“That’s the corrupting influence of Moriora, the price we pay. Feelings of anger, and actions of violence attune your soul to its power giving it greater hold upon you. Unfortunately, this also twists the mind, the end result being insatiable hunger and total madness.”
Jenoc scowled. “If madness is to be my end, then death is to be yours!”
Jenoc’s psychic senses reported an influx of Apeiron transferring from the dead-eyed girl into Shivara herself. He manifested his Moriora and wrapped it into a shield around him just in time to absorb a wave of force stronger than anything he’d ever experienced. It was so powerful that it even managed to shove him backward through his shield.
“Go after her, Etele!” Shivara shouted.
Jenoc made to strike at Shivara’s servant, but was forced to parry another casting, this one a net consisting of lines of light. He’d never seen a spell like that and could only guess at its function.
Jenoc could not afford to divide his attention between two targets, so the slave girl was able escape and chase after Kairah. Shivara was fast and strong, and he’d already discerned her to be the most adept spell-caster he’d ever encountered. But Jenoc himself was no mean student of the Five Disciplines. He met Shivara’s stare for stare and attacked.
Tears streamed down Kairah’s face and every step away from Jenoc came with a stab to her heart. Although he’d disowned her for siding with the humans that he reviled, in the end, her older brother hadn’t abandoned her. He’d come to her rescue just as he’d done on that awful day so long ago.
Explosions and the other sounds of a caster’s duel echoed from behind her, and it took all of her willpower to not turn back. But she couldn’t help him fight Shivara, both because she no longer could spell-cast, and also because she had to warn the synod and find some way to free Rasheera.
Kairah sprinted through the white hallways, lungs burning in a way she’d never known before. Her body no longer absorbed any kind of energy, and so she was entirely dependent on its natural functions to supply her strength. She was shocked at just how weak and fragile she felt.
Is this how humans always feel?
Footfalls from behind.
She glanced over her shoulder and found Etelegiving chase. She apparently retained all of her Apeiron-augmented physique as evidenced in the alarming rate at which she was closing the distance between them.
Kairah reflexively tried to cast a ball of fire behind her, but nothing happened; no warm swell within her chest, no wave of electric force flooding her extremities, no gratifying explosion of power as the spell took shape. She was human now, unable to absorb Apeiron and unable to cast spells.
Kairah broke left down a connecting corridor and burst through two doors into Shivara’s planetarium. She locked the doors a heartbeat before Etele smashed into them. They held, but white dust rained down from the doors’ arched frame signaling they wouldn’t keep Etele out forever. Kairah could keeping running, but the woman; faster, stronger, and probably able to spell-cast, would inevitable overtake her.
Kairah ran to the center of the room beneath the massive projection of stars and planets that swirled near the ceiling. There were talises in this room, out of Shivara’s presence long enough to have re-charged. Kairah frantically began searching the tables and the various oddities they displayed. She found several talises, but the only one that proved of any use was a silver wand that could repair and build stonework. With it, she could further seal the entrance to the room and buy her some time to escape. It would work, unless Etele could spell-cast.
Bang!
Kairah started and whirled toward the doors. She expected to see Etele stepping in the room, but to her surprise, she found them still closed.
“Kairah?”
Kairah turned toward another set of doors leading into the chamber from the opposite wall. They were open, one of the two slowly swinging back after having clattering against the wall astride the archway. Standing in the open doorway was a young man with messy black hair, green eyes, and a silver sword with a large round amethyst embedded in the cross guard and tiny emeralds peppering the tapered blade.
“Jekaran!”
He laughed, and Kairah was surprised at how much she’d missed that laugh. She ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. “You are alive.”
Jekaran stammered a moment before pulling away and looking at her. “And you’re blonde!”
Something was different about Jekaran. He appeared more confident and moved with an Allosian-like grace. She couldn’t spell-cast, but Kairah still retained her arcane expertise. “You have mastered your link to the sword!”
An explosion of wood and stone announced Etele had broken through, and one look at the splintered remnants of the doors scattered across the floor confirmed Kairah’s fear that the slave could spell-cast. Kairah let go of Jekaran and turned to face the mindless woman. She kept herself protectively in front of him, aimed the mason wand at Etele, and cast. Four walls of white stone materialized around the slave girl, boxing her in and forming a ceiling to trap her.
“Neat tri―”
Kairah grabbed his arm. “Run!”
But it was too late. A thin blade sharply protruded from the front wall of Etele’s stone box. It sliced to the side and then down, then to the side and then up. A square of white stone fell forward and landed on the ground, followed by Etele ducking through the opening.
Maybe it hadn’t been spell-casting the mindless slave girl used to break open the planetarium doors. Kairah’s eyes fell to Etele’s rapier. No normal blade could cut like that through stone. Kairah groaned upon seeing the circular amethyst jewel embedded in the rapier’s handguard. She’d seen it upon first arriving in Shivara’s tower, and assumed it was a talis, but now she understood the horrifying truth. Shivara had said she’d bonded the mindless Etele to an ego talis as part of her abominable experimentations.
The rapier was that ego talis.
Jekaran pulled away from Kairah and launched into a run toward Etele. “Jekaran, wait!”
Etele surged forward in a blur of motion, crossing the dozens of paces in a heartbeat, and struck. Even with the supernatural speed the sword lent him, Jekaran nearly parried the thrust too late. He knocked aside Etele’s thin blade, and whirled; horizontal cut aimed for Etele’s neck. The slave girl blurred again, rapier snapping up and stopping Jekaran’s sword mid swing.
Jekaran’s mouth hung open and he was about to say something, but Etele fell into splits, rapier following her as she dropped low and slashed. Blood sprayed and Jekaran stumbled backward, a large tear in his trousers exposing a diagonal red line across his thigh.
Kairah threw up another stone box around Etele and ran to catch Jekaran before he could fall down. “Her rapier is like your sword.”
“Yeah,” Jekaran said through clenched teeth. “I guessed that.”
The top of Etele’s stone prison fell in, and the woman rocketed into the air, skirts of her dress fluttering. She flipped and landed in front of the box, blank eyes staring at Jekaran as she whipped her rapier out to the side and held it horizontal.
Jekaran straightened, favoring his injured leg as he brought the sword up into a two-handed guard position. “There’s a healing ring in my pocket. Irvis gave it to me.”
Kairah gasped. “I could kiss that human!” She shoved her hand into Jekaran’s pocket and pulled out Rasheera’s ring.
“You’d better not do that,” Jekaran said.
“True,” Kairah agreed. “I do not wish to encourage his lustful feelings for me.” She examined the engraved images of lilies that ran across the silver band.
“It’s not that. He has a girlfriend. She strikes me as the jealous type.”
Though it was completely inappropriate for their circumstances, Kairah found herself laughing. She threaded a slender finger through the ring, but before she could begin a healing, Jekaran shoved her to the side. She crashed into a table, knocking a dozen metal instruments to the floor.
&nbs
p; Etele swung her rapier down before she even touched the floor, and Jekaran blocked the attack. The clashing of the two weapon talises sounding forth a resonant clang accompanied by an explosion of crackling purple sparks. Kairah searched for the mason wand, but found it lying on the floor a dozen paces away next to Jekaran’s leather boot.
Etele landed, leapt back, bent low, and lunged. Jekaran side-stepped, whirled, and brought his sword down in a diagonal slice, but Etele blurred away and the sword whistled through empty air. The two ego talis bearers commenced a blinding dance of swings and parries, and Kairah didn’t dare get close enough to grab the mason wand.
Kairah scrambled to another nearby table, sifting through its oddities for another talis she could use to help Jekaran. She reached for a star-shaped amulet but froze just before her fingers touched its silver chain. The goddess ring was glowing, the lines on the band that made up the semblance of lilies shining white. A hot energy suffused Kairah’s skin, not painful like heat from a flame, but electric like… like when her body absorbed Apeiron.
Jenoc deftly wove several Disciplines together and conjured a disabling attack on Shivara’s mind while at the same time increasing the gravity around her in an invisible vice. She deflected the psychic assault at the same time she pushed back against his sphere of force. Jenoc strained to maintain the casting, but his stolen Apeiron store was decreasing at twice the rate it did when he was Allosian. He ceased his attack, and struck out with something more basic; a whip made of fire. Shivara sliced the whip from the air with a beam of white light and it evaporated.
She laughed. “I am over a thousand years old, boy. I was the first human among our race to acquire spell-casting. I know secrets you could never dream of!!”
“Human?”
“That’s right! You don’t know!” A cruel smile touched Shivara’s ruby lips. “Allosians are actually human, albeit changed at the cellular level so as to be able to absorb and redirect energy.”
The revelation struck Jenoc like a physical blow. “No…”
Shivara eagerly nodded. “That’s right, boy. You are the very thing you hate!”
“But they are so depraved and violent…”
Shivara pouted and said in a tone of mock sorrow, “They can’t help it, I’m afraid. Partly because of interbreeding with those who have dormant Moriora in their blood, and partly because of the absence of Mother’s presence and light. Not to mention that I have actively suppressed tenets of Seiro.”
Seiro? Wasn’t that the Ursaj code of honor? The thought was one of thousands of questions swirling in Jenoc’s mind as it made dozens of connections. Puzzle pieces from history he’d never been able to fit into the official Allosian narrative started to fall into place. Rage ignited inside him, and he scowled at Shivara.
She grinned in response. “For centuries, I have controlled the appointees to the synod through my feigned divinations. I’ve led them by my authority as oracle the same as a bullock is led by its iron nose ring. I used them just as I used you.”
Jenoc growled.
“That’s it,” Shivara purred. “Lose yourself in the anger. Revel in the urge to consume and destroy. Wild, mindless, insanity is near for you, I think.”
Jenoc threw his hands forward as a desperate ragged scream tore from his lungs. At the same time, he telekinetically took hold of two massive pillars behind Shivara and yanked them from their footings. The columns tore free from the high ceiling and fell, tree-like, toward the bald woman, but Shivara and her dead-eyed slave disappeared in a flash of purple. The other slaves, sitting stoic on couches in the square between the stone columns, weren’t so lucky. The marble pillars crushed and rolled over them in explosions of stone, dust, and blood. Shivara reappeared at the far end of the long, narrow chamber with an arm hooked around the waist of her slave.
Why had she taken that girl with her while letting the others die?
Rage and a lust to destroy were clouding his mind once again. He shoved back the question and spun out another spell that tore a hole in the air. A portal to an abyss of absolute blackness yawned wider and wider as it sucked in chunks of stone debris and broken furniture.
Shivara cocked an eyebrow. “Who taught you how to make a singularity?” Her robes fluttered toward the growing mass of blackness, as though she were caught in a high wind. “That was one spell I’ve intentionally withheld from the College.”
Jenoc didn’t answer. He just poured as much Apeiron into the spell as he could. He would have to feed soon if this didn’t succeed in engulfing the oracle. He’d had the spell in mind for a while–a spell he’d puzzled out from studying a void scepter in his personal collection–it being his contingency plan in case he needed to destroy any appreciable number of his Morioran army.
The secret wasn’t the fire, as he’d originally thought, but striking in one swift, decisive, blow. You had to decimate a Moriora wielder in one attack so they couldn’t regenerate. Sucking the bald witch into nothingness would work.
Shivara’s slave stumbled forward, the vacuum of the black hole sliding her four paces before Shivara reached out and grabbed the girl. When she made contact, the girl’s purple aura flared and a wave of Apeiron poured into Shivara–but to Jenoc’s surprise the slave didn’t wither.
Shivara waved her off hand and Jenoc’s all-consuming void collapsed in on itself and vanished. He was low on Apeiron now, so low that his skin was beginning to flake and a chunk of his hair sloughed off and fell to the floor.
“I have to admit, I am impressed. You really do live up to your reputation as a master of the College of Disciplines, or at least what passes for a master these days.” Shivara let go of her slave and took half a dozen steps toward him. “I was going to take your sister as my lover, make her my ascended consort.” She tapped one finger against her cheek and looked Jenoc up and down. “Perhaps you would be a superior choice.”
Jenoc stumbled to one knee. “Go to hell, witch!” He had Apeiron enough for one last powerful demonstration of his acclaimed reputation, and then he would die. It was better than he deserved.
“I do think I will need to teach you how to control that temper of yours, if you are to remain coherent long enough for Boulos to raise us.”
Jenoc looked past Shivara to her blank-eyed slave. The Allosian woman, dressed like a little girl’s doll, continued to draw Apeiron. This close to the Mother Shard, it was an autonomic thing for an Allosian to absorb energy, much like breathing. What would happen if he fed on an Allosian, one who could channel Apeiron? He’d been so focused on being the first of his kind to reach the Mother Shard and cast the inversion spell that he hadn’t stopped to try it.
She’s a conduit! Shivara was using the slave to draw Apeiron through her and fuel her spell-casting. He knew he ought to have made the connection much earlier than this moment, but his rational mind was fading, lost in a storm of hatred and all-consuming lust for destruction.
Jenoc lashed out with a tentacle of Moriora and speared the slave through the chest. Her aura flared as he pulled Apeiron through her and into himself, healing his physical wounds and replenishing his core.
Jenoc had nearly died of exposure when he was a boy after spell-casting to save Kairah from the humans that murdered their parents left him weak. He remembered the dry pain of thirst, and the sweet relief when Kairah had found a stream from which they could drink. Drawing in potent Apeiron instead of its lesser forms from the bodies of men and animals was like that, only a hundred-fold. The pristine energy coursing into him was delicious and sating in a way he’d never known. It made it difficult for him to focus on Shivara.
The false oracle’s smug smile was gone, replaced by a contortion so fearsome it actually frightened Jenoc. She had manifested a tendril and was also feeding off the slave while screaming something at him. Jenoc pulled more and more Apeiron through the mindless girl, surprised that he had long ago exceeded the amount he’d always believed to be his limit.
Moriora is the erasure of limitations and bounda
ries, Jenoc the scholar said from far away. That voice was faint, and growing fainter. He was losing himself. Somehow the more Apeiron he drank in, the slippier his rational thoughts became. It was intriguing, but unimportant. All that mattered now was destroying this monster.
But he was a monster too. Had been one ever since the day he’d lashed out and obliterated the men who’d killed his family, but that wasn’t what changed him. He’d gone further than justice could sanction and destroyed the entire village of Taratra. Every man, woman, child, and animal had died that day. That’s really when Jenoc had become a monster, not when he first cast the inversion spell. Well, if it took a monster to slay a monster, then perhaps in his death he could find some redemption.
The slave girl’s aura shined brighter and brighter as both he and Shivara glutted themselves. The girl began to convulse, and a red trickle ran from her nose. They were killing her, but Jenoc couldn’t stop drinking in the energy even if he wanted to. It was more delicious than anything he’d ever tasted before.
The slave girl’s mouth opened in a silent scream and then the flow of power abruptly stopped. Her eyes dried and disappeared from their sockets as her skin stretched and shrank tight against her skeleton. She exploded into little more than bits of bone and dust.
“You insolent fool!” Shivara’s screaming had at last become audible.
Jenoc burned with the vast amount of Apeiron he held. He rose and met Shivara’s wild-eyed stare with a smirk. “Now let us truly see who the master spell-caster is.”
The comfortable warmth suffusing Kairah’s skin had quickly heated to a painful fire, and as much as she tried, she couldn’t remove the silver ring. Something new was happening to her, changing her at the very basic levels.
Why hadn’t the ring had this effect on me before?
It had powered her spell-casting and slowed the progression of Moriora’s corruption. The power that was decay and death had left Kairah when she refused its proffered metamorphosis, but could it have left Aeose in her blood? She was like Jekaran now, human with the potential to absorb energy. Perhaps with the obstruction of Moriora’s power gone, the goddess ring could… what? What was it doing to her?
The Lure of Fools Page 89
