The Blood Sigil (The Sigilord Chronicles Book 2) (9 page)

"Well, there's only one way to find out I suppose." Anderis gave his companion a slight nod.

The blood mage tightened his grip on the knife, readying for a killing blow.

Cailix's mind sought out the blood sitting in the bowl at the edge of the field. She drew it to her, and it pulled at her in return. She thrust her hand forward, and a spear made of solid blood rushed out of the bowl and soared through the air, plunging into the blood mage's chest just as he began to sink the knife into Orla's neck. Once embedded in his chest, it liquified and burst into flame, immolating him.

He screamed and flailed, falling away from the captive family. Cailix charged.

"Was that dead blood? No, Aerlissa, you can't—"
 

Cailix slammed shoulder-first into Anderis's chest, cutting off whatever he was going to say. Unlike like the last time she had tackled him, when his bones had broken like dry twigs, now it felt as if she had slammed into a brick wall. He went down, but just barely so.

With no apparent effort, he threw her off and leapt back to his feet. It was too bad she was going to cut him into a thousand pieces, or she would interrogate him and find out the secret to his newfound vitality.

Instead of attacking her, he leapt for Miss Orla.

"No!" Cailix shrieked, scrambling to her feet. She threw her knives, both plunging deep into his back. Neither appeared to have any effect.

He's doing it again
, she thought.
I need to learn how he shields himself like that.

She sprinted for him, but was too late. Before she could reach him, he had slashed his knife across Miss Orla's throat. A horrible gurgling noise erupted from her mouth as her life's blood pumped from her neck.

"No!" she screamed again, a terrible and sick feeling coming over her. Her lungs emptied and and her stomach churned. Tears streamed unbidden down her cheeks.

Now Anderis turned to face Cailix. Hands covered in Orla's blood, he lashed out, and an invisible hammer struck Cailix. It hit her again and again. It slammed into her knees, then her elbows and chest, the phantom mallet pounding her left eye shut, then bashing her nose so hard blood ran backwards down her throat.

As she fell onto the grass, unable to move, she wondered if she would be able to come back from the dead as a ghost and have her revenge that way. She didn't care how long it took, or what rules of the afterlife she had to break, she would kill him. And she would do it slowly, and as painfully as possible.

Anderis stood over her, gloating in that way only he could, hands on his hips, a self-satisfied smirk spread across his face.

Cailix tried to summon the power of her blood, but nothing came. She tried again, clenching her fists, channeling all of her anger and remaining energy. Nothing happened.

"You're blocked. Try as you might, your magic will not aid you now."

"I'm going to kill you," she managed to say through a broken mouth. "For Momma."

Anderis chuckled. "So you did learn how to care. How touching."

He held his hands out and turned them over slowly. As his hands turned, pain wracked her body. It felt like her blood boiled, her skin searing from head to toe. Just as she thought she might be able to withstand the pain, her fingernails began sliding out of her fingers.
 

The pain was excruciating.

"I could do this to you for days, Aerlissa. You betrayed me. You defeated my army and kept us from taking Aldsdowne. You kept us from the vertex. There will be no end to the pain I will visit upon you,
apprentice
."

She tried to respond but the agony was just too unbearable.

He can't shield himself and break my bones at the same time
, she thought.
I need to find a way to attack him
.

"I will let you stew in your own suffering for a few more hours, and then I have a very special surprise for you." Anderis smiled, licking his lips like an animal sucking fresh kill from its teeth. "A special kind of pain that only a girl like you can experience."

She was vaguely aware of the screams of her family. She tried to tell them to stay quiet, to not anger Anderis, but no words came out.

"Quiet, you backwoods dung-shovelers," Anderis commanded. "I will deal with you soon enough."

The blood mage turned to Cailix. "Would you like a sample of this special kind of pain?" he asked, shedding his cloak and rolling up his sleeves, a man about to thoroughly enjoy his work.

Cailix could feel Anderis use her freshly spilled blood to fuel his power. She felt his shield weaken as he began his torture.

"It starts with—" He stopped and made a choking noise, his eyes wide.

He stared down, Cailix following his gaze. There, protruding from his chest, were the three sharp, rusty points of an old pitchfork. The points withdrew then reappeared, this time from his stomach.

Anderis dropped to his knees, clutching the pitchfork in his hands. Cailix would relish and remember that look of shock and surprise on his face for the rest of her life. She looked up to see Colin standing behind Anderis. He pressed his boot into the blood mage's back and wrenched the pitchfork free, cracking Anderis's ribs.

Colin was about to go for a final stab when the blood mage vanished again, leaving nothing but a puddle of blood in the grass.

I really need to learn how he does that
, Cailix thought. She tried to move but found it too painful. She tried to talk but it was too hard to breathe through her broken ribs.

"Shhh, just be quiet and hold still. I'll take care of you," Colin said, kneeling down next to her, propping her head up in his hand. "My pa's on the way and I told him to bring the doc just in case."

I'm going to die
, she thought. Her bones were broken and poking holes through important places inside her body. If she didn't do something she knew she would be dead in minutes.

"Necklace," she gasped.

Colin checked her neck, wiped away some blood and reached for the bloodstone, which had stopped glowing.

"No…bottle."

Colin pulled the glass bottle from around her neck. "What is it?" he asked.

"Sigilord blood," Cailix managed to whisper through coughs and gurgling blood.

Colin gasped and leaned back on his heels, stunned. "You kept that guy's blood?"
 

While she wasn't much for feeling emotions, she was great at reading them. She saw a mixture of disappointment and jealousy on Colin's face.

"Pour it out," she said.

Colin pulled the cork free and upended the bottle. Just a few drops of blood escaped.

Cailix called to the blood. She felt its potency, the raw untamed power of the blood of a sigilord. If regular blood was intoxicating, there was nothing that could describe the euphoria of connecting with sigilord blood. It was like tasting the universe itself.

Fueled by the unbridled power of Urus's blood, she channeled that power into healing. Somehow she knew that even with its potency, she wouldn't be able to heal all her wounds, so her mind sought out the life-threatening wounds and sealed those first. Then she set about reattaching and mending her broken bones.

It only took a few minutes to exhaust the small supply of blood. She had consumed it much faster than she expected, wondering if healing took more power than destruction.

"Are you okay?" Colin asked, stepping back as she rolled to her side.

Before she could answer, the ground shook beneath them. It shuddered, then burst upward with a cracking roar like that of a thousand thunderstorms. The heaving earth surged then dropped, sending a rippling wave of churning grass and soil outward in all directions.

The earth rumbled for nearly a full minute after that, only settling to a calm after tearing the plateau to shreds.
 

Shaking off clumps of loose earth and grass, Colin stood up then helped Cailix to her feet, his face filled with genuine concern for her.
 

"That earthquake," he said. "That was because you used Urus's blood, wasn't it?"

"I don't know. Maybe," Cailix replied. She honestly had no idea what had happened, or why, but the timing of the rumbling earth could not have been a coincidence. The last time she had used Urus's blood, nearly half of Waldron had lost its rooftops.

She managed to stand up on her own and locked her gaze with Colin's. It was then that she uttered the most difficult words she had ever spoken. "Thank you."
 

Chapter Six

Urus had lain awake in his cell most of the night, twisting and turning away the dark hours on the hard straw cot until at last the first few rays of pre-dawn's soft blue light cast faint shadows of the window bars against the cell's iron door.

He sat up, rolling the iron chain over in his fingers as he contemplated what was about to happen. Unless some miracle intervened, he was going to be executed—killed for a crime he didn't know he had committed, enforced by people who weren't even from his universe.
 

What right do they have to say who can and cannot use magic?
Urus thought, anger rising up within.

Urus's journey had started with being culled, banished from his own people for not being a strong enough warrior. Now he was about to be executed for being too powerful. He simply could not win.

The door to his cell swung inward. Luse stood on the other side, her infectious smile spread wide across her face. She held a tray filled with eggs and salt pork. It smelled so good Urus almost forgot he was about to die. Long, beige linens hung from below the tray, covering her hands.

"I suppose this is my last meal," Urus said, reaching for the tray.

Luse reached out and slapped his hand. "Don't you dare!"

Urus frowned up at her, trying to find some explanation deep behind those green eyes.

"If you eat that you'll end up just like the guards at the end of the hallway," Lu said, cocking her head to the side. "They'll be asleep for hours."

She set the tray on the cot and pulled the linens free, revealing a large blacksmith's hammer.

Urus leapt up from the bed. "What are you doing?"
 

"What does it look like I'm doing, little bull?" Luse said with a grin. "This is a jailbreak! Here, you're the one built like a blacksmith. You get to swing the hammer."

"Won't someone hear?" Urus asked, taking the hammer. It was remarkably heavy, and he wondered how Luse had managed to keep the tray steady walking all the way from the kitchen to the dungeon.

"You're a little slow on the uptake, aren't you?" Luse said, chuckling. "The guards are asleep."

Urus blushed. He turned his attention to the shackle bolted into the stone wall of the cell. He pulled back the hammer, then unleashed the full force of his might on the last link in the chain. It bounced and sparked, but did not break. He swung again, and again, finally shattering the link after three swings.

"Now what?" he asked.

"Well, with that collar on, you can't use your sigils. Not that we'd want to anyway. There are wards all over Almoryll, the moment anyone casts a sigil within the grounds, the entire council will know."

Urus wrapped the chain around his waist to keep it from dragging on the ground, then followed Luse out of the cell. Even knowing the food had been poisoned, it was still hard to resist grabbing a fistful of salt pork on his way out.

As prisons went, this was the most beautiful he had ever seen. Stone of hues he had never thought possible had been expertly carved and chiseled to form walls, columns, and impossibly high arched ceilings. Even the doors seemed like art pieces. Lush carpets and tapestries of plush materials offset the cold, hard stone.

As they wandered through the castle, everywhere he looked he saw heavily armed men, some standing guard, others on patrol, each with a collar just like his.

"Are those all radixes?" Urus whispered. Luse merely nodded and waved for him to keep following. Radixes, from what little Murin had explained to him, were able to use artifacts imbued with sigilcraft but were unable to cast their own sigils. Urus's uncle, Aegaz, was a radix.

This was not the first time he had seen men wearing iron collars. The slaves in the southern cities of Ehmshahr and Kestian prisoners of war all bore similar signs of their bondage.

Why would people who preserve balance need slaves?
he wondered.
Doesn't having slaves upset the natural way of things?
And wouldn't a radix slave even further upset the balance?

Question after question filled his head as he followed Luse out onto one of the many bridges that connected the outer spires with the central spire. The bridges spanned the gaps like thick, black cobwebs supported by enormous buttresses.

"We have an hour or two before someone goes to get you for your execution," Luse said. "We need to get you back to the portal room before anyone notices you're gone."

"How are we going to get there without getting caught?" Urus asked. "This place is crawling with guards."

"Still working on that part."

He looked out over the carved railing and down into the canyon below. He still couldn't fathom how a group of people who certainly didn't look like masons or builders could have created something so massive. Kest, Waldron, and probably the capital city Corliss had once told him about would all seem like tiny country villages compared to this place.