Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) (11 page)

“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.

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.

By now Lar and Bryn had removed the other bindings and Elias
covered Danica with their father’s duster. He took her face in his hands. “Danica,
can you hear me? It’s Elias. You’re safe now. I need you to wake up.” The three
companions held their breath as they waited, each with the bloom of hope
flowering in their bosoms.

Danica’s eyes snapped open and darted back and forth. Against
her blanched skin and in the half-light, her green eyes looked feral, lit with
a preternatural glow. “Danica...” Elias said softly.

“I’m sorry,” Danica said, her voice hollow and bereft of
inflection or intonation, “but Danica’s not at home right now.” Danica started
to hum a tuneless ditty, which was interspersed with bursts of maniacal
laughter and hysterical sobbing.

“Come on,” Elias said, his voice a whisper, “Let’s get her
out of here.” He gathered Danica in his arms and walked up the staircase and
out of the cursed manor, the dumbstruck Lar and Bryn trailing behind.

†

“She’s resting quietly now,” Phinneas said, closing the
door behind him.

“Will she recover?” said Elias, who had waited with Lar and Bryn
in the hall during the doctor’s ministrations.

“Come now,” Phinneas said, “Let’s go have a seat in the
kitchen. I’ll have Agnes fix us something.”

“I want to see my sister,” Elias said. A fist-sized lump of
panic rose from his stomach and lodged in his throat and he unconsciously
rested a hand on the pommel of his sword.

“Peace, Elias,” the doctor said. “You can see Danica
whenever you want, but she is sleeping deeply right now, and likely will do so
until tomorrow.” Phinneas looked pointedly at Elias’s hand.

Elias followed Phinneas’s gaze. He abruptly snatched his
hand from his sword, as if realizing he had picked up something hot. He felt Bryn’s
hands on his arm, well manicured and delicate, which seemed a contradiction for
he had seen how capable they were in a fight. Still, they were a woman’s hands,
and reminded Elias, with a sudden pang deep in his breast, how much he missed
Asa—a pain that he had buried and ignored. Lost in his thoughts, Elias realized
that Lar had been talking to him.

“Sorry,” Elias said, “I am not myself.”

The doctor led them into the kitchen where his housekeeper
served up steaming bowls of pheasant stew and a warm loaf of barley bread. The
three companions attacked the victuals. Elias tore off a piece of the rustic
bread and spoke around it as he chewed. “Agnes has made enough stew for us all.
Did you know we would be returning so soon?”

“Not exactly, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to be prepared
in case you and Lar found yourselves in need of my services, or if the
marauders responsible for attacking you left any more patients in their wake.”

Elias looked up from his bowl and swallowed. “Slade won’t
hurt anyone else ever again.” He ignored the doctor’s pinched brows and quickly
changed the subject. “Will Danica recover?”

Phinneas shifted uneasily under Elias’s penetrating gaze. “Danica
appears to have lost a lot of blood, but there is no indication of any internal
injury, or any external wounds.” The doctor looked down at his folded hands and
took a breath.

“Give it to me straight, Phinneas,” Elias said, using the doctor’s
given name for the first time in his life.

Lar and Bryn watched the interchange silently, food left
ignored for the moment, as they waited on Phinneas’s response.

“The markings on her body were not put there by any
conventional means. A hot iron would have left significant blistering. There’s
something more sinister at work here.”

“That I knew,” Elias said dryly. “But what of her wits? Has
her brain been addled?” Elias recounted her delirium during her brief period of
consciousness.

“She hasn’t gone soft in the head from physical trauma. I
haven’t detected any swelling in the skull or any dents or fractures. She
exhibits none of the signs of a concussion. Rather, her bout of hysteria is
probably
due to psychological stress and will pass.”

There was something in the way the doctor said the word
probably
,
a certain inflection, that gave Elias pause. “Probably?” he said. “What do you
mean by that?”

Phinneas leaned in and grabbed Elias’s wrists. “There may be
a more sinister cause of her delirium.”

Elias stiffened and pulled back, but the doctor’s gnarled
hands gripped him fast. “Out with it then,” Elias said.

“There are some marks on Danica’s skin that are different
from the others—two at her temples and several in her hairline.”

“Yes,” Elias said, “I’ve seen them. They’re bruises.”

“I studied the markings at length, and I’ve come to the
conclusion that they are not bruises. They’re burns, like the others, but they
weren’t caused by heat.”

Elias’s stomach dropped. “How can that be?”

Phinneas looked down at his hands, which still held Elias’s.
He wished for neither the first, nor the last time, that Padraic was here. He
felt a storm coming in his old bones, and he wasn’t sure he could weather it
without his oldest and truest friend. Padraic was the adventuresome one, not
him.

Phinneas looked up and fixed his large, sandy eyes on Elias.
“I’ve seen the like of these wounds before, when I was a medic on the Sheer. It
looks like frostbite.”

“When I fought Slade, he cast a bolt of fire at me. Cold
fire.”

“What?” Lar said. “God’s blood!”

“Fell magic, Lar,” Elias said. “The doctor is saying that
Slade tortured Danica with fell magic.”

Phinneas let go his hold of Elias. “As I studied the markings
I noticed they were in an odd shape that was somehow troubling. Then I realized
why—the burns at the temples were in the shape of thumb-prints. The burns in
the hairline seemed conclusive as well.”

“Hell,” Bryn said.

Elias imagined Slade taking Danica’s head in his hands, with
his thumbs at her temples and his fingers spreading across the crown of her
head, as oily smoke and the scent of burning flesh filled the room. Elias,
unable to remain sitting, stood. “What now?” he asked. “Have you ever treated
anything like this before? Can you guess what will be the effect of this dark
magic?”

“There are a couple of possibilities,” the doctor replied. “Slade
may have used his power as an implement of torture, to inflict pain, or he may
have used it to subvert her will and induce terror. Fell wizards feed on fear.”

Elias rubbed at the headache forming between his eyes. He
had suspected something like this when he saw the feral look in his sister’s
eyes, but he had allowed himself to hope her condition was due to fever or
bodily stress. “So,” he said, “Slade may have driven my sister mad with fell
sorcery.”

“Don’t think like that,” Phinneas said. “With time, and the
proper treatment she will recover.”

“Although she may never be the same person she was before,”
said Elias, “but I suppose that is true for all of us, now.” Elias paced as he
tried to wrap his mind around this new hurdle. He could feel the eyes of the
others on him, watching, waiting to see how he would react—waiting for him to
break. How happy and ignorant he had been just a couple of days ago. Swords and
sorcery had been the province of his father’s past and the lurid pulp fiction
he read, but now it seemed that everyone he encountered had their hands steeped
in the arcane, or in blood.

He had lusted for adventure since he was old enough to wield
a willow switch in mock combat with his schoolfellows, and for a glimpse into
the mysteries of the arcane. Now that he had scant a day’s worth of it, he and
the people he loved were either dead or broken. Elias laughed aloud, keenly aware
of the eyes of the others on him, but he cared not.

“Elias...” Lar ventured.

“I’m sorry,” Elias said, “I just think it’s rather ironic
that after a childhood of yearning to be somewhere, anywhere, with some kind of
action, it turns out that our sleepy little town is rife with magic and
secrecy.”

“What do you mean?” Phinneas asked.

“Well,” said Elias, unbuttoning the sleeve of his right arm
as he spoke, “for one it turns out that my father was an arcanist as well as a
Marshal. His sword gave me these.” Elias brandished the symbols burnt into the
flesh of his forearm, the red marks having already faded to a blue-black. Phinneas
grew still, but Elias gave him only a brief moment to consider this peculiarity
before rushing on.

“Macallister and Cormik can both use magic, and what’s more,
hired a fell wizard-assassin to murder my family. You, Doctor, seem to know an
awful lot about the arcane, and no doubt my father’s secrets. That potion you
gave me worked very well, and quickly, a little too quickly to be crafted
entirely from conventional methods, I think. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re
a wizard too! Then there’s Lady Denar, our newly appointed tax bursar. She’s a
dabbler
in the arcane, and is, if I’m worth my salt, anything but an officer of the treasury!”

Bryn shrugged nonchalantly as Lar and the doctor looked on
with knitted brows. “Elias,” said the doctor, “I can’t fault you in the least
for feeling overwhelmed, but let me try to put some things into perspective for
you.”

“Please do,” said Elias as he approached the table and put
one foot on his chair and leaned an elbow onto his knee.

“Your father was an arcanist,” Phinneas said, “but he didn’t
talk about it because he wanted to leave that life behind for your and Danica’s
sake as well as for his. Fact is, son, you come from a long line of people with
a natural gift for the arcane.”

Elias slapped Lar on the shoulder and winked in parody of one
of the more provincial citizens of the Creek. “Ain’t that shiny!”

“As far the Macallisters are concerned,” the doctor
continued, ignoring Elias’s outburst, “they may have picked up a couple of
parlor tricks, but wizards they most certainly are not. What the Macallisters
lack in talent, or wit, they make up for in wealth. Macallister’s knowledge of
the arcane likely begins and ends with the enchanted baubles and incantations
he’s bought from some unscrupulous wizard or merchant. Such items are quite
rare and expensive, but Macallister has coin in spades.”

Elias leaned in. “My father said as much, but how can you be
sure?”

Phinneas exchanged glances with Bryn. “Practitioners of the
arcane have a specific aura that other arcanists can sense or see.”

“Pardon?” asked Elias.

Phinneas smiled ruefully, while Bryn ripped off another
piece of bread. Around a mouthful she said, “It’s like those paintings and
etchings of saints and knights of old where they have a golden halo drawn
around their head. That’s a symbolic representation of an aura. Nowadays it’s
just an afterthought, and people think nothing of it. Truth is, everyone has an
aura but with an arcanist it’s glaringly evident. So much so that some wizards can
make your hair stand on end, and at times even common folk can sense them,
though they may not be able to see them.”