Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel) (47 page)

I whipped my head around, but the others hadn’t caught up.

When I turned back to the skull, the once empty socket now held a great, black eye with a reptilian slitted pupil of burning red. It was deeply sunk into the skull, surrounded by leathery, weathered flesh.

The breath caught in my throat and for the first time in a long time, I didn’t care that my power escaped me.

It wouldn’t have mattered either way.

The dragons were a nation all and of their own, each a god in his own right. Their power was enormous. The only reason anything else survived was because they didn’t get along, didn’t reproduce often, and were just generally unconcerned with the rest
of the world. A few were active, a nightmare to whatever pocket of the world they terrorized.

“Close your mouth,” the skull said, though it shouldn’t have been able to. Its jaw didn’t move, nothing did, but I heard it clear as a bell. Not in my head either. It wasn’t telepathy. It was so deep, so resonating, that I saw the dust on the ground jump as it spoke.

“What are you?” I asked.

“A remnant,” the thing said. “The last coals of a dying fire.”

“You’re the…the dragon. Creofax!”

“Yes,” the dragon rumbled. “I followed the Rainbow to this damnable island.”

“I saw,” I said. “It was a big moment for these people. They beat you.”

The eye peered out angrily from the socket. “They were primitives with primitive magic. I am a Wyrm and my power still holds.”

“You did this?” I asked, indicating around us.

“No,” it replied. “They created this from me, but I haven’t died. Not yet. They fear me still, scavenging my body, taking what they can. They thought me subdued, have made that mistake too many times to come near me anymore.” He paused. “You followed it too.”

I nodded.

“Good,” he said. “That is how it must be. I sense a fire in you, an ember that holds great potential.”

I shook my head. “Not anymore.”

The dragon laughed. “Wizards,” he said, mocking. “You fool yourselves, let things muddle your power, what little you have anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think they stole your power,” he said. “A lie. They wounded you, nothing more. Your power cannot be taken from you.”

“You know nothing,” I said. “Nothing of power.”

The world exploded around me, heat bearing down from every direction. I felt the earth rumble, the black sun glaring down with searing fury, the very air felt like fire. The dragon’s gaze pinned me against the rock.

“I am a king, Sorcerer,” he said. “I hunted your people before they dug the first iron from the ground, before the Guild, when giants still walked the earth and predator and prey held no distinction. I am dead, mage, and yet my power still dwarfs the greatest of your Guildmasters. I am a Wyrm, Sorcerer, I know power. I speak no other language. No one, no curse, no enchantment, can rob you of your birthright.”

“Why do you even care?” I gasped.

“Vengeance!” he hissed. “You will be that tool. I have seen the fire in you, it is time others saw it as well.”

I dug my fingers into the ground, whatever he was doing, it was throwing off the hold this world had. Maybe it was because this was his own little slice of heaven, maybe he was just good enough to shrug it off. I didn’t know, but I was damned if I was going to be this thing’s vengeance.

I braced my shoulders, dug my fingers in harder, and focused. I slipped into my mind almost effortlessly, surprising me.

I was falling, and not like I felt that way, like I was really fucking falling. Out of the sky. Ash and cloud cover met me and I could just make out the woods where myself, Arne, and Tiffany had trekked through to get to BlackThorn.

And it was getting bigger and bigger by the second.

I took a deep breath (a lot easier said than done at this altitude) and calmed myself. Something was different here, I knew that. I had never entered my mind like this.

Light, dim and angry, shone down from above. I looked up and sure enough saw the black, angry sun of Creofax’s world breaking through the cloud cover. That’s why it had been so easy. He was in my head and I had just rode in on the wake.

My fall started to slow.

“A gift, mage,” he said. “Use it wisely.”

And then, there was an eruption. Light, like none I had seen in years, erupted from a dark corner of my mind. It flashed like a beacon, a second son that eclipsed the first.

Mulciber.

And then I was falling again.

“Virgil!” Dorne shouted in my ear.

I looked around, confused. The black sun still beat down, but we were at the mouth of the cave.

“What happened?” I asked. “Where’d the dragon go?”

“What?” Diana asked, arching an eyebrow.

“The skeleton,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”
she asked.

I made my way down the slope. Just like before, the dragon’s skeleton was laid out. I made my way to the skull, the others following me.

“It’s right over here,” I said. Sure enough, the skull was just as I had left it, half buried in the dirt, only now the empty socket glared angrily up at the sky.

Behind me, James whistled and Dorne cursed.

I frowned. The eye had been here, I knew that.
Al!
I shouted.
Have you been paying attention?

A bit,
he replied.
What’s up?

Did you see the dragon? The sun?
Mulciber?

Silence for a moment. Finally he said,
Virgil, are you okay?
And there was real concern in his voice.

“Never mind,” I said, to him as well as the others. “Forget it.”

We walked for an hour before we found the Walter Cloud.

The rocky, lava belching horizon abruptly ended, winding into woods and grassland. Above us the black sun shone on, but as we neared the border, I could make out the too large blue sun of the Walter Cloud. The temperature began to decline, the air growing more humid.

“How is this possible?” James asked. His eyes were wide. “This is bullshit!”

I sat down at the edge of the border. Hard stone and loose dust met soft earth and grass. I tossed a rock over the border and it hit the earth with a soft thud, rolling in the grass.

“They stole the Walter Cloud,” I said simply.

“That’s impossi-,” Dorne said while I mimicked. He frowned at me.

“How many times you gonna say that?” I asked. “This place is impossible! Get over it already!”

James fell to one knee.

“Oh, God,” Diana said, holding her hand to her mouth.

Then I saw why. An arrow protruded from James’s shoulder, blood dripping onto the hard stone ground.

I looked up and saw three Kira Nui just as one released another arrow at us. I sense
d motion to my right and there was a heavy thunk. The arrow quivered on the end of Dorne’s staff in front of me. He gave me a smirk.

We ran.

The Walter Cloud was exactly as I remembered, depending on how you looked at it. It wasn’t coming apart at the seams, horrors spilling forth from the minds of those running beside me. It was as it should have been.

Except for the trio of fish people chasing us everything was perfectly normal.

I felt an arrow zip just inches by my head. We needed cover. James was bleeding, badly, and if we didn’t do something to get out of their line of fire, we would be much the same.

I dove behind a tree and drew my pistol. Abigail was great, but at this range there wasn’t much she was going to be able to help with.

I turned around the tree, set myself in a shooter’s stance, took a deep breath, and aimed down the sights. Al was the superior shot in our duo but I wasn’t bad either, and the 1911 was a fine weapon if you needed a handgun at range.

I fired three shots and was rewarded with the sight of one of the Kira Nui stumbling, a flash of blue from his shoulder. I dove back around the tree and my heart skipped a beat as one arrow passed by, then again after the quite thunk of a second hitting the
wood.

“There are more coming!” Dorne yelled.

A beam of scarlet light lit up the Walter Cloud, arching over James’s prone form from Diana’s odd little toy. “One less!” she hollered

There was a sudden sensation, as if the air all around us had stopped moving, perfectly, to the very molecule.

And then Ectan was there. In front of me. And I couldn’t move.

“Where is the machine?” he asked, all the geniality lost from his tone.

I craned my neck, an effort that took everything I had, mentally and physically. The others were being held down, spears pressed to their throats.

Ectan grabbed my face, wrenching my attention back to him. “He sent you! What are you doing?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. “Arne left us.”

“You are lying,” he said. “You planned this. Somehow. I will not be tricked in my own world.”

He stepped back and clicked something at one of his guards. The islander dragged Diana forward.

Ectan squatted down in front of her. “Where did the machine go?”

Diana’s shoulder slumped, and I thought I heard a sob. Her head rolled back, she made a sound in her sinuses, and spit in his face.

“Fuck. You.” Daintily, she wiper her lips.

Ectan grabbed her head in both hands, his arms bulging. “You dare!”

And before any of us could do anything, Ectan waved his hand and Diana…just blew away. One minute she was there, the next she was floating away, dust in the wind.

“No!” Dorne shouted. Maybe it was me. It was hard to hear. My ears were roaring, and we were all shouting. The guards were clicking back and forth and Ectan was waving his arms, blue mist pouring from his fingertips.

“Very well,” he said. His voice was quite but it blotted out everything else, washing over all of us. “If you will not tell me, than I will drag if from your minds.”

He cast his hands forth and the world spun.

When everything came back together
, we were in front of the temple again. The rest of the crew was already there. Ectan gestured to one of the guards. “Bring them to the bridge. They will serve a greater purpose there.”

Our guards dragged us again up the stairs, continuing up the mountain. My last sight of the dome was one of the Kira Nui grabbing another of the crew members, dragging him to the center of the room.

The guards threw us before the Arcus. The column of light shone down from the unnatural sky, thinning to just a dozen feet wide where it hit the ground. The multicolored light shone brightly, making it difficult to look at.

Ectan grabbed my head, staring me down with his cold, blue eyes. “That night in the alleyway
, you lied. You know where the traitor is. Where is he, where is his machine?” He dug his fingers into my skull, the pressure a surprising indicator of his strength. He drew my face to his. “I. Want. His. Location.”

The traitor’s machine? Things started to fall further into place.

“As Diana said…” Then I spit in his face.

He roared, slugging me in the jaw and knocking me to the ground. “Start with the other one,” he snapped to the guard. “See what worlds the Wizard has seen.”

He picked me back up and I spit blood at him this time. He ignored it, his eyes drilling into my own again. I ignored it, ignored the pressure building up in my forehead. “I figured it out,” I said. “How you made the partition. You cannibalized your own fucking minds to do this.”

Ectan sneered. “Your ignorance of true power is mind boggling. It is a miracle the other powers have not wiped your kind from the earth.”

I smiled a bloody smile. “But that’s why you need this son of a bitch, isn’t it? This traitor? One of your little scouts didn’t come back one time, I guess. And you can’t figure out how, because he should be dead. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Where is he?” Ectan roared, a force like
a baseball bat slamming into my mind.

I reeled, but kept talking. “Now I get the prize,” I mumbled. “Only way you knew about the alleyway was if you had been there.” I smiled a
gain. “And none of them made it. I know, I killed them. Which means, and this holds up all things considered, that you linked your minds. That’s how you could just slip one on like a glove. This hellhole is being kept together because you took your whole culture, your whole people, and chained them together. You’re nothing but drones now. That’s why you can’t survive. Your minds have atrophied, you can’t survive outside the Aether!”

A piercing pain, like that in the alley, surged through my mind. Oh God, now he meant it. It felt like my brain was being peeled apart with a cheese grater.

I could hear Al in my head, screaming. The walls of my partition were cracking, breaking under the pressure. Red filled my vision, a whisper in the back of the mind, a whisper that spoke dark thoughts. A hurricane was tearing through my mind, until…