Chris Pierson - Divine Hammer

“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.”