Reign of Ash Read online

  Lowrey breathed a sigh of relief, letting his head fall back as though he were saying a prayer of thanks to the gods. Treven Lowrey could be overly dramatic, but in this, Connor suspected, the man’s lifelong passion as a scholar gave him to speak from the heart. “Thank Esthrane,” he murmured. “Is there hope, then, that perhaps some of the library was spared?”

  “We saved what we could,” Lynge answered. “Not everything, I’m sorry to say. But most of the books, and all of the Special Collections.” He gave a knowing look at Penhallow. “When we received your message, we cleared a room in the tunnels beneath the castle. It’s very secure. You can take your rest there and study the collections without interruption.”

  Lynge frowned. “Given your message, we had expected you to arrive considerably sooner. Did you meet with problems on the journey?”

  Penhallow chuckled. “Nothing major,” he assured Lynge. “The roads are not as easy to navigate as they once were.”

  “Let’s get the three of you belowground, and we can talk when you’ve rested,” Lynge replied. “There’s a flagon of fresh deer blood waiting for you, Lord Penhallow, and refreshment for Connor and Scholar Lowrey as well.”

  They followed Lynge down a winding stone staircase into the depths of the castle’s many cellars. Despite his years of service in the castle, Connor had never seen this area before. The stairway had been carved out of the rock itself, and this part of the castle was obviously the oldest. Torches burned at intervals in iron sconces affixed to the rock walls, but they did not completely dispel the shadows. Lynge led them down a maze of passageways, until the corridor narrowed to be barely wider than a man’s shoulders, and the ceiling was low enough that Lynge and Penhallow had to duck their heads.

  Finally, Lynge stopped at an oak door bound with iron. He swung the door open and lifted a torch to light the interior. It was a good-sized room, wide enough for a wooden table and chairs with space enough for two straw mattresses. On the table sat a flagon and a goblet for Penhallow, and nearby, two pitchers of ale, tankards, and a wooden tray heaped with cheese, honey, bread, dried meat, and fruits.

  “Hardly a feast,” Lynge said, “but there should be enough to fill your stomachs.” He glanced toward Penhallow. “There’s a separate room for you, Lord Penhallow, where you won’t be disturbed. As for the rest of what you requested, let me show you, and then I’ll leave you to your meal.”

  A servant stayed behind to light the torches in the room with the table and mattresses, while Lynge led them back into the narrow corridor. “How did you send him a message to expect us?” Connor whispered to Penhallow. “We were under siege in Voss’s fortress.”

  Penhallow nodded. “I’d sent the message before that, expecting our stay with Voss to be shorter. So I can imagine that our friends here were worried when we were delayed a good bit beyond the time I’d indicated they should look for us to arrive.”

  Lynge gestured toward a door on his left. “That’s your room, Lord Penhallow. It locks from within, so you’ll be quite secure.” He fell silent as they walked on until they came to a room at the end of the corridor. Its door was of the same heavy oak as the others they had passed, but this door was reinforced with iron, and a complex locking mechanism secured it.

  They hung back as Lynge worked the complicated lock. The bolts and levers that slid clear echoed in the confines of the stone walls. Finally, Lynge opened the door and stepped inside. The room smelled musty, with the scent of old leather and the dusty aroma of ancient parchment.

  Lynge’s torch illuminated the room, which was much larger than Connor had imagined. The seneschal walked around the perimeter, lighting several of the torches.

  “It’s a library,” Lowrey breathed, with a passion usually reserved for the sight of a beautiful woman.

  “Not just a library,” Penhallow said, and a faint smile touched his lips.

  “No, indeed,” Lynge agreed. “This is all that remains of the archives of the banished Knights of Esthrane.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I

  t always comes back to blood.” Pentreath Reese moved slowly around the perimeter of the dimly lit parlor. His hand trailed across the surface of a table, then stopped to linger on the ancient obsidian knife that lay in front of them. “Always blood,” he murmured, as if he had forgotten that Pollard was in the room.

  Pollard knew better than to interrupt. Since the Great Fire, Reese’s moods, always mercurial, had grown more extreme. Reese continued to pace the edge of the room, lifting items, examining them as if he had never seen them before, or caressing them with his fingertips before moving on.

  “Wild magic is a beautiful thing,” Reese said, his deep voice smooth as brandy. “Lovely and terrible.” He seemed to remember Pollard’s presence. “Did you possess magic before the Great Fire?”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  Reese nodded. “Yes, I did know that. I have no magic either, save for the dark gift that flows in my blood.” He looked up and met Pollard’s gaze. “You see, once again, it comes back to blood.”

  “What of the wild magic, m’lord?” Pollard asked. He had learned from experience that it was better to humor Reese when he was in a pensive mood. Reese’s melancholy could shift into deadly rage with frightening speed. Once, he had seen Reese casually eviscerate a servant who accidently disturbed him when he was feeling introspective. Pollard had no desire to push the limits of Reese’s self-control, nor did he harbor any assumptions about being irreplaceable to his lord. Patience was not Pollard’s strong point, but where it stood to yield tactical advantage, he could make an exception.

  “Have you ever watched a forest burn, Vedran? Or seen the sea rise up into a wave that reaches the sky and then surges forward onto the shore?”

  “No, m’lord.”

  Reese’s voice held a note of wonder that sent a chill down Pollard’s spine. “I have. The wild magic is just untamed. Without agenda or conscience or remorse. Beautiful, unharnessed power.”

  He paused his pacing in front of a set of shelves that held a variety of unusual objects. Small, intricately carved stone boxes. Focusing balls of crystal and gemstone. Athames made of polished, exotic wood or smooth, rare, semiprecious stone. Silver amulets and rings, rough stone bowls, and delicately wrought goblets: All of these treasures Pollard recognized as ones his men had systematically looted from the hidden stores of mages and scholars. “What a crime to bind such power to the will of insignificant men,” Reese mused, “men whose ability to harness magic is nothing but an inherited fluke, no more their doing than the color of their eyes.”

  He turned to Pollard, moving so quickly that Pollard stepped back, wary of an attack. But Reese did not advance. “Talishte are not created by accident of birth,” he said quietly. “We are chosen by our makers, tested to determine whether we are suitable to receive the dark blood-gift of the kruvgaldur. That is something for which mages can never forgive my kind,” he said, staring past Pollard into the dimly lit room as if seeing a memory.

  Pollard gently cleared his throat. “My lord,” he said with great care. “My men have returned from searching the ruins of the university at Aldomar. I came to make a report.”

  Reese nodded, but it was clear his attention was not yet fully engaged. “In good time, Vedran. In good time.” He gave an absent wave in the direction of one of the upholstered chairs near the fireplace. “Have a seat.”

  Pollard sat down, and his gaze was drawn upward above the blaze that burned in the fireplace to a large oil painting that hung above the mantel. Most of the manor houses and grand homes boasted fine portraits in such a spot, of the current owner of the manse or one of his or her illustrious ancestors. Still others favored scenes from the hunt, or perhaps an artist’s fantasy taken from the stories of the gods.

  A dark vision loomed on the wall above the mantel. The landscape was the stuff of nightmares, with leafless trees stripped of their bark and a sky filled with storm clouds. The foreground showed twisted images of a
nimals and men that seemed to have been painted by someone who had never seen such things. Deformed figures limped and scrabbled their way across the canvas with hunched backs and foreshortened or elongated limbs.

  Reese chuckled as he noted the direction of Pollard’s gaze. “Does it frighten you, Vedran?”

  “It is disquieting, m’lord.” Pollard kept his face as neutral as possible.

  Reese leaned against the massive study table in the center of the room and looked up at the painting. “A very long time ago, when I was a mortal child, a man came through our village with a traveling carnival. He promised us that, in exchange for a few coppers, he would show us monsters that would haunt our dreams forever. Monsters from the depths of Raka itself.”

  Reese’s voice had taken on a quiet tone, and his gaze was distant. “I stole the coppers I needed to see such wonders,” he said. “I was not disappointed. I saw a parade of things that had the flesh and faces of men, but whose bodies had been twisted into unnatural shapes, with malformed limbs and faces too hideous to look upon and too fascinating to look away from.” He shook his head in wonderment. “There were men, women, and children – or at least, things that were at once human and totally alien. Animals, too, that looked as if they had been sewn together from the pieces of several different species, or like a rag doll twisted by a vengeful child and allowed to remain so. And some creatures the like of which do not often walk upon this world.”

  He returned his attention to Pollard in time to see him shudder. “I learned later that these oddities, these freaks, had not been born thus. It was not the hand of the gods that made them magnificently horrible. Most were made by the carnival owner, who spirited them away as babies, using all manner of iron bonds and intricate straps to bend and shape their bodies to his will. Others were made by magic, brought from some other realm by the visithara magic and left here to prove that monsters are real.

  “I learned then that what is bound becomes warped,” Reese said, and his voice grew stronger, more passionate. “And I realized that true power means the absence of restraints.”

  In the blink of an eye, Reese straightened, sloughing off his reflective mood and growing businesslike. “Tell me what you found at Aldomar.”

  Pollard had grown accustomed to such whiplash-quick changes in topic. “The university was badly damaged in the Great Fire. Of course, none of the mages who survived retain any ability to wield magic. We interrogated them at length, and my men were their most persuasive,” he said with a dangerous smile. “Yet we learned nothing new about either Treven Lowrey or Vigus Quintrel. Both mages seem to have vanished into thin air.”

  Reese brought down his fist so hard on the end of the reading table that it smashed through the polished mahogany surface. “Unacceptable! I do not entrust these errands to you, Vedran, for you to come back to me empty-handed.”

  Pollard remained very still, a survival skill he had perfected long ago. He refused to give Reese the satisfaction of seeing him react, though he was well aware that the talishte could hear the rapid beating of his heart and the shallow rhythm of his breath. “I did not say that we returned with nothing, m’lord.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Our sources report that Lowrey was taken by Traher Voss —”

  “Voss again?” Reese interrupted and muttered a curse.

  “We’re certain it was Voss’s men who bested our own kidnappers,” Pollard continued, undeterred. “And we have reason to think that Voss sent them on orders from Lanyon Penhallow.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Reese said.

  “My men have caught sight of Penhallow once since he and his servant escaped from the siege at Voss’s fortress.” Pollard resisted the urge to wet his lips, refusing to show his nervousness. “There was a third man with them who matches Lowrey’s description. We believe they are heading toward Castle Reach, and very possibly, Quillarth Castle. I’ve activated the spies in the city and set men on every highway and footpath.”

  “Rescind the order,” Reese directed.

  Pollard frowned. “My lord?”

  Reese pushed away from the damaged table and began to pace, a dark, powerful shadow in the dim room. “If Penhallow has Lowrey with him, then odds are he’s on to something that has to do with McFadden. Don’t move on him until we know what it is. He may lead us right to McFadden himself, or to whatever McFadden and Lowrey believe is required to restore the magic.”

  Pollard resisted the urge to scream. “M’lord, I don’t possess your blood bond with my men. As I have previously cautioned, once the spies receive a mission, I have no reliable way to update their orders.”

  Reese made a dismissive gesture. “How you do your job is none of my concern. Just do it.”

  Pollard’s gaze took in the hundreds of old volumes on the library’s shelves. Most of them, he knew, fed Reese’s long obsession with the histories of Donderath’s oldest families, the genealogies of the thirteen Lords of the Blood. His own family was among those of the thirteen lords chosen by King Hougen four hundred years ago, one of the Lords of the Blood that raised the magic at Mirdalur. Yet Pollard’s blood was not of interest to Reese. It had been an open secret among Donderath’s nobility that Vedran Pollard was illegitimate, the product of an impotent father and a faithless mother. He inherited the title and the lands as the sole surviving heir, but that inheritance did not include magic.

  “What of the items I desire, Vedran? The ones held by the Lords of the Blood?”

  Pollard motioned to the box he had laid on the table when he arrived. “What we’ve found so far is in the box,” he reported. “Some odd old drawings and a few trinkets, but nothing that matches the sketch you gave me.”

  Months before, Reese had happened upon a sketch of a strange pendant in one of the books Pollard had looted from the scholars’ libraries. A very old drawing showed a wide, dark disk with cryptic markings and a strange arrangement of slits carved into its surface. On the same page, the drawing showed thirteen men costumed as of old, each wearing a similar pendant, standing in what was clearly meant to depict a ritual chamber.

  Since then, Reese had become obsessed with finding anything related to the old Lords of the Blood, anything that might deny McFadden his ability to restore the magic.

  Reese tore open the box and lifted each item from inside as if it were a hallowed relic. Pollard recognized them as they were removed. A yellowed scrap of a star map, showing constellations in the sky. A faded drawing of a strange pattern that might have been a magical symbol or ancient, forgotten heraldry. A few torn, water-stained, and partially burned pages ripped from a journal that might once have belonged to Archus Quintrel, ancestor of the elusive Vigus.

  “You’ve done well, Vedran, very well,” Reese said with a tone of satisfaction usually reserved for praise of a fine racehorse or a prize stag.

  “Thank you, m’lord. My men continue to comb through the ruins of the old manors,” Pollard replied, silently exhaling in relief.

  “Treven Lowrey uncovered information about how these elements raised the magic at Mirdalur, and Quintrel thought he knew something about even older attempts. I want what they know, Vedran,” Reese said, the insatiable hunger of an obsessed collector clear in his voice. “I want to find them and destroy them before McFadden can gain their knowledge.”

  “I rather liked the idea of just eliminating McFadden,” Pollard said drolly. “By the way, we’ve identified the soldiers who intervened near Mirdalur,” he added. He shook his head in amazement. “They’re actually King Merrill’s soldiers, or what’s left of them, returned at last from the war. Their captain is a man named Niklas Theilsson.”

  Pollard gave a snort of derision. “I knew of his father, Lars Theilsson. He had a large farm near the McFadden holdings. Called it Arengarte, as if it were a manor. Managed to put up with Ian McFadden enough to trade with him, although rumor had it that it was because his son was a friend of Blaine McFadden.”

  “So McFadden’s aligned with the army,” Reese murm
ured. “How interesting.”

  “I’d hardly call such a ragged band of vagabonds an ‘army.’”

  “They’ll complicate your plans to lay siege now, won’t they?”

  Pollard shrugged. “Sieges take too long and tie up too many men. There will be better ways to get our hands on Glenreith.”

  “What of the items our man said he saw on the ship from Edgeland?” Reese inquired, still examining the artifacts Pollard had brought for him.

  Pollard grimaced. “It would help if he’d gotten a good look at whatever it was they had,” he observed dryly. “He thinks he saw some kind of map case in the courtesan’s possession, and a similar case and perhaps a disk being closely guarded by Lord Garnoc’s servant, Bevin Connor.”

  “Penhallow’s spy,” Reese replied absently.

  “The problem is, we don’t really know what they had. They might have nothing to do with magic, or with McFadden.”