The prisoner slammed his father down, and Welstiel felt the impact through the floor stones. He hesitated in fear, as he had little skill at arms. His chosen method of conjury was artificing, the making of objects and tools, and not spellcraft. Even so, what could he possibly conjure or summon of the elements to aid his father now?
The air in the room began to swirl. It kicked up dust from the floor that made Welstiel blink as he looked for the source of the sudden wind in this underground chamber.
Ubad, in his whipping charcoal robe, hovered above the floor.
Wisplike eddies appeared in the swirling air around him, each twisting and curling, until translucent faces appeared at the head of each wisp. Their sorrowed features blurred in the air. Spirits of the dead gathered about the withered necromancer and, one by one, they broke away and dived at Bryen's opponent.
The first spirit struck through the prisoner. He shuddered but kept pounding down upon Bryen with huge fists. Another wisp pierced the wide man's flesh, and another, until he finally screamed in pain.
"Assist me-now!" Ubad shouted. 'Take his breath!"
Welstiel blinked once before understanding. Such a simple thing, he should have thought of this himself, but spell-work was not his strength in conjury. He held out his cupped hands, palms facing each other, then lifted them until they framed his sight of the prisoner. Forming the lines, shapes, and symbols in his mind to overlay what his eyes saw, he began to chant.
The air between his palms pushed outward, but he held it in place like a small entity trapped within a conjuring circle. He loathed following Ubad's commands but was determined to save his father.
Another spirit struck the wide man. He opened his mouth to yell, but no sound issued, and he buckled, grasping his throat.
Welstiel's head ached with concentration as he summoned the air from out of the prisoner's lungs. Free of the wide man's assault, Welstiel's father struck upward into his opponent's bearded jaw as two more spirits pierced the man's body.
The prisoner's eyes rolled as he gasped for air, and he toppled over. Bryen was up and on him in an instant, pinning his thick arms back with the dangling chains.
"Leave him alive," Ubad commanded.
Welstiel ceased chanting. His father pinned the captive's stomach against the brass vat and forced the man to lean forward over it. Before Welstiel understood what was happening, Ubad slashed open the prisoner's throat with a curved dagger.
The hulking man bucked at the blade's passing and thrashed wildly. Bryen put his full weight on top of his captive. It did not take long for the prisoner to go limp as his blood drained into the vessel. Bryen stood up, releasing the body to flop heavily upon the floor.
Welstiel saw the prisoner's eyes, smaller and darker than the elf's, staring blindly up at the ceiling. His mouth was clenched shut in a permanent grimace, and the thick beard was matted to his chest with his own blood.
"Well done, my son," Bryen said. "One dwarf is far more trouble man we expected."
Awareness filled Welstiel like a winter chill spreading from Bryen's approving gaze. His father lived an unnatural existence, but this spilling of blood without thought shocked Welstiel. The thing that stood before him, offering dispassionate praise, was far less his sire than he had ever before realized.
"We must not delay," Ubad said urgently. "Now that it's begun, preparation must be finished immediately."
Bryen cast the necromancer an annoyed glance but nodded agreement. Without another word to Welstiel, he stepped to the wood-framed crate with its canvas walls. Drawing his own dagger, he slashed open one side. The canvas separated and fell away.
Welstiel saw the prisoner within.
Bound with leather straps instead of shackles, she was delicate. Even curled in fright at the container's rear, he could tell she would barely reach his sternum when standing.
Her face and build were as lithe and slender as the last prisoner's had been hulking and wide. She would have been slight even standing next to the dead elf. Her two eyes, staring out in wide terror, had no irises. They were fully black like a sparrow's, and the dark rings around mem showed she had not slept in days. From narrow feet to her head of feathery hair, her pale flesh appeared downy, though there were places where it had molted or been rubbed to bare cream skin.
And bound down to her naked torso were wings of mottled grays and whites sprouting from her back. Her attempts to free them were likely what Welstiel had heard when he had first seen this container.
Bryen grabbed her bound wrists, dragging her out and holding her up to dangle from his grip as he walked toward the vat.
"You should retire," Ubad said to Welstiel. "There's still much to do here, and you've exceeded your stamina."
Welstiel got to his feet. He was about to approach his father, but Ubad slid into his way as the necromancer followed Bryen across the room. Welstiel suddenly felt isolated and alone.
He turned to leave. Behind him, the sound of a frantic scream was cut short. He thought of Magelia, locked in her cell, forced to listen, and he turned his eyes away as he passed her door.
Once in his own room, Welstiel locked the door and sat at a small desk lit by the three dancing flickers in his orb. There he remained for the rest of a sleepless night with his eyes closed, flinching at the sounds of two more screams that echoed up from the seventh room beneath the keep.
Chapter 6
C adell and Jan brought additional candle lanterns, and the room was illuminated around Magiere in yellow light. The stench was still so thick that she could taste it. Before her was a small heap of remains amid an old wood frame with decayed shreds of cloth still bound to it.
At first, she thought it was two bodies, for there were too many bones for a single being. Yet there was only one skull, human shaped, but too small and narrow, with oversize eye sockets like those of the elf. There was only one set of hands and feet, with toe bones that were too long. Its limbs had been bound with leather straps now crusted hard with age, as well as another hanging loose around the frail rib cage.
In the filth surrounding it were the remains of rotted feathers.
"Wings?" Wynn whispered as she drew closer, holding up a crystal. "It had wings… like a bird. Perhaps female-if its make is similar to other races."
Magiere's gaze traced the tangled bones until the illusion of two bodies was dispelled by the memory of once seeing a dead hawk in the woods. A few feathers lying before her still held their mottled gray and white color.
"What is it?" Jan asked, though he kept his distance a few steps away, near the large vat they'd discovered.
Wynn shook her head and looked up, but not at the zupan's son. Magiere saw fear in the sage's unblinking eyes. For an instant, all Wynn's horror turned upon her, and Magiere backed away.
"There's another over here by this iron box," Leesil called from the right side of the room. "But it's… something else. I'm not sure what."
The words barely entered Magiere's thoughts. What did the remains of this sealed chamber reveal concerning the death of her mother? Had something been done here to Magelia in order to bring her unnatural daughter into this world?
Magiere saw her whole life infested with the dead and undead. Even her birth was somehow forecast with these bones, yet she couldn't fathom what they told her of the past. She sensed-somehow knew-that the contents of this room were connected to her.
There were only more questions, and no answers.
Beside the crusted vat lay the second body they'd found. Wynn had partly cleared the hardened leather clothes from it, telling them it was-had been-a dwarf. The sage knew of these people from a seatt-dwarvish for a city stronghold or fortified haven-across the bay from the capital of her homeland, Malourne. That capital, Calm Seatt, had been named out of respect for the dwarven people who'd helped to build its first keep.