Chapter 48 – The Shadow of the Master, Part 3
Zull stared at General Steroth, feeling utter disbelief at what he had just heard General Steroth say. “You want…to arrest us? Why? There are far more pressing crises at present, Sir.”
“I already knew you were daft for choosing to serve the Empress, but the pressure of the battle must have made you completely lose your mind,” Vyle said sadly.
General Steroth winced with regret, the expression vanishing from his face as swiftly as it had appeared. Instead, after a nod to his soldiers to approach and grab Zull and Vyle by the arms, he said, “I’m truly sorry, both of you. I cannot express how much you have done for both the empire and the Empress. You saved my own life, and the lives of countless others, through your actions. However, my orders are clear. Prince Blyth is to be taken alive, if possible. You and your sister actively seek to kill him, Zull. For that reason, I cannot let you continue onwards.”
Zull seethed as the soldiers grabbed him, while Vyle weakly struggled against their iron grasp. “Are you insane, Steroth? Did you not hear a word I just said? Prince Blyth is pursuing us as we speak. It does not matter whether we want to harm him; if we do not act, he will kill us all first, without hesitation. He undoubtedly has the power to do so. Zaphyr might well be already dead; she stayed behind, sacrificing herself to buy us these few precious moments, moments you and your men are now wasting.” Zull paused to recover his breath, eyes glinting as he stared the elderly soldier down. “General, please let Vyle and I go, or everything will have been for naught.”
General Steroth’s left eye twitched, and he swallowed loudly as he stared Zull down. After a second, his gaze shifted as he looked away, unable to maintain his stare with the young boy. “You aren’t lying, are you?” he asked quietly. “He’s coming, and nothing will stop him, save death, his or ours.”
“Yes,” Zull answered plainly. “General, I beg of you, please listen to me. The key to stopping him is right there, in the throne room. It’s practically within our grasp! Let Vyle and I through, and we can stop him and save Prince Grevel in one maneuver. Who knows? He might even surrender once his stolen power and strength is stripped away from him. After that, I promise, you can do whatever you want with us. You can have Vyle, myself, and even Zaphyr, if she lives that long, all arrested. At that point, I will no longer care.”
General Steroth studied Zull and Vyle for a moment. “And you agree to this as well, Vyle? Your hatred for the Empress and her entire family is legendary.”
“Ordinarily, giving myself over to the Empress’ men would be the last thing I would ever dream of wanting,” Vyle replied. “But…I trust Zull. He and Zaphyr have saved my life multiple times, now. Whatever he says needs doing, I will do.”
General Steroth sighed, wearily shaking his head. “Since I have met you, boy, you have displayed nothing but the upmost arrogance concerning your own skills and abilities. You have repeatedly boasted of how supposedly crucial you and your sister are to overcoming Prince Blyth. You act as you will, ignoring orders from all figures of authority, even from the Empress herself. How can I know that I can trust someone as reckless as you to do as you have said?”
Zull grimaced, mulling over how he should answer before finally saying, “I give you my word, General. Nothing is as valuable as my oath to me, because it’s the only thing I have left.”
A moment of ragged silence stretched out, before one of the spearmen coughed nervously and said, “Sir? Your orders?”
General Steroth gave a fatalistic shrug. “Let them go. We shall stay here, make our stand in this hallway.”
“Sir?”
“No doubt, as Zull said, Prince Blyth is not far behind. He is a powerful hemomancer, but we should be able to buy just a little more time for the boy and Vyle,” General Steroth said. He turned his attention back towards Zull, his eyes weary and red-rimmed from exhaustion. “Use it very well. You say that you know how to strip Prince Blyth of his power; do so.”
“We will, Sir,” Zull said in a subdued voice. “Thank you.”
General Steroth snapped his fingers, and his soldiers reluctantly released Zull and Vyle. The two of them then moved past the spearmen, who awkwardly shuffled out of their way as they walked by. Vyle, trailing slightly behind Zull, limped to the end of the hallway, where he then stopped and turned around as Zull opened the door and continued forwards. “You’re a good man, Steroth, and a very honorable one at that,” Vyle said after a moment of consideration. “In another life, at another time, if things had gone differently between the Empress and me…we could have been good friends, I think.”
“Protect Zull, save Prince Grevel,” General Steroth said, not turning to look at Vyle.
After another moment, Vyle and Zull stepped through the door, shutting it behind themselves with a loud thudding noise. With a quick flick of his hand, General Steroth directed the spearmen to arrange themselves into a loose wall formation, spread out so as fully block the hallway, spears upright and at the ready. One of the soldiers glanced back at General Steroth, swallowing nervously, before asking, “Sir, if Prince Blyth is truly as powerful a hemomancer as they say, then…aren’t we all simply going to die?”
“Death comes for everyone, eventually. Whether he is as powerful as they say or not, we will stand our ground,” General Steroth responded calmly. “We fight for both the Empress and our own honor. Is that understood?” The soldiers barked their responses: affirmative to the man. The general nodded his satisfaction at their answer. “Good. Let us show Prince Blyth what true soldiers of the Empire look like.”
Meanwhile, Zull and Vyle found themselves standing in the wreckage of what had once been the Empress’ throne room. It had been demolished, every piece of furniture wrecked save for the unscathed throne, every tapestry torn down, and every priceless relic shattered. The walls and floors were now completely covered with inane scribblings, many written in blood, the sight of which sent shivers crawling down Zull’s spine.
None of that mattered, however, compared to the gruesome centerpiece of the room, set right before the throne. At the center of the ritual’s painted circle sprawled Prince Grevel, his once immaculate mauve uniform now torn and stained with his own blood. His face was ashy and dripping with sweat, his eyes half-closed and glazed over. Each breath he took rasped loudly, like the gasping of a beached fish, and sounded as if it could well be his last. His skin was covered with the inked etchings of hemomantic bindings, nearly twice as many as Zull had seen even on Sangue.A pair of mercenaries stood at opposite ends of the ritual circle, evidently left there by the Master as a protection for his sole weakness. Seeing Zull and Vyle, they instantly reached for their scabbards.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” Zull told them warningly. “I’m a powerful hemomancer of my own. Pull out your weapons, and I will make your own blood gush from your eyes. Would you like to find out how that feels? I bet it will be excruciating.”
The mercenaries looked at each other, then as one turned and sprinted towards the far end of the throne room, disappearing behind the throne and making their escape through a hidden door there. Once they were gone, Zull let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. Now, nothing remained between them and their goal.
“Would you have done that, Lad?” Vyle asked, curious.
“Absolutely. Could I? I wouldn’t know until I tried,” Zull responded. Vyle stared at him in astonishment for a moment, though Zull didn’t really care. He had accepted, as Zaphyr had, that he would do whatever was needed to defeat Prince Blyth; it no longer even bothered him that such sacrifices had to be made. Walking over to Prince Grevel, he knelt besides the man. He winced with sympathy, horrified by the man’s misery. The sight of him in such pain made Zull instinctively reach out with his hemomantic senses, searching for Zaphyr, worried for her well-being. To his immense relief, he detected her, still in the distant dungeon, alive but weak, repeatedly flickering between consciousness and unconsciousness. Regardless, the very fact she remained alive emboldened him, giving him the courage which he needed to push onwards.
“I don’t know if you can hear me, Prince, but keep courage; you won’t have to endure much longer,” Zull said as his eyes ran over the blood bindings on the Prince’s body, mentally taking note of each of them.
“How are you going to do it, Lad?” Vyle asked curiously.
“In theory, the process is simple,” Zull said. He drew out the blood-stained knife he had taken from the palace’s trophy room. Using the point of the knife, he cut the end of his thumb. A single drop of blood welled up on the finger. “Apply my own blood and a surge of hemomantic power to the binding, and it should snap, the link between the two princes instantly severed. In practice, it won’t be so easy. This isn’t one individual blood binding, or even several separate ones. They work together as a complicated structure, far beyond anything Sangue taught me about. The interactions are complex and breaking them in the wrong order could well kill Prince Grevel inadvertently. I need to be patient, thorough, and slow.”
“Well, don’t be too slow, Lad,” Vyle said worriedly, glancing back over his shoulder at the throne room’s door. “We’re running out of time.”
“I know,” Zull said absently, wiping the blood from his cut thumb across one of the blood bindings on Prince Grevel’s neck. He repeated this process, as hastily as he could, for each of the other individual blood bindings, noting the writing around each one as well as the inked lines connecting them like a web of tattoos across Grevel’s body as he attempted to deduce the order in which they had been applied, as well as how each one connected to the next. Once each individual binding had been located and isolated, the real work began. Zull worked frantically as he outlined a mental map in his mind, attempting to work out with his limited knowledge how the bindings had been constructed and fit together in the first place.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Making the best guess he could, he chose one binding, located on the back of the prince’s right hand. Ironically, it was the same place as Zull and Zaphyr’s own binding. His blood already smeared across the marking, Zull pushed on it with all the hemomantic power he had, sensing the binding and fighting against it. The binding sizzled, a faint wisp of smoke rising from the now burned skin. For a second, Prince Grevel’s breathing stopped altogether, and Zull froze, watching him anxiously. Then, he continued raggedly gasping as before. If anything, his breathing seemed slightly easier. Relieved, Zull continued his work, wary of Prince Grevel’s health.
Out in the hallway, General Steroth and his men were on razor’s edge, every moment which passed dragging by slower and slower as their anticipation and dread grew in equal measures. When the tension finally broke with Prince Blyth’s arrival, it bordered on anticlimactic: the door to the trophy room swung open and he simply sauntered out, head swinging to face General Steroth with a sneer of contempt.
“The boy, Steroth,” Prince Blyth asked casually. “Where is he?”
Instead of answering his question, General Steroth said, “Your mother is quite disappointed with you, Blyth. Your selfishness and fear of death has driven you to try and destroy the royal family. The empire has nearly been torn apart; you risk undoing everything the Empress has ever worked for. How could you do such a thing?”
Blyth laughed, the sound hollow and twisted by hate. “I owe her nothing. I did what I had to do to survive, to claim my birthright, Steroth. Anyone else with the courage and cunning to see the path would have done the same, in my place.” His eyes suddenly became glassy, as they seemed to stare through General Steroth and his soldiers and bore through the wall behind them. “The boy,” he whispered, his voice dry and small. Suddenly shouting, he bellowed, “The boy, Steroth! What is he doing?”
General Steroth gave a signal with his hand, and his soldiers hunched down, lifting their spears, and preparing for the expected onslaught. “Surrender, Blyth. This is your last chance.”
The prince gave no response. Instead, he slowly lifted one hand, pointing it at the furthest soldier to the right. The man collapsed to the ground, suddenly screaming and thrashing about. Blood began pouring from his mouth and nose, flowing out in a steady stream before forming into an enormous crimson globe which hung in the air, shimmering and rippling. The man fell still, his screams still echoing through the long hallway. The orb then split, forming into a pair of ruby blades, which hung before the spearmen, a clear promise of the carnage to come.
“Attack!” General Steroth cried, though it was already too late. Some of his men tried to charge towards Prince Blyth, only to be struck down where they stood, his blood blades moving faster than thought as they cut and sliced through each soldier in turn. Others drew their hands back, preparing to throw their spears at the Master. He expertly dodged past each thrown spear, moving with a grace and speed that no living person could hope to match. He even grabbed one spear as it flew and, twisting it around, hurled it back without even stopping to aim, watching with satisfaction as it skewered the very man who had first thrown it.
The massacre was over almost as soon as it had begun, the hallway now spattered with the gore of General Steroth’s fallen soldiers. Their bodies lay splayed about where they had been struck, hacked and mauled almost beyond recognition. General Steroth alone, sprayed with blood but unharmed, remained standing, his own sword in hand as he stared down at Blyth. Despite what he had just witnessed, his expression of quiet stoicism remained unchanged.
“Seen enough, Steroth?” Blyth asked mockingly. “Your loyalty to my mother is commendable, but surely even you must admit now, my victory is inevitable. No one alive is more powerful than I. There is no shame in surrender when no other option remains. Lay down your weapon, and all will be forgiven. We can dispose of the meddlesome Tyrell twins together and begin rebuilding Waed. What do you say?”
In response, General Steroth simply whispered, “for the Empress.” He lifted his sword and, without another word, charged towards Prince Blyth. He made it less than half the distance between them before he was cut down, one of the ruby swords spinning through the air before neatly lopping his head off. Prince Blyth sniffed dismissively, summoning the two swords to his side, where they hovered. Stepping over General Steroth’s body, he made his way towards the throne room door. Lifting his foot, he kicked the door with all his might, smashing it nearly in two and tearing its hinges out of the wall. What he saw made him nearly scream with despair. Zull sat beside Prince Grevel, most of whose blood bindings had been burned away, leaving dull red scars in their place. Zull glanced up as Blyth entered, smiling mockingly.
“You lose, Prince,” was all he said as he sent his hemomantic power coursing through the last few blood bindings. Prince Blyth almost shrieked with anguish as he suddenly felt as if a great weight had been pressed down upon his shoulders. The supernatural strength and sense of well-being which had flowed through him for the last few hours swiftly drained away. He fell to his knees, no longer feeling strong enough to even stand. He breathed faster and faster as panic set in, each gasp seeming to hurt more than the one before it. The ruby swords shivered for a moment, before bursting with a wet splatter, depriving him of his last weapon. Worst of all, he felt his old illness returning, feeling frailer with each passing second. His hair, limp and soaked with sweat, now hung across his face, a pale curtain which he stared through with unmatched hate towards a confusedly blinking Prince Grevel, now fully awake and restored to full health, and Zull, who helped Grevel to his feet.
“What…what happened?” Prince Grevel asked, clutching his head in both hands. “I have a splitting headache.”
“Your cousin stole your strength using blood bindings,” Zull explained. “They’ve just been undone.”
“I remember being dragged in here,” Grevel said uncertainly. “After that things are…hazy.” He noticed Blyth sitting there, slouched over, seeing with fury. “Blyth. How could you do all of this? Do you realize how much damage you have caused? How many people you’ve killed?”
“I…had…one…chance,” Blyth repeated, drawing each word out after a long, ragged gasp. “One chance to overcome my illness and live. Without those bindings, I will be dead within the year. You’ve taken everything from me. Everything. My kingdom. My throne. My health. My revenge.” He pointed a finger trembling with fury at Zull. “You. You and your obnoxious, mewling sister. You’ve ruined everything, plans years in the making. How? How did you do it? What makes the two of you so special?”
Zull turned to fully face Prince Blyth, his disdain equal to the Prince’s wrath. “Courage, Prince. We had the courage to never stop until we had made sure we had put an end to your evil.”
“Hypocrite,” Prince Blyth spat. “Your hands are just as blood-stained as mine. You and I would both do whatever was necessary to get what we wanted. The only thing that separates us is our goals.”
“Not true,” Zull said, his face growing paler at the accusation. “We never tried to twist other living people into hemomantic abominations, or worse, stole their life force.”
“And who gave you the right to judge which actions were just and which were not?” Blyth asked.
Zull wiped the blood from his thumb onto the sleeve of his tunic, leaving a red smear. “You are right about one thing: my sister and I have committed terrible deeds, and are willing to do more, to win the day. But there is one crucial difference, Blyth, which you overlook: you serve only yourself, while we are willing to sacrifice ourselves to save others. And that is what gives us the strength to beat you.”
Prince Blyth reached out a shaking hand, touching the wall behind himself. Using it as leverage, he slowly stood back up, never taking his eyes off Zull. “If my dreams are to end here, then so be it. As Emperor of Waed, this is my final decree: neither you, your friend Vyle, nor Grevel shall leave this room alive.”
With a trembling hand reaching out, he bent all his hemomantic power, tempered and fueled by his rage, towards drawing one of his blood blades back together. The blood coalesced, and the weapon floated in the air before him once more, its surface roiling, a reflection of the prince’s fury. He sent it flying, aimed directly at Zull’s head, before it stopped, hovering halfway between them all in the center of the room.
“What?” Prince Blyth shrieked, before realizing that Prince Grevel now stood beside Zull, his hand outstretched towards the blood blade.
“This madness ends here, Cousin,” Prince Grevel said quietly.
Seething, Prince Blyth pushed back against Prince Grevel, trying to regain control of the weapon, but for the moment the princes were equally matched. It hovered in the air, moving neither one way nor the other, as each pushed harder and harder, desperate to break through and seize the blade. It began to twist and morph as the tremendous hemomantic pressures from each side grew greater and greater, slowly squashing the sword until it was shaped more like an elongated disk, shimmering opaquely in the air.
Prince Blyth, practically rocking back and forth, raised both hands before his face, shouting as he did so, “I…will not…be beaten…by you!”
Prince Grevel, his entire face contorted, pushed back with every ounce of will he possessed. He didn’t bother to speak, gritting his teeth in an ugly grimace. Though he strived as hard as he could, he had still not fully recovered from his time as Prince Blyth’s prisoner, and he was too weak and tired to utilize his power fully. Steadily, Prince Blyth gained more control, pushing the ruby disk closer and closer to where they stood. Zull, standing beside Grevel, glanced back and forth between the two princes, mind racing as he tried to think of a way to break the deadlock. He knew he could try adding his power to Prince Grevel’s own, but even that might not be enough for them to triumph over Blyth.
I must do something, and fast, Zull thought, looking around the room for something, anything he could use to his advantage. At last, his eyes landed on Vyle, haggard and bruised, standing a short distance to their right, watching the struggle with confusion. Then, they moved down to the knife which he still held in his hands, as well as his bloodied thumb. A plan crystallized then in his mind, complete and miraculous.
“Vyle!” he called. The bandit turned to look at him, startled. “Use this!” He tossed the knife towards him, watching as it shimmered and spun through the air, glinting. Prince Blyth noticed what Zull was doing and twisted one of his hands in a quick gesture. The blade hung there, paralyzed, as Prince Blyth smiled slightly. He had manipulated the Empress’ dried blood on the end of the blade, controlling it as he had the blood swords earlier. It hung there, then moved towards Vyle, Blyth clearly intending to use it to cut him down.
No! Zull thought, desperate. His eyes widened, then he pointed an accusing finger directly at Prince Blyth. Bending his own hemomantic will, Zull did something which he had never dared do before; attack a living human being directly with his hemomancy. With all his strength, he attacked the blood vessels in the Prince’s face, trying to rupture any one of them. As weak as his hemomancy was, the most that Zull managed to accomplish was get a small trickle of blood to leak from the Prince’s left nostril.
It was enough.
Prince Blyth, reacting instinctively from a lifetime of knowing that even the smallest cut could meet his demise, drew both of his hands to his face, shrieking in panic as he wiped the blood away and stared at his blood-stained palm with raw terror. This total lapse in his concentration caused the dagger which he had been levitating to drop from the air and into the waiting hands of Vyle. Time seemed to slow down as Vyle drew his hand back, aim, then threw the knife, watching as it arced through the air, then hit Prince Blyth in the neck. The prince cried out in pain, grasping the knife before yanking free. Blood gushed forth from the now open wound, dribbling down the front of his uniform. Blyth stared at the knife for a second, blinking repeatedly, as if unable to process what he was seeing. Slowly, he raised his eyes to stare at Prince Grevel, Zull, and Vyle, glaring at each of them in turn. “Hate…,” he whispered, before crumpling into a pile on the ground, amidst a pool of his own blood.
“I hardly believe it,” Prince Grevel said. “He’s dead.”
“All that power, the ability to turn blood itself into a weapon, and he died to a simple dagger to the neck,” Vyle said, shaking his head. “It would be funny, if it weren’t so bitterly tragic.”
Zull said nothing, simply staring at the fallen Prince’s body in numb astonishment. Finally, after everything that he and Zaphyr had been through, it was well and truly over. Their quest was finished.