Authors: Greg Curtis
The gods of course would not help. They would never give such knowledge to mortals. Not even Prometheus, though he had prayed to the god of wizards all his life. The trickster god had brought man fire and magic, but even he would not bring him immortality. The gods guarded their secrets carefully.
But the demons didn't have the same concerns. They would happily give away the answers – for a price. But there was only one trade they would accept. Not coin, not gold and not knowledge. The only thing a demon would want was lives. The lives of people.
So the Circle had had to have “goods” to trade. And not just a few poor souls, but thousands. Demons were hungry and there were a great many of them. The lesser ones liked to consume flesh and bone. Sometimes blood and other body parts. But the greater ones had moved beyond those things. They consumed the life force itself. Normally they had ways of obtaining what they wanted even when they were mostly forced to remain in their own realm. Their normal way was to make a deal with some unfortunate, turn him into their thrall and then send their minions into the world to kill for them and let the life force of the victim flow through the minion to the portal or gate they'd created and on to them. As for their thralls they were usually the most unlucky of all. Whatever they'd accepted in return for their service was never usually worth anything, and when the demons had run out of use for them, they killed them too.
Terellion had developed a plan to give them what they needed without offering his service. He wasn't that stupid. He had instead gone for a straight trade. It was what he had to do. It had taken five long years, and for every one of those years he had felt more and more of his life slipping away. He had felt his body slowly failing him – it seemed that it failed even faster than those of the people around him. But that had only spurred him on as he knew he had even less time.
First he had captured the Circle, or as many of the Circle as he could. They were the most powerful wizards in the land and he'd known he would need them. And not just as a people he could occasionally bend to his ends, but as slaves. As creatures that he completely dominated. So he had bound them to him one by one. He had possessed them. He had to because he had always worried that one of them would sooner or later be able to defy him otherwise. That they would realise that he had a gift. Or worse that another one would cause him endless problems like Maynard. But they hadn't and in time he had bound eleven of them to him, all of them capable only of thinking what he wanted them to think.
After that he had needed power, and that meant the court and the nobility. It had no longer been enough to just control the king; he had to own the entire kingdom. So he had taken control of them too, readying himself for the day. For them though all he'd needed to do was change their thoughts so that they believed him their most trusted ally. Possessing them completely as he had the Circle would have been too much.
Even his gift had limits and dominating eleven wizards had stretched them. Fortunately the court was easily amenable to his persuasion as was everyone else. Just as long as he kept reinforcing his will every so often and didn't make them do anything completely contrary to their wills.
He had of course needed knowledge, beginning with learning which demons had what knowledge of which of the great answers. And then of course he had needed knowledge about the demons themselves and how to bargain with them. So Lucara the sage had become his right hand. In actuality Terellion despised the man. He might be a Circle wizard but he was a pointless sort who, if left to his own devices would have spent his entire life with his nose in a scroll. But he needed him. So he'd taken him even before the others.
Last of course had come the deal. Eighteen months of long and difficult negotiations with the demon king through his first thrall, during which time they had hammered out every detail. What the demon king would give them, what the Circle in turn would give Xin. The penalty clauses for failures and the settlement of disagreements. How the plan would work and who would have command of what.
That had been the most torturous time of his life, and he had truly learned to hate Various – the demon king's first thrall and negotiator – during it. But eventually an agreement had been reached. Xin would provide them with an ancient tablet from a ten thousand year old temple covered with the knowledge of the six great answers, in return for lives. Tens of thousands of lives. And to keep the deal going as the tablet was translated they would together conquer the five kingdoms.
It had seemed like a simple enough thing. The demon king would provide the Circle with armies of chimera and claim enough thralls to control them in the five kingdoms. Then those armies would do two things – conquer the lands so that Terellion ruled, and feed the demon king the lives of those they killed as they conquered the lands. It was a victory for them all. And because Xin was so hungry, because he had starved for so long, he would give them the information they wanted as well. After all, why would he care if the Circle learned the six great answers? He just wanted to eat.
So the deal had been made. It had been bound. The life forces of him, the other eleven Circle wizards, Xin himself and an extra few hundred souls, had been bound into the agreement. Enough to make it more than a mere spell. More than an agreement. It was that which could not be broken by any of them. Only by all of them together. It had seemed like the only way that trust could be gained.
That of course was where everything had gone wrong.
Demons couldn't be trusted. They couldn't tell a direct lie in their deals – that much was agreed by everyone – but their version of the truth often had no relation to the actual truth.
Naturally Terellion had always known that would be a problem. It was just that he'd never expected that it would be such a big one. That the demon king would so easily and constantly confound them.
The lies had begun on the first morning, just after the deal had been agreed. When the demon king's beast army had burst from the gate and started killing everyone in Lion's Crest. That was a mistake. The agreement had been that there would be a cull of one in ten. Everyone had understood that to mean that they would kill one in ten. The demons had somehow interpreted the agreement to mean that they would let one in ten survive. They'd claimed it was simply a misunderstanding. A mistake in translation. Even as they'd continued slaughtering the entire city.
Even Terellion had been shocked by the carnage he had seen that day. But what troubled him wasn't the extra deaths. It was simply the practical problems that such a cull had left them with. With so many dead they would end up with so few survivors that it would become difficult to find enough people to keep feeding the demon king. And they needed to have enough people left to keep trading with him. Because they needed more from him. They'd known they would right from the start.
The tablet Xin had given him had needed translation. That he had expected as it was at least ten thousand years old and written in a language no one had even seen before. Even properly motivated Lucara could do only so much. But if they'd given away ninety percent of their trade goods in the first deal, what did they have left to bargain with?
Terellion had repaired the mistake and limited the killing as the invasion had progressed, but never as well as he would have liked. The stench of the decaying bodies had been minimised by having the chimera carry the corpses through to the demonic realm for the lessor demons to feed on. It had also taught him that he needed to understand all the details of every deal they made. Yet still Xin always managed to get more from each new deal than they expected, and provided the Circle with less. It was the demonic way – bargaining in bad faith.
And now Terellion was certain, he was doing it again. Whatever Xin wanted the High Priestess for, it had to be important. He wanted her. He had traded for her. She had to be valuable to the demon king in some way. How, he didn't know. But he knew he had to find out.
“Good! Leave me!”
Terellion dismissed the soldier with a brusque wave of his hand, and if the man was upset about it, the wizard didn't know or care. He only cared about one question – why did the demon king want the High Priestess? Now?
It had been a clever move capturing her
when they'd taken the city
. A move that had crippled the Temple of Artemis and left them helpless for five long years. The Circle had destroyed the other temples quickly and completely. They were all enemies and dangerous ones – especially when priests were completely resistant to his control. But when they'd taken the Temple of the Huntress and assumed its identity, they'd desperately needed a way of ensuring that the Goddess' servants did not strike back. And keeping the last High Priestess of the temple alive and out of the way did that.
The other temples and shrines had been quickly destroyed. The priests and high priests had been slaughtered so that they could not pose a threat. But they couldn't do that to the temples of Artemis when they were pretending to be her temple. They'd slaughtered her priests of course. All that they could find.
A
ny that had survived could have been dangerous when her temples still stood. They could have exposed the lies. And if they'd had access to the temples they could have called on the Goddess herself to send her servants to aid them in battle. Unicorns and griffins were fearsome creatures. And with an angry Goddess behind them the temple could have overcome their armies.
But holding the High Priestess meant that no more high priests and priestesses to Artemis could be called. And it limited the power a priest or priestess had, since there was an ancient contract within the temple that granted some powers only to the highest priests. It was rather like stealing the generals to an army, and with them their knowledge as well. The remaining soldiers were leaderless and unable to be promoted to a position of power. But more than that they did not have the knowledge to run a campaign and they didn't know where to find that knowledge.
So they'd captured her, and then they'd made sure she could do nothing to guide the others. Trapped by the wards of silence the Circle had devised, she was unable to call upon the power of her Goddess and summon the terrible companions of the Huntress. The unicorns and the griffins. They would pose a direct and powerful threat to his mercenaries and the chimera. Equally, with the current High Priestess caged and bound there could be no new High Priests and Priestesses called to the Goddess' side. Especially once all of the Great Temples to Artemis had been destroyed save the one they held.
Holding her prisoner had been useful.
So why did Xin want her now? And when she died would the unicorns and the griffins be released and start returning to the five kingdoms by themselves?
They were both important questions. But not as important as his finally getting his answers. And the information Xin would give them in exchange for her would help.
“He's going to kill you.” Terellion jumped as the man's voice interrupted his thoughts. “Xin will never allow you to ascend. He's already worked out how you'll die and with a little of Tyche's blessing, it'll be brutal.”
The voice came out of nowhere, which wasn't surprising. Terellion knew it was only in his thoughts. Just as he knew whose voice it was that was plaguing him. Maynard the Irrepressible. Maynard the Miserable as he thought of him. Once more the summoner was slipping a little from his grasp. Something he should never have been able to do. But for forty years he had done the same. Ever since Terellion had first taken control of him.
It was unfair. A curse. No one else could resist him. Especially when he dominated them completely as he did the cursed wizard. But the miserable summoner could. He had for forty long years. When Terellion had first sought to join the Circle he had needed to be assessed. And since he was a summoner he had been assessed by another summoner – Maynard. But the miserable wizard would have noticed immediately that his skills weren't as powerful as he claimed. So to make Maynard believe his skills at summoning were as great as he said they were he'd tried to bend his thoughts just a little. It had been such a small thing. All he'd had to do was impress him. But when he'd taken control of the summoner's thoughts things hadn't gone so well.
Who would have thought that a simple summoner with no magic of the mind at all could thwart him, even in the small ways he did? That he could defy him? Aggravate him? But he had. He still did. He was the only one of the eleven he dominated who could contact him directly. The others could answer him when he spoke to them, but Maynard for some reason could simply call him. He could resist his compulsions. And every so often he would try to upset him.
It should never have happened. He'd initially intended to do no more than shift Maynard's impressions a little. A minor magic at best. But the annoying wretch had spotted his attempt to control him instantly and then battle had ensued. He'd been forced to take complete control so that Maynard never revealed his secret – that would be a disaster. Maynard however had fought him. He still did somehow. He'd fought him for forty years. Somehow he'd found a way of shifting a part of his mind into the creatures he summoned, those accursed, endless cats. And through them he could buy himself a little freedom from his control. Not much, but just enough to keep regaining his wits and fight Terellion's will. For forty long years he'd been forced to hold the wretch tight. Maynard had been the first wizard whose will he'd had to completely subsume. All because he hadn't wanted to admit that he wasn't quite as strong a summoner as he'd pretended to be.