The Brush of Black Wings (8 page)

He forced himself into a reluctant calm.
Marching back to the temple and leveling it to the ground might
make him feel better, but it would be a brief respite and
ultimately make his task of retrieving Martise much harder.
Instead, he seated himself at the table stacked with her notes,
ordered tea from Gurn and set to work reading what she’d gleaned
from his library.

One line in her translation drew him time and
again. “The king is the sword. The sword is the king.” Martise had
told him she believed the entity was drawn to that particular
structure by an artifact buried beneath it—a sword that acted as a
tether connecting one world to another. After reading several more
pages of her research, Silhara agreed with her. Beneath the ruin
lay a sword wielded by an abomination long forgotten by all but a
few.

He tore down half the library shelves,
scattering books and scrolls across the floor as he searched for
gate and lock spells, traveler incantations that bent the space
between worlds and hurtled the luckless and the malcontent into
times and places not their own. Every one of them warned of a
gruesome death if not performed correctly.

More snow had fallen when Silhara returned to
the temple, and a fresh fall of white obscured the spoked-wheel
design. He’d come alone, and only by threatening to lay a geas on
Gurn and shackle Cael to one of the exterior walls. Gurn replied by
raising the shovel he held in warning.

Silhara glared at him. “Cracking my skull open
with that shovel isn’t my idea of helping, and it’s stupid to think
we can dig the sword out from under all that stone. Even with both
of us—and the dog—digging for days, we’d get nowhere, and I don’t
have days.”

He’d already lost hours in the library. Bursin
alone knew what was happening to Martise in that time. The thought
ratcheted his temper and his panic up another notch.

Defeat slumped the servant’s broad shoulders.
He signed to Silhara who nodded. “We’ll return. Both of us. You
have my word.” Gurn knew him well enough to believe the effort he’d
make to fulfill that vow even if he couldn’t guarantee the
outcome.

He reached inside his shirt and slipped off
the necklace he wore. The delicate chain threaded through his
fingers, a pendant of colored glass swinging from its loop. The
glass encased a tiny curl of brown hair. Once the means by which
Martise’s old master kept her enslaved, the necklace was now a
favorite possession of Silhara’s. He’d crushed the spirit stone
that entrapped a part of his wife’s soul and replaced it with the
pendant that held a bit of her hair. He wore it when he traveled
without her to Eastern Prime’s markets, keeping her close even when
she was far from him. Now, the pendant would be a tether to bring
her home. He buried the chain under a loose pile of small rocks to
keep the crows from snatching it.

Cloaked beneath a sullen sky, Silhara
initiated the first of two rituals—this one to reveal a relic
buried longer than generations of memory.

Ritual spellwork hid numerous traps,
especially when the mage worked alone. Silhara always worked alone
and had paid dearly for the preference more times than he could
count. Burns, frostbite, teal-colored skin, orange eyes, hair loss,
blisters and a month’s worth of impotence when he was seventeen
that had terrified him enough to actually offer a sincere prayer to
the gods for help.

The gods had ignored him, but his mentor had
shown mercy—along with a generous heap of ridicule—and reversed the
damage of a poorly executed ritual. Except for his brief alliance
with Conclave to kill the god Corruption, Silhara remained a
solitary practitioner. He was, however, far more careful with his
spellwork now than when he was a juvenile sorcerer with more
arrogance than sense.

His caution served him well in the broken
temple. Incantations, combined with a rigid pattern of steps and
the scatter of certain herbs, illuminated the wheel, revealing the
entire design instead of the few lines not yet faded away by time
and the elements.

The illumination held the wheel’s shape and
began to rotate. Small mounds of snow collapsed as the ground
thrummed with a low vibration, reminding Silhara of Conclave
acolytes and their chanting during dawn prayers.

He built spell upon spell, connecting
revelation summonings with ward-break invocations until a complex
web of light and resonance engulfed the temple. Stone groaned
across stone as the shallow staircase leading to the structure’s
center broke at the left seam and slid to one side.

Success!

Silhara turned his spellwork toward the
opening revealed and invoked a string of incantations. The tremors
under his feet strengthened, and his teeth chattered against each
other more from the vibrations than from the cold. These were old
wards, inhuman ones. Without the lich’s grimoires to aid him, he
might never crack them open.

Blood streamed from his nose and coursed down
his cheeks in thin rivulets from his eyes. Powerful magic, whether
benevolent or malevolent, always demanded a tithe of some sort, and
Silhara had bled for it numerous times.

Shards of lightning crackled from the dark
hollow, and he caught the clanking sound of metal scraping across
stone before a flash of movement twinkled in warning. Quick
instincts and a finely honed sense of self preservation saved him
from impalement. He jerked back as a blade whipped out of the
shadows. It cleaved the air, almost slicing off his nose as it shot
past him to bury the first quarter of its tip in a nearby tree
trunk with a solid
thunk.

The embedded weapon oscillated from the impact
then went still. Cerulean light still bolted down the blade, and in
the woodland hush, Silhara heard the faintest hum—like far-off
voices canting funereal dirges. The sound raised the hair on his
arms, and he approached cautiously.

Bark began flaking off the tree’s trunk where
the sword stuck, bits and pieces turning to dust before they even
fell to the ground. Wood rotted at unnatural speed, creating a
patch of decay that grew to the size of a dinner plate before
stopping. The gnarled oak, probably as old as Neith itself, visibly
shivered, its leafless branches cascading snow to the ground.
Silhara suspected that were the oak younger, the wound left by the
ensorcelled sword would have killed it. Instead, the trunk’s
ligneous grip, softened by sudden rot, gave way. The sword fell,
landing with a soft thud in a pile of dead leaves that instantly
disintegrated to powder. The wounded oak shivered once more, and
Silhara didn’t imagine the sylvan groan of relief that echoed from
the roots below ground.

He crouched beside the sword for a better
look. He was neither swordsmith nor warrior. What fighting skills
he had, he’d learned as a wharf rat on Eastern Prime’s docks and in
her dangerous closes. He’d honed them as a rebellious novitiate
during his brief tenure at Conclave Redoubt. He was handy with a
knife, his fists, his spells and a savage will to survive that was
bequeathed to all rats.

Spells were his area of expertise, but he knew
enough about swords and the type of fighters who wielded them to
find this one puzzling. Whether forged as enchanted or later turned
that way, the blade surprised him. He expected something more
spectacular from a Wraith King.

The weapon reminded him of his cane knife.
Single-handed, single-edged and guardless, it was more long knife
than sword. Its slender, slightly curved blade was made for
slashing and thrusting instead of cleaving and blocking. The hilt
lacked any ornamentation. The pommel bore the design of an avian
head in profile. Plain like the hilt, its only nod to decoration
was a tiny river stone inset to represent the bird’s
eye.

He didn’t need a swordsman’s gaze to see the
edge remained sharp—lethal in a skilled hand. Still, this was not a
sword bequeathed to a king or even a nobleman. Far too humble and
unassuming, even with sorcery of the dead and the demonic infused
in its metal and lightning coursing down its fuller.

Megiddo Anastas. Wraith King, dark god,
commander of demon hordes. Not a collector of the
ornate.

Silhara returned to the exposed alcove beneath
the steps and incanted another spell. A scabbard usually
accompanied a sword, and his guess proved correct when one rose
from the same spot as the sword before dropping to clatter down the
steps and landed at his feet.

As plain an affair as the weapon itself and
protected from age and decay by the same blend of dark sorcery, the
scabbard offered no hints to its origin or maker. The smooth onyx
wood was waxed and would have shimmered softly from a fine polish,
even without the help of the eldritch light.

Silhara pulled the pair of harvesting gloves
he’d brought with him from his belt. They shielded his hands from
the orange trees’ vicious thorns but weren’t much use against
sorcery. He’d enchanted them with protection spells in preparation
for holding whatever artifact he retrieved from underneath the
temple. While the sword’s unassuming appearance surprised him, its
necrotic effect on anything it touched didn’t. Demon kings didn’t
wield death in half measures. What the blade’s edge didn’t
accomplish, the sorcery would. And it was highly likely the
scabbard was no less dangerous to the touch.

He invoked additional wards that enclosed the
sword within an invisible barrier. Silhara left nothing to chance.
He might be able to freely touch the sword with a pair of enchanted
gauntlets, but without the safeguards of barrier wards, nothing
else on his person was safe while in its proximity. The last thing
he needed was for the weapon to brush against his arm or
leg.

The sword hissed when he wrapped his fingers
around the hilt. It literally squirmed in his palm as if trying to
break free of his grip. Silhara shook it in warning. “I only need
part of you to do what I want. Keep still or I’ll break you in half
and melt you down for tithing coins.”

Sentient or not, the sword quieted at the
threat. Even the dirge-like humming stopped as the hilt settled
peacefully in his grasp long enough for him to retrieve the
scabbard and slide the sword inside. Silhara was still tempted to
melt it down despite its acquiescence. Conclave would collectively
piss itself at the idea of necromantic coins hiding in its
treasury.

The forest settled into an even deeper hush as
Silhara, sheathed sword in hand, began siphoning off the curse
magic he held over these woods to protect Neith. Magic of the black
arcana offered great power to its practitioners, demanding great
strength in return. His sorcerous skills came not only from his
generous Gift but from impressive physical prowess. The curse magic
weakened but didn’t debilitate him, and he was almost as formidable
without its parasitic drain. When, however, he reclaimed it for
himself, the potent surge left him breathless.

Flush with power and in possession of the
thing that tethered the demon king to this temple, Silhara began
the second ritual, drawing sigils in the air as he walked
widdershins over the wheel pattern and uttered spells written in
old blood on the pages of a grimoire bound in human skin.
God-smiter or not, Conclave would light him up like a torch without
so much as a by-your-leave if they caught him at this
ritual.

A hot pain blossomed between his eyes, growing
from a pinpoint to a voracious agony that reverberated in his skull
as if he were trapped inside the mouth of a ringing bell. He
clenched his jaw and invoked magic through gritted teeth even as he
wept more blood. Crimson streams poured from his nose to splatter
on the steps.

The temple’s center suddenly blazed in a burst
of emerald light, coruscating and tightening into a spinning column
just like the one Martise had described for him. The lit column was
empty, and he growled low in his throat as he scampered up the
broken stairs. The demon had already captured his intended
quarry.

No plan and no time to make one. But Silhara
had will, rage, and the strongest incentive. Nothing, and no one,
would stop him from taking his wife back. He leapt the last two
stairs and threw himself into the light.

CHAPTER SIX

Martise’s first impression of the half world
to which she had been taken was the stench. She dry-retched at the
smell—the same charnel house odor that surrounded Megiddo when he
first appeared to her in the temple. She bent at the waist, ready
to empty her stomach between her feet. Mercifully, nothing came up,
and she straightened, using her free hand to shield her nose and
mouth as she breathed.

Neith’s snow-flocked forest had yielded to a
gray wasteland. Spires of mountains rose in a far distance,
silhouetted against a dull twilight with no emerging stars.
Martise’s first glimpse of this strange place lasted only a moment
before she yanked her hand out of the demon king’s icy grasp, his
geas on her broken. She fled, pain rippling up her wounded calf as
she raced toward a horizon where bleak sky met dead earth. There
was no logic to her flight, no destination she tried to reach—only
the terrified instinct of prey escaping predator.

Her shallow pants sounded thunderous in her
ears, the only noise in a place drowned in silence as she ran. And
she ran for naught.

Megiddo Anastas suddenly appeared out of thin
air in front of her, once again enrobed in fabric made of shadow
and the souls of the damned. Martise yelped, almost cannoning into
him before she veered to the side and fled in another
direction.