“Visitors?”
I flashed her a cheeky grin. “Old friends. You’ll recognize ‘em, trust me.”
“Well, okay,” she murmured, looking puzzled. Her uncertain expression only made her look even prettier, and I figured I’d best leave before I ended up getting too distracted by her.
“I’ve got some things to take care of,” I said. “I’ll speak to you later. Like I said, dust off your mace and brush up on your magical powers. I think we’re going to need them.”
Without further ado, I turned and strode out of the room and headed all the way back down to the lower levels of the Keep, stopping a servant on my way to tell him to retrieve my armor from the armorer. Once he scuttled off, I made my way down to the crypts.
They’d been partially destroyed in the battle against Rodrick and his oblates, and a lot of my ancestors’ bones had been scattered by that asshole. Many of their tombs and coffins desecrated, but there were still chambers deep in the crypts where the ancient skeletons of my forebears lay undisturbed, as they had for a thousand years. It was down in the darkest and deepest of these chambers that I found Isu.
I sensed her before I saw her; as a necromancer, she pulsed with Death magic. To me, she was like a glowing beacon in the dark. My ability to sense her presence was a relatively recent development though. Whether that meant her powers had grown stronger or mine had—or perhaps that we had both grown stronger—I wasn’t sure of, but one thing I was sure of was that I wasn’t about to trust her much further than I could throw her.
I took a burning torch from the wall and carried it down into the chamber. The dancing flame threw twisted, moving shadows onto the walls, illuminating the old stone coffins with carvings of my noble ancestors in their knightly armor in tones of red, orange, and yellow. Soon, though, the firelight shone on a figure that was rather different compared to those somber, severe statues of stern-faced knights and lords.
Instead, the orange light was thrown onto an hourglass figure, with long, shapely legs that flared out into seductively round hips and an ass that you could bounce coins off all day. Above this firm, generous ass was a slim waist, and above that a pair of large round breasts that defied gravity with what seemed like a magical force—even though the woman who owned this impressive pair of tits was no longer a goddess. Above those two very large, very firm orbs of fun, there was a pair of slender shoulders, over which a mass of jet-black hair gracefully tumbled. And then there was her face.
Isu was stunning, to be sure, but in those eyes and the sharply arched eyebrows that crowned them, there was danger. And in the smirk she usually wore on her full lips was both arrogance and a dark threat. Most mortal men, despite drooling over her voluptuous figure, would cower before those piercing eyes. Of course, I was no mortal man.
“Vance,” she purred, her lips curling into a half-mocking sneer, “so good of you to drop by and grace this lowly necromancer with your divine presence.”
“Cut the crap, Isu,” I said. “What the hell are you doing sitting down here in the dark anyway?”
“There is illumination to be found in darkness that the eyes cannot see,” she murmured cryptically, finishing off this statement with a dark chuckle.
“If you say so,” I muttered. “Drok has had another of his dreams.”
“Ah, sent by the hag in the Wastes,” she sneered, her voice dripping with contempt. “And what does the old bag have to say this time?”
While Isu loathed Drok just as fiercely as Elyse did, Isu at least acknowledged, if somewhat grudgingly, that the “hag,” as she liked to call the Wise Woman, would prove useful against the Blood God.
“If Drok is to be believed,” I said, “the Wise Woman is trying to let me know that time is running out; the Blood God and his followers are growing stronger, and if we don’t step up our game, it’s going to get to the point at which that asshole is too powerful to stop.”
Isu nodded slowly, chewing on this information.
“I should have foreseen this, all those years ago,” she muttered, half to herself.
“What do you mean?”
She looked as if she was coming out of a trance before she flashed me a strange smile and clammed up. “Nothing, nothing,” she muttered.
I had a feeling that what she had just let slip had something to do with this whole thing with Xayon, who, upon being resurrected in Rami’s body and laying her eyes on Isu, had immediately become enraged and referred to the former Goddess of Death as a traitor. Some sort of very serious betrayal involving Isu had taken place, something to do with what happened to the Old Gods, but try as I may, I hadn’t been able to ferret the secret out of Isu, and whatever it was, she was doing her best to keep it under tight wraps. It was annoying, to be sure, but I’d long ago learned how stubborn Isu could be.
“Well, whatever,” I said. “I just came to tell you that we’re going to be leaving Brakith at first light tomorrow and making for the Wastes. So, whatever the hell it is that you do down here in the dark, this is the last day you’re going to be doing it. You need to get your shit packed and ready; I’m leaving tomorrow at dawn, with or without you.”
“I’ll be ready,” she said, in a somewhat haughty tone. “But before you go and busy yourself with your own preparations, there’s something you need to see, something related to, as you put it, ‘what I do down here in the dark.’”
Okay, so this piqued my
