Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) (31 page)

“No. I meant the bucket. Really? A bucket of water? I
expected you would use magic to rouse me, or something more elegant,
not...this...” Elias somehow managed to shrug despite his chains.

“Your attempts to elicit a reaction from me are in vain, I’m
afraid. I have long ago sold my soul. Yet I warn you to think long and hard
before you trifle with me.”

Elias looked up at his captor. He could feel menace oozing
out from Sarad and sensed the dark energies that swarmed around him. He felt at
once very, very cold, as if the mere presence of the fell wizard sucked all the
heat from the room and his body alike. Sarad had the cowl of his robes pulled
up over his head, his countenance concealed under the veil of a preternatural
darkness, for not the barest scintilla of light touched upon his face.

Elias willed himself into a state of quasi meditation, first
dropping his awareness within himself, seeking the void as he had practiced in
painstaking hour upon hour with Ogden, and then reached out with his senses to
probe Sarad. He at once felt carefully restrained rage spilling out from the
Senestrati and something else: an acrid, sharp, metallic sensation that left a
peculiar taste in his mouth—fear.

“No,” said Elias. “I fear you mistake yourself, Sarad. Anger
fuels your every thought. You are beside yourself that the Denar line yet
lives, having escaped your careful, clever snare, for you need the queen’s
blood to break the geas that binds your masters.” Elias read in the stiffening
of Mirengi’s posture that the deduction he had made on the night of the coup
was correct.

“You have not yet won,” Elias taunted, “and both you and
your masters know it.”

“Enough!” Sarad hissed and with a swing of his arm sent a
bolt of icy energy into Elias.

The Marshal fell onto his back and felt his heart stutter. He
focused his will on making it beat. Despite the fact that his plan had been to
goad Sarad into killing him, his natural instinct was to fight for survival.

Elias recovered momentarily to find Sarad perched on his
chest, pressing his eye-less stare into him. “I can tear the information I need
from your mind, boy, but it would save us both a great headache if you
cooperate. If you do I give my word that your death will be swift and
painless.”

“Why do you hide your face, Sarad? I have seen your visage
before, or was that an illusion?” Before he finished speaking Elias felt a
weight boring into him, pushing through his skull. He resisted at once, but fatigue
had weakened his reflexes and his resolve. When he realized Sarad’s intention
his pulse quickened and his mind cleared as a psychic force tore through him.

“Your desperation only fuels my magic!” Sarad snarled.

Elias bristled. He stiffened beneath Sarad. It was not
desperation that moved through him but rage, the equal of Sarad’s but born of
an utterly different source. As Elias often experienced, in the presence of so
much arcane energy, his perception of time slowed. Discordant images flashed in
his mind’s-eye as he felt himself slip from reality into the timeless,
spaceless depths of his psyche.

He saw his father turn to look at him over a shoulder, lips
pressed to a thin line, head held high, eyes shining wetly as he looked upon
his son for the last time as the carriage carried him away.

He looked down at Asa’s face as he cradled her slight form. Crimson,
almost black, blood splattered her creamy throat and tangled in her golden
hair. The light faded from her round, blue eyes, as the coppery aroma of blood
filled his nostrils.

He stepped through a doorway, his boots sticking in the
combined offal of sweat, urine, and congealed blood. Danica lay naked and bound
atop the table in seeming death, desecrated by the sigils of the enemy branded
deep into her flesh, and her soul.

Resolve born of outrage stole over Elias Duana. To perish
here, desperate and unavenged, after all the evil perpetrated by this man and
his cursed order, was more than he could bear. He couldn’t allow Sarad victory.
So, Elias decided that he would not die after all.

Elias seized his indignation and the immortal strength that
inundated his soul and used it as tinder for the inferno of his magic, even as
Sarad rifled through his thoughts and memories. Elias envisioned a wall of raw
energy surrounding his skull.

Sarad pulled back, scorched by Elias’s magic, for while he
had bound Elias’s power and barred him from exerting it in the world, he could
yet exert his might within his own mind. Elias did not retreat. He did not
hold. He pushed forward, into the breach, into the vacuum left behind, as Sarad
withdrew his consciousness from Elias’s psyche. He sank into Sarad’s mind
spitting the fire of his fury all the way…

...
Sarad Mirengi knelt before a circular mirror set into
an obsidian flagstone, reflecting a dim, orange candle glow as the sole source
of light. A child’s face looked back at him, tight with dread.

“Speak the name,” a voice said behind him, close to his
ear. “You must say it thrice.”

Sarad licked his lips. “I’m afraid,” he said.

“Fear is the refuge of the weak. Speak the name!”

“I...I can’t.”

“You will!”

A sharp, icy pain sprang into his right shoulder blade. The
pain radiated in waves, spreading rapidly throughout the entirety of his body. It
felt like he had been cast into a body of frigid, arctic water.

“Do not forsake your teachings! Summon the demon! Otherwise
your life will be forfeit!”

“Talinus Baelorus,” Sarad cried in a shrill, brittle
voice. “Talinus Bae…lor…us!” As Sarad spoke the name the second time the words
came with a great effort as if something pushed against his mind making it an
effort of will to form the syllables and utter them. As he prepared for the
third and final utterance a nigh unbearable pressure built in his head and
bands of force wrapped his throat, choking off his voice.

“Speak the entity’s true name or die!”

Sarad struggled against the roar in his skull and with a
hoarse rasp spat out the name for the third and final time. “TA-L-I-NUS
BAE-LO-R-US!”

A black vortex of fire erupted from out the mirror. An
inhuman howl echoed into the silence of the chamber as the demon took shape in
the infernal fire. Crimson, malevolent eyes pierced Sarad and the fiend spoke
directly into his mind:
release me and live
! The dark entity tested the
invisible barrier that contained him, but found it impenetrable. The enchanted
circle of the mirror held him fast.

“You are ensnared demon and bound to do my bidding,”
Sarad said, but the quaver in his voice belied the conviction of his words.

“Incorrect,” said the demon. “You have trapped me in this
spell-circle. You must bargain for my service. We must strike a compact.”

“I compel you for I know your true name!” Sarad looked to
his mentor, but his master only looked on stoically.

The entity chuckled. “True names are a finicky thing,
young necromancer,” the demon said conversationally. “You must pronounce every
syllable precisely and with enough will to empower your knowledge, and I must
identify myself enough with the name to be beholden to it. Otherwise summoning
the damned would become daily occurrences every time a fledging wizard
uncovered a moldy tome. You have not complete power over me, although I must
confess you have me tidily bound.”

“So...” Sarad said stupidly.

“So, we strike a deal. For the price of my service I
demand release from this circle, and a wage of blood. Your master’s should do
nicely, I think.” The demons visage grew dark once more. His gaping grin
revealed rows of sharp, yellow teeth, and his eyelids narrowed, compressing the
red-black coals of his eyes.

Sarad turned to the robed and hooded figure behind him
with the scarred face. His master began to draw sigils in the air with his
fingers, a spell on his lips.

“Done,” Sarad said. “Farewell, father.”

The demon tore out of the circle in a pounce empowered by
its leathery wings and onto the retreating wizard. The wet sounds of flesh
being rent from bone filled the chamber...

Sarad resisted Elias’s intrusion into his thoughts and
struggled to redirect him, to push him away. The fell wizard, however, found
himself unable to focus his will completely, his mind clouded by doubt, fear,
and rage, the source of which Elias was about to see as he crashed through his
nemesis’ memories.

...Sarad howled a banshee’s wail and convulsed on the bed
as his soul was forced back into his body through the red hole in his chest.

Seizures wracked Sarad as dark magic poured into him and
forced animation back into organs that had shut down. His senses began to
return. First, he smelt burning flesh. Next, he heard the thrum of raw energy
and the sizzle of bacon. His eyes focused and he saw four of his acolytes
standing over him. Black and purple lightning arced from their fingers and
forked into him, sending dozens of rippling waves of electricity across his
livid skin.

Sarad tried to speak, to call out, but his tongue was
swollen and burnt like a bloated worm too long in the sun and he only managed
an inarticulate rasp. Abruptly the spell snapped off with a pop.

He felt otherworldly eyes upon him and he turned his
head, despite his protesting spine. Talinus grinned a toothy smile at him and
said, “I think we lost you for a minute there, my Lord.”

Sarad’s vision began to fade and with it his grip on
consciousness. He heard a voice say, “Will he live?” Another answered, “I don’t
know. He’s lost a lot of blood. We’ve done all we can, the rest is up to
him.”...

With an adrenal burst of anger Sarad cast the memory aside
and struggled against Elias. The two engaged in a contest of wills. Elias, new
to such psychic battles, acted on instinct and his father’s basic precepts of
battle: always move, always cut and when there’s no way out, push further in. So,
he pushed against Sarad with all his might, all his will.

Elias felt Sarad give way grudgingly, and as he did so
images flashed in his mind’s-eye—vignettes of torment and suffering as Sarad
lay in his sick bed wracked by fever, too weak to rise and relieve himself. Elias
felt Sarad’s horror and disgust as he looked upon a body littered with blisters
and lividity from the fell magic that had literally shocked him back to life. Inexpressible
rage overcame him as he gazed into the looking glass and beheld the ravaged
remains of his once beautiful face. Thick, lustrous hair had been scorched
away, leaving patches of coarse, singed stubble; dark and shining eyes had
withdrawn into his skull, obscured by milky cataracts; full, smooth skin stretched
paper-thin and pocked with scars and blisters; wide, generous lips shrunken and
turned the purple of rotten plums.

It was then that Elias learned his nemesis’ weakness:
vanity.

If the Marshal could exploit this advantage, there may yet
be hope for him. Satisfied that he had learned what he could from his
disorienting foray into Sarad’s psyche, and tiring rapidly from his efforts,
Elias pulled back, willing his consciousness back into his own body. As he did
so, visceral pain overcame his senses once more, but Elias took a grim
satisfaction in the knowledge that he suffered no more than his tormentor had. Thus
bolstered, Elias ignored his pain and cast Sarad off him with a heave of his
legs and rolled himself into a crouching position.

Sarad regained his faculties momentarily and hunkered,
crouched outside of Elias’s reach. “You have been trained well,” he said, “but
it will not avail you.”

“I thought you left me alone here for days because you were
putting me on ice. Now I know your secret. I know why you hide in those robes,
cloaked in dark magic. A shining patriarch you are no more.”

Sarad grew still. “Before you die know this: I will scour
the kingdom and hunt down each and every one of your comrades. Not a single
thing will capture my attention until I have them all. I will torment them with
every dark art of Senestrati lore. Their agony shall know no equal, and special
attention will I pay to that slattern you call sister. Then I will go to that
backwater you hail from and raze it to the ground. I will leave nothing—not a
single blade of grass—left alive and then I will sow the scorched earth with
salt.

“With blood-magic I will discover any that can claim kinship
to you and wipe them and their seed from this land. When I am done no one will
remember the name Duana. It will be as if you never existed at all.”

“Yet you will still have no face.”

Sarad gathered a clot of inky energy in his hands, drawing
on the black reservoir of his hate, and launched himself at Elias. He could
have struck the Marshal down from where he was but he was overcome by a
consuming need to wring the life from his nemesis with his hands.

Elias, prepared for Sarad’s attack, waited until the necromancer
closed on him and threw himself backward, out of his crouch, and with a
scissoring kick, swept the legs out from underneath Sarad. The fell wizard
tumbled to the ground, throwing out his hands instinctively to catch himself, and
thus loosened a torrent of explosive magic into the granite beneath them. As
the pair were showered in shards of fractured stone, the circle of binding
etched into the floor, which imprisoned Elias and his magic, sundered with an
audible
pop
and a wild discharge of sparks.

Sarad reeled, stunned by the backlash of his own fell power.
Meanwhile, Elias reflexively channeled his own magic, his efforts fueled by
desperation and fear. He fed raw arcane energy into the chains that bound him
even as Sarad regained his senses and made for the door.

Once out of Elias’s reach Sarad turned on him, hands screwed
up into claws, a death curse on his lips. Elias, sensing his peril, bellowed
and strained against his chains, caught halfway between a crouch and standing. The
links glowed the incandescent red of forge-hot iron. Every muscle in Elias’s
body burned and flexed as he strained against the enchanted shackles.