Chapter 7

Cathan followed the strange woman out of the wood, questions roiling in his mind. Who was she? What was he doing here, at the Tower of High Sorcery?

"I'm Leciane do Cirica," she explained once they were beyond the olives, back in the square that surrounded the Tower. "The order's new envoy. Unless I'm mistaken, you came here on behalf of your Kingpriest."

That sounded right, more or less. He could recall parts, dimly. Magical lips in the floor. He put a hand to his head, wishing his thoughts would stop darting around like bloodflies. "And I don't remember any of this because…"

"The grove," the woman said. "It stole your memories."

"Ah." Cathan frowned, still not sure what to believe. "I don't suppose you—"

"Can bring them back? No. The magic doesn't work that way." She gave him a sympathetic shrug. "You're lucky I was there. Once, they say, the grove stole fifteen years of a man's life before it was done—and he was only twenty at the time."

Cathan shuddered. Everything before today he remembered; it was only his time in the grove that was lost. He glanced back at the olives, rustling in the wind, and winced.

He looked at the strange woman… Leciane. She was from Ergoth, judging by her dusky skin, and a bit older than him, with silver in her long black hair. She was smiling, her teeth very white. Her eyes were green. It wasn't any of those colors, though, that made him start. It was the hue of her silken robes.

"You're the envoy?"

Leciane nodded.

"But your robes—you—they're red!"

"Are they?" The sorceress looked at herself, her eyebrows rising.

Reflexively, Cathan took a step back, but stopped his hand before it touched Ebonbane. The Conclave had sent a Red Robe to live among them… how would the court react to that? For that matter, how would Beldinas?

"Sir Cathan?" Leciane asked. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"What? Oh," Cathan blurted, snapping back to himself. He stared at Leciane. "How do you know my name?"

She laughed—not the polite giggle of a high-born lady, but a hearty chuckle that made him think of Sir Marto. "Your eyes," she said. "We wizards hear the same tales as everyone else, Twice-Born."

At once, Cathan realized the other thing that had been troubling him about the Red Robe. She was looking him in the eyes, without turning away. Even Wentha hadn't been able to do that, back when the two of them were still speaking to each other. Until now, he'd been sure the only person who could was the Kingpriest himself. Cathan flushed and looked away. The sorceress's unremitting gaze made him uncomfortable.

"We should… we should go," he mumbled. "His Holiness will be expecting you."

"Yes," Leciane agreed, gesturing west, where the Temple's golden spires rose above the rooftops. "Lead on, then. Take me to your Lightbringer, Sir Knight."

The courtiers reacted to Leciane as he'd expected. Some stared in shock, and one or two shrank away in fear. Many signed the triangle, horns, or twin teardrops of the gods. A few, First Son Adsem among them, looked as if they would have spat on the ground, were it accepted at court. A good number of the people in Istar's streets had done just that as Cathan and Leciane made their way back to the Temple. Cathan hadn't even tried to get her through the adoring throng in the Barigon, but had brought her in through a side entrance. Now, standing amidst the Hall of Audience, he could feel the hierarchs' eyes on him—or rather, on his charge. It wasn't the hateful glare they would give a Black Robe, but neither was it in any way friendly.

Either the Red Robe didn't notice or she didn't care. Her attention was on the man who sat upon the throne, and him alone. Cathan followed her gaze, peering through the Kingpriest's radiance, trying to read his mood.

It wasn't easy. He could have been one of the statues that peopled the Temple's gardens for all the reaction he showed when he beheld the color of Leciane's robes. He sat still, fingers steepled before him, and said nothing for a long time. Silence—a rare thing, when court was in full session—stole across the hall as the courtiers turned to await his judgment. Finally, he shifted slightly, inclining his head.

"My thanks, Lady, for rescuing Sir Cathan from the spell that ensnared him," he declared, the dome ringing to echo his musical voice. "I can already see the wisdom in your Conclave's choice. Many among your order would have left him there."

The courtiers murmured at that. Beldinas ignored them, as did Leciane, who bowed.

"Your Holiness is kind. I only hope that should the need present itself one day, he would return the favor."

She flicked a glance at Cathan, who reddened. The idea that he owed anything to a Red Robe bothered him.

Quarath stepped forward, favoring Leciane with an icy stare. The Silvanesti had many mages, but all were White Robes. Donning the Black, or even the Red, was a quick and certain path to shame and exile.

"Majesty," he said, looking to the throne. "If this woman is the choice the sorcerers have made, she should be inducted into the court at once, before anything else is said here."

Beldinas nodded. "Thank you, Emissary. Your counsel is fair, as ever. Very well, Lady do Cirica," he went on, rising from his throne, "if you will kneel…"

"No."

Everything stopped. A few people gasped, and a few scowled, but mostly they stared, stunned, as Leciane's voice echoed through the hall. Cathan gaped at Leciane with open-mouthed shock.

"No?" Beldinas repeated, hesitating halfway down the steps from the dais.

"No," Leciane replied. "I do not wish your blessing, Lightbringer."

Quarath had just resumed his place with the other high priests of Paladine. Now he stepped forward again, brows knitting in outrage.

"Lady," he said, "His Holiness did not ask you to kneel. It is his command."

Leciane met the elf’s glare with a steely look, drawing herself erect before him. "I am not His Holiness's to command," she said. "My only masters are the Art I wield, and the Conclave who sent me here. I will kneel before no other—and neither should anyone who serves another sovereign."

The elf's face turned pale, his eyes flaring indignantly. The barb had struck deep.

"How dare you—" he began.

"Emissary, this is no time for hot words," Beldinas said quietly. Abashed, Quarath stepped back, but the glower didn't vanish from his face. The Kingpriest turned back toward Leciane, his brow furrowed.

"Marwort knelt, milady."

"Yes, he did," she replied. "Now he is dead. I shall not repeat his mistakes."

Cathan looked from Leciane to Beldinas and back again, not sure what to do or what might happen next. The hall felt like the air before a lightning strike. A few more courtiers quietly edged away.

The Kingpriest stroked his chin for a long moment, considering, then, to Cathan's astonishment, he nodded slowly. "Very well," he said. "You are right—you do not need to swear to me, although no one who has should be ashamed of that. Will you at least give me your oath that you will be faithful to those you do serve?"

"You have it, Holiness," Leciane said, clasping her hands before her. "By the Art and the crimson moon, I shall."

More murmurs greeted that, from priests uncomfortable with mention of Lunitari in a house of the gods of light. Beldinas ignored their consternation, walking down the last few steps to stand before the sorceress. Cathan tensed.

Leciane smiled, however, and offered the Kingpriest her hand. Beldinas looked at it for a moment, eyebrows raised, then clasped it in his. As he did, he leaned forward, so that his mouth was near her ear, and whispered something to her.

Her smile broadening, Leciane nodded and stepped back.

"This court is in recess," Beldinas declared. "I must meditate on this. We will resume after noontide."

With that, he departed the hall, through a door to his private apartments. His advisors followed, Quarath shooting one last wintry glance at Leciane before he left. When they were gone, the courtiers all turned to stare at the Red Robe, making little effort to conceal their contempt. She looked back at them mildly, then turned and walked toward one of the room's many antechambers. Cathan accompanied her, feeling every pair of eyes that followed them.

"What did he tell you?" he ventured to ask.

Leciane laughed, shaking her head. "Do you think he'd have whispered it if he wanted everyone to know?"

Cathan had no answer for that. "You should have sworn," he said instead. "No one says no to the Kingpriest."

"Maybe not," Leciane replied, pushing aside the curtain to the antechamber and striding through. "Would it be a bad thing if sometimes, people did?"

Cathan stopped, frowning, as the curtain closed in front of him.

Andras awoke with a cry, his heart thundering against his ribs as he sat up in his bed. It was dark in the room—a little, windowless cell of gray stone, hidden far beneath the earth. The floor was cold against his bare feet as he swung his legs out. The smell of mildew hung in the air, and something the size of a rat, but with far too many clacking legs, skittered away from the sound of his breathing. Normally, he would have killed the thing, sending it shrieking to its doom with a spell, but today he let it escape. Nor did he speak the incantation that would summon ghostly light for his room. He needed to save his magical energy for what he must do today.

Seven years. He had lived in this same room for seven years—or rather, slept there, for the rest of his time he was elsewhere in the cavernous dungeon that served as one of Fistandantilus's many homes. Not once in that time had he breathed fresh air or seen the sun. His lungs had been steeped in a miasma of arcane scents: the sweetness of crushed rose petals, the rancid reek of rotten flesh, the acrid tang of alchemical tinctures. The heat that warmed him came from the burning ache for revenge. One day, the Dark One had promised, he could assuage that ache at last. Until that day, Andras had gladly immersed himself in lessons, learning the spells he would need to unleash his wrath.

Now, as he hurriedly pulled on his midnight robes, he knew the day had come.

Torchlight stung his eyes when he threw open the door, and he flung up his arm, squinting as he strode down the passage outside. The walls glistened with moisture, and his breath plumed. He wondered if it was day or night, then decided he didn't care. After seven years in the cold and dark, time had grown meaningless to him.

He heard the banging and howling as he neared the hall's end. When he'd first come here, the noises—shrieks of agony, mindless snarls, the scrape of bony claws against stone—had driven him half-mad with terror, but since then Andras had learned to ignore the din. Today he paid it no mind even as he entered the place where it was loudest: a long room with a vaulted ceiling, lined with steel-barred cages. Within those cages lurked strange, misshapen forms, mercifully hidden by shadow. A pool of blood was spreading beneath one. A long, sucker-tipped tentacle reached through the bars of another, writhing like a dying snake.

These were the Accursed, Fistandantilus's greatest failures. They had been born centuries ago, the Dark One said, in an ill-fated attempt to create living beings. Only a few had survived, half-alive and in constant pain: misshapen, gibbering things that begged for death in languages no sane man could speak. When he'd actually seen one for the first time—shone a light into the cage where the archmage kept his failures—he hadn't slept for a week. The memory of that fleshy mass of viscera, twisted bones, and rheumy eyes still haunted his dreams.

One of the cages was open and empty. He grimaced. Fistandantilus was experimenting again.

The door at the far end of the Chamber of the Accursed was tall and strong, made of layers of lead, silver, and cold iron, engraved with hundreds of spidery sigils that pulsed with sickly green light. Anyone—human or otherwise—trying to enter through the door without the Dark One's leave would be torn apart like so many red rags. Andras walked up to the door, lifted the latch, and pulled it open without fear, letting himself into the Dark One's inner sanctum.

The laboratory was huge and dark, its shelves lined with thousands upon thousands of dark books and vials of every kind of putrescence imaginable. A broken, antique scrying orb sat on a pedestal in one corner. The mummified head of a giant was mounted on a bronze stake in another. Other things hung from the ceiling: dried flowers and herbs, enormous cocoons, and the flayed corpses of all manner of beasts—two elves and a dwarf among them. There were several wooden desks where black candles burned, and in the middle of it all a massive stone table surmounted by all manner of glasswork, some of it holding greasy fluid that bubbled over ghostly flames. Also on the table, in a pool of black blood, was the twitching body of the missing Accursed, its gnarled limbs affixed to a wooden rack with spikes, its belly cut open to leak out innards that looked like clusters of fish eggs. The stink from that offal was horrendous, like a corpse rotting in a sewer.

There, towering over the hideous corpse with a slime-drenched sickle in his hand, was the Dark One himself.

Fistandantilus had not changed at all in the past seven years. When one lived for centuries, as the archmage had, most of a decade made little difference. His hooded head, bent low over the vivisection, shook back and forth in disappointment. He reached inside the gash with a pair of tongs and pulled out some kind of many-lobed organ, covered with wet, bristly hair. Bile surged up Andras's throat at the wretched sight, but Fistandantilus didn't balk, cutting it free and dropping it into a jar of brownish brine. That done, he looked up, staring toward the door from the shadows of his cowl.

"Master," said Andras, lowering his eyes. "It is time."

Fistandantilus's beard—the only part of his face Andras had ever seen—moved in a way the younger mage had come to recognize as a smile.

"Yes," he said, then raised his head as if to sniff the air. He dropped his gore-streaked instruments on the table. "Yes. How did you know?"

"I'm not sure, Master. I just woke up and knew today was the day," Andras said. His voice trembled with excitement.

"Excellent," Fistandantilus replied. "Come, then. We'll begin."

In the five years that he'd studied under the Dark One, Andras had never gone past the laboratory. The glyphs upon the doors at its far end barred even him from passing through. Now Fistandantilus strode up to those doors and, raising a withered hand, willed them to open. They swung outward without a sound, and the archmage stepped through. Quivering with anticipation, Andras followed.

Another passage stretched out into the gloom, lined with still more rune-encrusted doors, before giving way to a winding stairway that snaked even deeper into the earth. At the bottom, one more door opened to Fistandantilus, giving onto a little round room with rough-hewn walls and a ceiling where fat, pallid slugs left pearly trails of slime. Beneath, in the middle of the floor, was a circular pool filled with water that glowed red from something far beneath the surface. Andras peered into it but could not see the source of the light. The pool looked to be bottomless.

"The Pit of Summoning," Fistandantilus said. "Your revenge begins here. You remember the spell?"

Andras nodded. He remembered every spell the archmage had taught him. He had practiced them, day after day, for years. He muttered the incantations in his sleep.

"Begin," the Dark One said and stepped back.

Andras licked his lips, stepping close to the pool. Its surface was still, like a sheet of Micahi glass. His heart raced as he stared into its fathomless depths. He shut his eyes, concentrating, calling the spell to his mind. As he did, his right hand dropped to his belt, drawing out a long, wavy-bladed knife. Clenching it in his fist, he began to weave the fingers of his left hand through the air.

"Suvet kajanto asofik yabengis zo," he chanted. "Daku faban harga, ben odu lamorai!"

As he recited the incantation, the red glow beneath the water grew brighter, like metal pulled from a forge. The surface began to move as well, churning as some great heat welled up below. The water hissed where it splashed upon the rocky floor, evaporating into steam. Andras smiled—the spell had begun to work. The rush of it through his body intoxicated him, but there was one thing he still had to do, to make it complete. With ritual slowness, he lifted the wavy-bladed knife, then placed its blade between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. Clenching his teeth, he tightened his grip on the hilt, then drew it sharply down, toward the heel of his palm.

Blood sprayed. His little finger dropped into the pool with a splash.

The pain was so intense that he nearly vomited, spoiling the spell. At the last instant, however, he fought back his gorge and jammed his maimed hand into the crook of his other arm. The dagger dropped, clattering on the ground. Gnashing his teeth, he bent down over the water, watching, waiting…

The first body bobbed to the surface soon after. It was small, the size of a human baby, with long, spindly limbs tipped with hooked claws. Its skin was the pallid color of a serpent's belly, shot through with writhing blue veins. Tiny, batlike wings drooped from its shoulder blades, and a bony tail snaked out from its backside, tipped with a stinger the size of a spearhead. A caul covered its oversized head, stretched tight over sunken eyes, upturned nose, and a mouth full of jagged fangs. The body floated on the surface of the pool, arms and legs flopping as the roiling water rolled it over and over.

Quasito, the bestiaries called it: an imp from the pits of the Abyss. Andras had brought it here.

Andras stared in horror. He had not known what would come out of the pit, only that something would. Now that he knew, part of him wanted to send the hideous thing back to whatever depths it had risen from.

He didn't. Stooping down, he reached out over the pool and caught hold of one of its legs. The imp was clammy and rubbery and hung limp as he dragged it from the water. Cringing, he reached out and pulled away the caul. It came off the quasito's face with an awful sucking sound, and he flung it away. As soon as it was off, the creature began to choke. Water sprayed from between its teeth, then it took a raspy breath, its arms and legs moving listlessly. Its eyes opened—cat's eyes, glowing yellow in the gloom. They were eyes that hated and knew nothing else.

It will kill me, Andras thought, watching venom drip from the stinger as the tail twitched. It will kill me if I don't do something.

He knew what that was. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he lowered his maimed hand to the quasito's mouth. It sniffed at the bleeding wound for a moment, then made an awful cooing sound, wrapped horny lips about it, and began to suckle.

Fistandantilus chuckled. "Well done. How does it feel to be a mother?"

Andras could make no reply. The sensation of the thing drinking his blood made it impossible to form a thought. All he managed was a low groan.

"I will leave you now," said the Dark One. "I have my own work to do. You can see to the rest, when they come."

When the archmage had gone, Andras pulled his hand away from the quasito's lips. It leered up at him, its face smeared with blood. Its eyes had changed—they still hated, but there was something else in them now. A connection—an ungodly bond had formed between him and the tiny monster.

A bubbling sound caught his attention. Another body had risen to the pool's surface. As he watched, a third came up to join it. Looking down, he saw more pale shapes beneath the surface.

Andras picked up the first quasito and moved it away from the pit. Wearily, he turned back to the pool and began to fish out the others. The rest of his children.