A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4) (27 page)

With the intent of her wyrd, she pushed Van back against a wall and bound him there. She cupped her hand to her mouth, and as she whispered her message, a bright green orb formed in her hands, words swirling over the surface. Once done, she tossed the orb out into the snowy air, her mind hurtling the message orb to Annbell.

Cynthia scuffed the cobbled street with the tip of her boot. In the rainy night the cobblestones of the Ivory City were dark gray, nearly black, and her light gray constable’s boots stood out like mist on the dark surface. She smoothed her red hair back into the required bun, and tugged on the hem of her jacket lower over the top of her fitted skirts.

She looked over at Garrant, the other constable on duty with her tonight. Behind her, through the bars to their dungeon home, the verax-acis hissed like snakes.

Cynthia shivered. She never could understand how the pasty white creatures, which had no voice of their own, were able to make any noise.

"I don't like this," she said, barely audible over the patter of rain washing over the ivory buildings around them. The entrance to the verax-acis pen was deep in the city, but because of the haunting noise they made, the only entrance was on a back street where few boots outside of the constables’ ever trod.

Children on a dare,
Cynthia thought.
Children would come down here occasionally.

It had taken them months to arrange their schedule without drawing undue attention, fixing it in a way that they would both be on duty so their employers could make the escape that much easier.

Cynthia shifted nervously, looking around. She was sure they were being watched.

"Don't be so nervous," Garrant grumbled. He was older than her by ten years, which would make him in his early to mid-thirties. She was newer to the force, and while he might be respected, she wasn't. "People know me, no one suspects."

But Cynthia wasn't so sure. Guardian Aladestra had come around in the last few days, when Garrant was off guard duty of the verax-acis, and Cynthia manned the cell with Paul.

She had checked the bars better than any inspector could have, testing even the bricks where the hinges rested. Aladestra had surveyed the constables on duty with scrutiny, like she didn't trust them.

And why should she?
Cynthia wondered. Several verax-acis had come up missing in the last month. But that wasn't anything Cynthia had a part in; if Garrant did, she didn't know.

A blast of light behind them brought a shout from Cynthia's lips, and she turned to see the growing light over the tops of houses from several streets away. The reverberation of the wyrded blast sent a shock wave high into the sky. The buildings shuddered around her, and Cynthia looked up in time to see several windows overhead blast out from the force of the attack. She covered her head, backing away as glass rained down around them, but all the debris missed her and Garrant by several feet. Her partner hadn’t even bothered protecting himself.

"The Ivory Tower," she said.

"A suicide mission," Garrant said. "That's our cue."

Cynthia felt sick to her stomach, hoping the Guardian was alright. When she turned back to her task it was to see two figures materialize out of the shadows of another alley directly across from them.

"Blanch," Garrant addressed the haggard-looking woman who stepped forward. Her brown hair created a greasy wreath around her head. It made Cynthia crinkle her nose just imagining what the other woman smelled like.

"Are they ready?" Blanch asked, her soothing voice belying her outward homeliness.

"They know
something's
up," Garrant said, tossing a look behind him at the bars containing the verax-acis.

"They feel him rising," Blanch replied.

"Who?" Cynthia said, surveying the clean-cut man that came with Blanch. He stood back, his hands tucked behind his back, watching the constables as if daring them to move. Cynthia didn't dare.

"It's time to do the Master’s bidding!" Blanch crooned. With an outstretched hand, she launched a volley of black wyrd at the bars of the cell. They clanged loudly in the night, and Cynthia stepped back, sure someone would hear that despite all attention being drawn to the suicide attack at the base of the Ivory Tower, the seat of power in the Holy Realm.

She should really go check on that; at least it would get her away from here. Her nervous feet stepped further away from the group at the verax-acis cell. But she stopped, frozen in dread, when the first of the black-robed, milky white figures stepped out of the darkness of their dungeon and took his first whiff of freedom.

Like maggots,
she thought of the verax-acis as more and more of them spilled out of the darkened depths and into the cleansing rain.

The first turned and looked at her, cocking its head as if listening to something only he could hear. His mouth distended, popping the joints of his jaw and unhinging them in a way that was more snake than human.

Cynthia stumbled back. Her boot caught on a curb and she fell into a pool of lamplight. The verax-acis shambled closer and into the light. His bald head reflected the lamplight like a small moon come to perch over her head.

From within his gaping maw came a gurgling noise, like he was choking on his own blood, wheezing through phlegm. When his fingers sought purchase on her scalp, Cynthia screamed out. The feeling of worms and bugs skittering through her brain blocked out all other thoughts as the verax-acis fed.

Cynthia's voice was plucked from her throat, but it still sounded in the night, her shrieks of terror issuing forth from the mouth of the verax-acis as it drained her of all life.

Mag was no stranger to deceit. She had, for some time, been a devout alarist. That had all changed with the death of Pharoh and Sylvie and the Splitting of the World. She realized she had been nothing more than a child, playing at games, knowing nothing of the repercussions.

To be honest, she hadn't thought much about the immortal soul. Since she knew she was going to live forever, she thought there was no reason to really worry herself about what would come after death. So, Mag honestly didn't think
anything
came after death. The votaries were charlatans to her thought, and the Carloso was written by a regular man, not someone in the grips of religious ecstasy.

Furthermore, she didn't fear death, and she didn't fear dealing death either.

But standing there when the world split, watching the Shadow Realm go dark with a deafening silence, the stigmata branding on the smoking palms of everyone around her, she knew true fear of the religious kind.

Mag broke her gaze from the snow falling outside Sara's bedroom window, and looked down to her own palms, the green dots marking her as one from the Realm of Earth. She rubbed at them, as she did now and then, wondering if maybe they would ever wash off, but they didn’t.

Despite the pain that had come with the branding, and the
feeling
of the Goddess rolling through their minds, making them feel her displeasure emotionally, Mag had thought maybe it was all a delusion.

She had seen Pharoh fall from the Ivory Tower, and when her body impacted on the unyielding ivory streets below, Mag had felt something break inside of her, and more than fear poured from her eyes.

She had been part of that. Mag had been part of the fall of Pharoh, the fall of goodness. She had retreated to hiding, and when she came out to Sara and Annbell, she had told them honestly of her past.

They listened, and gave her a chance to prove that she truly had changed her ways. Since then she had served them in whatever way she could, earning their trust as if she were dying of thirst and they were the only people in the world who had water. So she felt they were also the only people that could absolve her of her past sins against the Twin Flames.

She stood there, Van pasted to the wall with her wyrd, a guard watching over Sara in case by some odd chance Mag's wyrd didn't hold the traitor, waiting for Annbell to arrive.

An hour after the green orb had floated over the land and down the mountain passes, the ground glowed green in the courtyard of the Guardian's Keep. Mag stirred from her contemplations of the past, and watched a black maple grow from the ground, rapidly unfolding and blooming before melting away to reveal Annbell, dressed her in black furs.

Annbell opened her arms and her apprentice, Maeven, the boy who’d learned about Sara's illness, stumbled away, obviously not yet used to traveling through the ground.

With a word to the guard, letting him know where she was going, Mag left the Guardian's bedroom, lifted the skirts of her winter robes, and sped down the stairs. She met Annbell and Maeven halfway down the stairs, the two of them making their way up to Sara's room.

“How are the towns?” Mag asked Annbell, falling into step beside her. Mag gave Maeven a nod and a smile, thankful that he had alerted them that Sara's illness was what poisoned the realm. She had never thought the realms and the Guardians were so linked.

“Not good,” the Guardian answered, her face an unreadable mask. Annbell often looked like that, but Mag could tell there were emotions warring under the surface.

“Chaos dwarves?” she asked her ruler.

“No, malignant wyrd,” Annbell told her, pushing through the office door. She hesitated before the door to the bedroom. “He is still being held here?”

“Yes, he is bewyrded against the wall, and a guard is posted there in case. I wanted him to see what he had done to her while we waited for your return,” Mag told her, unsure how this news would settle with Annbell.

“Good,” Annbell said simply. Tension Mag hadn’t known she was harboring eased from her shoulders.

“Whatever he put in the tea, he had to be getting it from somewhere outside the keep.”

“And where he got it is among the answers we intend to find out. You will be charged with getting the answers from him, are you up to that?” Annbell asked without looking at the sorceress she had left in charge while she was gone.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Guardian.”

“Good, wait here,” Annbell told her and Maeven, and stepped into the room. Soon after, the guard came back out, and the door shut heavily on a muffled shriek. Mag didn't blink, only nodded to the guard as he left the office.

Maeven looked a little green around the edges, but Mag wasn't sure if it was because of his recent traveling, or if it had to do with what could be happening behind the closed doors. They would never truly know what Annbell was doing in there, since the door was wyrded against eavesdropping, and it was thick enough that no noise escaped the chamber.

“Come, let’s sit for a moment,” Mag said, turning him to the chairs set before Sara's desk, where she would audience with guests or officials. They both took a chair, Mag turning her back to the wooden box where the Orb of Aldaras rested. “Annbell said something about malignant wyrd?”

“Yes,” Maeven said, glancing back to the door. He rubbed his hands over his head, where the stubble he had arrived with had grown in thick and stuck up at odd angles around his head.

“I don't like the sounds of that,” Mag said. She looked at the desk where she had decrypted the message on the old parchment. “Malignant how? Chaotic, or do you think it had to do more with caustics?”

“Annbell didn't seem to think the caustics had anything to do with it,” Maeven confirmed Mag’s fear.