lar released his bear-hug and helped Elias to his feet. Elias, who had never relinquished his grasp on his father’s sword, sheathed the enchanted blade and repositioned the baldric so that the scabbard rested on his back. “You shouldn’t have come, Lar. You could have been killed, and that is something that my conscience couldn’t have handled.”
“Did you really expect me not to follow you?”
“No.” Elias turned his back on them and looked down at Slade. He took a deep breath. “Thank-you.”
“Actually, it was my idea, don’t you know,” said Bryn. “I had to drag him along, and you should have seen the sword he tried to bring!”
“I told you, it was the best I could find,” Lar said.
“Ha! Some decorative relic from the first age!”
“You remind me of my sister,” Elias said, “always ready with some joke, no matter the circumstance. You would have liked her.” Elias’s tone had gone flat. Bryn fell silent and looked at Lar who offered her a tight, thin smile.
Elias blinked away fresh tears and refocused his attention, on Slade. “He’s still wearing those gloves.”
“So,” said Lar, “you’re wearing gloves right now.”
“When we met him at the fair he wore those same long riding gloves. Asa mentioned it. She thought it odd, someone wearing gloves on a warm summer evening. I wore these gloves for riding and fighting. They are bulky and tough, to protect the hands. Look at his. They are thin and skin-tight—designed to allow him to go about his daily business without encumbering.”
Lar wondered at Elias’s observations, while his friend crouched down and began removing Slade’s gloves, first the right and then the left. The right glove came off revealing a normal hand beneath. Elias turned it over and inspected it carefully before moving on. He pulled off the left glove and then looked over his shoulder and favored Lar with a half-smile. Lar inhaled sharply. A serpentine S set inside a circle was t
attooed on Slade’s left wrist as it met his palm in a scarlet ink.
“What do you suppose is the significance of this,” said Elias. “Bryn, does this mean anything to you?”
“No,” she replied, “I haven’t seen it before. My guess would be it is likely the symbol of the assassin brotherhood to which he belongs. He has the look of an Aradurian, and they’ve no shortage of assassin and thieves guilds.”
“The question, then, is which one,” said Elias while rummaging through the dead man’s pockets. “He doesn’t have anything else of value on his person.”
Satisfied, Elias stood and faced his two companions. “We should search the area for clues or evidence. Even though you two are witnesses that Slade told me Macallister hired him, the bastard is chummy with the Magistrate. I’ll need more evidence than word of mouth to bring Macallister to heel. And,” he added looking each of them hard in the eye, “I need to find my sister and father. They deserve a decent burial.”
“We should search the perimeter first,” Bryn said. “He likely hid his possessions in the woods or somewhere off site.”
“Very well,” said Elias, “but let’s stick within sight of each other, in case Slade left behind any surprises, or friends.”
“Agreed,” she said and then looked to Lar.
“Yeah,” said Lar as he swallowed a lump in his throat. Being confronted with the corpse of Slade bothered him enough, let alone finding Padraic or Danica, or the One God knows what else. Lar skirted the wood looking for anything out of the ordinary, careful to keep an eye on the others. Bryn searched the clearing before the manor, starting where the road exited the wood, while Elias crept along the edge of the house, peering inside windows and scanning the roof.
“Here,” Bryn called out, “I’ve found something.” She crouched in the center of the clearing between the road and the front door, and studied the ground intently. Elias took a knee beside her. The ground beside them had been scorched, leaving behind a tarlike residue.
“What happened here?” said Elias. “No normal fire did this. It’s too contained, and look at this thick tar.”
“No,” Bryn said, “no normal fire, indeed.” She looked up, fixing her large blue eyes on Elias. “Look at the shape. It’s roughly the dimensions of a man’s body. This is old magic. This is a rare spell, and difficult to master, called the Phoenix Charm. I have read about it, but never met anyone who has invoked its power. It must be woven into the wizard’s body and bound to his spirit. When the wizard dies, or at a time of his choosing, the spell is triggered and consumes his body in spellfire. As the conventional wisdom goes, the spell was designed so that if the wizard was captured he could trigger it to save himself from the pains of torture or from giving up his secrets.”
“So this is why the posse did not find my father.” Elias sat quietly on his haunches for several beats and looked at his father’s final resting place. He felt Lar’s hand on his shoulder. He supposed this a less painful farewell than being confronted with his father’s lifeless body. “It makes sense, being in the employ of the crown, that it would be standard to enchant Marshals in this manner, so as to prevent them from giving away secret information.”
“I don’t think you understand what I am saying, Elias. For a spell of this magnitude to endure in a living body in a permanent state it has to be bound to the magic that created it, so that it has a sustaining source of energy. It’s a spell that a wizard can only cast on himself.”
“What are you saying?” said Lar. “Mr. Duana was a wizard?”
“Not only that, Lar,” Elias said, “but apparently a wizard of no mean power. I always knew my father had knowledge of magic, but I assumed it to be chiefly academic, based on what he had encountered in his service to the crown.” Elias’s voice took on a dreamy quality, and he gazed off into the distance with unfocused eyes as if captured in some long lost memory. “I always expected he was a dabbler in the arcane, but not this.”
“How is it that you know so much about magic, Bryn? Are you a...” Lar paused, trying to think of what one called a female wizard, “...a sorceress?”
“Not quite,” she replied, “but I am, to use Elias’s word, a dabbler. My father sent me to tutor at Arcalum, as is a customary part of court education. Such encounters usually provide one only with basic arcane theory, but I took it a little further. Many people have the ability to manipulate magic to some degree, providing they are trained and disciplined. Some just have a greater natural gift than others.”
“What I don’t understand,” said Elias, oblivious to their interchange, “is if my father was a wizard, why didn’t he fight Slade with his magic? The last I saw of him he was charging Slade with his wooden stave.”
“That I cannot answer,” Bryn said. “Perhaps Slade prepared for him and neutralized his magic, or maybe offensive magic wasn’t your father’s strength. It’s anyone’s guess, I suppose.”
“No matter. He’s at peace now,” Elias said. “Let’s go look inside. Maybe we can find Danica, or some clue that can help me track these bastards to their source.”
Without any further word Elias stood and walked to the front door of the manor and threw it open. Lar and Bryn exchanged troubled glances before following him. As soon as Elias stepped through the door he felt soiled, similar to the inarticulate sense that something was wrong when he entered the clearing yesterday. Steeling himself against the horrors he would likely encounter, Elias strode through the foyer and into the sitting room, cursorily scanning the rooms for danger, letting a more careful inspection wait until he deemed the manor safe.
Next he entered the dining room. His heart thundered against his ribcage. His legs continued to move, as if controlled by some force outside of himself, and he approached the fireplace. The hearth was of a size to accommodate a boar on a spit, but it was the sconce on the wall that attracted his eye. Inexplicably drawn to the sconce, Elias reached up and grabbed a hold of it. It shifted slightly in his hand. He gave it a tug and it began to move with a squeal of protest. He added his other hand and pulled down with a grunt of effort.
The grind of rusting gears echoed in the cavernous chamber. The back wall of the fireplace shuddered and swung back to reveal a narrow, spiraling staircase that led down into a subbasement.
A prickling sensation tugged at the crown of his head, and before Elias had time to process his decision, he found himself running down the stairs. When he reached the end of the stairs and entered the damp, dimly lit earthen chamber his blood, which had roared through him mere seconds before, drained from his face.
Bryn had been urging Elias to caution when he took off down the stairs, oblivious to her words, or else ignoring them. She was halfway down the stairs, Lar on her heels, reaching out with her senses to detect the whisper of magic, when she heard Elias’s cry. Bryn sprinted down the remainder of the cast-iron staircase, jumping the last several steps as she drew a long, thin dagger from a boot.
By the time Lar joined her on the earthen floor, having struggled to draw his blade in the tight confines of the staircase, Bryn had turned away from what she saw, her delicate brows drawn tight over her eyes. Lar paused when he saw her reaction to what lay beyond the stairwell. He took a deep breath and descended the last step.
Chapter 8
Palaver
Elias brushed sticky, oily strands of Danica’s hair back from her cold face. He produced a handkerchief and began cleaning her bloodless skin, which had assumed the grey pallor of the recently dead. He started around her mouth and nose, where there was a glut of blood, wiping congealed gore from her blue, rubbery lips.
Lar tried to swallow his gorge as he watched the grisly proceedings from the stairwell. Danica’s clothes lay crumpled and rent at the foot of a large, rusted iron table. She lay naked on the slab, bound by coarse ropes. The first ran across her brow, fixing her head to the table. The second set of ropes wound about her bosom, and the third and fourth bound her thighs and ankles.
Her captors had desecrated
her flesh, but not by any means known to Elias. Sweeping lines and bizarre runes and sigils had been scrawled into the flesh of her legs and midriff, as if the psychotic Slade had been working his way up from her feet, but they were drawn with neither dagger nor ink. The arcane symbols looked to be burned into her skin, but not by any mundane means, for there was neither blistering nor swelling. Rather, the markings appeared to be the aftermath of weeks if not months old burns, which indicated but a single method—the fell arts.
Other than a couple of thumb sized marks at her temples her face bore no trauma. Elias could only guess that Slade hadn’t gotten there yet, or that the twisted Slade didn’t work on her face, because he couldn’t force her to watch him torture her as he could when he worked on her body. Still, something had caused her to hemorrhage from her mouth and nose.
Elias continued to clean her face, purposefully ignoring her nakedness. He sang softly as he worked, an old lullaby, one of the few things he remembered clearly of his mother. Lar wept openly, hands balled up in impotent fists. Bryn, mastering herself, walked to Lar’s side and laid a hand on his back, somehow comforted by Elias’s rich, sonorous voice.
Elias’s keening song filled the chamber like something caught between this world and the next, the whisper of a ghost. As his voice faded, leaving the chamber empty, he bent and kissed Danica’s forehead and put the soiled handkerchief back in his pocket. He went to pull away, but before he raised his head his eyes went wide and a sharp gasp escaped his lips.
Frantic, he threw off his coat and he placed a hand on Danica’s throat and pressed an ear against her mouth. “She’s alive!”
He drew his sword and with one cut against the side of the table severed the ties that bound her at the torso. Casting brotherly modesty aside, he pulled the ropes from her breasts. Meanwhile, Lar and Bryn, who had experienced a momentary torpor due to the shock at Elias’s outburst, sprung to his aid. Bryn cut away the bindings at Danica’s head, while Lar sawed at the lower bindings with Bryn’s rapier. Elias retrieved his duster and fumbled for the flask that the doctor gave him. A swallow of the precious liquid remained at the bottom. He opened up Danica’s mouth and carefully poured the remnants of the potent brew into her mouth. He tapped the end of the flask to make sure every last drop drained out.
Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 10
