jade that stared out of the Silver Skull. It almost seemed alive, as if it were anticipating the red priests’ spells. Phen overheard Cole grumbling about Shaella’s extended flight with her new dragon.
The eager priests soon grew fidgety, but Cole seemed like he couldn’t care less about any of it. Long after dark, Cole took the skull back into the castle. He laughed at the priests, then he threatened them when they protested. Phen followed him down stairways and through twisting halls. He was led through several rooms, and a passage that no one but the wizard seemed to know about. He had to stop his pursuit when he looked up and realized he was lost. But at least he knew where the skull would be when the priests got around to using it. Luckily Spike found him and led him back to a familiar place in the castle before disappearing again around a corner.
Phen found that he was hungry, but ignored the sensation for now. He figured he could sleep in the corner of the room the priests had been using. It didn’t look like they would be leaving the gazebo. He decided that, if they came back to the hall, it was big enough for him to stay out of their way.
Feeling secure in his immediate plans, Phen decided that he needed to eat. He reached out to Spike through his familiar link and went to find the lyna. He ended up at a pantry that was built under a set of little used stairs.
To Phen’s great surprise, several lyna were gathered there. None of them, save for Spike, seemed very friendly though, and they gave the boy plenty of space.
“Hello, Spike,” Phen said as he dropped into a squat to rub his familiar behind the ears. Spike loved it, and as long as Phen only rubbed toward Spike’s tail, he didn’t get pricked. “Who are your friends?”
Spike didn’t answer him with words, but conveyed that the other lyna were pets of the zard, or had been delivered there in the shipping crate they’d been born in. Phen was privy to the odd thoughts that Spike picked up from the others of his kind. When he asked Spike to help him find some food, a female lyna urged them both to follow her.
Spike conveyed that the female lyna belonged to the Queen’s servant zardess. Phen remembered seeing Queen Shaella take her staff from a zard girl before she’d taken flight on the dragon. He noticed Spike’s smug strut and could tell by the peculiar glances he was getting that his familiar knew how to cultivate the acquaintance.
“I’ll bet she can’t hear the Queen at night,” Phen said to Spike.
“Sticka, I am,” the female lyna’s unexpected response found Phen’s mind. “She talks to her demon lover with her magics. She’ll use a silver skull soon to call him back from the dark place he is in.”
Learning that another lyna could sense his thoughts disturbed him, but his nose was suddenly filled with the warm wholesome smell of cooking bread. His mouth began to water and his belly growled. He hadn’t eaten since dawn, and by his best guess it was near the middle of the night.
The two lyna distracted a cook while Phen pilfered himself a healthy meal. A short while after he ate he fell asleep in the pantry under the stairs where the castle’s lyna congregated.
Cole found that many perks came with the duty of running Westland in Shaella’s name. One of the boons was getting to oversee the dungeon. Like his mentor, Pael, he had a great interest in crossbreeding species. They had different goals in their experimentation, though. Pael wanted to create a race of creatures he could control and use as an army. Cole, however, just wanted to create one terrible and powerful beast. Something he could control, that was capable of battling a pack of breed giants, or an entire troop of men. In the winter, Flick had captured for Cole a real giant. After the invasion of Westland, Flick lorded over the northern lands until Shaella loosed the breed giants. The giant herdsman had ranged down into Westland, chasing after a stray devil goat. Flick captured him and kept him in the cells below the keep at Northwatch. Cole had secreted the giant here to Lakeside Castle’s dungeon. Shaella either didn’t know about it, or she didn’t care. She stayed wrapped up in her chamber most of the time, using the Spectral Staff to communicate with Gerard. She had her twisted world, and Cole had his.
She wasn’t concerned with his experimenting. At least Cole didn’t think she was. After all, he was following in her father’s footsteps. His prisoner was forgotten for now, though. He was curious about the Skull of Zorellin. According to history, Shokin had used it to open a gateway into the Nethers. The priests were going to try and bring their god back through just such a gateway. Cole knew that the skull had capabilities other than opening portals into hell. Like his mentor, Cole had studied the spell books religiously. He learned that with the power of the skull he could summon a thing or two that he could use in his experiments, and more importantly, he could bind certain creatures to his will.
That is exactly what he hoped to do with a thing he accidentally loosed into the lower levels. It was a malformed creation-part cave bear, part breed giant. A sentient creature, it had escaped its confinement and was loose. Until he killed or contained it, the lower levels of the dungeon were useless to him. Not even he dared to go down there. He knew that it would eventually starve if he left it alone, but he wanted to try and bring it under his control before that happened. He knew he didn’t have much time to use the skull. When Shaella returned, he was certain that her full attention would be invested in using it to free her lover.
Cole had already ordered his zard servants to prepare a test subject for him. The lizard-men relished the chance to nab an unsuspecting breed.
The exauhsted beast growled out and pulled at the chains that held its arms splayed wide. Blood dripped from the wounds that shackles had dug into its writsts. Its legs were in chains too, and stretched so that that the creature couldn’t bend its knees.
“It’ll be over soon,” Cole comforted ironically, earning a hissing laugh from the zard was watching over the captive. He then sat the Silver Skull on the breed beast’s chest and spoke a series of ancient words three times over. There was a slight humming sensation, but nothing else happened.
Cole, fearing that the controlling spell hadn’t worked, moved the skull to a table and gave the creature an order.
“Get your hands out of those irons. Do it now.”
For a moment he was disappointed, but then the zard attendant started hissing and pointing at the breed. The huge beast began yanking and jerking at the shackles, tearing the skin from its wrists until a bone finally snapped. It screamed out terribly, but didn’t stop trying to get free. Cole wasn’t paying anymore attention. The skull could do what he needed it to do. He had to prepare so that he could finish before Shaella returned.
Chapter Thirty – Seven
The dragon-blooded beast that had once been Gerard Skyler was angry. He’d lost the ring. His long clawed finger stretched it to its limit, and in some recent battle it must have snapped off and clanked away into the endless darkness. He couldn’t even say how long it had been missing.
It wasn’t a necessary thing for him. Its magic was puny compared to his, but he coveted it. Gerard’s twisted power had grown exponentially. Blistering magical attacks, stout defensive shields, and tricky illusionary castings now came to his mind when he was trying to kill. The things he had consumed, Kraw, and both halves of Shokin, along with a dozen or more of the lesser devils and demons, all chanted the incantations on his behalf. They would protect their host vehemently, but while they were a boon in battle, the rest of the time his mind was filled with arguments and psychotic babbling. At the moment, the intensity of his rage had stilled them. He’d lost the ring.
He let out a raging roar of frustration, letting a long jet of flame blast from his maw. He then sent a great crackling bolt of crimson lightning streaking through the blackness. He’d searched for what could have been ages, but hadn’t been able to find his prize.
There were many things in this hell that were equal to his power, and thousands upon thousands of hell- spawned creatures that feared him, but there was one dark hulking monster that was greater than him: Deezlxar, the Abbadon, the dark master of hell. The demons of Gerard’s mind whispered that Deezlxar had found his ring and kept it. Gerard searched the carcasses of every kill he could remember. He scoured the endless brimstone plane interrogating the lesser things and challenging the others. Some fled, some fought and died. Those were consumed hungrily. Some of them sent him this way or that with lies manufactured to buy themselves distance from the powerful malformed creature that he was. Every path he followed led to more frustration, until there was nothing
