Dark Legion

CHAPTER ONE True Names

CHAPTER TWO Eye of Svyn

CHAPTER THREE Risen

CHAPTER FOUR Rest in the Mud

CHAPTER FIVE Outskirts

CHAPTER SIX Sagemont

CHAPTER SEVEN Something Fishy

CHAPTER EIGHT Scars

CHAPTER NINE Once an Assassin

CHAPTER TEN Grains in a Cup

CHAPTER ELEVEN Pretty Men

CHAPTER TWELVE Podge

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Dark Arrival

CHAPTER FOURTEEN Embers

CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Path Less Followed

CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Proposition

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Apprentice

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Gone

CHAPTER NINETEEN As the Crow Flies

CHAPTER TWENTY Red Skull

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Trouble Brewing

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Solstice

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Congratulations

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Separating Silence

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE A Plan That Exists

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Positions Vacant

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Branded Men

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Morwynne

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE A Day in the City

CHAPTER THIRTY Coming Together

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Hobart

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO Troubled Waters

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Harvest Festival

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Reception

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE A plan into action

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX The Chair

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN Crooked Eagle

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT A Step in the Right Direction

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Illusions

CHAPTER FORTY Another way

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE Blood of my Blood

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO Barrels of Fun

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE Journeys Ended and Begun

To the Reader,

 

 

Dark Legion

Blood of Blood - Book 1

 

Paul Kleynhans

I would like to thank the love of my life, Rachel, for encouraging me to write this book and for putting up with the many late nights I spent at the keyboard. I would like to thank Nevani for the hours she spent reading the many versions of this story that lived and died. I would like to thank Eliza and Ella for their magic ways with words. Last but not least, I need to thank coffee.

 

This book is a work of fiction. Any characters, incidents, cultures and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Content Warning: Contains graphic depictions of violence.

DARK LEGION

All rights reserved.

Published by Insomnia

Copyright © 2014 by 
Paul Kleynhans

First Printing, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER ONE

True Names

 

I held the dagger to my master's throat, and time stretched—measured by a dozen slow-drawn breaths. I wanted to savor the moment, but as much as I'd dreamed of it, when it came it was an empty thing. He wasn't even conscious to see me exact my revenge. It made for a hollow victory, but that was just life, wasn't it? I took a deep breath and released it as I slit his throat.

The door to the torture chamber slammed open as if pulled by the magnitude of my action. Framed in the doorway stood a red-robed Inquisitor, his skin covered in tattoos that reflected light as if they were drawn with silver. A cold dread surged through me at the sight of the man, grinning, and displaying less than the optimum number of teeth as his uneven laughter filled the room. His watery eyes flicked between the corpse and me. He was a sorcerer of the Inquisition and well beyond sight of sanity.

He took a slow step forward, and I a step back. “Apprentith,” he said with a lisp. “What have you done?” I did not reply, it was obvious enough. People often used the phrase “caught red-handed,” but rarely in a situation as fitting as this. I stood in front of my master's corpse, the dagger still in my hand and blood pooling at my feet.

I looked past the Inquisitor, expecting to see his minders. Sorcerers were too far gone to be left alone, and two minders stuck close to each of them like shit to a shoe. He appeared to have shaken his—or killed them, which happened often enough.

He stood there, laughing like the mad bastard that he was. It turned my bones to water, that laugh. For all that my mind raced to find a solution, an excuse, anything at all to get out of the torture chamber, I came up with exactly nothing. In the end, I settled on my standard response to a bad situation. I attacked, throwing my dagger at him. He pressed a finger to one of his tattoos, and the dagger stopped in mid-flight. The air shimmered around the blade, and the tattoo he'd touched glowed with a bright blue light. He touched another tattoo with his thumb, and the floating knife rotated, stopping when he lifted his thumb, pointing right at me. I gasped, and my eyes settled on a cleaver hanging from the wall beside him. Before I could try for it, the knife flew at me. I dived to the side, but it cut deep into my shoulder. I roared with pain as I clutched at the wound. Warm, sticky blood soaked through my coat and ran between my fingers.

“Oh no,” he said between laughs. “You're cut! Thlit open, coming to pietheth. You know the dangerth of infecthion. We need to cauterithe it.” He touched two tattoos at the same time, and a ball of flame shot from his hand. Pain enveloped me as it slammed into my shoulder. I screamed, rolled on the ground, and slapped my shoulder when I could. In time, and I'm really not sure how long, the flames went out. But the burning sensation persisted. I lay on my back, panting, and stared up at the ceiling with blurry eyes. Above me was my shelf of chemical encouragement. An idea occurred to me.

“Stop,” I croaked. I sat up against the wall, my body shaking with shock. “Inquisitor,” I said. Well, that's not what I said, but it's what he heard. “Are you here for my potion?”

“What pothion?” he asked as his laughter stopped for the first time.

“Never mind,” I said in a quiet voice. He touched his fingers to his tattoos again, and another blade rose into the air. I felt a cold creep down my spine, as it did for me when magic was used. “Okay, hear me out,” I said quickly, holding my hands up in surrender. “I thought you came for my potion, Inquisitor. The one that grants magical abilities.”

“That can't be,” he said, the knife clattering to the floor.

“Inquisitor, I assure you it's true.”

“Where?” he asked. I looked at the shelf above me. He walked to it and scanned the jars and vials that lined it. His eyes widened, and his laughter shook him once more as he snatched a small vial from the shelf. “Not very thubtle, are you, apprentith?” The label on the vial read “magic.” I shrugged, wincing at the pain it caused. His laughter faded away again as he stared at the vial. He narrowed his eyes at me.

“I can drink it for you,” I offered. “To show it's safe.”

He took a quick step back, holding the vial in both hands. “No,” he yelled. He held the vial against the light of the lone torch, then burst into laughter again. I cringed at that laugh as it echoed around the stone chamber. “You think you're tho thmart. Think I'll hand it to you tho you can gain thith power?” He flicked the rubber stopper off with his thumb and tipped the contents down his throat. The sorcerer stood in anticipation for a long moment, then opened his mouth to speak. Before a word passed his lips, his legs buckled beneath him, and he collapsed to the floor. He lay there, unable to move, his face the very picture of rage.

My vial of magic had seen plenty of use over the years, but it did not work in quite the manner I'd implied it did. Most knew it as “Liar's Demise,” a poison that caused the recipient to speak the absolute truth and which paralyzed the limbs. In my job as a torturer, it worked like magic. It had a downside, however. Within a minute, the body began a series of convulsions that increased in frequency and severity until the spinal column snapped. It was always fatal, so your questions had better be fast, and good, but I had none for this man.

I stood, my jaw clenched against the pain and walked to the door to shut it. I threw my patched coat, now in tatters, to the floor. A large hole was burnt through on the shoulder. No patch would mend that, and not surprisingly, my shoulder was a mess. The cut ran deep, but it was the least of the wounds. The burnt skin was mottled black and red in some places, orange in others, and blistered all over.

I knelt over a bucket in the corner. The cold water was a great relief on my burnt skin. It felt… Gods above, it felt good and stung like hell, both at the same time. When my shoulder was clean, I cast a glance over my shoulder to see the first convulsions take the Inquisitor. I expected he would scream, but the man was quiet. He stared at me as he shook. His eyes looked sane for the first time, and all the more frightening for it. Sorcerers were evil bastards, and the world would be better with one less of them tainting it. Though evil, there was no doubting their power. I was lucky to be alive, and owed it to two things: poison, and magic.

Liar's Demise was a useful poison, but I doubted I could have convinced him to drink it without using his true name. Naming was a complicated matter, but in simple terms, by using someone's true name you could gain power over them. This shouldn't be confused with the power clever words could have over not-so-clever people. True names held real power.

While I still considered myself a novice, it took me many years to learn what I had of the magic, in no small part due to my misunderstanding of the term itself. You see, true names weren't really names at all, but an expression of the person, of their ego, put to magic and wrapped around their name. Their name was but the key. It was accepted, comfortable, and lets the magic slip in with the name to unfold within their mind.

The power of the magic was directly proportional to the namer's knowledge of their victim. I had read that with enough skill and knowledge, you could command someone to die by using their true name. My own skill paled in comparison, but I'd learned to use it in more subtle ways. I created a name for the sorcerer with what I knew of the Inquisition and used it to add a compulsion to the words I spoke. To nudge him toward taking the poison. The power behind such a sliver of a name was fragile at best, and it was hard to say if my compulsion had had any real effect. Perhaps it hadn't even been necessary. But I was still breathing. There was that.

 

I sat down on the side of the torture rack to apply a salve and bandage my shoulder. Fortunately, my medical cabinet was well stocked. As a torturer, I found myself healing my victims as often as hurting them. Sometimes because I went too far, too quickly, but more often as a different form of torture. Some of my victims were strong of will, but that strength crumbled like ancient walls when offered comfort and hope. Hope that the pain had come to an end, and that release was imminent. When the pain started again, that hope was crushed to dust.

The mighty fell just as hard as any other man and names offered little in the way of protection. Take as an example my master's corpse. He lay strapped and chained to the rack, stretched out of proportion, his limbs pulled from their sockets. I called him Master, but to others he was known as Angus. Head torturer of the empire. As important and powerful a man as he was, in the end, his name had lent him about as much protection as mine had when he took me as his own. Master, Angus, head torturer… these were just words, and words were ever a poor shield.

My name? According to the empire, I had none to call my own. I was nameless—all slaves were. But I was more than a slave, even by their reckoning, and just saying a thing did not make it so. Prince Saul Baz Sharmoun had been my name in times past, and it was the name I took back this night. I was done with being a slave.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER TWO

Eye of Svyn

 

I rummaged through a small chest in the corner. It held all of my worldly possessions, being two tunics, a pair of boots and a heavy satchel. A sound behind me caught my attention, and I turned to see that the Inquisitor was dead. He lay like a snapped twig, and a red froth covered his mouth and nose. I pulled a rough tunic over my head and bit back a series of curses that sought to escape, the pain in my shoulder reawakened. I looked again at my discarded coat, charred and tattered, and put on my master's instead. His coat was several sizes too large. Anything sized to fit Angus's fat arse made me look like I'd gotten myself tangled in a curtain, but it provided some much-needed warmth, though, and it was a nice coat.