communicate with him. Placing his cup on the worktable, he grasped his medallion and turned it over.
As he expected, the medallion’s opposite side showed an image of his sister. She was seated in her chair at the great mahogany table in the Conclave meeting chamber, deep in the bowels of the Redoubt. Tristan could see Traax seated on one side of her; the empty chair on the princess’s other side belonged to Jessamay. Caprice the field flier sat perched at the top of Shai’s chair and was gently opening and closing her great wings. Given the limited confines of the medallion, Tristan could not tell whether anyone else was in the room.
As he looked closer, he saw that his sister’s face bore a worried expression. She held up a parchment, and he saw that its words were written in her handwriting. As Tristan read them, a sudden chill went down his spine.
Come quickly, the parchment said. The wizards need us.
CHAPTER XIV
IN THE END, THE CITIZENS OF TANGLEWOOD NEVERstood a chance.
As the once beautiful city burned in the night, the vicious man-serpents raged wildly through the streets. Tanglewood held many more inhabitants than had Birmingham. But that was of no consequence, for even now more snakelike beings continued to rise from the stream in Hartwick Wood to swell the monsters’ ranks. As though there were no end to their numbers, they flowed through Tanglewood like a dark, undulating river. Standing in the town square, their leader watched as his servants went about his bidding. He would kill every human he encountered during his quest to find and serve Failee.
From all around him came the screams and sobs of the innocent, as one by one they were impaled like those killed along the Birmingham shore. Because there were so many more victims here, the process would take far longer. But that didn’t matter, for he had all the time in the world.
The grisly impalements were ingenious, ensuring the immobilization of his captives while leaving his servants free to rummage about in the victims’ innards. Some succumbed straightaway after being impaled; others lingered in agony before dying. The crude impalement poles and their bleeding human adornments already filled the great square, and their numbers had started overtaking the connecting avenues and byways. In many cases the impalements wound far up the cobblestoned streets and out of sight, into the inky blackness of the night.
The master turned to look at the writhing victim impaled directly before him. The man had once been hardy and vigorous. He appeared to be somewhere near fifty Seasons of New Life and he had thick, graying hair. Although he had been one of the first to be impaled, he still lived. Despite how tenaciously he clung to life, his death would soon be at hand.
Like all the Birmingham victims, he had been stripped of his clothing. A sharpened pole had been viciously shoved into his groin, then threaded up through his abdomen to emerge near his collarbone. His hands were raised above him and impaled through his palms; pieces of wood had been fixed to the pole below his hands and feet to prevent him from sliding down the bloodied staff. Blood dripped slowly from his groin and onto the dirty cobblestones. Like all blood, it looked black in the dark of night.
How curious, the serpent master thought. Sometimes the men die so quickly, while the physically weaker women, children, and the elderly often linger for hours. It no doubt had to do with whatever bits were punctured, he reasoned. Clearly, the impaling process was not a precise one. Nor did it need to be.
Hearing another building cave in, he turned to look. Every structure in the city was ablaze. Carrying torches, the grotesque man-serpents had furtively slithered into the dwellings and set them afire, or simply tossed their blazing torches atop the thatched roofs and left them to do their work. Many screaming victims fled the infernos with their clothing and hair afire, and they were allowed to burn to death before being impaled. Some buildings had already tumbled into ruin, while others still spewed orange-red flames from their destroyed doorways and smashed windows.
The crackling of the fires sometimes drowned out the wailing of the victims, and thick, choking smoke curled into the air, blotting out the stars. Many people tried to run, but they were invariably snatched up by the man- serpents’ strong arms or winding tails. Children toddled about aimlessly, wailing and crying out for parents who would never again hold them. Some people emerged to find friends and loved ones already impaled. Many collapsed in grief, sobbing as they hugged their beloveds’ bloody feet before they too were taken up.
The serpent master smiled. Despite ordering the fires to be set, he cared nothing about destroying the city. Rather, the fires were an easy way to force the humans from their dwellings so that they could be caught and spiked. He enjoyed seeing their hovels burn, even though he too had once been human.
He watched as his grotesque servants dragged ever more struggling citizens toward the square. Stacks of freshly hewn impalement poles lay nearby on the blood-slicked cobblestones. There the captives were stripped naked and impaled and their clothing tossed into the raging fires. If they resisted, their livers were harvested quickly by the monsters’ slashing talons and biting teeth, and their dead bodies were impaled anyway.
To better view the grisly scene, the master reached up and lowered the hood of his robe. As he did, the raging fires highlighted his grotesque face. He was called Khristos, and his tale was a twisted one.
Like the heads of the man-serpents that he commanded, his cranium was also hairless, with long, pointed ears. Although his face could not be called entirely human, it was less snakelike than those of his followers. He bore no sharp, twisted horns, and his skin, nose, and lips were human. But his eyes, his tongue, and his teeth told a far different tale.
His large eyes were human in contour, but they held almond-shaped pupils that lay embedded vertically in bright yellow irises. Like those of his followers, his teeth were long, sharp, and yellow, and he possessed the same two pairs of incisors. Also like his servants, his long tongue was bright red and forked, and continually tested the cool night air. The rest of his muscular body was human.
His simple black robe was tattered, and in one hand he held a gleaming silver staff. As he had hundreds of years before, he again commanded the craft with a power and a mastery that easily rivaled any wizard in Eutracian history. And of perhaps even greater significance, there was a secret about Khristos that only a few surviving mystics knew.
Three centuries ago-long before his transformation into the being that commanded the terrible man- serpents-Khristos had been Failee’s secret lover.
Khristos returned his gaze to the impaled man. Somehow the fellow still lived. But whether the man was alive or dead was of no importance, for he would not survive what Khristos was about to do to him. Khristos raised his staff and pointed it at the bleeding man. At once the entire instrument shone, and the death-dealing began in earnest.
An azure beam, so narrow that it could hardly be seen, leapt from the staff and struck the man squarely in the chest. As his skin burned and smoked, he struggled against his impaling pole and cried out in agony. But he soon realized that it was no use, for the more he struggled, the greater the searing pain became.
Khristos used his glowing beam to carve an incision down the man’s body from his throat to his groin. Then he ordered the beam to crack apart the victim’s sternum and separate his rib cage, exposing the man’s working organs. As the sickly-sweet smell of burning flesh rose into the air, it took only a few more moments for Khristos to find and free the man’s liver. By this time the man had died, his chin slumping forward onto his chest. Like wriggling serpents suddenly liberated from a snake charmer’s basket, the man’s glistening intestines slipped free from his gaping body cavity and dangled toward the ground.
His job done, Khristos recalled the azure beam, and his staff reclaimed its gleaming silver color. Using his free hand, he calmly pointed toward the prize he sought and ordered it to float into his grasp. Smiling as blood ran down his hand, Khristos admired the liver in the moonlight. It was a fine specimen, but many more like it would be needed. He turned and handed it to one of the man-serpents standing by his side. Hissing with satisfaction, the monster greedily accepted the bloody prize and devoured it on the spot.
Turning, Khristos walked to the next victim. This one was an elderly woman who was already dead, but neither of those distinctions mattered. Amid the constant screaming and begging of those still being impaled, he once more raised his silver staff. The azure glow again began building within the shining instrument of death.
Just as he was about to incise her body, Khristos heard an unknown voice call out from everywhere, nowhere. Its sudden and unexpected presence startled him.
