“Alken…”

I grunted. “What is it?”

I could practically feel Emma’s eyes on me, though I kept mine on the table. Most of two hours had passed since she’d summoned Qoth, and we’d returned to the crowded inner districts of the city. We sat beneath a pavilion at the corner of a public square, with food. Apple tarts and meat balls dressed in fresh eggs, seasoned with ginger.

Garihelm hadn’t had such good food last I’d been. Then again, that had been during a war.

I heard, more than saw, Emma shift across the table, uncrossing one leg and recrossing it, then propping her elbows on the table and clasping her fingers. I chased half an apple tart down with some beer.

“You’re worrying me,” Emma said.

A cheer went up from the square below us — a pair of knights were having a mock battle. A magician had gotten involved, using exploding powders and sleight-of-hand to entertain the crowd, weaving in and out of the two swordsmen as they playacted some drama.

When the noise had died down I asked, “Why?”

“Well…” Emma blew out a breath, moving a loose strand of her dark hair out of her face. “After what Qoth told us, I expected you to charge off in a rage. Instead, well…”

She waved a hand at the square, the outdoor tavern, the meals.

I set my mug down on the table and shrugged. “We need to eat, keep up our strength.”

“Right…” Emma unlaced her fingers and laid her hands on the table, as though bracing herself. “And Lias?”

I felt the corners of my lips tighten, without making a conscious decision to frown. A flash of thoughts and emotions went through me — rage, frustration, and doubt chiefly among them. What game was the damn wizard playing?

“What about him?” I growled, stabbing at a meat ball with my fork.

“Well, we’re going to track him down, right?” Emma asked, some of her usual pluck breaking through her concern. “Once we’re done, uh, strengthening ourselves?” She waved to the food again. Below, someone let out a cat call and the crowd laughed.

“Obviously,” I said, after I’d swallowed.

“It’s just…” Emma sighed, exasperated. “You’re being awfully calm about the whole thing.”

I did not feel calm. “When it comes to Lias,” I said, leaning back and folding my arms, “there’s no point trying to use force. He’s magi.”

Emma’s brow furrowed. “How do you mean? He’s still mortal, isn’t he?”

“Sure,” I said, propping my own elbows on the table. “More or less. The thing about wizards, Emma, is that they cheat.”

Talking aloud helped distract me from the ugly feelings churning in my gut, so I kept speaking. “Magicians — true magicians, not that jester down in the square right now — don’t use magic the same way everyone else does. Did Nath ever explain how Art affects the soul? The reason most mortals, even intrinsically magical beings, can only ever use a handful of them?”

Emma tilted her head to one side in thought. “She spoke about it a bit. My grandmother did as well.”

I nodded. I’d forgotten that Emma’s grandmother had been a sorceress.

“Nath always told me not to bother affixing more phantasms to my aura,” Emma continued. “She insisted that the Blood Art of House Carreon is versatile enough.”

“She’s not wrong,” I agreed. “The only magic I’ve seen as versatile as your Shrike Forest are those threads Lisette uses, maybe a handful of other abilities. But none of it has anything on what one of the Magi can do.”

Emma leaned forward. I didn’t often lecture on arcana, preferring more practical lessons, but I could tell I’d caught her interest.

“You can only alter the shape of a human soul so much,” I explained. “Whenever you use your own aura to create a phantasm, you are changing it, in a fundamental way, and it grows more resistant to further alteration. It already takes some rare circumstances for any phantasm to form — take your powers for example. They had to be cultivated over generations of tyranny and war.”

Emma’s expression soured. “Thanks for that reminder.”

I shrugged. “It’s important to understand the scale we’re talking about. The creation of a single phantasm requires events so profound they literally imprint themselves into the fabric of reality. It can happen in nature — a meteor falls out of the sky, or a tsunami smashes a coastline to pieces, and it can leave a spiritual echo of itself. For humans, it takes something much more difficult to define, and usually something that impacts a lot of people — armies, or even nations. A great general performs a heroic feat, saves or slaughters thousands, and that might create a phantasm, which can then be refined into Art and used.”

I pointed at my squire’s chest. “Think about it. Your power is the manifestation of your family’s legacy, wrought into its most evocative image — the pikes they used to torture and execute their enemies. That only exists because that image embedded itself so deeply into people's memories.”

Emma nodded, her lips pursed. “I believe I’m following. But what does this have to do with wizards?”

I sipped more beer to wet my throat, then wiped my mouth with the back of one arm. “As I said, affixing a phantasm to your aura and turning it into a Soul Art requires changing your own innate essence, so it can take the form you want. It changes you. Awakening your aura is rare enough, and most who do never learn more than one Art through their whole lives. I’ve never seen anyone use more than three at most, except for elves, and even they don’t tend to go much higher. It’s even rarer to create an original technique.”

Emma folded her arms and cast me a dubious look. “I’ve seen you use far more than three abilities.”

I nodded. “I had to have my aura changed in order to do that, and it had a cost.” I placed a hand to my chest, feeling the omnipresent warmth of the Alder’s fire inside me. “The elves restructured my soul to link it to a repository for Arts. Which brings me to the Magi.”

I met my disciple’s eyes. “Wizards have no limit on how many Arts they can learn.”

Emma almost visibly reeled. “No limits? I don’t… How is that even possible?”

“They do something similar to what the Alder Knights and the Brothers of the Briar do,” I said. “They change the shape of their own souls. They use various means, and honestly I have no idea how most of them do it. I don’t even know what rite Lias performed — the Hermetical Orders guard their secrets very closely. The result is pretty much the same for all of them, though. It can make them unhinged, unpredictable.” Even inhuman, I thought.

I splayed my fingers out in an encompassing gesture. “Lias has no limits on his power. As long as he learns more, discovers more magic, continues to reshape his own aura to accommodate new power, he will grow more versatile. There’s basically no problem he can’t solve with magic, if he puts in enough time and cleverness, or just brute force.”

I could tell I’d disturbed Emma with this revelation. I didn’t blame her. Very few knew just how dangerous true wizards could be. “So,” she said quietly, “you’re avoiding confronting Lias because you’re not certain you can beat him, if things come to violence?”

I shrugged, and sipped more beer. “Nah, I could take the scrawny fop. That’s not the point I’m trying to make.”

Emma tilted her head to the other side, pouting. “Then what’s the problem?”

“The point is that he’s fucking infuriating to talk to when he gets it into his head that he’s right,” I growled. “The man’s over forty years old, and I doubt he’s aged a day up here since he first awakened his powers.” I tapped the side of my skull with a finger. “He can do pretty much anything he wants without consequences, and if he faces any real backlash he’s got a means to deal with that too, with magic.”

Emma’s expression turned doubtful. “I always heard of the Magi as very wise and responsible, the guardians of dangerous secrets and the like.”

“They cultivate that image,” I agreed darkly. “But for most of them, it’s just not true. Take the Traitor Magi for example, or the ones who back the Recusants. They’re all playing games, with kings and nations as their chess pieces. Wizards founded the Castias, the organizations that became the modern Church. They’ve always had their hands in everything.”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Emma clapped her hands together. “So, you’re avoiding going after your old friend because…”

“Because charging into his sanctum and trying to get any sense through that thick skull of his will be a fool’s errand,” I confirmed, glowering. “I need to figure out what he wants, and go in there with a plan, or he’ll just talk circles around me. So I’m considering.” I lifted my mug to her and waggled it.

What did Lias want? I’d been chewing on it ever since Qoth had so gleefully revealed who’d spirited Kieran away. I hadn’t seen him in weeks, not since before my foolish foray into an Inquisition sanctum.

I’d learned some dark things about my old friend’s recent deeds from Rosanna, and I still didn’t know how to feel about them. On one hand, I’d done many unworthy things throughout my life. I’d killed many people, all in service of individuals or edifices I’d been bound to in some way or another. Did I have any right to judge the wizard for assassination and malpractice?

It seemed like he was doing the same thing we’d always done, only on a larger scale.

On the other hand, he’d lied to me. What Lias had done had been so beyond the pale that Rosanna had allowed him, who’d known her even longer than I had, to be banished from the Emperor’s court.

Perhaps he’d only taken Kieran as a pretense to talk to me. If so, it had been an awfully convoluted way to go about it.

I truly couldn’t know what his angle was. Intrigue had never been my strong suit.

“Let’s go,” I said. The mock duel had ended, and the crowd below had begun to disperse.

“You have a plan?” Emma asked, grabbing her sword.

“Not quite,” I said as I took the lead.

Emma didn’t press me for details, her curiosity keeping her attention.

I had no plan. Lias was the one who did plans and plots, and damn anyone who got caught in his web. Damn his guessing games.

I would just ask him.

***

It was well past noon by the time we found the high storm wall where Lias had kept a hidden laboratory in the lower city. The remnants of the last storm curtained across the sky, bands of golden daylight shining through the clouds like ripples in an ocean wave. Like last time, the alleys were empty save for scavengers, vermin, and ghosts.

Of course, the base of the high bulwark we’d entered last time had no door. I only found damp brickstone.

“This is the same place, right?” Emma cast a dubious look at the wall, then around at our surroundings, trying to match them to her memory.

“It is,” I said. I studied the wall intently, but if I expected an angry glower to burn a hole in it, I was disappointed. “He removed the door. Or, more likely, the sanctum we were in last time was never in this wall. A lot of the older Sidhe can do something similar.”

“So the real laboratory could be anywhere,” Emma said with a huff, adopting her own scowl.

I recalled Eanor’s moonlit grove. Lias had grown powerful, if he’d advanced to manipulating space.

“Could be,” I agreed. Lias had always been a clever man.

Sometimes too clever for his own good. “Stand back,” I said.

Emma did as I ordered. I waited until she stood clear, then drew Faen Orgis. The faerie axe glinted in the alleyway’s shadow, the abstract spirals of gold etched into the alloy glinting as though caught in rays of sunlight.

The paladins of Seydis excelled at two things — slaying beings of darkness and dispelling phantasm. Really, the two powers went hand in hand. I focused my magical senses on the stone before me, feeling the traces of otherness etched into it.

A hole had been cut here, a tear through the fabric of reality meant to connect one point with another. Lias had probably manipulated the Wend, redirecting a thread of those tangled paths for his own purposes, or even adding his own. Though the cut had been sealed, it hadn’t been done cleanly. I could still feel the scab.

I lifted the Axe of Hithlen to my lips, breathed power into it, and murmured ritual words. “I am the shepherd who walks the unlit paths, he who holds the lantern, who wields the crook. Though wolves may stalk the shadows, I fear not their fangs. Show me the path through darkness, and I will walk it.”

The axe began to emit a faint light. I took its handle in both hands, my callouses squeezing tight around the uncarved branch. I let out a breath, and it misted amber.

I swung, and a sound very much like the peel of a smith’s hammer against an anvil echoed through the alley. Ugly carrion birds hidden in the densely packed buildings took flight at the sound, cawing angrily as they climbed toward the higher districts far above.

The stone of the great bastion wall cracked, and a white-gold light emanated from that crack. It split and splintered.

I swung again, and the second smite tore a wound through the stone. More light spilled out, like water released from a cavern spring, quickly fading to reveal a long, dank hallway fashioned from half-melted stonework.

I stepped back and rested the axe on my shoulder, its glow already fading. I inspected my handiwork a moment, then nodded toward the opening. “There we go.”

Emma whistled appreciatively. “When am I going to learn that trick?”

“Not certain it’s one I can teach you,” I said. “But I’ll give it some thought. For now, we have a house call to make.”

“Something tells me he’s not going to be too happy about his front door getting kicked in,” Emma warned.

“Probably not,” I agreed.

We entered the long corridor, the wan light of the lower city quickly fading behind us. I heard the sound of grinding stone, and that light suddenly cut off entirely. At my side, Emma startled.

“We’re locked in,” she hissed.

“Just the world mending itself,” I muttered back. “I can cut our way back out, if needed. Keep your head, squire.”

I heard her breathing next to me, hitched and uncertain. It quickly steadied. “I’m fine,” she said.

I lifted the axe again, and once more channeled my aura through it. The axe burned like a torch, illuminating the uncanny hallway. The stone looked wrong — no lavish foyer like last time, no empty suits of armor or spiraling stairs, just half-melted stone like damaged wax and an odd burnt scent.

Emma had her hand on her sword, but hadn’t drawn it. Good lass.

“Keep close,” I murmured. “And stay behind.”

We advanced, walking for roughly five minutes. The corridor twisted and turned, sometimes even dipping or rising, more like a worm hole than a proper hallway.

Lucky. Another few days, this entrance would have fully mended itself and I wouldn’t have been able to use it. Lias must have closed it not long after I’d gone into Rose Malin, probably fearing I’d give away his location at the hands of Oraise’s torturers.

He’d had very little faith in me, even after his assurances I was the only one he could still trust. He hadn’t even tried to break me free. I still wasn’t certain I could blame him, logically speaking, but deep down it still hurt.

This isn’t about that, I chastised myself. This is about Kieran, and the mission. Don’t mix your personal feelings into it.

The hall ended, with an abruptness that took me off guard. Emma and I stood in a large room, and I recognized it as the entry hall of Lias’s sanctum from last time — only it had changed. The stairway twisted in on itself in a strange helix, leading to nowhere, and the rich tapestries on the wall drooped down to the floor, fusing with the dark wood like a bad painting. There were at least a dozen exits, all of them black cavities in the walls, some set so high up they couldn’t be reached.

I glanced back to make sure Emma was still with me, and no sorcery had left her stranded in the passage we’d come from. She remained at my side, and when I caught her eye she set her jaw and nodded.

I got the message. I’m with you.

I turned, drew in a breath, and put just enough aura in my voice to let it boom through the abstracted room.

“Lias!” My voice emerged with a subtle echo of power, one the wizard would hear wherever he was. He’d made this place with his own power, and the very walls would quiver with my words. “I’ve come for the boy.”

Silence. I steeled myself, and put more power into my words, making the walls quaver with them. "Lias Hexer!" I roared. "I demand an answer, wizard."

“You shouldn’t have come here,” a disembodied voice said, seeming to emerge from every warped doorway and empty corridor at once.

I recognized the voice. “I’m not in the mood for games, Li.” I used no aura this time. “Don’t make me go looking for you.”

“The boy is safe,” Lias said, his voice an emotionless drawl. Overlayed a dozen times, it sounded like something more, and less, than human — a hollow chorus.

“Why did you take him?” I asked, turning about slowly in the center of the room. “You had to know I’d go looking for you.”

Silence.

“Lias,” I growled, growing angry again. “You have a lot of explaining to do. Rosanna told me what you’ve done. You brought me into a snake pit, and you left me out of the loop. I thought you wanted my help!”

“…It was a mistake to bring you here,” Lias said coldly. “I believed you would do as you’ve always done — find the thing which needs killing, and kill it. Instead, you drew the attention of powers far beyond your ken. Did the Empress send you?”

The Empress. “Rose didn’t send me,” I said, intentionally adopting the diminutive he and I both knew her well enough to use.

“I know you’ve been in the palace,” Lias continued, his voice fading and rising in seemingly random rhythms, the effect unsettlingly alien. “I should have known that you would have gone crawling back to her the moment you had the chance. I will not be taken prisoner.”

I spoke through my teeth. “I’m not here to take you back to Rose, though you damn well should talk to her. If I’d known you two were feuding—”

“You would have refused to help me outright!” Lias said bitterly. “You are like a child, Alken. You never could pick a side when we squabbled, and I had no time for your sulking.”

I drew in a deep breath, forcing calm over myself. “Where is Kieran?” I said again. “Hand him over to me, and I’ll leave.”

“I can no longer trust you to handle this matter without complicating it. The boy is in my care. I will destroy Yith Golonac. You should return to the wilderness. The game of realms is no longer your concern, Headsman. You have your role, and I should not have distracted you from it. Go.”

It surprised me, how calm my next words sounded to my own ears. “I’m not leaving, Li. Not without the kid.”

“…Then you leave me no choice.”

The rattling sound intensified, then cut off abruptly. I tensed.

“Alken,” Emma said, worry in her voice. “I think maybe we better—”

I bared my teeth in frustration. I wouldn’t leave things like this. “Lias, don’t—”

The hackles on the back of my neck stood on end, and I hurled myself into a roll just as something dropped down from the ceiling. It landed with almost no sound on the spot I’d occupied an instant before, crouching low like a spider. Its face tilted up to look at me.

Or, what passed for its face. Its head was smooth, featureless save for subtle depressions where eyes and mouth should have been, no nose or ears visible. The head lolled on a ball-jointed neck, connecting it to a segmented body with long limbs, vaguely humanoid.

The thing of wood and metal rose, its many-jointed limbs rattling slightly with the motion. Its body, all seven feet of it, stretched taut, toeless feet lifting off the ground so it hung suspended on invisible strings.

The steel blades emerging from its wrists, which were fashioned from brass spheres, retracted until only their tips were visible. Its manikin’s face tilted to one side, as though studying me with curiosity.

Worse, there were more. They fell down from the ceiling one after the other, all stopping at varying elevations with jerking motions, puppets on strings in a macabre show.

Emma had drawn her sword. Sweat beaded on her skin. “What are they?” She asked, backing toward me.

I lifted my axe, preparing to defend myself. I had fought creatures like this during the war, and I knew just how lethal they were.

“They’re Marions. Living dolls.”

image [https://i.imgur.com/ZLwj1Qs.png]