The Fifth Vertex (The Sigilord Chronicles) (25 page)

Where Anderis won't notice
, she thought. She'd been punched like that before at many of the orphanages. The workers there liked to beat the kids, but didn't want to lose their jobs by bruising them up so much they couldn't work.

A net dropped from above, and with the skill and ease of expert fishermen, the men trussed her up in the net, cinched it tight with a pair of thick knots, and hung her from a hook lowered through the hatch.

"Haul the little brat up. If the wizard wants to keep her a prisoner, he can do it without her damaging our cargo," shouted one of the men, checking the back of his head for blood.

She kicked and screamed, tugging and pulling on the net to no avail. The more she fought it the more entangled she became.

Bright daylight hit her as she was winched up into the warm air to dangle a few feet above the deck. All around her, sailors hanging from the sails and riggings stopped to stare. Armed mercenaries, and more sailors walking the deck, all turned to see the fresh catch as she cried and squirmed.

"Let me out or I will kill every last one of you!" she shouted.

The men burst into a chorus of laughter, a deep-throated, uproarious noise that filled her with shame.
 

Nobody laughs at me
, she thought.
I'll make them all pay. I'll show them how powerful I am and that I can take care of myself. They don't frighten me
.

"Absolutely fantastic," called a familiar voice from the foredeck. It was Anderis. "Child, you are the most remarkable creature I have ever laid eyes upon."

Anderis stepped lithely down the stairs and past the mainmast to stand just below her, thumbs stuck in the top of his bright red captain's coat with long tails. In that outfit with his black breeches and high boots he looked every bit the dignified gentleman, the opposite of the monster he really was.

"Here you are in the middle of the ocean, trapped on a ship filled with blood mages and mercenaries who would just as soon toss you overboard as help you, and yet still you fight. Still you try to escape. Such a remarkable creature you are, Aerlissa."

"My name is Cailix, you bastard!" she snapped, still fighting against the grip of the net. From her vantage point, dangling above the deck, she could see nearly everyone on the ship. She counted a crew of twenty veteran-looking sailors, another dozen mercenaries who looked as though they could barely tie a knot let alone manage a ship, and at least four other blood mages standing about in their white robes looking down their noses at the inferior folk around them. Despite Anderis's ridiculous attire, there was probably a real captain somewhere, the one who gave the real orders and held the respect of the crew.
 

She spotted two more ships on the horizon, barely more than little white splotches floating on the blue-green sea.

Way too many to kill
, she thought.
I'm going to have to get off this ship and swim for it
.

"Cut her down and toss her in the fish trough," Anderis said, pointing at a long, high-sided tray filled with salt water that the fishermen used for dumping and sorting their catch.

They opened the net, and she dropped into the puddle of water with as much gentle grace as a dead fish. She sputtered and coughed, flailing about for purchase on the wet, slimy wood.

As she managed to sit upright, two men grabbed her arms and held her still. She spit a mouthful of salt water into her nearest captor's face. His look of surprise at seeing this little female prisoner resist was priceless. If she was going to die today, she would take that memory with her to the afterlife, giggling all the way.

Anderis came to stand over her, his narrow, old-looking form blotting out the midday sun. "My master thinks I should have killed you. He thinks I should have killed you where I found you in Naredis."

"Your master?" Cailix smiled sweetly, remembering the pockmarked mage she'd seen in the pool of briene blood. "I didn't think you took orders from anyone. I thought you took what you needed. Surely no one is more powerful than the omnipotent Anderis?"

Anderis reddened and bent closer, whispering in her ear. "I suffer the presence of a master so long as he furthers my aims. You should know exactly what that feels like, Aerlissa."

He straightened and raised his voice, ensuring that the nearby blood mages could hear him. "You and I are so much alike. It is a shame it had to end this way. You could have been something truly amazing."
 

"Fight me without your cronies and I'll show you just how amazing I can be," spat Cailix.

Anderis threw his head back and laughed. The sailors ignored the spectacle and went about their business, while the mercenaries simply gripped the hilts of their swords in case the annoying brat got loose.

"You really think you learned everything there is to know about being a blood mage from our short time together?" Anderis waved over one of the mercenaries. "Bring the slaves."

The man nodded and disappeared through a hatch in the aft deck.

"Mage, must I remind you how much those slaves cost me?" a voice boomed from the captain's quarters as the door swung wide.

"You will be more than adequately compensated, Captain."

"I'd better be. I'm losing more than enough money on this fool's errand as it is," the captain bellowed, a giant of a man with an equally robust beard. Were it not for a few pieces of jewelry and the expensive saber he wore, he would have looked just as dirty and ragged as the rest of the crew.

Pirates
, thought Cailix. It looked as though they had picked up slave trading as a side business. Pirates and mercenaries, people who didn't need convincing to do the Order's fighting. All they needed was money.

A few moments later, the mercenary climbed out of the other hold, followed by a line of men shackled to each other at the ankles with iron chains. Each man was dirty and naked save for short breeches, hunched over and barely able to walk. Time spent crammed into the hold weakened the slaves, and she had heard that the longer they spent on a ship the less they were worth when brought to market.

Clearly Anderis had no intention of selling them.

"For example, Aerlissa, I never taught you this little trick," he said, a proud grin on his face. "Drain the trough."

The sailors did as ordered, and the water spilled out of the trough onto the deck. The mercenaries holding her pressed down on her neck and tied her hands to the trough's support legs. It took all her strength to crane her neck and look her former mentor in the face.

He pointed at the first slave in the chain, and the man dropped to his knees, mouth agape, gasping for air. When Anderis clenched his fist, the man doubled over in pain, clutching his stomach. He spasmed violently, thrashing about on the deck, shrieking like nothing she had ever heard before.

"Pay attention, apprentice," Anderis said. He clenched both fists then clapped them together. As his fists touched, the slave exploded. It wasn't like a cannon explosion, but it was the closest description her brain could call up. The slave's skin vanished. One moment flesh and bone flapped on the deck like a fish out of water, and in the next, red mist filled the air as though the ship had sailed through a fog of blood.

The blood fog swirled into a vortex like the tornados she had conjured back in Waldron, spinning itself into the trough. It took only a few more seconds for everything the slave once was to collect as a pool of blood as deep as her waist. Everything that man was and had ever been now collected in a puddle around her.

She had seen all kinds of violence and had imagined visiting every kind of punishment on Anderis; had even seen her previous caregiver bleed out before her eyes, but nothing could compare to what she had just witnessed. She wanted to throw up.

She felt her stomach heave and her throat open but she resisted, fought with everything she had not to give that man the satisfaction of seeing her weakness. Swallowing back the bile, she faked a bored, blank look and stared back at Anderis, showing no reaction.

"Now do you see the power you could have had? If only you hadn't betrayed me."

Cailix said nothing, feigning disinterest.

"Since you chose to betray me when you had the freedom of choice, I am going to take that away from you. I am going to bind you to me, and you will no longer have a choice. You will do everything I say and, more importantly, kill whomever I ask you to kill." Anderis dipped his hands in the blood at the end of the trough.

"Prelate, the master said she must be killed," urged one of the other blood mages.

"The master does not always know best. If we kill her then we waste all of her power. Bind her, and she becomes our weapon to do with as we please."

They nodded. "Perhaps it is better this way. We can certainly use all the weapons we can get."

"He will see the brilliance of my plan soon enough." Anderis leaned forward and cut his wrist with a fingernail, adding a few drops of his own blood to the mix. "And now for your blood, my dear."

The soldier to her left pulled a small knife from his belt and grabbed her arm. She struck as he took a step closer for better leverage. She lunged to the left and bit down on his arm, ripping a chunk of flesh right out of it.

She couldn't use her hands for the blood power, so instead she sucked a mouthful of blood from the mercenary's arm. In her mind, she imagined the blood heating up and becoming as hot as flame.

She spit the blood in the man's face and, as she imagined it, the blood burst into flames and the mercenary raced across the deck, screaming, engulfed in dark, blood-red fire.

Shrieking, the burning mercenary jumped overboard, splashing into the ocean, a thick black puff of smoke rising from the water.

"Gag her!" Anderis yelled.

Hands grabbed her from all sides and pushed her face-first into the blood pool. Her mind sought the power of the blood in the pool around her but found nothing, as if it wasn't there. It smelled and looked like blood, but it carried no power for her.

More hands lifted her head up and stuffed a wadded-up rag on a rope into her mouth and cinched the gag tight. Ropes drew her arms back and bent her back at a painful angle.

"Another trick you never learned, apprentice, is that the blood in which you now sit belongs to me. You might as well be still sitting in ocean water for all the good it will do you."

A knife pierced her thigh, squirting her own blood into the vermillion mix. All she could smell was its pungent, metallic odor. She could barely see, struggling to blink the blood out of her eyes.

"You know what I'm going to enjoy most?" Anderis asked, pressing a bloody fingertip to her forehead. "That you will be aware of what is happening the entire time and completely unable to do anything about it. You will see and remember everything I make you do."

"You'll never control me," Cailix said, hoping he couldn't hear any of the doubt creeping through her veins like a plague. The only thing she could imagine worse than dying out there on that boat was living as Anderis's unwilling slave. It would be the ultimate humiliation, and all of her work to gain power and control would have been for nothing.
 

She hadn't come this far just to lose control now.

Anderis plunged his hands into the trough as the mercenaries tightened their grip. He chanted in a language she had never heard him use before. Up until then, she'd assumed it was all just triggered by thought.

I should have waited before I betrayed him
, she thought.
There was so much more to learn!

His voice rose in pitch and volume, then fell into a deep rumble that barely sounded like words at all. His muscles spasmed, his face twitched, and she half expected to see a demon or something crawl out of his mouth, he looked so bizarre. She studied his every move, fascinated by the ritual and the power required to complete it.

Tremendous gusts of wind blasted into the ship's sails, all of which were at full sail, driving the ship through the churning water. Clouds formed directly over the ship, smothering the sunshine and blanketing the boat with a chill air.

Anderis's head jerked forward, a triumphant, exhausted look on his face.

"Arise as my new thrall, Aerlissa," he said, spreading his arms wide, proud of his work and gesturing at it for all to see.

"Go piss yourself!" Cailix spat, shocked that she had enough free will to do so. She couldn't help but smile.

"What?" Anderis shouted, nearly falling backwards. "How is this possible? Ruorg, what did you idiots screw up this time?"

"Nothing, prelate. I felt the binding flow between you. It should have worked," Ruorg said, the shortest and widest of the white-robed hench-wizards Anderis always kept nearby.

"I guess you're not as powerful as you think you are. Maybe you're just losing potency in your old age," Cailix taunted him with a sneer.

Anderis leaned forward and backhanded her across the face. It stung, but she enjoyed being able to get under his skin and drive him mad even more. Even if he hit her, it was because
she
made it happen. She was in control again.

"You cannot even begin to comprehend my power, whelp," Anderis said, then whirled to face his fellow mages. "How could the binding fail? Could she have cast some kind of immunity before we took her out of the cargo hold or taken something to pollute her blood?"

The three men made their way across the deck to stand before their leader, their eyes downcast and faces filled with fear. Clearly they didn't find Anderis's impotence as amusing as she did.

"Prelate, there is no such spell. There is no way to ward oneself against the binding," said one mage.

"There is one way," said Ruorg, hesitating a little and avoiding Anderis's eyes.

"What? Tell me, how could she resist the spell?"

"Well," Ruorg stammered, "the only known immunity to the binding spell is if it is cast upon a blood relative."

"The only way she could have resisted the spell is if she was your—" another mage began.

"Daughter," Anderis finished.