Eris tumbled to the floor. She fell to her side and hit her head on cold ground and when she gazed upward she saw no portal behind her but instead the circuitry of a conduit room. The lines ran in every color and coursed with power—yet with her hands bound she detected only a hint of mana in the air. These auritium shackles rendered her helpless. The whiteness of the Rytusian winter had been blinding and her eyes still adjusted to this dark interior. Her palms buzzed at sudden warmth while the rest of her skin swelled with rashes even as the fire from Lukon’s Mana Burn exhausted itself. Her Essence was tapped, the mana in her veins flushed at once by that evil spell.
She would learn it and use it on him when next they met. With her open mouth to the floor that was the vow she made.
But even then she knew there would be no next time. This was where her adventures ended.
A hand grabbed her by the bicep and hauled her to her feet. She screamed again as the tightness of the grip impaled dull forks into her manarashes. She bit her lip until she tasted blood in her mouth. When upright she stared directly into the blank white eyes of an elf.
He wore a long gray robe that flowed across the floor. He stood a foot taller than her. The expression he wore had not known mirth in centuries. His hair was long and loose and blond.
“Eris,” he said. He traced her features with a spearpoint fingernail. “The Seeker told me you’d be arriving shortly.”
She might have bit him were the pain not so great. It was all that kept her awake. For the first time she looked around the room, and she saw its great scale: three times larger than the top of the Spire, this vast conduit chamber, and around the walls were stationed countless Cult Custodian guards. Each had a partisan spear and a suit of mail and plate embroidered with gold, etched with silver, and at a glance Eris knew they were enchanted.
This was the Tower of Pyrthos, where they spared no expense for guards.
“You features are almost Elven,” he said. “Too bad you’ll age so quickly. You’ll make a good statue for a while.”
Eris met his eyes again. Only then did she remember: the gray robe, the blond hair, the voice that seemed too young, too human, too much a tenor for such a dignified and ancient magician, yet somehow in its fast pace and spitting, rolling locution, in its sneering haughtiness, matched perfectly one’s imagination for an immortal Magister.
This was Antinaz. The eldest of the Gray Council. One of the greatest sorcerers to have ever lived. And she was in his arms.
He must have seen her expression when she recognized him—she had read of him in books a thousand years old and seen him once as a child in the Tower—for he smiled.
“You’re wondering what I could ever want with you,” he said. “Or maybe…” he dragged his nail across her skin, “you think my attention is just what you deserve. I’ll bet you’re used to special attention. Troublemakers always are.”
Eris was not often tongue-tied, but now she was speechless. She felt helpless. Even worse than the pain and certainty of death was knowing there was nothing to say to a creature like Antinaz that he hadn’t heard before. She was one of many small insects crushed beneath his boot. That made her furious, for she wanted like anything to be the one passing judgment. She wanted this power for her own. She did not understand why she—she, Eris—was stuck in her place, while this eternal elf stood in his.
Antinaz frowned. “I thought you’d have more to say.”
“Wither and become an orc, old man,” she managed.
A smile spread across his lips. He gestured over his shoulder toward a second figure near seven feet tall, this in red armor, surrounded by short robes, a skirt, and a tabard with the Tower’s emblem. Another elf.
Antinaz handed her off to the other elf. He faced the center of the room.
“I don’t often take interest in runaways,” he continued. “But you’ve done us a favor by retrieving the Hypaspist. That’s very kind of you. He’s the one I want.” To her again: “Not you.”
That made her even angrier. She pulled against the elf’s grasp, but had she an eternity he wouldn’t move an inch.
Minutes passed. Antinaz growled. “Where is he?”
“If he is as inept as last time,” Eris said, “busy tumbling off the Spire’s top.”
The Magister didn’t bother to look her way again. Instead he snapped his fingers. When she next went to open her mouth, it was sealed shut. She tried to yell but no noise came out. She could no longer feel her lips. Breath came only through her nose.
“Don’t aggravate me,” he said, “or you’ll find there are even worse fates than becoming a Servitor.”
She silenced herself at once. She wanted him to kill her, because she preferred anything to enslavement. Servitors were the lifeless husks of magicians who still wandered the Tower’s halls. They saw and heard and acted but did not think. To become one was like being stuck in a body she could not control. Nothing could be worse.
And yet she did not doubt that Antinaz knew something that was worse. So she stopped fighting back.
At last something happened. A flash of red light appeared at the center of the room’s conduit. There emerged from it a man in armor, and while Eris expected Pyraz, instead she saw Lukon—Lukon, without his helmet, without his sword, battered, bloodied, freckled with snow, and defeated.
“Regizar’s name!” he swore. He grabbed a chain from around his neck and spoke into a small crystal at its end. “Open the portal again! Open it to Dakru Spire!” He pointed to nearby Cult Custodians. “You, come with me. We are returning at once. I—”
Lukon turned. That was when he saw Antinaz.
“Your Eminence,” he whispered. “You’re here.”
The elf loomed over the Seeker. “Where’s Pyraz Shvaana?”
Lukon stumbled backward. “He broke free from his bonds. Auritium bonds, like they were old bronze—"
Antinaz’s voice became much lower. “You let him go?”
“He wore a suit of enchanted armor, Lord Antinaz! There was nothing I could do once he was awake, you understand…”
“There was time enough to send her through,” he said, grabbing Eris again.
“Antigone assured me—most important was to retrieve Aletheia, and to ensure Eris faced judgment for her crimes!”
Antinaz seethed. “You think two girls are more important than the living fossil of a Hypaspist?”
“Antigone assured me—”
“Damn that woman! You knew who he was, and you still chose two runaways over—yebhei gehadati skeronaz!”
“There may still be a chance! The portal only needs to be reactivated! Were it not for the fools in Translocation, I could return with more Custodians at once. It is their fault to begin with! Had they not delayed the opening of the first portal, he never would have had time to break free!”
A whisper came from the crystal in his hands. “The Spire is offline. We can’t send you back.”
Antinaz’s face contorted. “Be grateful for the protection of your puppetmaster, Seeker. If you answered to me you’d be joining Eris in servitude. Idiot! Defeated by a huntress, now even with a battalion of Custodians?”
He put his razor-point nails to his forehead and closed his eyes. Silence fell like a roaring blizzard. Both Eris and Lukon stared at him, when at last he continued.
“No matter. Take her to the lower levels. Even you can manage that. Prepare her…” he looked back at her in his elf’s grip, “…for memory extraction. We’ll locate Pyraz one way or another. Then proceed with the excision.”
“Yes, Your Eminence,” Lukon toadied. “Of course. I will find him again, I promise you.”
“No,” Antinaz said. “You won’t.” He gestured for them to depart. “Go.”
The Seeker stared at the tall, thin elf for another minute, terror in his eyes, until at last he stepped to Eris. He took her from the grip of the armored elf and hauled her from this chamber. She found herself pulled through an enormous metal door, past a forcefield, and into a hallway that ran around the Tower’s exterior, where arches let in the sunlight and the open air.
And there she saw Pyrthos down below. A city of pins in the Erimos desert, where countless clustered spires rose from a riverside metropolis. All was set in a walled circle about the Tower itself, and ‘tower’ was such an understatement. The Tower of Pyrthos was the greatest structure anywhere in the world. The foremost marvel of the Old Kingdom. A dozen Oldwall Spires together couldn’t compare to its size and its height. Up and down its sides ran classrooms and dormitories. There were offices for Magisters and mages, laboratories, elevators and portals, stairs in every direction, countless wings which, like the tower at the Magister’s Keep, were larger within than without. Wings connected only by thin bridges levitated off its sides.
This was the only city of Esenia which escaped the devastation of the Fall. The only city which looked today just as it did in the prime of the Old Kingdom. The Magisters had seen it preserved.
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They said the Tower’s pinnacle was so high that it breached the very aether. That standing atop Pyrthos was the only way terrestrial men could ever know what it was like to visit that other, immaterial realm, as its denizens so often visited the Earth.
Eris did not know if that was true. But she knew, looking through the window now, that she was higher up than she had ever been before. Higher than they ever took the students. The tallest buildings of the city reached as high as a Spire, high enough so that the magicians who made their residences there always could fuel their spells. These upper reaches of the Tower were at least a mile higher than that.
She knew what it was like to walk the city’s streets. Every building was massive. The city itself was small, only a few miles across, but in scale it felt a place to dwarf even the peninsula-spanning Katharos, which could take days to traverse in full.
Now it all looked small. Miniscule, thousands of feet below her.
Lukon was cowed. That gave Eris some confidence to fight back. If only she could slip toward the ledge, through the open windows, over the side…her mouth was still bound, so she inhaled through her nose and wriggled her shoulders and lurched to break from his grasp, but after she made it an inch forward, he grabbed her by the hair.
“There is no easy escape this time,” he sneered. He traced a hand across her left arm, over the still-bubbling manarashes, and she collapsed. Red overcame her vision. She screamed in pain but no noise came out. Then he tugged her back to her feet.
Now she was cowed. They continued on.
----------------------------------------
They passed archways and Custodians at guard. Eris was desperate to glance at what the dark corridors of these secret reaches were like. She had wondered her entire life. She saw a woman in gray robes in a room filled with books that glistened with Manastone ink covers. She saw a man with golden eyes fashioning a sphere in a basin, condensing mana from the air into physical shape. She saw a dwarf and an elf constructing automatons in a laboratory. And then—
They reached an elevator. And it was a very long ride down. The large stone glistened with blue crystals underfoot, and once it moved it was without any friction, no connection or wires, lowering them in silence. They passed open atriums filled with great libraries, where huge automatons guarded shelves. They descended through rooms lined with forcefield cages. They witnessed students in practice, young students, and saw hallways through glass ceilings where more pupils went about their daily tasks. The facilities were enormous. There was no end. After five minutes the elevator moved fifty miles an hour downward, but still it took an eternity before they came to a stop.
A passage revealed itself. They were underground. A long hallway illuminated by manalights.
“Forward,” Lukon commanded.
Steel golems with pollaxes stood guard at the elevator, then at every fork in the corridor. Their eyes glowed violet through empty armored helmets. Left and right Eris was escorted through this dungeon, past a row of cells filled with children moaning, past a room with a single table, then into darkness. For minutes they descended at a gentle slope. A sharp scream pursued them all the way, until—nothing except their footsteps.
A vault door appeared before them. Two more golems standing guard. It was an enormous slab of stone, a circle a dozen feet tall and a dozen feet wide, and at its side there was a bronze basin colored red. A knife was above it.
Lukon tugged off his left gauntlet.
“Lukon, Seekers, Eris, rogue. Open.”
With the knife he drew blood from his exposed skin, letting it drain into the basin. A moment passed. Then…
The vault door shifted. Dust unsettled. It moved an inch backward, then slid without rolling, scraping across the ground all the way, retracting into the wall to make room for their entrance.
Beyond was another elevator. A switch on its opposite side. Standing beside it was a man in a purple robe. Across his face was a branded burn scar, on his cheek, like a runaway slave, in the shape of a T, and it glistened blue in the dim light.
“Take us to low security,” Lukon said.
The robed man stared forward. His eyes were bright green—he was a magician—and yet there was no thought behind them. He never blinked. A long moment passed, until he replied, “Yes, Master Seeker.” He pressed the switch. The elevator descended.
Eris tugged at Lukon’s grip. This man was a Servitor. This was the fate that awaited her. Branded, his soul extracted, nothing but an empty Essence. Her heart raced again. She hit Lukon in the chest, but her hands deflected against his cuirass, and he restrained her and looked into her eyes with a smile. A knowing smile.
There was nothing she could do.
A long time was spent in a shaft of solid black stone. Ever farther down. Deep below the earth. Eris’ ears popped.
The elevator stopped. Another vault door slid open. The moment it was fully ajar, Eris gasped. Her jaw lowered, she felt her lips, and the spell which bound her mouth shut ended.
A hallway opened before them, just like the last, lit by sconces along the walls—sconces that burned with mundane fire. There were no manalights here. Guards stood watch in armor like the Custodians they fought at the Spire, except—
Every single guard here was a dwarf. No golems.
Beside the vault door, buried underground, were two enormous crystals pulsing violet. They must have been protected by twenty inches of glass.
The aether couldn’t reach them this far below ground. There would be no natural magic unless it was piped, or they were near a lay line. But there was something else at work. Something more than even her bindings. Something which tapped the mana from the air and suppressed all spells.
Eris knew about such a thing. The mana suppressant field in the Dungeons of Pyrthos. Where rogue magicians were taken.
There were no Lightning Walls. No Sentry Pylons. No Arcane Protectors. No magic at all could be used in this place. It was like a world before the Old Kingdom. Simply man and meat and iron.
“Have a pleasant day, Master Seeker,” the Servitor said.
“Die,” Lukon replied. He dragged Eris down the corridor. It was a labyrinth of eternal dead-ends. As above cells lined the walls, cramped, tight cells with nowhere to go and no amenities, and in each sat creatures from all across the world. A troll covered in green Manastone tattoos. A halfling with a shaved head. Five gnolls snarling at everything that passed them by. A meditating man with the head of a tiger. Arktids and hobgoblins and even an orc who beat his head against the bars of his cell and screamed in agony at all hours.
And magicians. Dozens of them, knowable only by the color of their eyes.
Lukon stopped short of one cell. A dwarven guard opened it with a key. Eris’ manacles were removed and she was thrust inside, the door slammed shut behind her.
She felt more secure with metal between her and the Seeker. So she turned to him and smirked. “No wonder you stay in the Council’s employ,” she said. “You must enjoy being abused.”
A cacophony of screams came down the line. Human and chimera and animal and everything else—and this was low security. Eris was offended to know she didn’t warrant a higher grade. Lukon sneered at her.
“Enjoy your last days of conscious thought. They say memory distillation is not as painful as the Manasearing, but I am certain they can find some way to make it more entertaining for themselves.” He smiled. “And once you have been pacified, perhaps I might requisition you to my quarters. No doubt you will be in high demand.”
Eris’ smile disappeared. Her mind tingled with horror. “Even you would not do that to me,” she whispered.
“You did not think the Council wanted you for a bellman, did you?”
“I am an initiate of the Tower.”
“You are our doll. We will do with you as we sit fit. The torturers will prepare you for their rituals presently. Do try to have fun, Eris.”
Lukon turned and departed. Eris was left alone, standing against the bars, overcome with fury beyond any she had ever known. She clutched the steel and tried to melt it, tried to channel heat, but nothing happened—nothing at all, like breathing out of empty lungs.
There was nothing to do but collapse.
----------------------------------------
Her manarashes resolved within hours. The one blessing of a mana suppression field. Another Servitor in a green robe, branded with the same blue T across his face, brought her a potion and instructed her to drink it in preparation for the forthcoming ritual. She refused. A guard threatened her. She still refused. The guard beat her. The potion was forcefully administered.
The same happened the next day.
Eris did not know how long it would take to prepare her for these procedures. She almost wanted them sooner before later, because languishing in this cell was torture of the highest degree. She was given no food and one drop of water per day, which she forwent in protest. She prayed now for death. Never before had she thought she might want her life to end, but the grave was preferable to rape, literal and metaphorical, to the molestation of her mind and memories, to enslavement at the hands of the Tower she fled.
But every day that groaned past was hope of rescue. Hope of pardon. Hopeless hope, for she knew no rescue would come. There was no one to come. Pyraz, and perhaps Rook, were free, and yet…
She had told them she was leaving. She told them what she thought of their company. She told Rook what she thought of his love. They would not be coming for her. And even if they did, to what purpose? It was suicide. Eris wouldn’t have come for them. They would not come for her. She had abandoned her only friends in the world, and with them her only hope of salvation.
On a third day there was delivered a third potion. Her will to resist was shattered. She drank it. A disgusting, bitter mulch drained down her esophagus, freezing all the way. When done she threw the bottle at the Servitor’s head and tore a gash in his skin four inches wide. Blood poured down into his eyes, but he didn’t seem to notice.
The Servitor departed. Eris retreated again to the wall. Her stomach churned. She thought about Rook. All she wanted was to be near him again. After so much abuse, she longed for the comfort of his body. And…of him, because in that cell Eris felt so terribly lonely. All her life she had delighted in her own company. She loved solitude more than anything. But now she wished she had anyone else alongside her. She wished she did not have to face the terrors of the Tower by herself. She regretted more than anything telling Rook she needed to leave. This was not easier than being at his side. This was so much worse.
She couldn’t even find comfort in knowing it would all end soon, for she would still be locked away within the Servitor, somewhere, imprisoned for fifty years before release came.
Fingers wrapped across the door to her cell. She looked up.
An elf looked down at her. Male. Dark hair. White robes. Despite the suppression field around them he wore bracers on both his wrists which gave off a dim red light.
“Hello again, Eris,” he said. “The time has come. Will you follow me?”
She recognized him at once. He was someone she could never forget. The elf who Seared her.
Eisolaz.
----------------------------------------
“It’s easier, you understand,” he said. He led her through the hallways. Past more dwarf guards. Toward an operating room where the floor was stained with blood. Eris followed at her own volition. “I remember all my pupils. It expedites the process.”
He was soft-spoken. Gentle. Almost kind. No one would ever suspect this centuries-old creature had killed thousands of children. Tens of thousands. Perhaps more than anyone who had ever lived.
She stopped in the doorway. There, at its side, was another glowing crystal. This was where the mana suppression field ended.
“Will you have a seat, please?”
“With respect, Master Eisolaz,” Eris said, “I do not think I will.”
“Memory extraction is not painful. It will take only a few moments.”
“And then you make me a Servitor.”
He was at a counter. He traced his hand across a collection of manaserum vials, then pressed his hand against a bronze machine. Next he withdrew a branding iron in the shape of a T. Its iron wasn’t iron at all, but Manastone. He gave it a long look before placing it away.
“Yes,” he said. “But not today.”
Eris stepped forward. There was still hardly any mana in the air, but over the threshold into this operating chamber her Essence was unsmothered. If it wasn’t for the Mana Burn she might have been able to cast some spell, but as it was she was too drained to do anything without risking spellsickness. Then again, spellsickness was worth escaping death…
Eisolaz gestured with his hand and the door slammed shut behind her.
“I like you, Eris,” he said. “Be civil. We can leave your bindings off.”
“Be civil,” she echoed.
“All creatures must know their place in this world. There is honor in resistance, yet beauty in acceptance.”
She stared at him. “It must be easy to accept indeed, when you are at the top and I at the bottom.”
He nodded sagely, as if this were the most apparent truth in the world. Eris sneered. She had to make her decision. But it was hardly a decision. She waited one more moment, then jumped forward. She grabbed Eisolaz by the arm and used Disintegrate, just as Pyraz taught her—
The spell did nothing against his bracers. The mana she spent came back at her like regurgitated water in an obstructed throat and she felt her veins sizzle and burn.
Eisolaz put his open palm on her head. “That won’t do.”
Darkness overcame her vision. Her limbs grew numb. Her head tingled. She tumbled to the floor, asleep.
When she awoke she was in a cell. And when she glanced about herself, she could not remember why she was there.