Drake of Tanith (Chosen Soul) (21 page)

The priestess stopped at the door and gestured to its knob. “Please go inside and help yourselves to some refreshments.”

She waited as Loki and Grolsch exchanged another uncertain look and Loki finally turned the knob. The door opened into none other than a kitchen. It was a simple kitchen, at that, possessing stone walls and round windows that allowed streams of light into a rather small, definitely quaint interior. A single wooden table sat at the center of the kitchen. Along one wall hung tools for stoking the fire and cooking stews and meats. At one window hung a planter where several herbs were steadily growing. At another wall rested a raised tub with pipes for flowing water, and a rack for hanging pots and pans. There was a brick oven here, and from its fiery recesses came the smell of fresh baked bread.

Atop the table rested two plates, two cups, and a steaming pitcher of what smelled like black tea. A small white bowl held sugar cubes. Another, clear jar seemed to contain honey.

Loki glanced back at the priestess, but she only nodded, continued to smile, and gestured for the two of them to enter the kitchen. Loki resigned himself to whatever was going to happen that day – and he went inside.

The feel in the room was instantly inviting. The air was warm, but not too warm, and it smelled so good, Loki wondered whether the bread cooking in the oven was nearly done. He was hungry.

Grolsch sat his large body down at the kitchen table, and Loki followed suit. The priestess nodded at them once and then left them alone, closing the door behind her.

It was a while before either of them spoke. Grolsch folded his hands on the table top. Loki fidgeted a bit. And then Grolsch said, “So here we are in Magus’s kitchen.”

“Better than the bathroom, I guess.”

Loki ran a hand through his hair and looked over his shoulder at the windows streaming in light. “Not what I would have expected from the god of magic,” he mumbled.

“It even has flies,” Grolsch said.

Loki turned back around to see what his companion was talking about. A single black fly had alighted atop the tea pot. Loki frowned at it. The feeling of magic in the air intensified.

Grolsch swatted lazily at the fly and it took off to circle quickly over the two of them and then land once more on the table top. Grolsch slowly raised his hand and balled it into a fist.

“Grolsch, no!” Just before it could come down, Loki grabbed Grolsch’s arm and held it still. His heart was hammering.

Laughter moved through the room, a whisper at first that built into a rumble. Loki’s eyes widened. He stared at the fly. The fly stared back.

There was a flash of light that temporarily blinded him, and the rolling laughter at once sounded much closer, and much more human. Loki lowered the hand he’d raised to shield his eyes from the brightness and found himself staring at a young blond man who sat across from him at the wooden table. The fly was gone.

“We came here because Drake was coming here,” said Grolsch, his expression a little unsettled since he’d almost tried to squish the god of magic. “Tanith,” Grolsch clarified. “He said you owed him a favor.”

“I did,” Magus said. “I no longer do. But I’m willing to make a new bargain.” At this, he looked once more at Loki.

“With me?” Loki asked.

“A
small
bargain,” Magus said. “I’ll send you to where your sister has gone – in exchange for just one thing.”

“What?” Grolsch and Loki asked at once.

Magus gracefully stood from the table and, without looking, waved his hand at the only bare wall in the small kitchen. The wall warped and wavered as a portal swirled to life. “You need to make a decision, Loki. Soon, you’ll need to decide what to believe.” His eyes flashed green, then blue, and then brown once more. Loki’s own eyes widened. “There’s a lot of power in a name, priest. When the time comes, just make sure you call out the right one.”

Magus’s deep brown eyes speared holes through Loki, but he couldn’t look away. Then the god of magic stood to the side and gestured to the now-open portal.

Loki blinked, shook his head as if to clear it, and forced himself to his feet. Grolsch followed suit. Together, the two skirted the kitchen table and came to stand before the portal.

“Where is it?” Loki asked as he peered through the transportational door and into the red and black landscape beyond. He already knew the answer, but there was a part of him that nonetheless hoped Magus would tell him something other than what he knew to be true. It was worth a try.

“You know where it is,” Magus responded, dashing Loki’s hopes at once.

Grolsch spoke up from where he stood at Loki’s shoulder. “Nisse,” he said. “She’s in Nisse. This isn’t good.”

“Why is she there?” Loki asked, although he knew the answer to that as well. It had something to do with Drake of Tanith and his ancestry, no doubt. He imagined his sister, borne of ice and winter, in the midst of that red heat, and a little more of his hope trickled away like melted snow.

“Not a welcoming land,” Grolsch said. “We should take water.”

And weapons
, thought Loki. He felt the missing weight at his back and remembered that he’d lost his bow.
It doesn’t matter,
he thought next. Looking into that plane of red and death, he realized he would probably never leave it. He would die there, on that parched, burned ground, weapon or not.

Beside him, Magus raised his hand. Loki blinked as the air around the god began to glitter as if filled with gem dust. He blinked when the sparkling motes blinded him, and then felt a new, familiar weight at his back.

Loki glanced quickly over his shoulder. The top of his bow and the fletching of the nock ends of his arrows stared back at him. He had his weapon back. On instinct, he looked down. Sure enough, a full leather wine skin had been attached to his belt, and another just like it hung from Grolsch’s belt. They’d been given everything they’d just asked for, despite the fact that Loki hadn’t asked for his out loud.

Loki looked back up at Magus. Something like amusement flickered in the god of magic’s brown eyes. Other than that, he was unreadable.

“I still don’t know what you want from me,” Loki admitted, fear and confusion forming a knot in his stomach.

Magus held his gaze. “You will.”

“Right then,” said Grolsch – and without further preamble, the ork stepped through. Loki watched the portal swallow him and spit him back out on the other side. He continued to watch as Grolsch rearranged himself a little, and then he turned back to Magus. “What is the deal with the kitchen?” he asked, for some reason wanting to know.

Magus smiled. “I grew up in a house with a kitchen just like it.”

“You
grew up
?” Loki asked, feeling bewildered.

“Yes, Loki. All gods were mortal once. You would do well to keep that in mind.”

Loki had no idea what to make of that, much less what to say to it. So, he remained silent, nodded his farewell, and stepped through the portal.

Chapter Twenty

It was like taking a fish and giving it lungs. That was what being in Nisse felt like for Raven. At least, that’s what it felt like as far as
she
was concerned. Nisse was the land of fire, and she was the daughter of Malphas. She was
Winter
. To call her an ice princess would not necessarily be an insult so much as an absolute truth. She was out of her element here.

Raven stood at the window of Asmodeus’s private bed chamber and gazed out over the broken land beyond. She hugged herself, as if her arms could protect her from this place and its ruler. She thought of Drake. And then she thought of Lord Darken, the “twin” who had threatened them in the Witherlands.

She’d since learned that he was no twin after all. He was Darken, the ruler of the seventh plane of Hell, son of Asmodeus – the one that Magus had told her about.

Upon pulling her tightly into his arms and transporting her to his castle within Nisse, Lord Asmodeus had at once set about seeing to her “comfort.” She’d been assigned servants and guards, who had both accompanied her to the Lord’s private quarters. The guards were Nisse’s soldiers, massive and terrifying, and looked much like Adonides would have had he gained several sizes.

The servants were lesser devils, humanoid in form and function, and even wore the clothing of humans. They were strangely beautiful; their red skin was smooth, and their yellow eyes and yellow-orange streaked hair provided stark contrast. They looked like living, breathing flames.

Once they had sequestered her in Asmodeus’s chamber and the guards had left to station themselves in the hall outside, the servants offered Raven drinks and food and promised to acquire for her anything she desired.

Raven wanted nothing from them. By all rights, she should have been dying of thirst, but she was obviously being shielded from Nisse’s murderous temperatures, because she felt physically fine…. Other than the crippling fear.

However, Asmodeus’s servants seemed terrified to leave her side without seeing to at least some of her comfort, so after a few hours, Raven gave up and had begun to ask questions. Knowledge was power, and it was the one thing they could give her that she felt like accepting.

The servants were more than happy to answer these questions. They were an elemental sort of creature, and because their make-ups consisted so much of fire, they were a communal, flame-bound society. Wherever fire existed, these beings could see and hear and feel. The knowledge they acquired was shared throughout their entire species.

Hence, they knew quite a lot.

They happily told her about Lord Darken and how he had come to be the ruler of the seventh circle of Abaddon so many thousands of years ago. It happened on the prince’s thirty-first birthday. When Raven asked which prince they were referring to, they looked at her as if she’d gone stupid. “The lord’s son, of course,” they replied. And she knew it was as she thought; they meant Drake.

Drake decided to leave Abaddon, forever turning his back on the circles of Hell and all that they entailed. However, he was so much a part of the land, his soul and blood tied to it so strongly, that when he did this, he was literally torn in two.

On the Terran Realm, even divided as he was, he was still so much more powerful than the mortals around him, he quickly became what everyone now knew him to be: the infamous Bounty Hunter of Tanith.

In Abaddon, what was left behind was the part of him too immersed in the nine circles to let them go. Lord Darken was created, a shadow of the man he’d once been, and at once, the former lord of Phlegathos was assassinated. Darken became its king.

According to the fire servants, the steward of Malphas – Adonides – was indeed dead. But it was Darken who’d killed him, not Drake.

Raven shivered as she replayed all of this information in her head. With a sinking feeling of lost hope, she glanced over her shoulder at the room behind her. It was a darkly beautiful room, furnished simply and richly with what Raven could only imagine were the finest, most expensive things in any land. The floor was constructed of black and gray marble, with streams of real ruby running through it. It was polished to perfection, its smooth plane reflecting the flames of the fire place against one wall. Raven almost shook her head as her eyes fell upon the massive hearth. There was little need for one in Nisse, and this one had clearly been added purely for aesthetic purposes.

It was a monstrosity of a fire place, its enormous ruby-hewn casings carved in intricate, impossible detail, and at its mantle, the visage of a beast had been formed from the stone. The eyes of that beast glowed with the light of the fire that burned steadily beneath it. Raven felt as if it watched her.

The rugs that covered the stone floor were black and thick, taken from some giant, furry animal. There was a leather-backed chair in the room, tall and intimidating. The only other piece of furniture in the chamber was the bed.

Raven glanced at it and shivered. Four thick posts made of what looked like onyx or obsidian had been carved from floor to nearly a foot beneath the high ceiling above. Sheets of blood red satin or silk, or perhaps a mixture of both, adorned the mattress. She hadn’t yet summoned the courage to sit on the bed, but it looked soft. It looked as if you could fall into it – and keep falling forever.

Raven closed her eyes and turned away from the bed and the rest of the room and once more stared out over the endless circle of Nisse. She had already tried twice to open a portal out of the room. Of course she’d failed. Not so much as a spark of her power worked within the castle’s walls. She’d wasted so much energy trying too many things too many times, and now she felt diffused and empty.

She knew she needed to feed, but she’d never felt less like doing so. The desolation and desperation of Nisse was getting to her, it was seeping into her bones and her blood.
It could be worse
, she told herself wryly. She could feel the magic of the room protecting her as surely as it kept her prisoner. In here, the heat of Nisse couldn’t touch her. Out there, where the horizon of black met red, she wouldn’t last long. The harsh realm gave her the impression that she would fade into ash as surely as she breathed.

Frustration coiled in Raven’s belly. Drake had been left unconscious and bleeding on the ground in the Witherlands. She had no idea where her brother was, though her gut told her he was alive. And her lack of magical ability meant that her chances of leaving Nisse alive looked grim.

Raven curled her hands into fists and bowed her head.
I have to get out of here
. She knew that Asmodeus was using her as bait for his son. She knew in her heart that everything that was happening revolved around the infamous bounty hunter. Raven was a pawn on a chessboard covered with kings.