The Elements of Sorcery (14 page)

Trulia's secret entrance to the Brauch manse, as it turned out, was only two streets away from the place where I'd met the business end of a knife.

Mendoz, Vellierz and I stood in front of a wooden door which sported a barred window at head-height. According to Trulia, the door led to a series of catacombs which eventually ended up in the cellars of the mansion, which were much older than the building itself. Her brief description indicated to me that these passages likely predated the city by thousands of years, built back in a time when the royalty of Valisia were far more paranoid than they were today. Nowadays, the thought of a peasant revolt never entered the minds of the aristocracy; whether that was because an actual rebellion was so rare or because they were too stupid to think of it were equivalent possibilities.

All I could hope was that Alvar's dance with corruption hadn't wakened anything unpleasant in those catacombs.

I swallowed hard, licked my lips, and tried to pretend that I wasn't shaking in my boots. For a professional monster hunter, Mendoz seemed oddly pale.

"What are you so worried about?" I asked him. "You've killed shrikes before."

He looked at me, and his scarred face split in the first nervous grin I'd ever seen on the man. "Yeah, about that…"

One of my hands leapt up to forestall him. "Don't. Just… don't."

The big man gave a sort of nervous chuckle. "Well, today seems like a good enough day to bite it, if you know what I mean."

"Or get bitten," Vellierz murmured acidly.

"Stop that," I commanded, and to my surprise, they listened. "We don't have time for that kind of attitude. Let's just get in there and do what we have to do."

Without waiting for further protest, I reached out and opened the neglected door. It yawned slowly open on rusted hinges; who knew how long it had been since it was used?

Beyond it, only dank darkness awaited.

I reached into my pocket and procured a small white gem from my bag of tricks. It was actually made of clear glass, but the artisan who'd made it had been able to create what looked like a flawlessly-cut diamond. I spoke the word of activation, and it burst into blinding white light before zipping up into the air to hover over my shoulder.

Who knew I would spend the things I'd created over the past several months all in one night? I tried not to grumble too much at the loss of the second of my one-time enchantments.

Casting a quick glance to either side of me, I took a deep breath and stepped inside. Nothing happened.

"I've always wanted to wander an ancient catacomb," I said, trying to sound cheerful.

Neither of my companions spoke as we marched down into the pitch blackness.

As it turned out, the wet and moldy passage was less a catacomb and more a royal escape route. The hallway had few turns and bends, and no forgotten or discarded furniture or any stone caskets littered the path. It had clearly been built as a way for some ancient ruler of Selvaria to get his family out in the case of an attack; nothing more, nothing less. It had held up remarkably well, considering its age.

Given the strength of the shrike's corruption, I was both rather surprised and relieved that the nobles who built this place hadn't put any of their honored dead into it. If they had, we would have been faced with a whole different set of problems.

After what seemed like an eternity in the darkness, a ring of yellow light became visible up ahead. I approached with caution, and came up against what seemed to be a wooden door. Around the edges of its rounded shape, flickering light was visible.

"We made it," I whispered. Fumbling in the dark, I managed to get hold of a metal ring that sent a chill through my fingers as I grasped it. I pulled on it, but to no avail.

"Try pushing it," Vellierz said from behind me, so I reversed my stance and pushed my shoulder up against it. The door budged a fraction of an inch before hitting something hard and heavy.

"There's something in the way," I muttered.

"Let me try," Mendoz said, shoving his way past me.

Thankfully, it was dark, so the monster hunter was unable to see the grin on my face as he tried and failed to open the door. The big brute deserved the occasional blow to his giant ego.

"We don't have time for this," Vellierz snapped. "Get out of the way."

"Just give me another—"

"Get down!" I yelled, as the pudgy sorcerer's hand went back.

"
Kazzek
!" Vellierz cried, flinging his hand forward as he incanted the Valisian-accented version of my force bolt spell. White light leapt from his fingertips and whizzed past Mendoz's head as I dragged the big man to the ground with a tackle. The force bolt exploded into the wood of the door, shattering it into flying shards—all thankfully going
into
the room—and quickly followed by the sound of rushing liquid.

"Dammit, Vellierz, you could have killed him," I snapped.

My pudgy friend rolled his eyes. "Please. It would have only knocked him cold, at worst."

"Watch it, ya damned…" Mendoz's Low Valisian curses trailed off.

The next thing I knew, my robes were soaked. "What the hell?"

It only took a moment for the smell to hit us. We were covered in wine.

Good wine, too, by the scent of it. Mendoz sniffed it, dipped his finger on the floor, and took a taste. "It's been here a while," he commented. "Pretty good. Not vinegared at all."

The door in question led into a very large, expensive wine cellar. The doorway had been blocked by a fairly large cask, which Vellierz's spell had rendered into splinters along with the door itself.

As Mendoz and I picked ourselves up off the sopping-wet ground, he whistled appreciatively. "Now this is the kind of place I could retire in."

"There's no time for that now," I said, wringing wine from the lower part of my robes. "We've got to find the shrike and kill it before Alvar figures out what we're up to."

I shepherded them up the wooden stairs that led out of the wine cellar. Thankfully, the aristocracy apparently did not fear anyone entering the palace from the disused passage, because they hadn't bothered to lock the door that led further into the cellars.

The corridor that we emerged into split to either side. None of us could tell which direction would take us there faster.

Prickling pain began to chew on the fingers of my left hand, slowly creeping up toward my wrist and forearm. It was the same sensation that had bothered me in the courtyard, and, I realized… the one which had tipped me off as to what was happening in Warsil.

"This way," I said, pointing to the left.

Vellierz and Mendoz exchanged a glance. "How do you know?" the monster hunter asked.

"You don't want to know," I muttered. "Believe me, I wish I didn't."

By paying close attention to the sensation of pain, I led us through the darkened halls and corridors until we at last came to a great set of double doors which were locked and barred. As I faced the wooden portal, the pain flared up my face and tingled along the back of my neck.

"This is the place," I murmured.

"How are we going to get in?" Vellierz asked.

"The same way we got into the wine cellar."

"If you're right, isn't there a shrike in there? What if it gets out?" Mendoz hissed.

"It will give us that much more pressure to kill the thing," I answered. "Let's face it; if we die in there, it gets out anyway when Alvar releases it. What's the difference?"

Mendoz coughed. "You know that thing you didn't want to know about?"

"Must we do this now?" I lamented.

He grinned. "I've only ever killed one shrike."

"Oh. That's not as bad as I expected."

"Well, it was mostly an accident," he finished.

"And there's the sense of dread and impending death I was waiting for." I pushed up the still-wet sleeves of my robe. "All right, stand back. Here goes nothing…"

No matter how much my mind did not want to make the comparison, I must have looked like a vengeful Arbiter when my power smashed open the doors to Alvar's secret shrike lair—particularly when the normally-white energy I employed took on a distinctively blue tinge.

Much as the door to the wine cellar had, my force bolt tore the double doors asunder, reducing them to burning cinders. The echo resounded in the hallways; if Alvar didn't know about our invasion before, he certainly did now.

When I reopened my eyes from my concentration, the tingling pain hit me full-force. It was so intense that it robbed me of my breath, suspiciously like the knife had when it had gone in. For a moment, the baleful crimson glow of the shrike's eyes pinned me to the floor.

It snorted, snapped, snarled at me, lunging forward and coming to the end of its very large chains, brought up short like an overzealous guard dog. Its huge claws raked the sandy earth beneath it, and a slit of a mouth opened to reveal the same glistening yellow teeth I'd seen from above, each one sharp as a razor and much,
much
larger than I'd believed possible.

The beast was
hideous
. The glistening black hide rippled almost hypnotically in the way light danced in dull rainbows across its surface. Its bulbous head and asymmetrical red eyes seemed to slice through me, as though it could stare into the abyss of my very soul.

"That's… uh… bigger than the last one," Mendoz whispered behind me. His hand went to the gilded hilt of his longsword, and pulled it free from the scabbard on his back.

And then, to top it all off, who should step out of the shadows from around the shrike and come into the radius of my tiny ball of light but Alvar Brauch, grinning his perfectly-white smile and staring at me.

"Hello, Edar," he purred. "I've been waiting for you."

"I knew you would come here," Alvar said, folding one arm against his chest and using the other to stroke his chin thoughtfully. "I knew you would try to stop me."

"Then you must have the gift of prophecy," I shot back, "seeing as I didn't even know that when I left."

"It's good that you're here," he went on, ignoring my outburst. "Now I can demonstrate to you just what you have helped me accomplish, Edar. You are going to help me cleanse this city of the Circle of Thorns and return absolute power to my brother. Anyone who stands in my way will be killed."

"Isn't that a little severe, Alvar?" I asked, trying to control the tremble in my voice.

"There is a price to pay for power," he answered, his gaze smoldering. "It has long been my belief that
anizari kovensek ak'kar so ven briia
."

"Eh?" He'd been speaking clear Valisian until that last part, which I spoke passingly well thanks to its close kinship with the language of my homeland, but on the last words his accent had suddenly changed dramatically.

"It's something they say in my… uncle's homeland," he said, the little embarrassed wave of his hand telling me that it was in fact his
father's
. "It means 'it is better to be feared, than to be loved.'"

"Well that's some attitude for a ruler to have," Mendoz grunted.

"I'm sorry to have to demonstrate the use of my new weapon on the very person who helped me bring it into being," Alvar said. "Still, there is a certain poetic justice in it… and I do so love poetry."

He stepped back toward the shrike, his hand moving toward the chains as he began to chant in what sounded like the same language he'd just spoken in. I had no idea of the content, but the import was clear. It was a commanding chant, an invocation of control. Alvar's eyes lit up the same red as the shrike's, and the struggling beast suddenly went quiescent.

"Alvar, please," I said. "Don't do this."

He didn't even seem to hear me as he completed his chanting, his voice slowly fading into mere echoes in the prison chamber. Alvar's head twitched, and the head of the shrike moved in perfect harmony with his. A cold shiver ran down my spine.

"Now you will see what I have created," Alvar intoned, and the shrike's mouth moved with his, making slimy scratching sounds that might have been sick perversions of the words. "Farewell, Edar Moncrief."

The scion of House Brauch hit the release on the chains, and suddenly the shrike was free. It lunged forward and encountered no resistance.

I stared into those brilliant scarlet eyes, and all I knew was despair. They seemed to pull me in to the pitch blackness of the shrike's heart, whispering death into the darkest corners of my brain. It held me captive with those eleven eyes, promising that my impending death would be unbearably painful.

Then, not ten feet away from me, the shrike stopped. It canted its bulbous head. The jaws opened, dripping luminescent saliva onto the sand beneath it in great gobs. Slowly, so slowly, the creature turned back to look at Alvar.

The crimson light in the aristocrat's eyes snuffed out, leaving only a look of utter fright and misery upon his face.

"No—" the word turned into a guttural cry as the shrike leapt forward, its scything claws tearing through the air… and through Alvar Brauch.

The younger son of Selvaria's great house disappeared beneath the mass of slick black flesh as the shrike feasted upon he who had tried to control it. Shrikes possessed greater minds than most imagined, and this one had just proven it. Beyond simply being deadly, they were cunning and clever beasts. Alvar had left a hole in his web of mind control over the creature, and it had exploited him.

Alvar's screams died away within seconds, replaced by a sick sound of crunching bones and tearing flesh as the shrike dined. Instinctively, we all took a step backward toward the door, and then remembered that we had broken it down.

"Shit," Mendoz spat.

"I hope you're ready to put those monster hunting skills to good use," I murmured. "Remember, you did say that you wish the Conte had given you a shrike."

"Trust me to say something stupid," he muttered.

Almost every part of me wanted to turn and run; a feeling I was quite familiar with. Normally I'd have taken my instincts up on that, but the shrike would just catch me anyway. My only chance for survival was to stand and fight.

Strangely, a part of me that actually
wanted
to.

"We can do this," I whispered under my breath, almost unconsciously. "We can do this."

After what seemed like an eternity—though it might have been only seconds—the shrike looked up from its meal and stared at me once again.

It made a sound, a horrible, terrifying sound; a cross between a woman's dying shriek and the rasp of steel on stone. The shrike's cry raised gooseflesh along my arms and shoulders, and I shuddered. To hear it echoing up from the depths of a dungeon was frightening enough, but it was another thing entirely to be less than twenty feet away from it as a hot breeze, scented with the blood of the aristocrat it had just devoured, washed over me.

It was the sound of death.

Time slowed as the shrike's muscles bunched up beneath it. The entire creature seemed to tense all at once as it contracted itself and then leapt into the air, flying toward me with the intent to kill.

I saw everything; the rippling muscles beneath the slick black flesh, the ivory claws slashing through the air, the yellowed teeth bared as its muzzle retracted. Blood dripped almost rhythmically from its jowls as it hurtled toward me, death incarnate.

My hands flung out before me. I summoned up every ounce of manna that would come to my command, and screamed at the top of my lungs, "
Kettek kovarra
!"

Brilliant light flared from my palms as my new, improved and amplified force bolt took shape. It hurtled from my hands directly toward the shrike, ivory white and laced with blue flames.

Light met darkness in a silent, blinding explosion. The force of my spell stopped the shrike mid-leap, driving it backward and slamming it to the sand. It gave another shriek, but it had changed from the hunter's cry.

I'd
hurt
the thing.

"We can do this," I repeated, breaking into a grin.