The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) (27 page)

Linciard obeyed, silently cursing himself for six different kinds of fool.  Yes, the sex was great, but that didn't guarantee they could work, and he should know that by now.  Prying, bargaining, begging—it was too early for that kind of shit, and his arms stung from the marks of Rallant's nails.

Still, he thought maybe if they were cautious with each other...

He tied the drawstrings tight then moved to Rallant's side, unbarring the door.  Trying not to think of grabbing the man and hauling him back behind the privacy screen.  He had to be good.

Outside, the amber glow of the wards illuminated the upper hall.  Rallant slid past him before he could make sure it was clear, then looked to the right, toward the captain's quarters.  “Oh,” he said mildly.

Linciard leaned out, heart thumping, and saw Scout Weshker—that piking useless Corvishman—rise from a seated position by the captain's door.  His expression of prurient amusement flashed to alarm as his eyes met Linciard's, and he sprang like a cricket to the stairs.

“Little shit,” Linciard hissed as he disappeared below, feeling a knot incongruously loosen in his stomach.  That was the secret out, then.  Not that he should have kept it in the first place.

“You're letting him go?”

“What else would I—“

A hand came to rest on his neck, sharp nails digging into the muscle, and suddenly he felt dizzy.  A cloying taste filled his mouth, his throat.  At his ear, warm breath moved, more important than the words.  “
Deal with him.
”

He nodded slowly, his headache gone.

Chapter 7 – A Conspiracy of One

The whiteness opened to swallow him whole, and as he plunged into the sea of nacreous light beneath it, he knew he would never escape.  Never remember—

A banging noise shocked him awake, setting him clawing at the blankets in disoriented panic.  His mentalist training snapped into place an instant later, and he thought,
Geraad, I'm Geraad.  I'm in the necromancer's lair, not the Palace.  I'm all right.

The last bit was questionable, but at least the rest was true.

“What is it?” he called cautiously in the near-dark.  From under the bed he heard a querulous chitter, some kind of question in the goblin tongue, but he was too rattled to pick up either Rian's thoughts or those of the person outside his door.

“Enkhaelen needs you,” came the muffled reply.

“What—  What for?”

“Didn't say.  But he wasn't happy.”

Instantly everything that Geraad had done that could possibly have angered the necromancer flew through his head.  His behavior in the Palace—
since
the Palace—and every question he had asked Tarren Enwick or any of the other bizarrely talkative 'new mages', every spying mission he had sent Rian on, and all the speculations he was trying to assemble into some clear picture of Enkhaelen's purpose...

“I—  I'll be right out.”

He flung the bedsheets back and cued the chamber light with a thought.  The place was not large: bubble-shaped but with a flattened floor, it seemed to have been formed into the basalt rather than carved, and the striations of the walls flowed and twisted beneath the etchings of the wards.  The desk, shelves and bed-platform had been extruded from the floor like hot glass, and though the first two were still bare, the platform housed a rather comfortable feather mattress atop a thicker straw one.  A wooden trunk—the only movable piece of furniture—sat at the foot of the bed, Geraad's few personal effects crammed inside.

Since the Palace, he had spent most of his time in here, curled up in the bedding and mindworking himself to ameliorate the flashbacks.  It was difficult and dangerous; the terror was still fresh, threatening to draw him into a feedback loop every time he tampered with it, and there was no one here who could draw him out.  But it was the only way he could make the memories stop crushing him.

He couldn't imagine what the girl they'd rescued was going through.

Reluctantly he slung himself up and started digging through the trunk.  It was difficult to find a clean robe; the sniff-test didn't work because of the pervasive scent of sulfur, and they were all the same forest-green color and traditional cut as the one he had arrived in.  Apparently Enkhaelen had latched onto that as his preference and just duplicated it.  This place was wearing on him and he didn't even know how long he had been here, only that the laundry service had come to his door twice and he had chased them away with two identical nervous fits.

Laundry service!  In a volcano!

It wasn't supposed to be like this.  He was a prisoner of the most monstrous mage the world had ever seen, yet there was laundry service and dining-hall camaraderie and tolerance of goblin shenanigans.  At least this summons sounded appropriately threatening.

He nearly leapt from his skin as a small body flew at him, impacting his shoulder then struggling to cling to his undershirt.  “Rian, Light, don't do that,” he hissed as the goblin got one hand knotted in his hair, one prehensile foot planted on his back and the other—and the tail—wrapped around his upper arm for balance.  The goblin's weight was negligible but the long black digits pressed hard into his skin.

“Is trouble?” Rian hissed in his ear, eclipsing the view with his mottled-grey face.

Geraad exhaled a long sigh.  In a change as bizarre as the rest of the situation, the goblin had become protective of him.  He suspected it was because Rian could move around the complex so easily in comparison.  Though his Sanctuary was still set in his Master chambers up in Valent, that would be a one-way trip, whereas Rian had been in and out of the complex repeatedly through the air-shafts that ran its length and depth.

“No more than usual, I hope,” he said, and finally just picked a robe at random.  At least Enkhaelen was not forcing him to wear the black garb of his minions.

He had been called to Enkhaelen's side three times since the Palace, each phrased like a request but giving him the feeling of a tacit order.  All told, he had spent about six candlemarks with the terrifying man, most of it dedicated to minding the dead hawk in his spying mirror while he tended to his cadavers, or fetching books or bottles for him, or sorting bins of shattered crystalline objects into colored piles.  Enkhaelen barely talked, and Geraad had been too intimidated to ask any questions—but at least nothing bad had happened.

“Would you get off me, please?” he told the goblin, and slung the robe on over his nightwear once Rian reluctantly obeyed.  With the addition of slippers, he was ready to go.

The tippy-tap of goblin toes followed him to the door.  “Rian,” he started, but faltered at the goblin's sad-eyed stare, always his bane.  “You know you can't come in with me.  Enkhaelen won't allow it.”

“Not care,” said the goblin, then scuttled over to wrap spindly arms around Geraad's robe-swaddled legs.  “Is trouble, will come with!”

“If he bars you out, promise you'll go to the dining-hall and have a snack.”

“Snack!”

“And not try to come back through the vents and snoop around.”

The goblin's notched ears drooped, but he nodded solemnly.  “If snack, not come back.”

“Right.  You promise?”

“Ys.”

“Then...very well.”

With a happy chirp, the goblin climbed him like a ladder until he was standing on his shoulders, arms locked around his forehead and pointy chin resting in his hair.  Geraad sighed, almost used to his goblin headgear by now, and set his hand on the swirled basalt of the door.

It irised open to reveal an agitated black-robe.  The lower half of the man's face had been eclipsed by dark swellings the size of marbles, twisting his mouth and turning the knob of his throat into a fist-sized monstrosity, but his eyes were clear.  They flicked from Geraad's long-suffering expression to the goblin's toothy grin.  “Ah...follow me,” he gurgled, and set forth in a shambling gait, some part beneath his robe just as deformed as his face.

At his heels, Geraad absently rubbed his own stubbled but unmarred jaw.  His visceral disgust had ebbed somewhat, but he wished he could feel something nobler.  Empathy maybe.  Instead he couldn't help but think
monster
when he saw these people, even the friendly ones.

As they passed through the corridors, Rian adjusted himself around Geraad's shoulders to hang less awkwardly.  Geraad worried about what Enkhaelen would say; there was no love lost between necromancer and goblin.  He sometimes wondered if Enkhaelen's tolerance of Rian existed merely to keep him from fleeing.

The ambient temperature rose as they neared the core of the complex, then chilled again as they took a side-corridor that fed into the path to Enkhaelen's laboratory.  The many gates along the route stood aberrantly open, and as they neared the laboratory he saw that its door was open too, sending an icy current up the corridor along with a few blue sparks.

“All yours, Iskaen,” said the black-robe, gesturing him forward then turning to jog back up the corridor.  Geraad stared after him, aghast.  If things were so bad that Enkhaelen's grotesque minions just ran away...

In the ensuing silence, he heard Enkhaelen arguing.

He stayed in place for a long moment, trying to catch a second voice, but there was none—just Enkhaelen pausing between tirades.  Not sure if he would be interrupting, Geraad edged toward the entry and felt Rian's fingers pinch harder into his shoulders.

Beyond the doorway, light flickered erratically and pale sparks drifted on unfelt breezes, but otherwise the view seemed normal.  The basalt slabs still held their array of corpses, the far wall held its counters and cupboards and endless racks of weird supplies, and the articulated skeletons—human and otherwise—stood on their supportive stands like empty-eyed sentinels.

The light was coming from the side opposite the portal-frame and Enkhaelen's office.  Nervous, Geraad leaned through the archway to look.

That end of the lab was a broad empty circle, clear of any furniture or tools or even light-fixtures.  Geraad had never seen Enkhaelen use it but had examined the area surreptitiously, and knew that the concentric rings inlaid in its floor made it a protected casting chamber.  A broad band of warded floor stretched between it and the rest of the lab, and the walls that cupped it were etched densely with containment runes.

Right now, the whole array scintillated with energy.  Small arcs of electricity coursed along the three rings to leap erratically inward, collecting in Enkhaelen's hands and swaddling his form in a shifting cloak of blue-white light.  On the outskirts and the walls, the ward-runes glowed molten orange, stressed by the power they were containing.  As Geraad watched, a few bright bolts escaped the wards to spider along the ceiling and spit sparks through half the room.

“No, I can't simply drop it,” Enkhaelen snapped at his invisible conversation partner.  “I've been working on this for five marks straight.  Why can't you make an appointment like every—  Yes, I know you're my master, but that doesn't give you the right to—  No—  Yes, but—  Wait, I see him now.  Iskaen, get over here!”

Though every instinct screamed at him to run away, Geraad obeyed.  As he came to the edge of the warded area, Rian arched on his back and hissed.

“What in the world possessed you to bring that?” said Enkhaelen, pointing with his chin as his hands were enmeshed in the energies.  “Dismiss it, I'll not have it foxing up my work.”

“Rian, go get your snack,” said Geraad, not turning his gaze from the lightning-covered necromancer.  Rian hissed again then sprang off, and he heard hard digits scratching on the ground in retreat.

Enkhaelen stared after the goblin, electricity reflecting in his eyes like mania.  Then he fixed his attention on Geraad and said, “You're a Warder, but do you have any experience with Energies?”

Geraad blinked.  “The introductory coursework, yes.  We all go through that—“

“Nothing more substantial?”

“I was never interested in the discipline...”

“Blast.  Well, it will have to do, you're the only standard mage here.  Ward yourself as best you can; I'll try to dampen this.”

Still blinking, Geraad automatically began shaping wards.  Drawing energy from this place was easy; the magma core throbbed in his veins the moment he opened to it, and the ambient level of the laboratory surpassed his own, making the magic funnel into him in an automatic attempt at equilibrium.  He tried to use it up as quickly as it came, but even after quadruple-warding himself and adding several peripherals to circulate the influx, his nerves still hummed with extra power.

Meanwhile, Enkhaelen was grounding much of what he held—forcing it into the three metal rings and the wall-wards until they glowed dangerously yellow-white.  As his cloak of power faded to intermittent crawling sparks, he raised his arms then snapped them forward, leaving bold blue images of them imprinted on the air.

Geraad had never seen such a thing before, and for a moment thought they were after-images.  But as Enkhaelen crouched to touch the innermost metal circle, the blue imprints moved with him, energy coursing through their spectral fingers to maintain his primary spell.  With his real hands, he drew a quick redirect-sigil on the metal, and Geraad felt the tension in the chamber ease as an array further down the laboratory lit up cherry-red.  The containment wards dulled to the same, their arcane pressures balanced.

Straightening, the necromancer swept his arms up to meet the spectral imprints.  Flesh and power meshed again.  Though the coils of electricity around him had lessened, they still made dangerous patterns up and down his arms; at his beckon, Geraad could not help but flinch.

“Come in,” said Enkhaelen.  “I need you to take this off my hands.  If I drop it, all this work is gone.  Oh, and don't step on the blades.”

Geraad glanced down to see the fused crystal daggers arrayed between the circles.  He had watched Enkhaelen create a few, picking shards from the piles he had sorted and hand-melting them together with high energy.  Even then, he had thought it was odd that they were all multicolored.  Each color of crystal had a different resonance, and the haphazard way they were put together meant their channels were mismatched; if Enkhaelen meant them as tools, he would have to smooth such imperfections out lest they explode at first use.

Swallowing his trepidation, Geraad crossed the field of sullen runes and stepped over the first ring.  Electricity crawled up and around his outermost ward, and then he was inside and striding deeper.  The ambient energy heightened with each stride, making his skin tingle, and as he passed over the second ring into an even denser atmosphere, he had to wonder what it had been like before Enkhaelen dampened it.

Across the third ring, static crackled through his short hair and crawled up his robes.  Had he been wearing metal accessories, he might have been burned; as it was, the temperature spiked and sweat immediately began rolling down his back.