by C. M. Hayden
“What the hell, kid!” Mica shouted.
Taro grabbed him by the arm and turned his wrist right-side up, exposing a single line tattooed into his skin. “You’re an artificer?”
The man looked helpless, as if he’d just been caught in the biggest lie of his life. “How do—”
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Taro said, his voice sounding far too much like his father for his own liking. “Or get someone else killed?”
“It’s not what you think.”
“You’re using your templar to probe into people’s souls. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is? Magister Ross would be frothing.”
Mica’s eyes widened at the name. “Magister Ross? Oh god, is that wicked woman still teaching?”
Taro went for the door. “This might just be the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Good luck.”
“Hey, these Helian morons don’t know the difference, right? I’m super careful, and I never use any physical manifestation. It’s perfectly safe.”
“You don’t get it, do you,” Taro said. “Just wait, and you’re going to have a few guards or Inquisitors inspecting the place. I hope you didn’t bring anything incriminating.” He waved as he left. “Like an inscriber, or God-forbid a magistry lantern.”
Mica stared dumbly as he sat in his chair, then with a fierce urgency began to pack his things as if somebody had lit a fire under his feet. Taro put some distance between him and the tent.
“Where were you?” Bran said, as Taro caught up with him. The show had changed now and consisted of a female minstrel playing a set of reed pipes. Her playing wasn’t anything special, but she was gorgeous, with long curly hair and delicate black skin.
“Saw something I really wish I hadn’t seen,” Taro said. He nudged Bran. “Looks like you haven’t had that problem.”
Bran blushed. “Shut up.” He glanced at the Grand Aculam a block away. “We should go. They’ll be expecting the delivery just before the Shahl comes out.”
“The Shahl’s going to make an appearance?” Taro said.
Bran shrugged. “I guess. But I’ve heard he’s not doing too well.” He lifted the pegs of his cart and started down the dirt road toward the towering aculam. Its massive structure eclipsed everything behind it, and it seemed to loom over the entire festival like a monolith.
The entrance to the basilica was blocked off, as the interior was still under repair; however, the steps leading from the great double doors to the street below had been converted into a makeshift stage. The stage was composed of thick timber beams that fitted together in a series of notches, and from the wear and tear on it, the stage seemed to be something they disassembled and reassembled each year for special occasions.
A few clerics circled the stage lighting several paper lanterns and putting the final touches on the stage. Meanwhile, Taro and Bran shuffled off to one of the side doors tucked beside a series of trash bins and a wire fence.
When Bran rapped his knuckle on the door, a small window slid open. An eye peeked out, then followed a rustling of latches as the door was opened. They were greeted by a tall, thin cleric in the characteristic robes of the Mast. He wore a frayed brown belt wrapped around his midsection and numerous silver and brass symbols around his neck. He was an imposing man with sharp features and thin eyebrows, but he had a pleasant demeanor as he motioned Bran inside with his candle cart.
“Ah, Bran,” he said as the boys passed the post, “you’re getting so tall. Wherever is your father? Azra never comes by these days.”
Bran set the cart down momentarily. “He says he’s trying to give Archcleric Koros a ‘wide berth.’ Not sure what that means.”
The cleric nodded gravely. “It means he’s a wise man. Koros is an obstinate one; but give him some time, and he’ll simmer down. Too much confrontation can end badly for a man of low standing such as Azra.”
Bran didn’t show any offense to the ‘low standing’ comment. “He never told me what he said to Koros.”
“Nor should he.” The cleric turned his attention to Taro, his eyes briefly darting from his face, to his wooden leg, to his staff, and back to Bran. “Here’s a new one. Every time I think I’ve met all Azra’s children, a new one sprouts up like a flower in a field. I presume this is the wayward older son?”
Bran looked as though he’d disagree, but Taro interjected. “Yes, sir.” He hobbled closer and shook the cleric’s hand. “I haven’t gotten to visit home in a while.”
The cleric returned the greeting warmly. “I am Undercleric Isen. I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”
“Taro.”
“Taro. With that tan and the hair, you look almost Endran.”
“I’ve been spending a lot of time in Endra. I guess a bit has rubbed off on me.”
“Not too much, I hope,” Isen said. He returned his attention to Bran and made an overexaggerated motion with his hand against his back. “I’m afraid I’m not as young as I look. Could you help me get these to the other room?”
“I’ll just wait outside,” Taro said. He opened the heavy door and stepped out. Isen accepted that Taro was going to leave and immediately turned to walk with Bran down a long hallway that led deeper into the aculam. Taro did leave, momentarily; but just before the door shut behind him, he wedged his staff inside. He waited for a long minute to give Isen and Bran time to get a decent distance, then re-entered.
The area seemed like little more than a vestibule. There was a long coatrack on the left, and opposite of that was a stone bench that stretched from one wall to the other. Even here, however, the ceiling was a beautiful mural of Old Gods, warring ships, and a vast ocean under a glowing gold sunrise. Both eyes of a sea monster in the mural were encrusted with emeralds the size of Taro’s fist, and he idly wondered how much effort it would take to get them down unnoticed.
Taro rummaged through the coatrack to find something that might make it easier for him to make up an excuse if he were caught snooping around. The only thing that fit him was an old cleric’s robes, the same kind that Isen had been wearing. Wearing it might not have been the smartest thing to do, as it very well could have the opposite effect he was hoping for—attracting more attention rather than less, as Clerics were invariably old men.
Just as Taro was going to put the cloak on, he heard someone shouting from outside. Or, rather, it was one person shouting, and the voice was familiar. It was the fortune-teller he’d met minutes ago; his voice was almost in a panic, and it was accompanied by the clanging sound of metal soles against the brick road outside. City guards.
The sound of a key being pressed into the door and the latch drawing back followed immediately thereafter, and Taro jumped into the fray of coats, cloaks, and shirts on the rack. He stood motionless, with one eye peering out, as the guards hauled the fortune-teller, Mica, inside.
“Friends,” Mica said as they dragged him. He was forcing a smile onto his face, but the mascara running down his cheeks made him look rather pathetic. He glanced back several times at the door. “Fellas. Pals. This is all…” he began breathlessly, “a misunderstanding.” He picked out one of his fake breasts, a ball of sand wrapped in stitches of cloth, and tossed it on the floor. “See? What with the makeup and the crystal ball. It’s a joke! Don’t you get it?”
They didn’t seem to. The one farthest in the back was holding some of the fortune-teller’s things, including an inscriber.
It became apparent that these weren’t city guards at all. They were Church militants who, according to what Bran had told him, answered directly to the Inquisitors.
The situation seemed to hit the fortune-teller all at once, and he began to cry and plead for them to let him go. “It was just a bit of trickery. No magic here, I swear.”
The guard-captain stopped and jammed his elbow into Mica’s stomach. The scene was almost surreal, with the four hulking church guards hauling off a crying man in a dress.
“We should take him to the dungeon until morning, yeah?” one of
the guards asked.
The captain shook his head. “No. Put him in the Sepulcher with the other Endrans.”
Chapter Thirty-five
The Netherlight
At first, the Sepulcher was exactly what Taro expected it to be, though he couldn’t for the life of him understand why the guards were taking the fortune-teller there.
Taro followed as closely behind them as he could. The aculam was a veritable maze, built like a castle with old gray bricks and stained glass throughout. While it was certainly impressive, to his eyes one hallway looked like another, and each room was simply a smaller or larger version of the next.
A few strikes to the cheek kept the fortune-teller silent as they descended into the underground. The Sepulcher was, as its name suggested, a series of tombs deep below the Grand Aculam. The walls were loose earth and hard stone, intermixed with several rectangular headstones with bronze plaques fix to them, each with the name of a deceased noble.
Not all the bodies held therein were so well-kept. The walls, ceiling, and corners were lined with bones and skulls arranged in grizzly and complex patterns.
Other larger chambers were devoted to the Helian Emperors and their families. These were far more elaborate, adorned with ivory and sapphires, gold trim and fine obsidian cover stones.
The guards reached one such tomb. However, unlike the others, it bore no inscriptions or sigils, and the sarcophagus in the center was empty.
Despite there being no body, the smell of death was thick in the air, almost overwhelming, and mixed with acrid taste of centuries-old dust. Taro leaned against a cobweb-covered statue and waited.
On the wall overlooking the empty sarcophagus was the symbol of the Mast. When the captain of the guards touched the gemstone in the center, there was a rumbling and dust sifted from the walls as the whole room trembled. A crease in the wall appeared, as if it were a door. The captain dismissed his men and took the fortune-teller in personally.
The men turned to leave, and Taro wedged himself into the corner to avoid being seen. Not two inches from his eyes, a group of spiders and centipedes wriggled and crawled from the crevices in the stone. Taro steeled himself to keep from moving, and when the guards were a fair distance, he pulled away from the corner and brushed the creatures from his skin. The insects behaved peculiarly, moving with deliberate purpose away from the empty tomb.
Then it hit Taro like a punch to the gut. He felt a crushing darkness deep inside his soul. It filled the room like heavy water, and made the hairs on his neck and arms stand on end. He’d felt something similar as he and the others had neared Helia Edûn, a constant nagging feeling in the back of his mind, but this was a hundred times more intense. He could feel the dark energy pushing against his templar like a gust of wind pushes against a candle’s flame.
It was suddenly very cold, and he had the urge to move away as quickly as possible. It took all his willpower to press on. With every step, a greater weight pressed down against his templar as if he was moving in the deepest part of an ocean of dark magic.
Before the tomb door closed on its own, Taro slipped through. Inside, the immediate area was pitch-black, but further along the guard and the fortune-teller were just on the edge of a lit corridor. Taro put his hand to the damp wall for balance, and as he moved toward the light, his hand rubbed against wet stones, and then onto a wrought-iron bar. In the darkness, he hadn’t noticed that the walls were lined with four barred cells. It was dark enough that he couldn’t make out who was inside of them.
The light at the end of the corridor waxed and waned, as if some toggle-switch was being flipped. A bit of chatter and the sound of busy hands working came from inside, and Taro cautiously moved toward the door and peeked around the corner.
The inside was unlike anything he’d seen in Helia before, but it was very familiar to him. It was the spitting image of any of a number of rooms in the Magisterium. It was ancient, much older than the aculam above it, and most certainly built by the Old Gods. The walls were the same smooth, silvery-gray stone used throughout the Magisterium. They were lined with thick pipe-like cords that housed clear wires and pulsing electric nodes.
In the exact center was an octagonal dais built into the floor. It was about shoulder-high to the guard-captain, and on the top was a pyramid-shaped point. Balancing on top of the point was a chunk of black crystal glass with gold inscriptions running along it. The crystal was slightly smaller than a man’s fist, and Taro immediately recognized it as the source of the dark energy. Within the glass were dark purple flames only a few shades from black. It was obviously an artifice of the Old Gods, but Taro couldn’t begin to guess what it was, or what it did. The magisters in Endra would’ve given their right hands for a chance to study it.
The rest of the room was organized around this light. There were a few chairs and desks around the edges of the room, piled high with books, scrolls, tubes, burners, vials, and more alchemy supplies than Taro had ever seen. Nailed to the wall were hand-drawn sketches of the crystal and a myriad of alchemical calculations that looked vaguely familiar.
“Got another one for you, Lord Farseer,” the captain said casually.
The farseer was dressed much as Dr. Halric had been. A simple white coat with vials stitched into the fabric. He was scribbling onto a bit of parchment, and had been muttering to himself as he wrote.
“Intensity and luminosity has decreased ninety percent since the High Inquisitor’s death.” The farseer was going to re-dip the nib into his inkwell, but when the guard got his attention he set it down and swiped his glasses from the chair beside him.
He wasn’t especially old, perhaps in his late forties, but there was a slow deliberateness to his movements. He inspected the fortune-teller, whose legs looked like they’d buckle. The light in the center of the room was clearly having an even stronger effect on him, and he fell to his knees.
The farseer inspected him as one would inspect a new horse. He tilted his head, brushed his palm against his chest, and opened his eyelids wide and stared into them.
He nodded appreciatively. “A templar, I see. A Magisterium reject, are you?”
“You got it all wrong,” Mica said. His voice wavered and his whole body wobbled, as if he was just about to pass out.
The farseer patted the side of his face in a grandfatherly way. He knelt and smiled warmly. “Don’t you worry. This won’t hurt a bit.”
The crystal on the dais sputtered and waned again, almost dying for a moment before sparking back to life. The farseer tapped the glass casing with his fingers and grimaced.
“You’ve done your Shahl a great service, captain,” he said. “But if we don’t find a more plentiful source, we might lose the Netherlight forever.” He said this last bit with an air of nervousness, then prompted the guard to hold the fortune-teller still.
The guard did so, and the farseer touched the sphere again. The gold inscriptions burned to life, and the purplish-black fire within pierced through the shell of the crystal as if it were being pulled toward the fortune-teller.
Mica thrashed and kicked in a vain attempt to pull away. Sweat poured from his body, and his skin turned red with fear. The fire touched his chest and seemed to grab hold of his heart. He wailed in agony and exhaled so hard, it sounded like his lungs had collapsed.
The farseer watched with mute analytical curiosity, patiently waiting for it to be over and done with. Eventually, the fire receded into the sphere, and the fortune-teller fell like a ragdoll to the floor. His chest continued to heave and he seemed to be alive, but his body was utterly spent.
“Put him with the others,” the farseer said dispassionately, returning to his writing.
The guard-captain lifted the fortune-teller over his shoulder and started toward the door. Taro made a frantic dash to cover and crouched as the man exited and found an appropriate cell. The guard-captain left without another word to the farseer, and Taro crept over to the Mica’s cell.
The fortune-teller was pressed up
against the bars, his sweat making the makeup on his face run even more. Taro reached in and checked his pulse. It was faint but present.
The cell was large, perhaps five yards deep, and in the back Taro saw several figures with their backs to the wall. They made no motion toward him, and Taro wondered if they were in similar shape.
He leaned in to Mica’s ear and whispered. “Can you hear me?” He shook him. “Can you speak?”
The fortune-teller mouthed something, but no words came out. His eyes were open; but even in the dark, he looked hollow and empty. Taro risked a bit of templuric light on his fingertips and moved it sideways across the man’s face. It got no reaction from him; however, one of the figures against the wall moved toward him with such suddenness that Taro fell backward.
“It can’t be,” the voice said with bewilderment. It was familiar. Taro held his light forward to see who it was. The Sun King’s face stared back at him. “Taro?”
The Sun King didn’t look well. His skin was pale, his hair disheveled, and his top lip was split on the right side. Dry blood was caked to his tattered shirt, and he looked more like a pauper than a king in the simple gray clothing they’d saddled him with. At the Sun King’s words, the others in the cell came closer. Magister Sullen was there, his mechanical arm missing, along with a half-dozen warders, aviators, and magisters.
“Your Majesty,” Taro whispered, glancing briefly over his shoulder. “What happened?”
“Valros overpowered us,” the Sun King rasped. “Can you get the door?”
“I don’t have my inscriber,” Taro said.
Sullen nudged toward the room that held the Netherlight. “Our inscribers and weapons are being kept in there.”
“Can you make a distraction?” Taro asked.
The Sun King nodded. “I think so.”
Sullen raised a hand at Taro. “The farseer’s no pushover. If you let him speak or cast, you’ve got no chance. But try not to kill him.”
