Malediction (Scars of the Sundering Book 1) (28 page)

Kali,

We'll try to get away tonight after dinner. If not,
then tomorrow.

Keep warm.

-- Kale

He looked
around for something with which to wipe the excess ink off his claw finally
settling on his leg. Kale placed the ink and paper back in the ossuary, closed
the lid, and then returned to the upper levels to tell Delilah. His sister and
Pancras were both dozing by the fire when he returned. He was thankful the wind
died down so he didn't wake them with an icy blast when he opened the door.
Kale tiptoed through the parlor to the bedroom he shared with Delilah and
stared at his puzzle box sitting on the table. It seemed to mock his failure to
discover the secret to unlocking the fourth side.

Kale
rummaged through Delilah's pack instead of continuing his exploration of the
box, and took the lexicon she used to learn the common trade language.
Maybe
I can read myself to sleep, too
.

* * *

A specter of
the past rose out of Pancras's dreams. A furious, screaming, skull-headed man
marched toward him. The man was short, but was convinced of his own superiority
as he ranted and raved, waving his flanged mace around to punctuate his
sentences. The words spewed forth were gibberish to Pancras

The
skull-headed man stalked closer, growing in size with each step until he loomed
over Pancras. The minotaur cowered in the corner, and the skull-headed man
raised his mace to strike. With a mighty overhead swing, he brought down the
mace intent on pulverizing the minotaur's head. Pancras moved away at the last
moment.

Deep inside,
Pancras knew what he saw was wrong. It was a vision of an event that never
occurred, yet he was powerless to do anything except watch it unfold. Again and
again the skull-headed man swung at Pancras, and again and again Pancras moved
away at the last moment. The man's screaming rants turned into a high-pitched
keen, and his features melted away. He dropped his mace and offered a fur-covered
hand to the cowering minotaur.

Pancras took
the hand, and a familiar face greeted him as he was pulled to his feet.

"Thanos?
Is that you?"

"I have
missed you, Pancras." Thanos embraced him. Warmth Pancras had not felt in
decades filled his body, and he felt a stirring within he thought was long
dead.

"Thanos,
how did…" He held the other minotaur at arm's length to look at him.
Thanos smiled at his lover. He moved to kiss Pancras, and his bottom jaw fell
off. Eyes, clouded with decay, slid out of sockets and down Thanos's cheeks.

Pancras
screamed and shoved Thanos away. His hands punched through Thanos's chest, and
the minotaur gurgled. Worms writhed and wriggled from the holes. Without
conscious thought, Pancras worked the magic that took him away from Thanos so
many years ago. He felt shadowy claws scratching at the back of his mind,
wrapping themselves around his brain, and drawing out the magic. The tips of
his horns glowed with brilliant emerald light. Tendrils of dark-green smoke
swirled around the rotten corpse, lifting it up and devouring with raw power.

"Thanos!"
Pancras gasped and fell out of the armchair. The chair upended and fell with a
crash, muffled by the thick carpet and the furs and blankets under which
Pancras slept.

Delilah
awoke with a start and looked around the room, bleary eyed. "Who's Thanos?
Is someone here?"

Wiping tears
from his cheeks, Pancras extracted himself from the tangle of blankets and
righted the chair. "No, no one. Sorry, bad dream." He patted Delilah
on the arm and looked out the window. "It's getting late. Perhaps we
should see if dinner is ready?"

She yawned
and nodded. "Good idea. I'm hungry. I'll get Kale."

Pancras had
not thought about Thanos in years. When he was a youth in Muncifer, he and
Thanos were lovers. They lived together and made plans together as young people
in love do. During Pancras's final years at the Arcane University, however,
Thanos became jealous of his lover's dedication to the arcane arts. He pledged
himself to a mercenary company preparing for a lengthy expedition into the
Western Wastes on the other side of the Dragon Spine Mountains.

They
promised to wait for each other until after their respective tasks were
complete. Pancras waited two years after completing his apprenticeship, but the
mercenaries never returned. He made some inquiries and learned they were
thought to have been wiped out by giants in the mountains.

Pancras left
Muncifer that very day and had never returned.
And now I'm going back to
give money to the people who forced us apart.
The vivid nature of his dream
shook him to the core. He rarely remembered dreams, and when he did, they never
involved the rotten corpses of people he knew. He never dreamed about the dead.
Reaching up, he removed both components of his focus from the tips of his
horns. He promised Kale and Delilah he would no longer sleep with them on. Of
course, he hadn't planned to fall asleep by the fire.

Dinner was a
quiet affair. He ascertained by each drak's body language they made plans for
after dinner, but Pancras decided to let them be. Stopping them would be too
much work for too little gain, and if they kept themselves busy and didn't burn
down the palace or rip chandeliers out of the ceiling, who was he to complain?

The Codex of
Passion awaited him after dinner. He was almost ready to return it, but there
were a few more notes he wanted to take and a few more passages he wanted to
revisit. After he completed those tasks, all that remained was to confirm a few
things with a priest of Cybele and to gather ingredients. In his heart, Pancras
knew giving Prince Gavril what he wanted was wrong. He would make the prince
happy, though, because he planned to make him believe he got what he wanted.
The hard part was making the effect last long enough to convince Prince Gavril
that it worked. Pancras needed to bide sufficient time for the snows to melt,
all of them to leave Almeria, and reach a safe distance before the prince
discovered the ruse.

* * *

"I
noticed you didn't bother telling Pancras where we were going."

Kale smiled
and held the door to the undercroft open for his sister. "What's the
point? He'd just worry or want to go with us, and we can move faster without
him. Besides, he's too big for some of these tunnels, and he looked terrible.
You said he had a bad dream or something?" Kale couldn't remember the last
time he had anything but happy or silly dreams, like being chased by giant
fruit or being held down by fuzzy rocks while they tickled his feet. He asked
Oren about his dreams once, but the drak fortune teller was hardly helpful and
predicted he was likely to die by choking on a piece of moldy fruit.

They entered
the catacombs, and Kale paused to check the ossuary. The note was gone, but the
inkwell remained.

"So
what?" Delilah paused to illuminate her staff. "She's got a new route
for us that isn't going to be a dead-end-waste-of-time?"

"Yes,
she does." Kali stepped out of the shadows. "I'm glad you were able
to make it. Word is they brought a new batch of slaves in just before that
storm. New slaves are stronger and will be able to fight back."

Kale took
point as they moved through the catacombs. Kali directed him with taps on his
shoulder when they needed to take a new turn. "So what do we do if we free
a bunch of slaves? Lead a revolt and kill all the slavers? Deli and I can't
just flee the city if things go bad."

"You
won't have to. We'll lead them back here to the catacombs. There's a network of
sympathetic folk who have cellars that connect. They'll hide them and give them
shelter for now. Slavery is illegal; the only way they get away with it is
because most humans don't care about draks."

Kale didn't
know many humans. Mirek and Dusan seemed nice, and there were a few others who
came to Drak-Anor over the years who didn't seem to think draks were some sort
of vermin. "Not all humans are bad."

"True
enough, but there are enough who think if you're not a smoothskin, you're
little better than an animal, and there aren't enough willing to stand against
them. They think it's not their fight." Kali tapped Kale on the shoulder
and pointed down a cobweb-filled corridor. The burial niches were shrouded in
shadow, and the odor of the grave permeated the air.

Darkness
encroached upon the light from Delilah's staff. Kale cut away the cobwebs with
one of his daggers, but the preternatural silence unnerved him. "Shouldn't
there be rats or something?"

Kali held up
her hand signaling them to stop. "You're right. It's too quiet."

"You
said there'd be some small vermin. I don't hear any vermin."

Delilah
thrust her staff between them, illuminating the corridor ahead. "I'm cold.
It's cold in here, more so than it should be, I think."

All three
draks stiffened as something scraped against the stone behind them. They turned
in unison and saw a cadaverous form with long nails, stringy black hair, and
burning red eyes. Knife-like teeth filled its mouth, and it ran its nails along
the walls. A long pointed tongue ran along its teeth as it glared at them.

"That's
not a small vermin." Kale took a step back, away from the creature.

"Ghoul."
Delilah pointed her staff at it.

It hissed
and lunged.

"Run!"
Kale turned and grabbed his sister. The three draks tripped over each other in
their haste to leave it behind. Kale heard its nails scraping the rock as it
loped behind them, giving chase, but he dared not look back. Its long legs
enabled it to close the distance, and Kale saw a grimy, skeletal arm swipe at
Delilah's cloak, rending the fabric.

Kale skidded
to a stop as they rounded the corner, pulled Kali, then Delilah around and
pushing them behind him. He inhaled, and as the ghoul loped into view, he
unleashed a gout of flame into its face. The ghoul screeched a high-pitched
wail, falling to the ground and clawing at the inferno covering its head. Kale
continued exhaling fire, covering the ghoul in flames until he could exhale no
more. The ghoul scratched and clawed at the flames, ripping and peeling away
blistering, burning flesh in ragged strips.

The ghoul's
rotted flesh sizzled and popped, and its wail of anguish trailed off. It
stopped moving but continued to burn. Kale put his hands on his hips and
watched. "Ha! Nasty thing."

He felt
someone tap his shoulder.

"What?"
Kale turned around. Delilah and Kali pressed backward against him. The stench
of rotting flesh hit him like a punch to the stomach, and he fought the urge to
vomit. Beyond them, he saw dozens of glowing red eyes in the darkness. A
translucent pea-green shape emerged, a human knight wearing battered armor,
holding a spear, and ragged stumps where his legs should be. He lifted the
visor on his helm. His left eye glowed in the darkness. The right was nothing but
a jagged hole.

The
apparition pointed his spear at the three draks and said something in a
language Kale didn't understand. Behind him, the ghouls hissed in response and
charged.

* * *

Pancras
closed the Codex of Passion and returned it to his satchel. Satisfied he
acquired all the information from it useful for his purpose, he pulled on his
heaviest robes and stepped outside. The night sky was clear but cold, and a
strong breeze sculpted the snow on the ground into gentle drifts. The light of
the waning moons cast a cool glow on the city. The Eye of Tinian, a hazy blue,
oval-shaped formation with red-tinged edges rose in the sky, a reminder that
the king of the gods was ever watchful, even when his wife, the Earth Mother
was covered in snow and ice.

"Taking
an evening stroll?" Princess Valene joined him at the wall, her
ever-present goblet steaming in the chilly, night air. Covering her
floor-length, shamrock-colored gown, she wore a heavy, fur-lined, red overcoat.
The light of the King and Queen reflected off the jewels dangling from her
ears.

"I do
not often come up here at night, but Gavril is being particularly annoying this
evening, and I had to get away. Are your companions too much for you to handle
tonight, as well?"

Pancras
chuckled and shook his head. "No, I just wanted to get some fresh air.
Drak-Anor is mostly underground, so I don't get to see the night sky often. I
sometimes forget to stop and look at the world around me."

"My
husband doesn't actually value your services, you know. If it were up to him,
he'd run all the draks and minotaurs out of the city."

Princess
Valene didn't reveal anything he didn't already know. He was curious, however,
where she was headed with her commentary. He brushed snow off the top of the
wall and leaned on it, gazing out over the city. In the stillness of the winter
night, it was possible to hear the songs of minstrels playing in nearby
taverns, although the sound was so faint the words were unintelligible.