Storm of Prophecy: Book 1, Dark Awakening (37 page)

He looked over at Vincent’s cousin before continuing. “Karl Faren has already told some of us what has happened, but not all of us have had a chance to hear it. Despite his pleas, we have refused to allow him to elaborate further until this point in time. The search team which he guided to the site of the altercation has already informed us of their findings; your testimonies will be compounded with these other facts we’ve received.

“Since you are believed to be the primary instigator of this affair, Vincent Faren, we will hear your testimony first.”

Vincent was silent a moment at first, not knowing where to begin, and felt an uncomfortable nervousness settle over his body as all eyes were on him. “As you wish, grandmaster,” he replied. “Where would you like me to start?”

Treyfon’s expression unexpectedly took on an irritated set, his eyes incriminating him where before they had remained dispassionate. “We know about your external trappings prior to the date in question. Word has reached our ear of the interviews and other activities you pursued on the keep’s behalf without our permission.” Vincent felt a fear clutch at him while his eyes darted to the side to glance at Karl, but his cousin hadn’t noticed and showed him no look in response. There was no way for him to know if they had learned this from him or from someone else. Treyfon’s sharp senses caught him doing this, and his keen eyes also flicked once in Karl’s direction, but he did not answer the silent question Vincent had asked. “Begin by telling us everything you were up to, everything you learned, everything happening up to the night in question, and then tell us what happened on the night in question.”

It was a lot, but Vincent couldn’t back down. “Yes, sir.”

It took a while though not as long as he thought it would have. Many among the council passed surprised looks between each other at exactly how much initiative he had taken. They were particularly ruffled by one instance Vincent recounted where he had used intimidation as a means of eliciting cooperation from someone he questioned. He would have kept this secret from them for his own sake, but since they claimed knowledge, there was no way for him to know exactly how much they really knew. If he wasn’t forthcoming, his integrity would be compromised and things would turn out worse for him in the end. Rather than take any such risk, he decided that he preferred to be damned for who he really was.

Grandmaster Treyfon and the rest of the council became increasingly discomforted when he got to the part where he spoke with Stan and Craig to discover the name ‘Kargoth’ but did not interrupt him. None looked surprised when he told them of the prophecy where the name appeared. Even though they found his actions surrounding Stan and Craig upsetting on the night of the 22
^nd
, they still kept quiet and let him continue on with the rest.

Vincent then reached the point in time when they had a brief conversation with the cult’s leader, Clyde, in which he offered them a chance to join. “…the cult believes themselves to be part of The Lord of Death’s revolution against false gods and that it has begun. I don’t know if…”

Treyfon held up his hand. “Your cousin failed to mention this.”

“You didn’t give me the chance,
grandmaster
,” Karl retorted.

“Watch your tone!” Magnus scolded irately.

“That is their cause,” Vincent stated plainly. “They believe that their god, Kargoth, has finally risen and that they serve his will. There is no way to know yet if they are merely mad, delusional, or if there really is someone posing as The Lord of Death.”

Treyfon’s pointy ancient eyes continued to fix themselves on Vincent. “You believe then that their backing is immaterial?”

“I would like to since that would make them nothing more than an isolated group of deranged lunatics that we need only find and destroy, but I have to consider the other possibility. And based on this deviation from their usual cautious and secretive behavior”
-
he glanced at Stacy
-
“as well as the…curious astrological alignment that my friend has shown me…well, I just hope that I’m wrong.” Master Anthony looked on with only a hint of disapproval, much less than when Vincent had first told the masters what she had shown them.

Grandmaster Treyfon slowly and unexpectedly leaned forward and buried his face in his right hand. “Kargoth is the fabled bringer of the dead. His insatiable hunger to devour all life is the reason the other gods turned against him in the first place.” The other masters looked his way but said nothing.

A moment passed. “Perhaps we shouldn’t jump to conclusions,” Master Anthony put in stoically. “The timing of events does not always match up correctly with the stars.” The dean of atmomancy then glanced over at Stacy. Vincent had no way to know if this was right.

Treyfon kept his face in his hand, muttering at a level meant only for Anthony to hear or perhaps just himself. “‘The death plague has seven arms,’” he quoted. “‘They will strike when the storm covers the eye.’” Master Anthony looked his way once but remained quiet.

“Sir?”

“Please go on,” he replied without looking up.

Vincent continued, telling them the rest of the conversation before they were attacked. He told them about the liquid inside the cauldron which Clyde claimed not to be the source of the undeath spell, and they were in agreement that it was probably something else. Treyfon also commented on how the vial of plant extract stolen that night couldn’t be used for anything related to undeath. In addition to this, they claimed that every source known to them made no indication that necromancy required any potions. No one could tell Vincent what the liquid inside was and voiced that it could be just about anything else.

He recounted the battle, as much of it as he could remember, his memory not perfect due to the quick pace of events during the heat of combat. As he told the tale, something happened that Vincent did not foresee. A few of the masters raised eyebrows at what he recalled and were silently impressed by his valor and efficiency. Master Magnus was not. Apparently they had a much lower estimation of what Vincent was capable of than he thought they did and were therefore surprised.

When he got to the part when the cult unleashed the black wyvern, the master pyromancer was not only unimpressed but was becoming increasingly incredulous. “No one can control that flame on a whim; it contains a power from the world beyond. And reconciling it with our own is not something I have deemed necessary to teach my students, since it is so rare.”

Rick put a fist over his mouth and coughed, clearing his throat before speaking up. He treaded cautiously. “Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that,” he started. “I didn’t like the feel of that green flame coming from its mouth. It felt tainted somehow. Wrong. I had a hard time controlling it.”

“That’s because part of its essence doesn’t belong in our plane of existence,” Magnus explained. “Its fire was mixed with that from the underworld. And you’ve had plenty of chances before now to ask me about it, why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t think that you would believe me.”

“Well at least you’ve gotten one thing right.”

Vincent was bothered by this and spoke up in his defense. “If I had to, I would stake my life on him being able to do it again.”

Magnus regarded him with a sneer, unconvinced by his remark. “I don’t think you had to do it the first time.” He then sat back and mocked him. “But please, don’t let me stop you. Go on. I
like
listening to fanciful stories.”

Vincent began to lose his temper. “We’re telling you the truth!”

Treyfon interposed himself before Magnus could say more, striking the metal ball on its plate several times with a deep, thick clank while holding up his hand. When the other two were silent, he asked Vincent to continue, and he did. At the part when he had sealed Stacy’s wounds shut with his heated knife, he heard her whisper a ‘thank you’ at his side. He glanced her way once to acknowledge it and kept speaking. It didn’t take long after he began to tell them about the madness he had endured in getting her out of there before Master Magnus once again started raising objections.

“Wait a minute. You mean to say that you fought against a black wyvern, a creature thirty times your size, by yourself, with only a sword, and lived to tell about it?”

“Well, master, like I was about to say I was not alone. My cousin Karl aided me in the fight…”

“I thought you said you had become separated.”

Magnus was probing for any inconsistencies that might reveal lies, but Vincent had nothing to hide. “It was right at that point when he managed to rejoin Stacy and I, aiding me in combat.”

“How lucky for you,” Magnus remarked doubtfully, “go on.”

Vincent sighed in annoyance and then continued to tell the tale of his frightening battle with the wyvern that nearly resulted in his death and how with his cousin’s help he was able to at last injure the beast enough to drive it away. After that, there wasn’t much left, only how Karl helped cauterize his wounds with the heated knife that he handed to him and how the three of them limped back to the keep.

The masters were nothing if not thorough. In the same meticulous manner as on the other occasion that Vincent had come to stand before them, they had Karl go through everything that
he
experienced that night. They wanted to gather anything and everything that could be gleaned from hearing his perspective, considering no detail unimportant. As Karl progressed through a story that Vincent had more or less already told, he echoed points of contention in Vincent’s account that the masters had been trying to find slip-ups in. His cousin verified what had happened with the wyvern, deviating only during the period of time when they were not together.

Rick told a similar story when it was his turn, though with little concerning the wyvern after he steered away the flames and they all made their escape. Much of what he remembered after that point was being tirelessly hunted by zombies until finally losing them and then becoming lost himself in the forest. Stacy’s account was even shorter since she was unconscious for much of the time when they were fleeing the wyvern, yet she confirmed nearly everything else.

Occasionally Vincent caught some of the masters whispering to each other while staring at him. At first he thought they were speaking of things that incriminated him or were passing judgments between themselves, but it looked less harsh than that, as if they were seeing him in some new light. Perhaps it was something about having all three of his friends speak of his fighting prowess and integral part of their joint strategy to stay alive that was giving them something to think about. The decapitated corpses and the arrangement of bodies that the search team would have reported to them certainly would have verified his friends’ claims. It also would have been easy to discern those that Vincent had slain from theirs.

After Stacy had finished giving her testimony, looking almost ready to faint, Treyfon once again turned his attention to Vincent. “What else can you tell us about this cult that you haven’t already? If the four of you are to have any hope of being forgiven for your offense, you must disclose all that you have learned, no matter how insignificant it might seem.”

Vincent’s mind grabbed at anything it could find. “Well, this is probably already a moot point…”

“Voice it anyway,” Treyfon insisted.

“I believe that the cult is in fact responsible for all the deaths and disappearances that I was looking into. Many of the corpses attacking us bore a resemblance to some of the missing persons I sought.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

“I know, but their sheer numbers do. I’m sure that once all the bodies are identified, if they can be, you’ll see that I’m right.”

The gruff voice of Master Gautrek, who normally kept silent, joined in. “But what of all the missing children on that list?” The green-robed Dwarf asked. “From your own recollection, you were swarmed mainly by deceased adults.”

“I think that their wyvern is the answer to that,” Vincent replied sadly. “They used children for their Seal of Cheated Light and probably fed what was left to it. The crumpled up bone remains might be the result of…”

Magnus, who sat leaning the side of his head on his hand with the same elbow resting on the table cut him off rudely, his tone quick and impatient. “Yes, yes, we are all aware of how wyverns consume their prey whole, digest them, and then without having any further use of the bones, regurgitate the pellets to excrete them orally. Get on with it.”

Vincent silently glared in his direction, thinking to himself that if Master Magnus were so knowledgeable, maybe he should have done something about it. He then returned his gaze to Treyfon and did as told. “I don’t know if the Kargoth they fight for is a man, truly a god, or just an idea, but if there is one congregation of his followers, there might be more.”

“Of the ones that you battled, how many do you think are left?” The ancient Elf asked next.

Though Vincent thought it a very pertinent question, he had trouble coming up with an answer. He took a deep breath and scratched his head while letting it out. “The villagers and other victims who were slain and resurrected as zombies were plentiful enough…I didn’t get a precise count. As for the ones wearing black hoods and robes, I wasn’t really in a position to…” Stacy murmured something at his side but he didn’t hear it because it was too quiet.