know?”
Cathan had no answer for that. “You should have sworn,” he said instead. “No one says no to the Kingpriest.”
“Maybe not,” Leciane replied, pushing aside the curtain to the antechamber and striding through. “Would it be a bad thing if sometimes, people did?”
Cathan stopped, frowning, as the curtain closed in front of him.
Andras awoke with a cry, his heart thundering against his ribs as he sat up in his bed.
It was dark in the room-a little, windowless cell of gray stone, hidden far beneath the earth. The floor was cold against his bare feet as he swung his legs out. The smell of mildew hung in the air, and something the size of a rat, but with far too many clacking legs, skittered away from the sound of his breathing. Normally, he would have killed the thing, sending it shrieking to its doom with a spell, but today he let it escape. Nor did he speak the incantation that would summon ghostly light for his room. He needed to save his magical energy for what he must do today.
Seven years. He had lived in this same room for seven years-or rather, slept there, for the rest of his time he was elsewhere in the cavernous dungeon that served as one of Fistandantilus’s many homes. Not once in that time had he breathed fresh air or seen the sun. His lungs had been steeped in a miasma of arcane scents: the sweetness of crushed rose petals, the rancid reek of rotten flesh, the acrid tang of alchemical tinctures. The heat that warmed him came from the burning ache for revenge. One day, the Dark One had promised, he could assuage that ache at last. Until that day, Andras had gladly immersed himself in lessons, learning the spells he would need to unleash his wrath.
Now, as he hurriedly pulled on his midnight robes, he knew the day had come.
Torchlight stung his eyes when he threw open the door, and he flung up his arm, squinting as he strode down the passage outside. The walls glistened with moisture, and his breath plumed. He wondered if it was day or night, then decided he didn’t care. After seven years in the cold and dark, time had grown meaningless to him.
He heard the banging and howling as he neared the hall’s end. When he’d first come here, the noises-shrieks of agony, mindless snarls, the scrape of bony claws against stone-had driven him half-mad with terror, but since then Andras had learned to ignore the din. Today he paid it no mind even as he entered the place where it was loudest: a long room with a vaulted ceiling, lined with steel-barred cages. Within those cages lurked strange, misshapen forms, mercifully hidden by shadow. A pool of blood was spreading beneath one. A long, sucker-tipped tentacle reached through the bars of another, writhing like a dying snake.
These were the Accursed, Fistandantilus’s greatest failures. They had been born centuries ago, the Dark One said, in an ill-fated attempt to create living beings. Only a few had survived, half-alive and in constant pain: misshapen, gibbering things that begged for death in languages no sane man could speak. When he’d actually seen one for the first time-shone a light into the cage where the archmage kept his failures-he hadn’t slept for a week. The memory of that fleshy mass of viscera, twisted bones, and rheumy eyes still haunted his dreams.
One of the cages was open and empty. He grimaced. Fistandantilus was experimenting again.
The door at the far end of the Chamber of the Accursed was tall and strong, made of layers of lead, silver, and cold iron, engraved with hundreds of spidery sigils that pulsed with sickly green light. Anyone-human or otherwise-trying to enter through the door without the Dark One’s leave would be torn apart like so many red rags. Andras walked up to the door, lifted the latch, and pulled it open without fear, letting himself into the Dark One’s inner sanctum.
The laboratory was huge and dark, its shelves lined with thousands upon thousands of dark books and vials of every kind of putrescence imaginable. A broken, antique scrying orb sat on a pedestal in one corner. The mummified head of a giant was mounted on a bronze stake in another. Other things hung from the ceiling: dried flowers and herbs, enormous cocoons, and the flayed corpses of all manner of beasts-two elves and a dwarf among them. There were several wooden desks where black candles burned, and in the middle of it all a massive stone table surmounted by all manner of glasswork, some of it holding greasy fluid that bubbled over ghostly flames. Also on the table, in a pool of black blood, was the twitching body of the missing Accursed, its gnarled limbs affixed to a wooden rack with spikes, its belly cut open to leak out innards that looked like clusters of fish eggs. The stink from that offal was horrendous, like a corpse rotting in a sewer.
There, towering over the hideous corpse with a slime-drenched sickle in his hand, was the Dark One himself.
Fistandantilus had not changed at all in the past seven years. When one lived for centuries, as the archmage had, most of a decade made little difference. His hooded head, bent low over the vivisection, shook back and forth in disappointment. He reached inside the gash with a pair of tongs and pulled out some kind of many-lobed organ, covered with wet, bristly hair. Bile surged up Andras’s throat at the wretched sight, but Fistandantilus didn’t balk, cutting it free and dropping it into a jar of brownish brine. That done, he looked up, staring toward the door from the shadows of his cowl.
“Master,” said Andras, lowering his eyes. “It is time.”
Fistandantilus’s beard-the only part of his face Andras had ever seen-moved in a way the younger mage had come to recognize as a smile.
“Yes,” he said, then raised his head as if to sniff the air. He dropped his gore-streaked instruments on the table. “Yes. How did you know?”
“I’m not sure, Master. I just woke up and knew today was the day,” Andras said. His voice trembled with excitement.
“Excellent,” Fistandantilus replied. “Come, then. We’ll begin.”
In the five years that he’d studied under the Dark One, Andras had never gone past the laboratory. The glyphs upon the doors at its far end barred even him from passing through.
Now Fistandantilus strode up to those doors and, raising a withered hand, willed them to open. They swung outward without a sound, and the archmage stepped through. Quivering with anticipation, Andras followed.
Another passage stretched out into the gloom, lined with still more rune-encrusted doors, before giving way to a winding stairway that snaked even deeper into the earth. At the bottom, one more door opened to Fistandantilus, giving onto a little round room with rough-hewn walls and a ceiling where fat, pallid slugs left pearly trails of slime. Beneath, in the middle of the floor, was a circular pool filled with water that glowed red from something far beneath the surface. Andras peered into it but could not see the source of the light. The pool looked to be bottomless.
“The Pit of Summoning,” Fistandantilus said. “Your revenge begins here. You remember the spell?”
Andras nodded. He remembered every spell the archmage had taught him. He had practiced them, day after day, for years. He muttered the incantations in his sleep.
“Begin,” the Dark One said and stepped back.
Andras licked his lips, stepping close to the pool. Its surface was still, like a sheet of Micahi glass. His heart raced as he stared into its fathomless depths. He shut his eyes, concentrating, calling the spell to his mind. As he did, his right hand dropped to his belt, drawing out a long, wavy-bladed knife. Clenching it in his fist, he began to weave the fingers of his left hand through the air.
“
As he recited the incantation, the red glow beneath the water grew brighter, like metal pulled from a forge. The surface began to move as well, churning as some great heat welled up below. The water hissed where it splashed upon the rocky floor, evaporating into steam.
Andras smiled-the spell had begun to work. The rush of it through his body intoxicated him, but there was one thing he still had to do, to make it complete. With ritual slowness, he lifted the wavy-bladed knife, then placed its blade between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand. Clenching his teeth, he tightened his grip on the hilt, then drew it sharply down, toward the heel of his palm.
Blood sprayed. His little finger dropped into the pool with a splash.
The pain was so intense that he nearly vomited, spoiling the spell. At the last instant, however, he fought back his gorge and jammed his maimed hand into the crook of his other arm. The dagger dropped, clattering on the ground. Gnashing his teeth, he bent down over the water, watching, waiting …
The first body bobbed to the surface soon after. It was small, the size of a human baby, with long, spindly
