Ever since he became possessed, the muddy voice kept on with its deceptive lecture as an abundance of hatred emptied his heart. He was turning into something he never thought he could be—a cold, emotionless beast.
The first time Demitri ever killed someone, he did it to protect the princess from a mage who was influenced by the same entity that possessed him. That was the last of his fleeting control over his body. He remembered walking up to a gasping offender, whom he’d hit with a dagger to knock her down, and pointed an arrow straight at her forehead. She’d gazed upon his face, saw the evil that lurked behind his eyes, and smiled with bloody teeth. “My lord,” she’d said to him in a low voice. It was then that the controlling force made him release his arrow through the center of her head. Shut her up, it had said. And without his doing, his finger released the bowstring.
But there was another act he’d unwillingly committed that hurt him more than any of the tower guards he’d killed or the mage at the sack of Illyrium. For as much as he resented Burton, he’d never imagined ever doing anything to hurt him. How could he? The man from the sky had given him more knowledge than any human, book, or journal. Although he felt awful for kicking his former sensei into the Illyrium oubliette, the addicting power excused his shame. The entity fueled his anger toward Burton’s berating, intensifying it so much that any love and respect he’d ever felt for him turned to abhorrence.
Demitri began to enjoy the scientific information he was learning from this horrible intelligence, thirsty for death. New compounds and mixtures using material he’d never come by before amazed him. They shared with him the blueprints of devices and machinery that people of Naan didn’t yet dream about.
“The world would be a much better place without Burton Lang in it to suppress our quest, isn’t that so, Demitri? The voice said.
His dark inhibitions were no longer contained. “Yes,” Demitri bleated.
“Gather the mages and the rest of the exiles. Go to Rottin’s Cave, deep within the Eire Mountains. There are bodies there, centuries old, that your predecessors have preserved and collected for us. Wake the dead from their slumber and assemble an army. We now have children from all three islands…Test them.”
The fact that Demitri held children captive mortified him the most. He thought of his late son. He knew how it felt to lose a child. But at least, Demitri thought, he had been with his boy before he’d passed, holding his hand, telling him that everything was going to be okay and that daddy would make him feel better, even though the scientist knew that his efforts would be futile. The parents of these children didn’t know where their sons or daughters were or if they were alive or dead. Demitri wanted to take the children home, but he knew that he couldn’t. He’d been ordered to test them. Why and for what? He didn’t know.
Rottin’s Cave, he repeated. Demitri knew the infamous place; a place of dark worship where Burton had told him mages performed sacrifices to appease their Nekrum gods. The southern mountain was still volcanically active and was believed by some to be the gates of the abyss.
Demitri knew it was a prime location to organize and plot against the three kingdoms. The civilized world didn’t dare venture there. It would provide an uninterrupted work zone. And with the heat of the molten lava streaming through the mountain’s deep caverns, he can easily forge tools and weapons for the Nekrum army. But the Nekrums wanted him to build something much more terrifying than an army of armed mages.
When talk about building an army of monsters began, Demitri’s fading consciousness became alert. Bodies? Centuries old? What could they possibly want with corpses? he wondered.
“Reanimation,” the dark voice answered.
If awakening an army of corpses wasn’t startling enough, the lecture that followed was madness. The voice gave instructions for bonding the various internal and external organs of different animal species. It included directions on how to crack bones so as not to damage the marrow within, how to sew together skin of different textures, how to transfer muscle tissue, how to amputate appendages and attach them to foreign bodies, how to re-connect brain tissue to new nerve endings, etc.
He was also given plans to create machines equipped with functions that could calculate and analyze the contents of blood down to a microscopic level—functions that he couldn’t even understand.
The possibilities of what Demitri could create with this information were endless. His scientific mind began to daydream. What if the venom of a spider, the teeth of a panther, the claws of a bear, were combined with the body and mind of a man? The possibilities gave him goose bumps.
“You want to impress Burton Lang?”
Demitri hesitated. But it was too hard to deny. “Yes,” he said, accepting the revolting mission.
A HEAVY fog congested the land. Montague La-Rose joined Alexandal and the stampeding Ikarus army and rode hard for twenty minutes to Faux Tower at the tip of the plateau. A pack of hounds led the way.
An open field leading up to the gates was sprayed with blood and strewn with bodies of men torn to pieces. On Alexandal’s signal they relaxed their charging steeds and cautiously approached.
The tower was completely dark. Its tall, slim column disappeared into a rising fog.
To the sound of two dozen men-at-arms unsheathing their swords, Demitri walked out of the smoky stillness holding the reins of a white horse with red glowing eyes. His face was streaked with blood.
Dear God, Montague said to himself. The pretentious, clean-cut man he once knew now resembled a
