The Fifth Vertex (The Sigilord Chronicles) (30 page)

"As you wish, master," Anderis replied into the blood-filled trough.
 

Cailix hung on her side, wrapped in a fish net, gagged and trussed up a few feet above the deck. After Anderis's spell had failed, he had taken his rage out on her, beating her like a butcher tenderizing a cut of meat. She winced at the memory of the blows raining down on her face and body. Everything hurt. Her bottom lip was swollen, and she imagined her right eye must look like a blueberry pie by now.

Anderis turned from the trough and stepped over to Cailix, his hands folded behind his back and a disgusting, smug grin on his face. She imagined what it would feel like to cut that head from his neck.
We'll see if he's still grinning when I'm done with him
, she thought.

"In case you have any aspirations for escape, let me dash those hopes for you now. It seems your sigilord friend did not survive the briene assault on Waldron, nor did anyone else for that matter. It was a bloodbath." He smiled. "You might have enjoyed that part."

She wriggled and kicked, screamed behind her gag. Her tears dripped onto the deck below. She wasn't supposed to cry—strong women didn't cry. She had lost people before, caretakers and food providers mostly, and hadn't shed a tear at their passing. So why would the death of people she barely knew bother her? Perhaps it didn't, and she was only crying because of the beating.
That's got to be the reason
, she tried to convince herself.

Anderis's smile widened. He was enjoying this, making her show weakness in front of all these men and mages.

"Have you anything to say?" Anderis asked. "Here, let me." He reached through the next and removed the gag.
 

She coughed and tried to spit at him, but she failed to muster the saliva needed. Her mouth was sticky and dry and tasted like other people's blood. Useless, impotent blood.
 

"Why haven't you killed me?" she asked with an itchy, dry throat.

Anderis blinked.
He's hiding something
, she thought.

He recovered quickly, but not quickly enough that she didn't notice. If they had been playing at cards, she could have bought a castle with the winnings.

"Because the blood in your veins is mine," he answered, "and that makes it powerful. Think of your skin like the walls of a bank. I keep you around in case I need to make a withdrawal, and as long as you keep making more blood, I can keep making withdrawals."

"What if I were to kill myself to deprive you of your bank?"
 

"Why do you think you are wrapped up like a dead fish, my dear?" Anderis grinned again. "I am protecting my investment."

"Who was she?" Cailix asked, trying to change the subject, and more importantly, stall for time until she had a plan.

"Who was whom?"

"The woman you raped to make me. Surely no one would've given themselves to you freely," she said, leering, hoping the insult would make him angry—angry enough to make a mistake.

He pivoted and walked toward the captain at his great wheel, calling back to her, "The truth of it is I haven't the faintest idea. She was probably some bar wench who caught my fancy one night. It's a miracle she survived the encounter at all, let alone carried you to term."

If it's possible to kill someone twice, I'm going to do that to him
, she thought.

As Anderis reached the captain's wheel, Cailix could make out some of their conversation.

"…until we reach the island?" Anderis asked.

"We should be there at the dawn of the third day from now, sir mage," replied the captain.

"And you say there are a few thousand people there?"

"Aye sir, could be as many as ten thousand if you count all the inland farmers and the fishing villages."

"That should be plenty," Anderis replied.

"For what?"

"Just be ready to earn your pay, Captain, and make sure a skiff is ready for me at dawn tomorrow with a few oarsmen," her former master replied.
 

They're going to kill the people on that island like they are no more than a herd to thin, just for their blood
, Cailix thought. Her mind again turned to escape.

Mercenaries paced back and forth across all the decks, some of them still getting seasick over the gunwales. She counted six blood mages, all of whom were assembled up on the foredeck, gesticulating to each other and at the ships beyond them, a large naval fleet. The ships were of different sizes and shapes and flew different banners.
More pirates
, she thought.

She had been submerged in useless blood, unable to cast a single spell. She wondered if her own blood would be as ineffective. All she had to do was twist around in the net enough so she could get her teeth close to her arm.

"Aerlissa," Anderis called, turning back from a conversation with the captain. She froze, hoping he hadn't noticed anything. "Do you want to see a demonstration of the true power of the Order of the Sanguine Crystal?"

She said nothing.

"Keep your eyes to the sky." he pointed upward. "Shortly, you will see what we are really capable of."

A moment later the sea crackled with a thunder unlike anything she had heard before. It was a terrible boom that sounded as if a god had reached down and broken the sky itself. Two more booms filled her ears and made them ring.

Everyone on the ship looked up, mesmerized by what they saw. Three flaming cannonballs, bigger than she could imagine, streaked out of the sky. They separated and each took its own course, screaming toward the earth.

Nobody was watching her.

Cailix writhed and spun until at last she could reach her shoulder with her mouth. She bit into it and stifled a scream. She sucked at her own blood until she had a mouthful, then, imagining the same flaming blood she had used on one of the sailors before, she sprayed it in a broad mist onto the ropes.

They caught fire, the multicolored flames licking at the higher ropes as they raged upward and across the net. Cailix kicked and clawed, pulled and stretched, hoping that the ropes would give way before her escape turned into a cremation.

A swath of net snapped away and her legs dropped out beneath her. She fell through the net to her shoulders, then stuck, face to face with the searing flames. She held up her arm to shield her face and her skin bubbled and burned. With another fierce twist, she shrugged into as straight a line as possible and slipped through the hole onto the deck.

All hands on the ship still stood transfixed by the falling fireballs. Cailix ran for the nearest gunwale, nearly falling as pain wracked her legs and torso. The sailor who stood between her and the ocean never saw her coming. She yanked his knife from his belt, slit his throat with it, then pushed him overboard and plunged into the water alongside the dying mariner.

* * *

Urus had taken a breath, at first inhaling air, then finishing with saltwater. When he opened his eyes, the cave chamber with the inscribed stone slab and the horde of oncoming briene was gone. There was nothing but darkness: cold, wet, salty darkness.

His ears and head hurt, and his chest felt as if it was being crushed by a boulder. The pain was unbearable, worse than when his ears would get punched by his sire as a sick punishment for being deaf. He choked on the salty water and swallowed some of it. He wanted to open his mouth and gasp for air, but he was aware enough of being underwater to resist that urge, as such a gasp would be the end of him.

There's something very wrong with a Kestian meeting his end by drowning
, he thought, struggling to figure out which way was up.
 

No one is meeting any ends here
, came another thought. It was the voice of his own mind, but it had that strange tinge to it. It was Murin.

A hand pushed up into his armpit, another pressing against his back. Urus's fingertips tingled, as did his toes. He felt dizzy and his eyelids grew heavy. He longed to take a nap.

Enough of that, Urus. Swim up or you will be that Kestian who drowned in the ocean
, Murin said within his mind.

Urus tried. He kicked his legs back and forth and lashed out with his arms. He was a terrible swimmer, as anyone who grows up in a desert should be. Kestians didn't swim in water; they saved every last drop for crops and drinking. One might as well have been swimming in an ocean of gold.

At some point he was vaguely aware of the fact that he had stopped paddling. Then his arms stopped moving, and the world went black, even blacker than the salty depths of the ocean.
 

A slap across the face jolted him awake, and he threw up bile and saltwater. His head was above water.

Can you tread water?
asked Murin.

"I think so," Urus replied aloud, still not used to communicating with thought instead of his hands, which were currently occupied trying to keep himself afloat. He looked around to see Murin before him, casually treading water as if he could do that all day without fatigue. But that was all there was—in every direction there was nothing but ocean, an infinite blue expanse with no land in sight.

"Where are we?" he asked.

Murin squinted up at the sky and swished left and right in the water. Urus had no idea what he would be looking for, there were no landmarks in the endless water, just clear open sky that met the horizon in every direction.
 

Murin thought,
We're clearly in the middle of the Faernath Sea
.

"How can you tell that?" Urus asked. "And more importantly, where is that?"

"I have neither the time nor the energy to explain how I know. Suffice it to say that we are roughly two days journey by ship—a fast one at that—northeast of Waldron harbor."

"There's nothing out here. Why did we end up here when we traveled through the vertex?" Urus asked, his legs and arms starting to settle into a synchronized rhythm, though he was sure he was going to have to discard Hugo and the rest of his heavy gear soon.

"Do you know anything about n-dimensional geometry?" Murin asked.

"Of course not," replied Urus.

"The vertices are unique in that, in order to form a barrier between universes, they must exist in multiple universes at once. The stone slabs are really just anchor points for the real vertex, which we cannot see."

"What does all that have to do with us floating in the middle of an ocean?"

"Everything, boy," Murin said. "The vertices are millennia old. Over the ages the universes have changed position relative to each other…drifted in the quantum foam where both universes reside. That means the stone slabs and the real vertices are not in the same place relative to each universe any longer. That is why we did not appear at Waldron's vertex and why we are not standing before a stone slab now."

"So where is the stone slab?" Urus was going to ask even more questions, like
What in the hell is a quantum foam?
but stopped short when the sky erupted with flame. He felt pressure against the inside of his ears and could see waves forming on what used to be the calm surface.

He and Murin both stared, slack-jawed and in awe, at the flaming orbs dropping out of the sky.
 

The heavens are falling
, Urus thought.

Not quite, but an altogether appropriate analogy
, Murin replied.
Asteroids, pulled from a safe orbit around this planet. The amount of blood it would have taken the Order to discover and compel those rocks is mind-boggling
.
In fact, I am not sure it would have been possible on their own
.

A wave of emotion rushed from Murin to Urus, a gut-wrenching swirl of despair, hatred, and anger.

"Why would they knock rocks out of the heavens?" Urus asked aloud.

They've discovered the same temporal shift we have. They know destroying the stone is only part of the task. They need a much more potent weapon, something like the destruction of a falling asteroid.

They watched in silence, horrified. The asteroids streaked out of the sky, leaving a contrail of rock and a thin streak of what looked like clouds behind, highlighting the path to destruction like the stroke of a devil's paintbrush.
 

As each massive rock slammed into the earth, pulsating rings of light flashed outward from the impact spot; then a cloud of smoke and ash shaped like a monstrous mushroom appeared. Even from as far away as they were, the ocean churned in response, whitecaps forming on the surface as far as the eye could see.

Murin spun around to face Urus.
Urus, one of those asteroids may have hit Kest. There would be nothing left, no life of any kind, not even the tiniest of creatures. Nothing for miles.

Nothing?
Urus thought of Uncle Aegaz, who he had last seen battling that traitor Kebetir. Goodwyn wasn't in Kest, but there were thousands of innocent people there. They had culled him, but that was the Kestian way, and they didn't deserve to die.

Tears welled up in his eyes and ran down his face.
All those dead people
, he thought.

Murin grabbed Urus by the shoulders, somehow keeping himself afloat with just his feet.