“Yes, they can. There are a number of natural phenomena that can cause spells to go awry, not to mention the fact that even the most skilled wizards makes mistakes. God knows I have made some myself. There are other tests we need to perform.”
“Are there?” he replied.
“Give me a lock of your hair.” Rik was suddenly wary. Locks of hair, nail clippings, splashes of blood were all things the Old Witch had collected back in Sorrow whenever she wanted to lay a curse on someone. She stared at him, and offered him a small knife. Something in her manner told him that she would not take no for an answer.
Reluctantly he took the knife and cut off a small length of hair. He handed it back to her along with the knife. She took it and passed her hand over it murmuring something in the ancient tongue. “I suspected as much,” she said eventually.
“Suspected what?” She took the hair, placed it a sealed package and then placed the package within one of her trunks.
“That it would not hold a trace.”
“I would appreciate it if you returned that lock to me, or destroyed it.”
“I need to test it with more elaborate spells, but rest assured it will be destroyed when it is no longer needed.” And that was that, he thought. He would need to see about recovering the lock himself some time.
She opened her hand and held something out to him. “Take this and hold it.”
He studied the thing warily and made no move to take it. He was very suspicious now and wondered where this was all leading.
“Take it,” she said. Her voice was laced with subtle compulsions. He felt a near overwhelming urge to obey, but he resisted.
“What is it?” he said. The words were difficult but he spoke them instead of doing what he was told. She smiled as if he had just proven something she suspected. He wondered if he had fallen into some sort of trap by not taking the stone. He wished that he knew more about what was happening here, about what was going on. He did not like this feeling of being someone else’s pawn at all.
“It is something I brought from the homeworld, a magestone. It is a simple thing really, used for testing children, to see how much magical potential they had. That was a thing far more common there than here, and far more useful. Take it. It won’t hurt you, I promise.”
He took it. It was a smooth, hard gem-like object, cool to the touch. He thought one surface had been scratched but when he inspected it, he saw that it had been etched with an Elder Sign, one he did not recognise. He felt oddly disappointed. He had expected it to shine or glow or respond in some way, and yet it remained totally inert. Asea nodded as if another suspicion had been confirmed.
“I know you have magical potential,” she said. “Yet the stone says no. The sign should glow when you hold it. Keep gripping it for a minute. Let us see if something happens.”
There was silence. Both of them looked at the stone. Rik felt as if it were a grenade with the fuse burning. If he had no magical potential, he could not become an apprentice. Was it possible Asea had made a mistake about that? Of course it was. She had said so herself.
Eventually, she gestured towards herself with the palm of her hand, indicating he should return the stone.
“You resist all forms of divination very well,” she said. “Shadowblood.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you never heard the expression?”
“No.”
“The old horror tales are no longer told?”
“Horror tales? What do you mean?”
“The Shadowblood were a dark legend on Al’Terra. They were the fist of the Desecrator, secret and deadly.”
Rik had heard of the Desecrator. Who had not? “The Prince of Shadow?”
“Perhaps the greatest of them.”
“You are saying there is some connection between he and I?” He glanced over his shoulder. It was like being told there was some connection between himself and the Shadow of God. The Princes of Shadow had been evil’s greatest champions. “That’s madness.”
“I would be happier if it was,” she said. There was fear in her voice and that made him more afraid, for she was one of the greatest sorcerers of the realm, perhaps the world. Anything that could make one of the First nervous was something of which he should be terrified. “But alas it is not. We had thought the Shadowblood gone from the world. Azaar believes he destroyed them all. It seems that my half-brother made a mistake.”
“I am not what you are talking about. I know nothing of these things.”
“I made other inquiries when I was in Sorrow. My agents went to some very dark places, and talked to some very desperate people. There was once a very successful thief in Sorrow, a very prince among burglars, they called the Halfbreed. He had a friend called Leon. They were said once to have been in Temple Orphanage together.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“This half-breed stole from the mansions of the rich. Places protected by wards and all manner of mystical defences. Some of his victims hired diviners to hunt him down. The goods were sometimes found but he never was.”
Rik had not known that. It seemed that many of his escapes in Sorrow had been closer than he had ever suspected. “Most of those magicians are charlatans.”
“Some of them were not.”
“I don’t see that it proves anything.”
“No but the absence of something can provide corroboration as much as its presence. The Shadowblood were assassins, bred by magic, immune to scrying. They showed up on no tests save when they wanted to. They killed the Desecrator’s enemies in secret during his rise to power. They were perhaps the deadliest killers in a world that was not short of deadly killers.”
“I have told you I am not one of them.”
“One must have survived Azaar’s attack on their secret Temple, which is only logical. Some of them must have been performing missions when the attack came.”
“Temple?”
“In the Mountains of Madness. Azaar found it after a search of decades. There were those who believed it to be nothing more than a legend, but he was driven, for the Shadowblood killed his wife and children, and tried to kill him many times. For him, it was a war unto the death. Azaar has only ever lost one war, and that was unwinnable by anyone.
“I feared there had been survivors but for decades after the Temple was razed there were no attacks, and we allowed ourselves to believe we had won… then the End Times were on us and there were more important things to worry about.”
Rik did not know what to say. Asea seemed locked away in a world of her own, looking back into the past. He tried to sort through what she had said, and the explanation came. “You are saying my father was one of these Shadowbloods. That somehow he survived and he is here, in this world.”
“Precisely.”
“I cannot be held responsible for what my father might have done.”
Her laughter held no mirth. “Believe me you can. The Old Queen’s edict states quite clearly that all of the Shadowblood are to be killed as soon as they are found.”
He considered this. “That does not seem fair.”
“They were not fair times, Rik. The Shadowblood terrified many powerful people. They had strange gifts — it was said they could make themselves invisible, travel instantly through shadows, cloud the minds of those who saw them. They were too dangerous to be allowed to live.”
“But to kill someone just because they were born seems monstrous.” He was speaking only of his own case but as the words came out of his mouth, he realised they were true in all cases. He would have felt the same way even if he had no personal stake in the matter.
“A lot of monstrous deeds were done back then, Rik. The Dark Sun was rising. We did not understand who
