ALARIC MAER

A low roar, like the lapping of waves on a distant shore. Hot red light pushing through closed lids. Pain, fuzzy around the edges.

I opened my eyes, regretted it, and closed them again. In that brief, blurry look at the world around me, I confirmed only that I was in a small dimly lit room. More carefully this time, I opened only my left eye.

The room was plain, unadorned except for the rough cot I was currently lying on and the chamberpot in the corner. My wrists, I realized, were shackled with mana suppression cuffs. The low roar was the blood drumming in my own ears, as if there were a tiny, angry man hammering his way out of my skull. The hot red light was the backlash.

The bastards didn’t even give me time to recuperate before slapping these unad-makers on. I could have died.

It was something, though, that they hadn’t cared enough to make sure I survived. That meant they didn’t really need me, which in turn meant there was only a limited amount of damage I might be able to do if the Redwater whelp and his Scythe leash-holder broke me.

The memory of those last moments was coming back in bits and pieces. Edmon’s death, Darrin’s ill-fated attempt to save me, the soulfire…

“You better be alive, boy,” I said aloud, my tongue thick and my voice raw. I pictured Darrin’s eyes as Wolfrum bloody Redwater’s soulfire danced behind them, and bile rose up in the back of my throat.

Something bumped against the wall just to my left. I leaned closer, pressing my ear to the wall. I attempted to imbue mana into my ears to enhance my hearing, but of course this failed. “Who's there?”

There was no immediate response, and so I knocked twice on the wall.

“Keep it down!” a man hissed from the other side. “We’re not allowed to speak to each other.”

“Who are you?” I said, modulating my voice to a low rumble that I knew would carry through the wall without sounding across the entire complex, wherever we were.

A few seconds passed before the timid response. “No one. Just an Instiller from Taegrin Caelum. You don’t need to know me.”

I felt a jolt of interest that helped to clear my head, and I sat up in the cot. “Taegrin Caelum? Is it true the fortress turned against everyone who was there after the shockwave? What—”

“I-I’m sorry, I can’t say. I don’t know much, only that I barely got out.” A pause. “If they hear us talking, they’ll hurt us.”

I snorted. “They likely intend to kill us both anyway.” When this didn’t engender confidence in the Instiller, I tried something else. “I was brought in with a man named Darrin. Do you know if he’s in one of the rooms nearby?”

“No, I don’t know. The guards don’t speak around us.” Another hesitation. “None of the other rooms were opened when you got dropped off, though. At least not close to me. I’d have heard.”

I let my head knock against the wall in irritation, but I wasn’t too worried yet. Wolfrum hadn’t needed the threat of killing Darrin to get me here; he’d already defeated me. There was no reason he’d have brought us both if they didn’t have some plan for Darrin as well, which meant he was probably still alive.

Unless I’ve been unconscious for longer than I think.

The shadowy figure of Cynthia sat down on the foot of the cot. “You can tell from the depth of your cottonmouth that it's been a few hours or so. The cuffs have chaffed your skin, but they haven’t broken through from your tossing and turning.”

I sat up and considered the cuffs, trying to ignore the hallucination. They were standard issue mana suppression cuffs, reliant on exterior runes. By destroying the right runes, it was possible to disable them. Then, with my mana back, it wouldn’t be too much trouble to break out of them. I knew this, but I didn’t act immediately.

“Good boy, Al,” the phantom said, bending forward slightly and looking at me in my periphery. “You ended up right where you wanted to be, so there’s no hurry to get out of here. Not before learning more about what’s happening.

Right now, only your enemies know who this runaway Instiller is and what was on that recording. That’s priority.”

“Darrin is priority, the fool,” I grumbled, leaning back on the cot and kicking my feet up so they passed through the hallucination.

There was nothing else to do, then, but wait. As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait for very long. Only about an hour later, I was roused by the sound of heavy booted steps stopping outside my door. I’d listened carefully to the guard walking up and down the hallway, memorizing his timing, but he’d never stopped before. They were coming for me.

As the door was unbolted, I stood and placed myself in the center of the small room. The door swung inward, just missing the foot of the cot.

“I demand to be taken to the proprietor of this establishment,” I said.

The soldier—a young man, Striker by the looks of him—took a single step in, his mouth open as if to say something. He startled slightly and pointed a shortsword shakily at my chest. Clearly, he’d been expecting me to be unconscious or too battered to move.

“Hey! What are you—s-sorry, what?” he asked haltingly.

I snorted. “The service here is abysmal, the bed’s **, and”—I rattled the short chain of the manacles—“the provided sleepwear was damnably uncomfortable.”

An older soldier pushed the young man aside, smirked at my joke, and drove his gauntleted fist into my mouth. With no mana, I didn’t have the response time to dodge and took the full force of the blow. My lips split open with a shock of bright pain, and my mouth filled with blood.

The soldier caught me before I fell, then half dragged, half pushed me past him. I stumbled out into the hall, lost my balance, and fell headlong into the opposite door, which shook from the blow. Someone gave a frightened shout from within, and the guards yelled for her to shut up. Two of them grabbed me under my arms and dragged me back to my feet, then I was being hauled bodily down the corridor.

It took a minute to shake off the knock, but by the time we were outside, my head was clear again. The indistinct silhouette of a woman and her babe looked sadly out at me from the shadows beneath a nearby gazebo.

Aside from ghosts and loyalist mages, the Central Academy campus seemed to be all but empty. The students were gone, as was the staff. Whatever folk Scythe Dragoth had under his command, they were out of sight as well. Most of the buildings were dark, and with the cuffs on, I couldn’t sense any mana signatures at all, leaving me feeling blind.

They dragged me past the reliquary, which was under heavy guard, and the ancient portal frame, sans portal, that the academy was so proud of. I was familiar enough with the campus from my previous exploits there, but when they hauled me down a narrow alley toward a squat building, I realized I didn’t know where we were going.

“No time to visit the staff baths then?” I asked. Bending my head, I sniffed my underarm loudly. “I’d hate to show up to my date with sweet old Dragoth smelling like—oof!”

An elbow came up into my jaw, snapping my teeth together. I felt around my mouth with my tongue, making sure everything was still in its proper place.

The building I was dragged into had a sterile air. Portraits of Instillers I didn’t recognize lined the entryway, and then we descended a dark but clean stairwell. I guessed that we went down two floors before I was hauled through a door, down a corridor, a left, a right, and then through another door into a dimly lit room. It wasn’t large but was nonetheless cramped with tools and workbenches along its exterior. The middle of the chamber was dominated by what appeared to be a surgical table, complete with straps to bind a patient.

The soldiers tossed me roughly onto the table and then, instead of tying me down, began to drive their fists and elbows into me, striking my stomach, chest, legs, and arms with ruthless efficiency. I curled in on myself, shielding myself as best as I could, not bothering to shout or plead with them.

Stars exploded behind my eyes as a stray punch caught me in the cheek and bounced my head off the metal table. I felt my body going limp as my mind lingered at the very edge of consciousness, no longer caring about the assault, but a muffled command sank into my ringing ears, and the attack halted. My arms and legs were jerked into place, and by the time I came back to my senses, the straps around my wrists, ankles, throat, and waist had been secured.

I coughed up blood and spat off the side of the table. One of the soldiers cursed and jumped back as red spittle sprayed across his shins.

“He’s a tough old piece of rawhide, you have to give him that.”

My head swam as I turned toward the source of the voice. I was disappointed to find Wolfrum of Highblood Redwater instead of Scythe Dragoth himself, his two different colored eyes sparkling with amused malice. Or maybe that was just the stars I was seeing.

He approached, manifesting out of the corner like one of my hallucinations. Before speaking again, he pressed a hand against my chest. Black flames erupted from his flesh and burrowed into mine. My jaw clenched and my body bucked despite my best efforts; every nerve in my torso burned like a candle wick under my skin.

“Why was your man digging around at the academy?” Wolfrum asked, leaning down to peer at me.

I sucked in a choking, desperate breath against the pain. “Looking for…evidence,” I ground out through clenched teeth.

“Evidence of what?” he demanded.

“That…th-that…” I paused, forced to swallow, hoping I didn’t choke to death on my tongue. “That your mother was a mountain goat.”

Wolfrum smirked. “You’re old, Alaric. Only a little life force left. And it’s burning away by the second. Each word you utter should be spoken with care. It could be your last.”

“Then I’ll make sure…not to waste them,” I shot back, forcing out a chuckle that turned into a bubbling cough as blood seeped up the back of my throat.

He patted my shoulder. “And I’ll try not to kill you too quickly.”

The questions continued. The pain came and went. It was better when it stayed, lingering, consistent. The mind adapted to it. But the flames jumped and danced, falling only to swell again, burning first in one part of my body then another. It was agony, and soon enough my jokes grew half-hearted and ill thought out. I lost track of what Wolfrum had asked or how I’d answered. Names and locations, the structure of the organization, information on Seris…

Through the fog of pain, I recognized the tactic. He was verifying information he had already received from others and getting a baseline for how truthful I was being. Unsure exactly what I’d told him, I could only hope I hadn’t given away anything essential. Not that there is anything essential about our operation at this point, I thought somewhere deep in the back of my mind, where the pain couldn’t reach.

When Wolfrum suddenly withdrew his soulfire, a shock struck me like being plunged into icy cold water. I gasped and choked, writhing in the straps as the leather burned my flesh. Something else was there, oppressive, looming in place of the pain. A seething, wrathful intent.

Powerful fingers wove into my hair and jerked my head back, nearly snapping my neck.

I stared up into the broad, dumb face of Scythe Dragoth Vritra. Only, he was missing a horn since the last image I’d seen of him. I lacked the strength to mention it.

He growled something, demanding information. I gawped stupidly up at him.

“You smuggled stuff for Seris. Food. Weapons. People.” The hand not trying to rip my scalp off wrapped around my throat instead, but it didn’t squeeze. “Tell me everything. Who, where, how. I want every detail of your network.”

I sputtered something out, although I wasn’t sure exactly what. The names of dead men and sunken boats, and the locations of burned safehouses, I hoped.

He released me and began pacing back and forth beside my table. Wolfrum had slunk back into the corner.

“How do people—clients—contact you? I want everyone who might bring someone into your group. Everyone. I’m told you know them all.”

He stopped his pacing suddenly, grabbed the sides of the table, and lifted it up so I was no longer horizontal. Even if I hadn’t been strapped to the metal table, I couldn’t have done anything as he rammed the table legs into the wall. Stone gave way with a horrible crunch as the metal legs were impaled into the wall. I hung painfully from the straps, which were meant to keep me down, not hold me up. Dragoth was face to face with me, close enough for me to see the hairs up his crooked nose.

I spit out a few names, all of them in Dicathen and of no use to Dragoth. My thoughts swam in and out of focus.

“Vritra damn it all,” Dragoth cursed, rounding on Wolfrum. “He’s no use to me like this. Take him away. Have a healer make sure he won’t die. When he can speak again, tell me.” Without waiting for a reply, he started to leave.

“And the other one?” Wolfrum asked, his tone strained and nervous. “I’m confident he doesn’t know anything of value.”

Dragoth stopped and looked closely at me. “Hold him for now. If pain isn’t enough to motivate this one, watching his friend be pulled apart one joint, one ligament at a time might.”

“Get him out of here,” Wolfrum said after Dragoth had left. The soldiers, who had lingered outside the room until that moment, hurried to obey, and I let myself slip into blessed unconsciousness.

It did not last nearly long enough. I woke feeling hollow. Bruises were forming in my flesh, but the scars of the soulfire were much deeper and less tangible. Still, I’d gotten what I’d needed.

The thing about torturing someone with the expectation that their throat will soon be slit and their carcass dumped for the mana beasts was that certain details easily slipped into the questioning. Neither Wolfrum nor Dragoth were practiced at any of this, a fact made painfully obvious by their amateurish demands for information and lack of subtlety. In particular, Dragoth wore his desperation and fear as clearly as the one remaining horn on his rock-filled skull.

They didn’t know where their defector was, meaning the Instiller had escaped. And there was something else. I couldn’t be completely sure, but the outward fear Dragoth hadn’t been able to contain made me think he was still guarding this recording. He thought I’d sent Edmon and the Severin boy into the academy to find it.

This tracked. He was on his own. Despite being a Scythe, he was a servant. Everything he’d ever been given was due to the Vritra blood that pumped like poison through his veins, but now there were no Vritra to pat his head and give him treats. He was too scared to destroy the recording, and he was too scared to keep it.

This suggested a narrow window of time.

I started to sit up, let out a grunt of pain followed by a long moan, and eased myself back down.

Instead, I rolled onto my side and carefully pushed up into a sitting position.

There was a knock on the wall behind me, quiet but persistent. “Hello?” came my neighbor’s muffled voice.

“I’m here,” I said, again modulating my voice so that it was deep but quiet to better pass through the wall. My lungs and throat protested this use of them.

There was a muffled noise, and then, “Your friend. He’s here. Three doors to the left, across the hall. I heard them talking about him when they brought you back.”

This news perked me up. Spending time searching for Darrin was exactly the kind of time I couldn’t spare, but I wasn’t about to leave the boy here to fester and die at the hands of a cankerous lump like Wolfrum. “Thanks.”

There was no response from the other side as the guard went by on his patrol along the hallway.

Taking a deep, aching breath, I reached into my mouth and felt around for my false tooth. It moved when I touched it, and I could only be grateful that it hadn’t been knocked out by the beating I took.

Tipping my head forward, I wiggled the tooth until it dislodged from the gums, quickly removing it from my mouth afterwards to avoid accidentally dumping its contents into my mouth.

When the tooth was tipped upside down over my palm, a capsule fell out. The waxed parchment was slightly see-through, revealing a small amount of powder inside. My fingers trembled as I attempted to twist the package open.

“Steady your nerves, Al,” Cynthia said from the cot beside me. Her incorporeal hands reached out and wrapped around mine.

Despite how she wasn’t really there, the trembling eased. I unwound the package with great care, then adjusted my arms to expose the runes etched into the metal of the left cuff. With painstaking precision, I sprinkled the powder onto the runes. As dehydrated as I was, it took a minute to gather enough spit to catalyze it, and when I let the frothy liquid drip from my lips to wet the powder, it was tinged pink.

Regardless, it did the job. Acrid smoke began to curl up from the powder on contact with the spit. In moments, sparks were jumping off the cuff, bright and hot. I didn’t move even when one of them burned through my sleeve and into the skin of my forearm. Others smoldered in the cot, peppering it with little black scorch marks, or jumped across the floor sending out more sparks.

Within seconds, the steel curtain that the cuffs wrapped around my mana fell away. My sense of mana stuttered, swelling and receding as the magic of the cuffs failed. I pulled at the atmospheric mana like a dehydrated man gorging himself at an oasis. What already purified mana had been contained within my core flushed through my channels, infusing my muscles to provide both strength and comfort.

I had to give myself time to ease into it, and listened to the guard pass by twice more before I was ready to act. At least my mana signature was so weak that it was no trouble to suppress it.

Finally, when I gauged the timing to be right, I pushed mana into my arms and twisted the left cuff. The chain snapped at the connection point.

Quickly, I pried the cuff off, then used it to break open the right cuff by sliding it between the irritated skin of my wrist and the metal, then twisting. My efforts had made a little noise, but I didn’t sense any reaction from the guards.

Moving to the door, I channeled mana into Sun Flare and waited. When the pacing guard was just outside my door, I reached for the lighting artifacts in the hallway, causing them to flare with horrible brightness. The guard shouted in dismay. The flare lasted barely a blink before the lighting artifacts shattered, plunging the hall into darkness.

I smashed into the door.

It ripped through the frame and swung outward, the hinges jerking free of the hall. The door slammed into the guard, who was bent over and rubbing his eyes. He flew back into the door opposite mine and collapsed in a heap. Once again, a startled cry came from within the room, but this time it was followed by shouts up and down the hall, including from two other guards.

They charged into the darkness, mana burning around their weapons and further blinding them. I couldn’t manage a second pulse of Sun Flare and instead channeled Myopic Decay, targeting both at once. They cried out in alarm as their already insufficient eyesight went blurry and their eyes began to water painfully.

Whipping a dagger from the boot of the guard at my feet, I hurled it at the closer of the two guards. It sank into the man’s neck. With my other hand, I took up a sword and sprinted toward the remaining guard. Hearing my approach, she swung blindly, but her glowing weapon was easy to dodge. My own found the gap in her armor just above her hip, thrusting upward. I covered her mouth and eased her to the ground as she died in my arms.

Shouts erupted from the surrounding rooms, the prisoners desperate to make themselves heard.

“What’s happening—”

“—to help us, please, we’re—”

“—damned fools, Dragoth will kill us all, shut up, shut—”

“—have to let us out!”

Darrin’s voice wasn’t among them, meaning he was either unconscious or smart enough to keep his mouth shut and listen instead of bellowing like mad.

The guard I’d struck with the door was still breathing. I quickly rectified that, then relieved his corpse of a ring of mundane keys. Thankfully, they had numbers punched into them.

I went straight to Darrin’s room, as indicated by the Instiller who’d spoken through the wall. The keyring jangled as I fumbled for the right number, the metal slick in my blood-stained fingers. I needed to hurry.

The lock turned with a smooth click, and I pushed open the door and stepped back. Darrin was standing there, his torso bare and covered in wounds, both eyes nearly swollen shut inside a pulp of bruising, and a broken cot leg clutched like a dagger in his fist.

“What exactly were you going to do with that, then?” I asked, nodding at the improvised weapon.

“Stab you for taking so long,” Darrin croaked, his voice hardly recognizable.

The keyring lacked any way to deactivate or remove the cuffs. Instead, I took the guard’s dagger and wrenched the chain free from one side, allowing Darrin full freedom of movement with his arms. It didn’t fully disable the mana suppression effect, but it did destabilize the artifact, which relied on both sets of runes being connected.

“There. At least mana should begin circulating through your body again,” I said. “We can finish when—”

“Well let’s get going then,” he demanded. His gaze kept jumping from one end of the hallway to the other, then to the corpses. “Surely some kind of alarm must have gone up.”

“One second, boy.”

I hurried to the door next to mine, unlocked it, and pushed it open. Inside, curled in on himself in his cot, was a small man with a couple weeks worth of beard and eyes wide and wet with terror. I shouldn’t have felt sorry for the poor bastard, considering he was one of Agrona’s pet Instillers. Who knew what kind of horrors he’d been involved in at Taegrin Caelum. Still, I couldn’t just leave him—all of them. And their escape would help cover our own.

I tossed him the keyring. “I assume you can get those cuffs off on your own?”

He nodded weakly. “Thank you.”

“Don’t waste any time.” With a sharp flick of my hand to bid him farewell, I marched away, gesturing for Darrin to follow. Despite his worries, no alarm had gone up.

“They’re amateurs,” Cynthia said, following along after us, her hands held behind her back as if she were examining a training session. “Desperate and flailing. The last gasp of a dying empire. Soon, Dragoth will be dead, and everyone will see what pathetic creatures the Vritra were.”

Here’s hoping it’s that easy, commander.