‘Who’s Gilanthus the Golden?’
Eremul sighed. ‘The Merchant Lord. God of wealth and commerce. Not one of the Primes, and besides, he’s been dead these last five hundred years.’ He reached across and took the scroll from the lad’s unresisting fingers. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ he added. ‘Piss off.’
The urchin blinked and suddenly began to cough. He raised his hands to his mouth and hacked into them. Eremul rolled his eyes.
‘Ah, that old chestnut,’ he said. ‘Let me just reach into my robes and withdraw a nice big bag of fuck-all to hand to this poor afflicted youth, whose sad lifeless corpse I will surely encounter at some point in the near future…’ He trailed off as the boy continued coughing. He was bent over now, his body convulsing in wild spasms. When the urchin finally recovered enough to stand up straight, Eremul saw that blood flecked his chin and stained his small hands.
The boy would, in fact, be dead within the year.
The Halfmage slipped a hand inside one of his pockets and withdrew a silver coin. ‘Buy yourself something to eat,’ he mumbled. ‘And drink plenty of honeyed tea. It will help with the cough.’ He tossed the coin at the lad, who didn’t react quickly enough. It struck him on the side of the head and rolled into a puddle. The urchin picked it up off the muddy ground, his eyes wide with disbelief.
‘Thank — thank you,’ the boy stammered, but Eremul had already turned his chair around and wheeled himself back inside the depository, slamming the door shut behind him.
The scroll was blank. He had known it would be. Only a fool would entrust an unencrypted message to a street urchin. The Crimson Watch was known to employ street rats for the sole purpose of diverting literature meant for the eyes of malcontents and using it to track them down.
He ran his fingers down the parchment. The enchantment was faint, absolutely undetectable to anyone not skilled in the arts of magic. In this post-Culling era, when mages were about as welcome in Dorminia as the plague, that meant there were precisely two people in the city capable of discerning its message: himself, and a certain genocidal Magelord.
Muttering an incantation, Eremul summoned forth the latent energy that hummed within him. Every wizard was born with a certain capacity for the harnessing of magic. Salazar and the other Magelords possessed a veritable ocean of power to draw from. For Eremul, it was more like a puddle. Raw magic — the essence of the gods — could be siphoned to replenish or augment a wizard’s strength, but it was consumed by the process. Without such external help, a wizard was restricted to the limits of the power they were born with. While that tended to increase with age, the speed with which it recovered once spent slowed at a similar rate.
Of course, Salazar and the other Magelords controlled the distribution of raw magic with an iron grip. Already possessed of power that dwarfed mortal wizards, they widened the gap further still by maintaining exclusive access to the corpses of the gods.
Magic was fading from the world, and as soon as the last divine corpse was sucked dry, there would be nothing left, unless further discoveries like that of the Celestial Isles were made. The murder of the gods had broken something fundamental in the world: the land was slowly dying, refusing to rejuvenate itself as it had prior to the Godswar.
Eremul finished his evocation and then waited. Slowly but surely, spidery words of glowing white energy seeped up from the blank page to float a fraction of an inch above the parchment. The message was starkly simple: Attend us at the abandoned lighthouse north of the harbour two nights from now. Be there at midnight precisely. Do not be late.
And that was it. Eremul hissed in frustration. The lighthouse in question was a good mile to the north, situated on top of a large bluff overlooking the harbour. It was an uphill slog most of the way. He hoped Isaac had returned by then.
The cryptic note bore all the hallmarks of the enigmatic individual whose attention he had been seeking for many months now.
The White Lady.
And if there was one individual in the Trine capable of deposing the Tyrant of Dorminia, it was the enigmatic Magelord of Thelassa.
No Brother of Mine
He could hear footsteps. Torchlight flared, and it seemed to burn as brightly as the sun. He squeezed his eyes shut immediately, blinking away tears and the crust accumulated from countless days spent in impenetrable darkness. A harsh voice reached his ears.
‘The Sword of the North. Huh. That’s a fancy fucking title for a man as wretched as this old greybeard.’
The footsteps slowed. Sounded like three of them, though he couldn’t be sure. Another voice.
‘He ain’t seen the outside of that cage for nigh on a year. It’s a wonder he ain’t as mad as a wolverine.’
Silence. One of the men coughed. He opened one eye a fraction. How long had it been since his last meal?
The first voice again. ‘Fucker’s awake. Listen up, Kayne. The Shaman wants you brought to the Great Lodge. Guess who the Brethren found holed up in a cave up in the Devil’s Spine?’
Sudden terror. Had they discovered her? He wanted to scream. Bracing himself on the fouled floor of his prison, he pushed himself up, willing his atrophied muscles into life. The weeping sores covering his body chafed agonizingly with his every movement. He didn’t care. He squeezed the bars of the cage, trying desperately to force them. They didn’t move an inch. He remembered exhausting himself attempting to escape when he’d first been imprisoned. He had no chance now, not after a year of wasting away, yet he grunted and redoubled his efforts.
The harsh voice again, this time amused. ‘That got your attention. Your wife. What’s her name, Mhaira? She did well, evading the Brethren for all this time. And she ain’t a young thing either, though that didn’t stop the Butcher having his sport.’
His teeth ground together. His eyes felt as if they were going to explode and he tasted blood. Still the bars wouldn’t budge.
A third voice, this one known to him. ‘That’s enough. Let’s just get the cage on the platform.’
He stopped struggling. Stared at the speaker, met his eyes. Saw shame there. Shame and regret.
‘My son?’ he managed. His voice cracked; it sounded like a foreign thing to his ears after all this time. ‘Where is my son?’
The man who was known to him looked down at the ground. ‘You’ll learn soon enough,’ he said, and his tone was apologetic. ‘Don’t struggle, Kayne. You can’t change what’s coming.’
He sank back to the floor of his prison. Covered his face with his hands. He’d suffer a thousand agonies, embrace an eternity of torment for the chance to avert the atrocity he knew would be committed at the Great Lodge.
But it was no good. He couldn’t change what was coming.
‘Kayne.’
The rasping voice dragged him awake and into a world full of misery. His body hurt all over. He opened his eyes to be confronted by the unpleasant sight of Jerek’s scowling visage staring down at him. The Wolf had a few bumps and bruises but otherwise appeared unscathed.
‘Shit,’ Brodar Kayne muttered. ‘Help me up.’
Jerek reached down, grabbed hold of his wrists and then hauled him roughly upwards. He tottered for a moment, a hundred little niggles assailing him like a pack of wolves trying to bring down a bear. The old Highlander breathed deeply. His knees ached like buggery and his chest felt as if it had been bludgeoned by a giant’s club, but he could tough it out. You had to, when you were stupid enough to keep doing this kind of shit at his age.