“I always assumed them to be naturally occurring creatures of Parthalon that you enslaved upon your arrival, just as you did the rest of the population,” Wigg said skeptically.
“You assume a great deal, Wigg,” Failee said. “You and the Directorate always did, and this time your assumption is quite wrong. Until we arrived upon these shores, the Minions did not exist. I systematically bred them. Bred them from humans taken from the countryside and mated over time with the many exotic animals we found here. A disgusting process to watch, I assure you, and requiring use of the craft to overcome nature, but quite effective in the end. After I had the product I desired, I needed to be sure they could only reproduce among themselves, since there was nothing else like them in the world.” She watched in triumph as a horrified look of realization began to creep over the Lead Wizard’s face.
“Yes, Wigg, that’s right,” she gloated. “I have formulated an incantation that prevents inbreeding, allowing the Minions to reproduce perfectly among themselves, each one a brother to the other. The Gallipolai are the only aberration, and most of them turn by the age of twenty-five. The ones who do not are dealt with in the Vale of Torment. The same incantations used to prevent inbreeding among the Minions shall also hold true for Shailiha and Tristan’s union, as they conceive the being I desire.
“The process was not a simple one,” she admitted. “I made many mistakes along the way, and the results were at first often horrifying, even to my seasoned mind and talents. In truth, the Minions have a race of ancestors. My initial mistakes, if you like. I cherish these errors of the craft as if they were my own children, as though they had come from my own womb. There are hundreds of them still living, protected by my time enchantments. And they dwell here, among us, in this room.”
Horrified, the three prisoners in the hanging gibbets watched as the First Mistress raised her hand and pointed to the far side of the chamber. Immediately a split began to appear in the wall and the marble floor moved back to reveal a gaping pit, its contents just out of view.
“Please, my children, come out and join us,” Failee said lovingly. “Awake from your sleep. I believe there are people here whom you know.”
Tristan watched, his mouth agape, as the first of the awful things crawled up and out of the cavern that lay beneath the floor of the Sanctuary.
The wiktor.
At first it appeared, impossibly, to be the very one he had killed that day in front of the royal palace in Tammerland. The same one he had watched die at the point of his dreggan in the dirt beneath him. The same one that had sworn to tear the prince’s heart from his body, ft can’t be, Tristan said to himself. Not only did I kill it, but I also beheaded the awful thing and impaled its lifeless head upon a stick. But the longer he looked at the Wiktor, the more he realized that it was indeed the same one, despite the fact that there was now many more of them in the room as they deftly continued to clamber up and out of their living area.
Tristan took in the green, scaly creature, seeing the useless-looking dark wings that protruded just above each shoulder. The yellow, slanted eyes looked intently back at him from above a long, pointed snout; its grin showed sharp, yellow teeth arrayed in neat upper and lower rows. It stood upon its two large, powerful lower legs, using its barbed tail for support; and the short, equally powerful arms that ended in black talons moved back and forth nervously, as if anxious to tear into the prince’s chest and take what had been denied it at their first meeting. Green drool ran from its mouth to the floor, its pink, forked tongue occasionally licking some of the shiny slime away from its teeth.
But it was the thing’s wounds that finally convinced Tristan of its identity. The wiktor had a light-green, recently healed scar that ran vertically down the center of its chest—carved by Tristan’s dirk—and another, less ragged one that completely encircled its throat where the prince had beheaded it. But how did it get to Parthalon? his emotions asked of his common sense.
Tristan thought about what the First Mistress had said, about how the wiktors were the ancestral forerunners of the Minions. Her mistakes, her children, she called them. Except for the wings, he could see little similarity between the wiktor and the Minion commander. But in the two pairs of eyes he saw unmistakable cruelty, and a total, blind willingness to obey the Coven’s orders no matter what the risk. But how could it be alive? He had killed it!
“I now realize how it is that the wiktor remains alive, although it gives me no pleasure to have to tell you,” Wigg said to the prince, as if reading his mind. “I fear that its survival is the product of yet another of my mistakes.” He looked into the puzzled faces of the prince and the now-conscious dwarf, and his face seemed to sadden even further with guilt.
Failee smiled as the Wiktor continued to glare hungrily at Tristan. “Please, Wigg, by all means, enlighten us all,” she said nastily. “Perhaps you may even prove yourself to be correct.”
“Tristan,” the wizard began, “do you remember the day I killed the screaming harpy in the courtyard of the palace? Do you remember the orders I gave to the Royal Guard regarding the disposal of the body?”
Standing in the gibbet, his mind and legs close to exhaustion, the prince thought back to that day as best he could. Wigg had killed the harpy with a wizard’s cage, crushing the life out of it, after Tristan had thrown a dirk into one of its eyes. And then he remembered.
Tristan raised his eyes to his friend. “I remember,” he said. “You ordered it cut up and buried in separate pieces.”
“Yes,” Wigg said, “because the harpies had the ability to rejoin their parts and reacquire life if the limbs and organs were left close enough together. The Harpies were a product of the Coven, just as are the wiktors. The wiktor must have been taken to Eutracia in Succiu’s flagship as a safeguard against you, I, or any of the royal house or Directorate surviving. The wiktor’s job would have been to stay behind and hunt us down. After you supposedly killed it, we must have left the wiktor’s head and body near enough to each other, and then, after the rejoining, Succiu took it back to Parthalon with her. But obviously the First Mistress has been unable to bestow that particular talent of coming back from the dead onto the current ranks of Minions, since many of them were killed when they invaded Eutracia.”
“Well done, Lead Wizard. Right on all counts!” Failee scoffed. “And, as I am sure you have already deduced, it is because of that failure that I was forced to develop the incantations that prevent the Minions from inbreeding. But Succiu did not leave that day, as you had thought. True, by then all of the Minions had been boarded back on the ships, and only she remained in Parthalon to make a last attempt to find you and the prince—dead, presumably. But when she returned to the palace gates, hoping to find your bodies, instead she found the Wiktor. It is my pet, don’t you see? How could you expect me to leave it behind? I simply had to let Succiu retrieve him. And now here he is. Such a shame the two of you and the Second Mistress didn’t cross paths that day, isn’t it? But that doesn’t matter now. Now we’re all together once again.”
Tristan watched in disgust as she lovingly began stroking the wiktor’s head and face, her hands becoming partially covered in the drool that continued to run from the thing’s mouth. The green of the wiktor’s drool combined with the less-viscous red of the wizard’s blood to form a brown-tinted fluid that dripped sickeningly from her fingers onto the shiny, pristine, white marble floor.
“Everything seems to come full circle eventually, doesn’t it, my dear Wigg?” she asked the wizard. “Even the Coven’s loss of the Sorceresses’ War, as you call it, has ironically resulted in your final prostrations here, in Parthalon, before me.”