The Last Cleric

by Layton Green

  Contents

  Chapters

  1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • 36 • 37 • 38 • 39 • 40 • 41 • 42 • 43 • 44 • 45 • 46 • 47 • 48 • Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  THE LAST CLERIC

  Book III of

  The Blackwood Saga

  Layton Green

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE LAST CLERIC, Book III of the Blackwood Saga, copyright © 2018, Layton Green

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Cloaked Traveler Press.

  Cover design by Sammy Yuen.

  Interior by QA Productions

  Books by Layton Green

  THE DOMINIC GREY SERIES

  The Summoner

  The Egyptian

  The Diabolist

  The Shadow Cartel

  The Resurrector

  The Reaper’s Game (Novella)

  THE BLACKWOOD SAGA

  Book One: The Brothers Three

  Book Two: The Spirit Mage

  Book Three: The Last Cleric

  Book IV: Return of the Paladin (Forthcoming)

  OTHER WORKS

  Written in Blood

  The Letterbox

  The Metaxy Project

  Hemingway’s Ghost (Novella)

  To Number Nine

  Hear us, O Devla!

  This dream of dreams I have seen.

  A black night will come, stars asleep in their bower.

  Our people scattered

  Adrift in the sea of lament

  Ground under the wagon wheel

  When everything is ash.

  Who is this savior?

  When will he come?

  When shall we be free?

  O, Devla!

  Not until the prophet shall herald

  And the people shall hear

  The roar of the last true cleric of the age, the Templar

  Your fist, Your scorn, Your righteousness

  The one who unseals the coffer

  As he breaks the will of the world.

  —Modern Translation of Book 14,

  Stanzas 77–78 of the Romani

  Canticles of Urfe,

  Author Unknown

  -1-

  Imprisoned in a cell built for wizards, kept in soul-numbing isolation with no windows, Valjean Blackwood put his head in his hands and wondered when he would die.

  He felt crushed by memories of his loved ones, reeling from a future that might never come to pass. The plight of his two brothers, trapped somewhere on Urfe without him, hurt the most. Ever since their father had died and their mother was confined to a mental institution, Val had been Will and Caleb’s guardian, parent, and eldest sibling all rolled into one.

  Dying, Val could accept. He loathed the thought of it as much as the next person, but if execution by the wizards was his fate, then so be it.

  Failing his brothers was another matter.

  He stood and paced the cell, trying to come up with an escape plan for the millionth time. It felt so useless. The powerful wizards who had imprisoned him, those gods among mortals, would hardly have put him someplace he could magic himself out of.

  Still, he had to try. He had to think it through.

  Was he still in New Victoria, he wondered? Somewhere else on Urfe? In a different dimension? Ever since the elder mages had caught him trying to use the Pool of Souls and sentenced him to die, teleporting him straight to wizard prison, Val had not seen another human being.

  A hole in the corner served as his toilet. Food and water had magically appeared in his cell forty-six times. Though he had no way of keeping time, the regularity of the meals felt half a day apart. He had tried to reverse-engineer the teleportation channel but couldn’t get past the honeycombed walls. He assumed the geometry of the azantite cell, tiny pockets covering every available surface as if hollowed out by some giant race of bees, contributed to the immensely powerful wards shielding the room.

  He had no idea when they were going to execute him. What he did know was that his limited magical abilities would never get him out of that prison. After assaulting the walls with every lesser spell he knew, all to no avail, he had summoned every ounce of magic he possessed and blasted them with Spirit Fire.

  Not even a scratch. Drained and out of ideas, he slumped to his back and idly wondered if the honeycombed walls would prevent a powerful spirit mage, someone able to open dimensional doors and step through reality itself, from escaping. It didn’t matter, because that sort of power was far beyond him.

  He paced and he paced and he paced. As an attorney on Earth, he had once worked a pro bono case involving prisoners suing the state for keeping them in solitary confinement. A prison within a prison. Val knew better than most the effects of prolonged isolation: chronic headaches, heart palpitations, weight loss, muscle atrophy, and a slew of other problems.

  But the real dangers were psychological. Anger, extreme stress, loss of a sense of reality, confusion, paranoia, depression, hallucinations. Many inmates became psychotic or suicidal. Sometimes both.

  Val knew he had a strong mind. But the hallucinations had already begun, and his depression kept him huddled in a corner for much of each day. He could feel himself slipping into a dangerous state of despair.

  When he next woke, his legs and chest felt heavy, as if a great weight bore down on him. He curled on his side, succumbing to the melancholy. Just kill me, he thought. Put me out of my misery.

  The thought had slipped unbidden into his mind, and when he realized what he had said, he shuddered and forced himself to his feet. Snarling, he stalked to the nearest wall and pounded on it, over and over, until his knuckles bled and his white-hot rage beat back the despair. Anything to make him feel alive. Remembering a cuerpomancy trick Adaira had taught him, he hardened the skin on his hands and continued pounding, hammering the cell walls over and over with blows that would have shattered brick.

  Exhausted, he sank to the floor again and watched the blood drip from his hands. The pale, cracked skin ignited a spark in his mind. A spark that grew to a small flame when he thought about the body-altering magic he had used to pound the walls.

  So far, his escape plans had all centered around magic. He knew this was useless, but what if he took a different approach?

  What if he used magic on himself?

  He knew some wizards led extraordinarily long lives. Spirit mages lived the longest, by far, and most scholars at the Abbey believed the use of magic, especially reality-bending spirit magic, somehow altered the nature of time.

  He also knew that cuerpomancers—a vision of strolling with Adaira in her father’s garden seared through him—could reach inside someone and stop their heart.

  Could cuerpomancers, he wondered, also slow down the vital organ?

  The Congregation would never let him out of here alive. This he knew.

  But what if he were dead?

  The thought gained currency in his mind, and for the first time in weeks, a slow, grim smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

  It took cuerpomancers years of practice to hone their craft. They had teachers, textbooks, cadavers, and live subjects on which to practice.

  Val had desperatio
n and an ironclad will.

  During a dangerous trial and error period, he found that he could render his own pulse sluggish. The experiments made him dizzy, short of breath, and disoriented. He was sure he had induced a minor heart attack on at least three occasions. The question was, could he stop his pulse entirely? Or at least slow it enough to fool his captors into believing he was dead?

  Just as importantly—could he do this and wake back up?

  He didn’t want the jailers to find an unmoving body with no visible wounds. They would probe. Doubt. Possibly tear him apart.

  Instead, Val’s plan hinged on faking a suicide convincingly enough to fool a mortician, and praying they stuck him in a coffin without calling for a cuerpomancer. Then praying even harder he woke on his own before he suffocated to death or was burned on a pyre. So many things could go wrong he shuddered even to think about it.

  It was a desperate effort. A life and death gamble. But if he didn’t try something, the wizards would execute him. Even worse, his brothers would be stuck in this nightmare world without him. Unlike Val, they had no innate magic, no way of getting home without the aid of a powerful wizard.

  To carry out his plan, he decided to repurpose another cuerpomancy trick Adaira had taught him: turning a fingernail into a small dagger. Unwilling to spend another few months growing out the keratin on his nails, he huddled on his side and pretended to sleep, hiding his hands under his stomach. In case someone was watching, he forced himself not to gasp as he used his magic to rip the nail off his left index finger. Once the pain subsided, he reshaped the nail into a stiletto-sharp file.

  A shudder rolled through him. What if he went comatose and couldn’t wake back up? Buried alive, trapped in a living nightmare?

  With a shout of anguish, both for himself and for anyone who might be watching, he slit the underside of his own wrists with his nails.

  He cut horizontally and only slit a portion. Blood poured from the wound and stained his arms. He knew he had to bleed enough to convince the guards of his death, but shallow enough to live. Yet another deadly variable.

  He curled in pain as he bled, wondering if anyone would notice. He assumed someone was giving him food, though perhaps it was automated or teleported inside without a glance.

  As blood pumped from his wounds, Val closed his eyes and reached for his magic, feeling the rhythm of his pulse beat through him. He focused his will and breathed deeply, slowly, in through his nostrils and out through his toes, entering a meditative state. This time he didn’t stop when the dizziness overcame him. He kept breathing, kept pushing, kept drifting. When the mental confusion made it a struggle to stay focused, he collapsed on his back and pushed even harder, willing his heart to slow, trying to induce unconsciousness before he lost control of the magic.

  Black spots filled his vision. A chill seeped into his bones and caused a wave of teeth-rattling shivers. He felt his mind drifting away from his body, untethered.

  Still he pushed.

  Saliva seeped out of his slackened mouth, and his muscles no longer responded to his commands. The last thing he remembered was seeing, in his mind’s failing eye, one last vision of his brothers.

  THE BARRIER COAST, URFE

  -2-

  “Freetown is in ruins,” Tamás said, quietly stating the obvious from the head of the long oaken table in the Red Wagon Tavern. He was the youngest member of the Roma High Council and the undisputed leader of the Revolution.

  Lined with dusty casks of rum and ale, the tavern was one of the few buildings still intact after Congregation wizards had flown across New Albion in tilectium airships and leveled the capital of the Barrier Coast with lightning, tornadoes, and Spirit Fire. For the last few weeks, nearly everyone left in the city, Will and Caleb Blackwood included, had spent most of their waking hours searching for survivors and clearing out rubble.

  As Will took in the drawn faces at the table, mostly remaining members of the council, he felt an overwhelming stab of compassion. Those unable to make the perilous trek across the continent to Freetown were forced into terrible ghettoes by the Congregation, the body of wizards that controlled the Realm. The Barrier Coast was the end of the line, the one safe place for those who refused to take the Oaths.

  “Hundreds fill the death wagons,” Tamás continued. “Many more crowd the infirmaries. The question is, what will we do about it?”

  One of the elders, Jacoby Revansill, slammed a gnarled fist on the table. “What is there to do? Besides start over?”

  Merin Dragici, a wealthy trader, shook his head. “It doesn’t matter where we go. If the wizards wish to hunt us down and kill us, they will do so.”

  “Aye,” Kyros Toth agreed.

  “Is that what they wish?” Tinea Alafair said. She was the oldest person at the table, her face puckered with age. “If they desired to eradicate us, they could have started with this attack. Or long before. Instead, they imparted their lesson and returned to New Victoria. I say we do well to heed their warning.”

  “Some lesson,” Kyros said grimly.

  To Will’s left, Caleb stifled a yawn. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “Hung over again?” Will whispered to his brother.

  “Not yet,” Caleb whispered back with an unsteady grin.

  Yasmina, seated on the other side of Will, heard the exchange. She didn’t smile at Caleb’s remark, but then again, the once-carefree Brazilian zoology student and budding wilder hadn’t smiled at much of anything since the attack. She especially hadn’t smiled at Caleb, who had slept with another woman on the return journey from the Darklands, just as he and Yasmina were starting to reconnect.

  Will felt bad for Yasmina, who could have almost any guy she wanted. In his heart, he knew that while his brother cared deeply for Yasmina, he had never truly loved her.

  Marek and Dalen had not been invited to the meeting. Will missed their steady presence. Far more keenly, he felt the absence of his oldest brother, Val, who had somehow made contact a week ago, just before the wizards razed Freetown. If that mysterious communication was to be believed, Val was now a prisoner of the Congregation.

  How had such a terrible thing happened, and what could he and Caleb possibly do to help him?

  “If our Black Sash brethren hadn’t hired an assassin to kill students at the Abbey,” Tinea said, “the wizards might not have come at all. An Alazashin, no less. I warned them the Congregation would find out.”

  Merin sneered. “Wouldn’t have come? A fantasy that will endure right until the genocide is complete.”

  “I, for one, am glad the Black Sash gypsies acted as they did,” Jacoby said. “Let the wizards feel our pain for once.”

  Tinea stood. “And how did the Black Sash afford an Alazashin assassin, Jacoby?”

  “Enough!” Tamás said. “Killing students is wrong, but Merin is right—the Congregation made their intentions clear long before the attack on Freetown.” The long-haired Roma leader swept his gaze across the table. “We have three choices: flee, stay and pray the wizards do not return, or fight. And to those who still question the motives of the Congregation, despite the death squads and Inquisitors patrolling the Ninth, there is something of which you are not aware. The flying ship that attacked our city was built with tilectium.”

  There were murmurs from the elders. Tamás exchanged a glance with Will. “As we were fleeing the mines,” Tamás continued, “we saw more of these ships. Many more. The end game of the Congregation, my friends, is clear: to settle the Ninth, and solve the twin problems of the Devla uprising and the Revolution by eradicating our people.”

  Silence deafened the room.

  “We can rebuild here or we can flee,” Tamás said, “but the result will be the same. Sooner or later they will confine us to the fens or put us to the sword.”

  “But it’s the same if we fight,” Tinea said, with a frustrated wave of her hand. She peered down the table at Will. “Even with the return of Zariduke.”

  Will’s fingers tightened
around the hilt of the sword his father had bequeathed him. The gypsies called it Zariduke, Spiritscourge, or Spiritwell. Devourer of magic. An artifact of immense power that could cleave through spirit and strike down wizards. Will didn’t know how his father had found the weapon or what he had planned to do with it. The histories were unclear whether Dane Blackwood was an agent of the Congregation or a secret member of the Revolution, and almost two hundred years had passed since he had left Urfe.

  Whatever the histories said, Will knew his father’s motives had been pure. He would never have sold out his own people.

  “As for myself,” Tamás said, “I would rather die with honor than live as a slave. But our people need guidance. Let us put this to a vote.”

  “Does mine count?” said a mocking voice from the doorway.

  The voice belonged to a short, lithe, copper-skinned woman with waves of dark hair and cheekbones as sharp as the vertical scar dividing her forehead. Will’s pulse beat faster at the sight of her.

  “Mala,” Tamás said coldly. “There was a reason you were not invited. You’ve made your feelings on the Revolution clear.”

  Dressed in black leather and scarlet boots, her dangerous blue sash tied around her waist, Mala sported her typical array of pouches, weapons, and colorful jewelry. She was also holding a short bronze tube in her left hand. As she approached, she opened the tube and shook out a scroll. Will started, recognizing the red tie and brittle parchment. It was an item Mala had recovered during the expedition to Leonidus’s castle. Will had forgotten all about it.

  “Allow me to guess,” Mala said. “You’re discussing the bleak future of our people and whether the re-emergence of a legendary sword,” she graced Will with one of her mysterious, sardonic smiles, “might help combat the wizards.”

  The council members replied with frosty stares.

  “The sword is impressive, no doubt,” she said. “The wizards will fear it. But it is one sword, wielded by one barely-trained warrior.”