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GRIMOIRES, The Shadow of the Revenaunt, #4
is a standalone novel within the Revenaunt-series.
It is the tale of Magister Bo Lusindral, who with the young death priest Anliin and the little ghost prince Jesserie goes to hunt for the Revenaunt Emperor's last grimoires. The mighty spellbooks containing the most horrendous of the Dar'khamorth's falmagic.
The restoration of the godslorn country of Rockath, the future of the wild nomad boy-duke Fedar, and his growing attachment to Meanne, the magimech from Upper Nophat, all play an important role in the story.
CHAPTER ONE (Excerpt)
Bo snapped the book shut and got up. The pale winter sun coming through a chink in the curtains shone in his eyes and made reading impossible. Careful so as not to disturb his mother, he walked to the window. Outside, the world lay frozen in icy silence. Bo sighed. Inside the house was the same emptiness. His mother sat in her chair by the hearth, her thoughts far away as so often since his father’s death. Her eyes stared into distances Bo didn’t know, and only her hand with the needle moved, creating magical patterns on her eternal spell cloth. Bo suppressed an urge to scream, curse, anything to break the silence.
His breath clouded the windowpane, and while he drew a doodle on the misted glass, his thoughts far away.
Six months ago, Bo and his friends had completed Ghyll’s quest in Zihaen. He had returned home, heartbroken by the death of his loved one. Since then he’d been here, alone with his mother. The first weeks had passed in a gray haze, swallowed by his grief over Ruchelle’s death. His finger on the glass faltered. Ruchelle. Just getting used to that name had been so difficult. Yet he couldn’t call her Avelore any longer; that was the other girl. The living one.
Weeks had turned into months, passing in a meaningless void. Erstewine, Tempesten, pointlessly gone. Witteken, Jaarsend, Snevall, and now Iscome with its hard frost and stilled landscapes. His family had gathered here for the New Year’s celebrations, and he had barely noticed them. Huddled by the fire, he had struggled with the growing awareness that his first love had not been what he had believed. That she hadn’t been a young, awkward adepta, to whom he could be the hero, but a treacherous sorceress who had planned to kill him. Still, in the end she’d called him back, at that cursed tempel ruin, or he’d blithely have walked into the waiting trap. In his stead, the Dar’khamorth hard killed Ruchelle.
Those cursed Dar’khamorth. They needed killing. Once more, the words of the undead mage Neferestan echoed in his head. Your path through the dark, along the tops of knowledge and the depths of madness, is narrow as the edge of a knife, and the fall is closer than the exaltation, but at the end the light is waiting. What did they mean? Were they a prophecy? A warning? Hunter in the dark had Neferestan called him. A good word, hunter. Bo hated the Dar’khamorth. Because of Ruchelle. Because of his father.
His father. Ludovo Lusindral, the mage who in his search for more and more knowledge hadn’t been able to resist the forbidden sorcery. His father’s path had led to oblivion. Was that the depth of madness? Bo clenched his fists; it must not happen to him.
He took a series of quick breaths to regain his composure. If he wanted to be a hunter, he shouldn’t stay here. His hunting ground was outside, beyond the closed curtains. He looked at the misted glass and saw what he had drawn, a wingspreaded bird. The phoenix of the Dar’khamorth. With a savage wipe, he erased the drawing, and the outside world was visible again.
He caught his breath and hurriedly cleaned the whole pane with his sleeve. His eyes hadn’t lied–on the other side of the glass drifted a translucent appearance, waving ghostly hands at him. ‘Whoo-o!’
‘Jesserie!’ His bad mood disappeared instantly, and with pounding heart, he hurried out of the room. The visitor was waiting in the vestibule. Closed doors couldn’t stop the ghost prince, but good manners prevented him from going further than the hall.
‘Jess, how are you? And Ghyll, and ...’ Bo realized how much he’d missed his friends. ‘Come in,’ he said eagerly, and he threw the door open. ‘Semelda, look who’s here.’
His mother rested her needle and smiled. ‘Welcome, Jesserie anAbarran. I hope you come to cheer up my son?’
The ghost prince bowed with a flourish. ‘Good morning, Semelda. All that worrying is so bad for one’s health. I never do it.’
‘No,’ Bo retorted, ‘and your health is excellent.’
‘I haven’t been sick for a thousand years.’ Complacently, Jesserie stared at a chair by the table, and it slid over the carpet toward him. Carefully he sat down and folded his arms across his chest.
‘How did you do that?’ Bo said. ‘Has anyone taught you telekinesis?’
Jesserie casually knocked on the chair’s armrest with his translucent knuckles. ‘Neferestan showed me some tricks. It is not really telekinesis. I’m a prince, not a juggler like you. I use undergy - the Underworld leaks enough for small things like this.’
‘Juggler?’ Bo looked quasi indignant. ‘I am a magister mage, friend; not some jester at a fair.’
Jesserie grinned, and for a moment they said in a friendly silence.
‘I’m carrying a message,’ the ghost prince said suddenly.
Bo looked at him sharply. ‘From Ghyll?’
Jesserie shook his head. ‘From Neferestan. He has discovered something he wants to talk over with you. Urgently. And since I was the one who could get here the fastest, I’m playing courier.’
‘Is that all the message?’
‘That’s it! Do we go now?’
Bo’s eyes lit up. ‘I’ll just pack up some stuff.’ All worry slid off him while he hurried upstairs. This is it, he thought, the hunt begins!
In his room, he quickly grabbed some clothes. No longer did he need endless bags of costly robes; that affectation had died with Ruchelle. While he changed his dressing gown for a dark red tunic and pants, Jesserie sat on the edge of Bo’s desk and rocked his legs. ‘You know, sometimes that makes me jealous.’
‘What does?’ Bo said, lacing his boots.
‘You are wearing clothes. There won’t be much left of my wardrobe, I suppose.’
Bo lifted his staff from the rack and turned to look at Jesserie’s translucent nudity. ‘Be glad you’re at least wearing a loincloth,’ he said. ‘Imagine you hadn’t!’ He pulled his cloak around him and picked up his saddlebag. ‘Ready, now for my horse.’
‘No stableboy?’ Jesserie said.
Bo shook his head. ‘Semelda likes us to do our own chores. That way we won’t grow lazy, she says. We have a housekeeper, though.’
Another half hour later he was ready to go back into the world, where it just started to snow again. Semelda stood at the front door, a long cloak loosely over her shoulders and her eyes unreadable. White flakes fell on her dress and her silvery hair net.
Bo turned to his mother, and suddenly it struck him that he had to bend down to her, rather than the other way. He kissed her cold cheeks. ‘You will hear from me.’
‘Walk the path to the light, Bo,’ Semelda said serenely.
Bo gave her a quick look. He had never told her of Neferestan’s prophecy, but it didn’t surprise him she knew the words. Semelda had strange capabilities for a firemage. Then he nodded, and jumped into the saddle. Their parting words evaporated, only their breath drifted like white puffs between the whirling snow crystals.
‘Let’s go.’
Jesserie waved and without more ado, they disappeared.
From the icy fields of Herinaul to the dripping cypresses of the Widderen was seven hundred miles. The time of a heartbeat, porting through the chaos of the Intermedium.
‘Oh Gods!’ Bo staggered slightly, stepping from the hard frozen ground onto the soppy surface of the swamp. The stench of rot and stagnant water filled his nose and he nearly gagged. He hated the marshes, its sucking water and the many mosquito swarms. Around him, the fog banks hung like mourning drapes over dark pools where each ripple could be a crocodile. From nearby came the complaint of a hunting bird and out of sight the splash of something big, wading through the water. The young mage shuddered. Slowly, wary of anything and everything, he steered his horse over the stone path to the ruins of Sterrevank. At the foot of the broken tower, he dismounted and looked around. Nothing much had changed since his last visit, eight months ago. He knew Ghyll’d had plans to rebuild the ruins of the Sterrevank Magical Academy, but so far the only new thing was a solid stable and that was no luxury in this wilderness.
‘Watch out!’ Bo heard the warning cry and froze. Out of nowhere, Jesserie appeared, gesturing wildly toward the nearest pool, whose water reached almost to the foot of the tower. ‘Croc!’
Only then saw Bo the long trunklike shadow, drifting slowly past. It looked at him with a pensive eye.
‘Shoo!’ The ghost prince waved his arms excitedly. A fistsized stone rose up from the boggy ground and flew toward the lurking shadow. A tall spray of water followed, and the eye disappeared.
Bo let go of the fire spell he had readied, and unclenched his fingers. ‘Crocodile Jess,’ he said, with a relieved grin. ‘The Terror of the Widderen.’
When they came to the basement door, it opened automatically, and showed narrow stairs leading into a torch-lit room. It was cold there. Cold as a tomb, Bo thought, and he drew his cloak tighter around him. The air was stale and dry; fat tomes and spell scrolls stacked high everywhere.
Ambiaunt Neferestan, the revivit mage, looked up from the book before him on the lectern. The light of his regained life force brightened in his eye sockets when he saw the two newcomers, and his fleshless hand made a gesture of greeting. ‘Ah, Bernabo. The prince has brought you my message; my thanks, Jesserie.’ His voice was toneless, as if the spell that allowed him to put his thoughts into words knew no intonation, which made him sound like an archaic script. ‘Welcome, it is good that you could tear yourself from home.’
‘Good morning, Ambiaunt,’ Bo said, cheerfully. ‘Your call came at a perfect time. I was ready to go and do something, but I had no idea what. Jesserie’s arrival was a pleasant surprise and your message made me curious.’
‘Curiosity ... yes, you still have that, young man.’ The revivit mage seemed to laugh, and his lower jaw clattered. ‘Come hither then; I have a task waiting for you. It concerns information from the time of the Revenaunt Emperor. Sorceric information I deem of importance to the present.’
Bo’s eyes narrowed, and he pulled a chair forward. ‘That sounds interesting. Go on.’
‘One of my ... agents,’ Neferestan said carefully.
‘His criminal cronies, he means.’ Jesserie smirked, and gave an imitation of a thief creeping through a room. ‘Zethir’s father would love to lay his hands on us.’
‘Us?’ Bo raised his eyebrows. ‘Who are they and what are you up to?’
Jesserie grinned. ‘I and a few handy fellow apparitions. We collect books. Steal them, rather. Lots of manuscripts lie rotting in temple libraries while Neferestan needs them for his studies. He has taught me that object manipulation thing not just for fun.’
‘Call it undokinese,’ the revivit mage said. ‘Displacement magic with the energy of the dead.’ His jaws rattled in a breathless chuckle. ‘The prince and his brethern are very helpful with my research. Recently, measured by your standards, they have brought a very valuable work. Surprisingly, one of the temples in Rhidaun-Lorn has an almost complete Forbidden Index under lock and key. Most titles are not very interesting for my purpose, but there was an undamaged copy of Malaparth’s Conversations with the Allhighest. My excitement about this discovery cannot be described,’ he said flatly. ‘It is an essential document for a student of the Dead Centuries–and some superstitious simpletons hid it in a box with seven locks. What folly.’
‘It must have been fear rather than folly,’ Bo said. ‘And not without reason. We haven’t forgotten the Falmagic Troubles of a hundred years ago, Ambiaunt. The struggle with those overmighty plenimagori gave the Convocation a blow they are only now fully recovered from. And still there are magi who not only study the forbidden knowledge, but use it for their own gains.’ Again he thought of his father, the mage who’d been slain by one of his own experiments only two months before his youngest son Dolinder’s birth. Bo had been present, when three masked convocators with an armed escort had come to fetch his father’s body, his books and his notes. They hadn’t spoken. Semelda had admitted them without a word and silently they had left with their burden. After that, his mother had withdrawn into her own world. Now, nearly ten years later, Bo was Magister Bernabo Lusindral, Court Mage of King Ghyllander III, and a convocator himself.
Neferestan knew his bitterness and bowed his head. ‘I accept your correction, my young friend.’ He moved a little and the sound of his shifting bones sounded like dry rustling. ‘That time, the Convocation acted with alacrity and uncommon forcefulness.’
Bo grimaced. ‘They executed three hundred mages from all walks of life, without a trial or even an explanation. You can call that forcefull indeed.’ Roughly, he pushed the image of the three magi and his mother, in expressionless silence around a too small, silver coffin, back into the recesses of his memory. ‘Go on, Ambiaunt. Who was the author of that precious book?’
The revivit mage shrugged his shoulder blades. ‘I know him as Malaparth, Pontifax of the main temple of Hamorth and for more than two centuries the right hand of the Revenaunt Emperor. He was a necromancer and one of the leading powers in the Abarranese realm. Toward the end of his existence in the living world, he wrote down some of his most important talks with the Revenaunt, in the greatest secrecy and only intended for his successor’s eyes.’ Neferestan’s bony finger tapped a tiny, leather booklet and then pushed it to Bo.
Eagerly, the young mage opened the cover. At the sight of the text, a constriction grabbed him and with a cry he dropped Malaparth’s writings back on the table. He could feel the sweat dripping from his face, while he panted as if he’d just escaped a great danger.
‘You cannot read it,’ the revivit mage said calmly. ‘Even you cannot, Bo. It is not a language of the living.’
At that moment, they heard the door open and close. Soft footsteps came down the stairs, and a stocky figure in a purple cloak stepped into the basement.
‘Ah,’ Neferestan said. ‘Here is someone who can explain Malaparth’s words.’
Bo’s face brightened. ‘Anliin! Have you escaped your teachers?’
The young death priest lowered his hood and grimaced. ‘With difficulty. I couldn’t stand any more lessons, Bo. I was oozing spells at the seams, so I left. The temple didn’t really want me to, but Ghyll persuaded them.’
‘Study is important,’ Neferestan said. ‘But there are limits, even to such young minds as yours. Now is the time to act. That includes you, Bernabo Lusindral.’
‘I know.’ Bo stared at his friend. ‘Anliin, what have they done to you?’
‘What? You mean this?’ The boy ran a hand over his hairless skull. The symbols that decorated his head and hands, shone with an inner light.
‘That,’ Bo said, ‘and your eyes are blue.’
‘They have always been blue,’ Anliin said defensively.
‘But not the eyeballs.’
‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘Do you find it ugly?’
‘Not ugly; different,’ Bo said. ‘How come?’
‘I am now a chaplain of Greos, Bo. They adjusted my eyes to see better in the Underworld, and all those symbols on my body strengthen my undergy. I’ve got more of them than any other priest of my rank,’ Anliin added timidly.
Bo stared at the young cleric. ‘How many more?’
‘Four times.’ Anliin stretched his arms and from his sleeves ran glowing, squiggly lines into his robe. ‘But then I’m the only death priest among them.’
Neferestan’s frame rattled impatiently. ‘Tell Bo what is in the book.’
‘I read it,’ Anliin said obediently. ‘From front to back. Few people know what the Revenaunt really was planning. Now I do and if the Dar’khamorth manages to call the monster back, the end of everything is nearer than anyone realizes.’
Bo snapped the book shut and got up. The pale winter sun coming through a chink in the curtains shone in his eyes and made reading impossible. Careful so as not to disturb his mother, he walked to the window. Outside, the world lay frozen in icy silence. Bo sighed. Inside the house was the same emptiness. His mother sat in her chair by the hearth, her thoughts far away as so often since his father’s death. Her eyes stared into distances Bo didn’t know, and only her hand with the needle moved, creating magical patterns on her eternal spell cloth. Bo suppressed an urge to scream, curse, anything to break the silence.
His breath clouded the windowpane, and while he drew a doodle on the misted glass, his thoughts far away.
Six months ago, Bo and his friends had completed Ghyll’s quest in Zihaen. He had returned home, heartbroken by the death of his loved one. Since then he’d been here, alone with his mother. The first weeks had passed in a gray haze, swallowed by his grief over Ruchelle’s death. His finger on the glass faltered. Ruchelle. Just getting used to that name had been so difficult. Yet he couldn’t call her Avelore any longer; that was the other girl. The living one.
Weeks had turned into months, passing in a meaningless void. Erstewine, Tempesten, pointlessly gone. Witteken, Jaarsend, Snevall, and now Iscome with its hard frost and stilled landscapes. His family had gathered here for the New Year’s celebrations, and he had barely noticed them. Huddled by the fire, he had struggled with the growing awareness that his first love had not been what he had believed. That she hadn’t been a young, awkward adepta, to whom he could be the hero, but a treacherous sorceress who had planned to kill him. Still, in the end she’d called him back, at that cursed tempel ruin, or he’d blithely have walked into the waiting trap. In his stead, the Dar’khamorth hard killed Ruchelle.
Those cursed Dar’khamorth. They needed killing. Once more, the words of the undead mage Neferestan echoed in his head. Your path through the dark, along the tops of knowledge and the depths of madness, is narrow as the edge of a knife, and the fall is closer than the exaltation, but at the end the light is waiting. What did they mean? Were they a prophecy? A warning? Hunter in the dark had Neferestan called him. A good word, hunter. Bo hated the Dar’khamorth. Because of Ruchelle. Because of his father.
His father. Ludovo Lusindral, the mage who in his search for more and more knowledge hadn’t been able to resist the forbidden sorcery. His father’s path had led to oblivion. Was that the depth of madness? Bo clenched his fists; it must not happen to him.
He took a series of quick breaths to regain his composure. If he wanted to be a hunter, he shouldn’t stay here. His hunting ground was outside, beyond the closed curtains. He looked at the misted glass and saw what he had drawn, a wingspreaded bird. The phoenix of the Dar’khamorth. With a savage wipe, he erased the drawing, and the outside world was visible again.
He caught his breath and hurriedly cleaned the whole pane with his sleeve. His eyes hadn’t lied–on the other side of the glass drifted a translucent appearance, waving ghostly hands at him. ‘Whoo-o!’
‘Jesserie!’ His bad mood disappeared instantly, and with pounding heart, he hurried out of the room. The visitor was waiting in the vestibule. Closed doors couldn’t stop the ghost prince, but good manners prevented him from going further than the hall.
‘Jess, how are you? And Ghyll, and ...’ Bo realized how much he’d missed his friends. ‘Come in,’ he said eagerly, and he threw the door open. ‘Semelda, look who’s here.’
His mother rested her needle and smiled. ‘Welcome, Jesserie anAbarran. I hope you come to cheer up my son?’
The ghost prince bowed with a flourish. ‘Good morning, Semelda. All that worrying is so bad for one’s health. I never do it.’
‘No,’ Bo retorted, ‘and your health is excellent.’
‘I haven’t been sick for a thousand years.’ Complacently, Jesserie stared at a chair by the table, and it slid over the carpet toward him. Carefully he sat down and folded his arms across his chest.
‘How did you do that?’ Bo said. ‘Has anyone taught you telekinesis?’
Jesserie casually knocked on the chair’s armrest with his translucent knuckles. ‘Neferestan showed me some tricks. It is not really telekinesis. I’m a prince, not a juggler like you. I use undergy - the Underworld leaks enough for small things like this.’
‘Juggler?’ Bo looked quasi indignant. ‘I am a magister mage, friend; not some jester at a fair.’
Jesserie grinned, and for a moment they said in a friendly silence.
‘I’m carrying a message,’ the ghost prince said suddenly.
Bo looked at him sharply. ‘From Ghyll?’
Jesserie shook his head. ‘From Neferestan. He has discovered something he wants to talk over with you. Urgently. And since I was the one who could get here the fastest, I’m playing courier.’
‘Is that all the message?’
‘That’s it! Do we go now?’
Bo’s eyes lit up. ‘I’ll just pack up some stuff.’ All worry slid off him while he hurried upstairs. This is it, he thought, the hunt begins!
In his room, he quickly grabbed some clothes. No longer did he need endless bags of costly robes; that affectation had died with Ruchelle. While he changed his dressing gown for a dark red tunic and pants, Jesserie sat on the edge of Bo’s desk and rocked his legs. ‘You know, sometimes that makes me jealous.’
‘What does?’ Bo said, lacing his boots.
‘You are wearing clothes. There won’t be much left of my wardrobe, I suppose.’
Bo lifted his staff from the rack and turned to look at Jesserie’s translucent nudity. ‘Be glad you’re at least wearing a loincloth,’ he said. ‘Imagine you hadn’t!’ He pulled his cloak around him and picked up his saddlebag. ‘Ready, now for my horse.’
‘No stableboy?’ Jesserie said.
Bo shook his head. ‘Semelda likes us to do our own chores. That way we won’t grow lazy, she says. We have a housekeeper, though.’
Another half hour later he was ready to go back into the world, where it just started to snow again. Semelda stood at the front door, a long cloak loosely over her shoulders and her eyes unreadable. White flakes fell on her dress and her silvery hair net.
Bo turned to his mother, and suddenly it struck him that he had to bend down to her, rather than the other way. He kissed her cold cheeks. ‘You will hear from me.’
‘Walk the path to the light, Bo,’ Semelda said serenely.
Bo gave her a quick look. He had never told her of Neferestan’s prophecy, but it didn’t surprise him she knew the words. Semelda had strange capabilities for a firemage. Then he nodded, and jumped into the saddle. Their parting words evaporated, only their breath drifted like white puffs between the whirling snow crystals.
‘Let’s go.’
Jesserie waved and without more ado, they disappeared.
From the icy fields of Herinaul to the dripping cypresses of the Widderen was seven hundred miles. The time of a heartbeat, porting through the chaos of the Intermedium.
‘Oh Gods!’ Bo staggered slightly, stepping from the hard frozen ground onto the soppy surface of the swamp. The stench of rot and stagnant water filled his nose and he nearly gagged. He hated the marshes, its sucking water and the many mosquito swarms. Around him, the fog banks hung like mourning drapes over dark pools where each ripple could be a crocodile. From nearby came the complaint of a hunting bird and out of sight the splash of something big, wading through the water. The young mage shuddered. Slowly, wary of anything and everything, he steered his horse over the stone path to the ruins of Sterrevank. At the foot of the broken tower, he dismounted and looked around. Nothing much had changed since his last visit, eight months ago. He knew Ghyll’d had plans to rebuild the ruins of the Sterrevank Magical Academy, but so far the only new thing was a solid stable and that was no luxury in this wilderness.
‘Watch out!’ Bo heard the warning cry and froze. Out of nowhere, Jesserie appeared, gesturing wildly toward the nearest pool, whose water reached almost to the foot of the tower. ‘Croc!’
Only then saw Bo the long trunklike shadow, drifting slowly past. It looked at him with a pensive eye.
‘Shoo!’ The ghost prince waved his arms excitedly. A fistsized stone rose up from the boggy ground and flew toward the lurking shadow. A tall spray of water followed, and the eye disappeared.
Bo let go of the fire spell he had readied, and unclenched his fingers. ‘Crocodile Jess,’ he said, with a relieved grin. ‘The Terror of the Widderen.’
When they came to the basement door, it opened automatically, and showed narrow stairs leading into a torch-lit room. It was cold there. Cold as a tomb, Bo thought, and he drew his cloak tighter around him. The air was stale and dry; fat tomes and spell scrolls stacked high everywhere.
Ambiaunt Neferestan, the revivit mage, looked up from the book before him on the lectern. The light of his regained life force brightened in his eye sockets when he saw the two newcomers, and his fleshless hand made a gesture of greeting. ‘Ah, Bernabo. The prince has brought you my message; my thanks, Jesserie.’ His voice was toneless, as if the spell that allowed him to put his thoughts into words knew no intonation, which made him sound like an archaic script. ‘Welcome, it is good that you could tear yourself from home.’
‘Good morning, Ambiaunt,’ Bo said, cheerfully. ‘Your call came at a perfect time. I was ready to go and do something, but I had no idea what. Jesserie’s arrival was a pleasant surprise and your message made me curious.’
‘Curiosity ... yes, you still have that, young man.’ The revivit mage seemed to laugh, and his lower jaw clattered. ‘Come hither then; I have a task waiting for you. It concerns information from the time of the Revenaunt Emperor. Sorceric information I deem of importance to the present.’
Bo’s eyes narrowed, and he pulled a chair forward. ‘That sounds interesting. Go on.’
‘One of my ... agents,’ Neferestan said carefully.
‘His criminal cronies, he means.’ Jesserie smirked, and gave an imitation of a thief creeping through a room. ‘Zethir’s father would love to lay his hands on us.’
‘Us?’ Bo raised his eyebrows. ‘Who are they and what are you up to?’
Jesserie grinned. ‘I and a few handy fellow apparitions. We collect books. Steal them, rather. Lots of manuscripts lie rotting in temple libraries while Neferestan needs them for his studies. He has taught me that object manipulation thing not just for fun.’
‘Call it undokinese,’ the revivit mage said. ‘Displacement magic with the energy of the dead.’ His jaws rattled in a breathless chuckle. ‘The prince and his brethern are very helpful with my research. Recently, measured by your standards, they have brought a very valuable work. Surprisingly, one of the temples in Rhidaun-Lorn has an almost complete Forbidden Index under lock and key. Most titles are not very interesting for my purpose, but there was an undamaged copy of Malaparth’s Conversations with the Allhighest. My excitement about this discovery cannot be described,’ he said flatly. ‘It is an essential document for a student of the Dead Centuries–and some superstitious simpletons hid it in a box with seven locks. What folly.’
‘It must have been fear rather than folly,’ Bo said. ‘And not without reason. We haven’t forgotten the Falmagic Troubles of a hundred years ago, Ambiaunt. The struggle with those overmighty plenimagori gave the Convocation a blow they are only now fully recovered from. And still there are magi who not only study the forbidden knowledge, but use it for their own gains.’ Again he thought of his father, the mage who’d been slain by one of his own experiments only two months before his youngest son Dolinder’s birth. Bo had been present, when three masked convocators with an armed escort had come to fetch his father’s body, his books and his notes. They hadn’t spoken. Semelda had admitted them without a word and silently they had left with their burden. After that, his mother had withdrawn into her own world. Now, nearly ten years later, Bo was Magister Bernabo Lusindral, Court Mage of King Ghyllander III, and a convocator himself.
Neferestan knew his bitterness and bowed his head. ‘I accept your correction, my young friend.’ He moved a little and the sound of his shifting bones sounded like dry rustling. ‘That time, the Convocation acted with alacrity and uncommon forcefulness.’
Bo grimaced. ‘They executed three hundred mages from all walks of life, without a trial or even an explanation. You can call that forcefull indeed.’ Roughly, he pushed the image of the three magi and his mother, in expressionless silence around a too small, silver coffin, back into the recesses of his memory. ‘Go on, Ambiaunt. Who was the author of that precious book?’
The revivit mage shrugged his shoulder blades. ‘I know him as Malaparth, Pontifax of the main temple of Hamorth and for more than two centuries the right hand of the Revenaunt Emperor. He was a necromancer and one of the leading powers in the Abarranese realm. Toward the end of his existence in the living world, he wrote down some of his most important talks with the Revenaunt, in the greatest secrecy and only intended for his successor’s eyes.’ Neferestan’s bony finger tapped a tiny, leather booklet and then pushed it to Bo.
Eagerly, the young mage opened the cover. At the sight of the text, a constriction grabbed him and with a cry he dropped Malaparth’s writings back on the table. He could feel the sweat dripping from his face, while he panted as if he’d just escaped a great danger.
‘You cannot read it,’ the revivit mage said calmly. ‘Even you cannot, Bo. It is not a language of the living.’
At that moment, they heard the door open and close. Soft footsteps came down the stairs, and a stocky figure in a purple cloak stepped into the basement.
‘Ah,’ Neferestan said. ‘Here is someone who can explain Malaparth’s words.’
Bo’s face brightened. ‘Anliin! Have you escaped your teachers?’
The young death priest lowered his hood and grimaced. ‘With difficulty. I couldn’t stand any more lessons, Bo. I was oozing spells at the seams, so I left. The temple didn’t really want me to, but Ghyll persuaded them.’
‘Study is important,’ Neferestan said. ‘But there are limits, even to such young minds as yours. Now is the time to act. That includes you, Bernabo Lusindral.’
‘I know.’ Bo stared at his friend. ‘Anliin, what have they done to you?’
‘What? You mean this?’ The boy ran a hand over his hairless skull. The symbols that decorated his head and hands, shone with an inner light.
‘That,’ Bo said, ‘and your eyes are blue.’
‘They have always been blue,’ Anliin said defensively.
‘But not the eyeballs.’
‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘Do you find it ugly?’
‘Not ugly; different,’ Bo said. ‘How come?’
‘I am now a chaplain of Greos, Bo. They adjusted my eyes to see better in the Underworld, and all those symbols on my body strengthen my undergy. I’ve got more of them than any other priest of my rank,’ Anliin added timidly.
Bo stared at the young cleric. ‘How many more?’
‘Four times.’ Anliin stretched his arms and from his sleeves ran glowing, squiggly lines into his robe. ‘But then I’m the only death priest among them.’
Neferestan’s frame rattled impatiently. ‘Tell Bo what is in the book.’
‘I read it,’ Anliin said obediently. ‘From front to back. Few people know what the Revenaunt really was planning. Now I do and if the Dar’khamorth manages to call the monster back, the end of everything is nearer than anyone realizes.’
