Awaken
The moment Math passed the threshold, crystal lanterns flared to life, casting shards of soft light into every corner.
“It’s a girl!” one of the children exclaimed.
“Yes,” Tanxi replied. “We can see that.”
No, Math thought. Not a girl.
A grim lord: Kaiataris Von.
Of all the things he’d expected to find in the heart of the maze, the woman herself wasn’t one of them.
It had to be her, though.
Kaiataris provided the only color in an otherwise stark room of white marble, silver-clad books, transparent crystal, and gray metal.
If her skin had been white, he might’ve mistaken her for one of the statues they carved atop funeral caskets in the west. Her skin was that smooth, her body that still.
She appeared no older than Math, and never in his entire life had he seen someone who looked less like a “necromancer.”
Her golden-brown skin and angular eyes were typical of the Souna people from the Rokasmaa grasslands.
Her lips and nose were small. He couldn’t see her eyes, but suspected they would be a brown so dark as to verge on black.
Her hair, kissed with sun-streaked highlights, wrapped her head in intricate braids.
She wore a flowing gray dress so thin it scandalously outlined every curve.
Golden rings, chains, and bracelets crossed her arms and circled her throat.
Writing carved into the slab’s edge completed the quote that began outside:
IN SILENCE, WISDOM IS KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE LIbrARY AND THE TOMB.
Math was unnerved at how closely his thoughts had mirrored the infamous grim lord’s.
He could already feel how his life would forever be divided into two parts: before first seeing Kaiataris, and after.
Also, she hardly needed armies of the dead to defeat her enemies. A coy look would’ve worked just as well.
He’d assumed the author who’d commented on the beauty of her statues had been exaggerating. Instead, they’d undersold it. Someone should have mentioned that Kaiataris was the sort of beauty that heroes from legends once went to war over. Lisadre and the Sea Serpent or Cyala of the Halkanis Wars.
Someone tugged on Math’s trousers. He glanced down to see little Jura. “Is she sleeping?” the little girl asked, holding out her arms to be picked up.
“No.” Math dragged his gaze from the dead woman. He lifted Jura to his side.
“This must be a tomb.” Master Wadera’s hand hovered over his collar as though he hadn’t decided whether he wanted to clutch his robes or his beard. “She must be one of the Illuminated.”
Math didn’t trust himself to answer. If she was one of the Illuminated, then everything the Order believed was wrong.
“We need to reset the maze,” Tanxi said. “So they can’t follow us inside.”
Math exhaled. “You’re right. Let’s spread out and look for a map or switch—something simple. Captain of Safety,” he shot a theatrical look at Iduan, “your job is to make sure no one touches anything.”
The little girl bounced in his arms. “Are you going to kiss the pretty lady and break the spell?”
Math blinked. “What?” He glanced at the body, then away. “No!”
Jaiik piped up, “Can I kiss the pretty lady and break the spell?”
Tanxi burst into tense laughter as Taris smacked Jaiik’s head.
“No! You can’t— Tanxi, stop laughing.” Math glared at his sister, who’d covered her mouth but whose eyes still betrayed her amusement. Worse, Master Wadera was laughing too.
Math groaned. “No one is kissing anyone. We are the Idallik Order. We don’t do that.”
His sister stopped laughing and stared flatly at him.
“Work with me here,” Math muttered. “I’m trying to set a good example.”
“Whatever you say, little brother.”
Ignoring her, Math pointed at the unmoving, still, hopefully dead woman. “No kissing the scary dead lady. Understood?”
“I don’t know if I’d call her scary,” Tanxi said. “A little underdressed, maybe, but that’s more tempting than frightening. Though … Never mind. Idallik Order. I stand corrected: terrifying.”
Math sighed in frustration, hugging Jura before handing her back to Taris. He pulled Tanxi aside. “She’s scary because she’s a grim lord, Tan.”
Her eyes flicked to the body. “What? I’m sorry, you just said … what?”
“That’s Kaiataris. The Kaiataris. No one goes near that body. Ever.”
A loud thud echoed from the distance—something slamming into the antechamber door. Math and Tanxi turned toward it. Something was trying to break in. Maybe it was Captain Rabu. Maybe it was a giant animated tree.
Neither option was ideal.
Before Math could shout orders, a movement caught his eye. Iduan was making a mad dash for the grim lord’s body, apparently having decided forgiveness trounced permission. Or maybe she’d convinced herself touching the woman’s jewelry wasn’t the same as touching the woman herself.
“Iduan, no!” Tanxi shouted.
Math ran faster than he’d ever run before. He grabbed the girl’s waist and swung her out of the way, narrowly avoiding the marble slab. His hip slammed into the edge, a bruise forming even as he held Iduan away from the body.
“What did I just say?” Math hissed, fighting not to shout. Iduan’s eyes widened, ready to unleash the most effective weapon in her arsenal and start crying. “No waking the scary death lady, okay?”
Iduan’s only response was to flinch as a thunderous boom echoed from the far side of the antechamber beyond the maze.
Then the wall exploded.
The children whimpered; the older novitiates summoned their courage.
“Jaiik, Taris,” Master Wadera called. “Get the children behind the stacks!”
“But we can help!” Taris protested.
“You can help by staying out of the way,” Math ordered. “Make sure no one else touches anything.”
Master Wadera gave him an approving look as the older man summoned his staff. “Well said.”
Math grabbed a sword from the wall. Another crash drew his attention back to the maze.
The trees were coming. All too quickly for something that creaked and groaned and shouldn’t move at all.
Math could feel them, even before he saw them.
Roots writhed on the stone floor, sending out waves of murderous intent.
The trees were angry. One of them was recognizably one of the giant trees Math had seen at the logging camp—a Queen.
Math felt the same sense of wrongness he had the first time he’d seen them: the feeling that he gazed upon something of vast, terrible intelligence, more horrible for taking a shape so familiar.
Underneath the dark shadows of her looming branches, Captain Rabu advanced.
“Captain Rabu, you can resist this!” Math shouted. But the captain wasn’t listening. He was too far gone.
Math didn’t know what had happened to Lieutenant Nuhzar, but he feared the worst.
Tanxi pushed herself in front of Math, her sword a white-hot bar of light. “Come any closer and it’ll be your last move.”
Captain Rabu laughed. “Surrender, monster, and I’ll make it quick.”
Math wondered what the captain thought he was seeing.
Master Wadera tapped his staff against the ground, causing a rumble. “Think, Captain. This isn’t you.”
Math’s gut clenched as Rabu advanced. Both Wadera and Rabu had Land resonance, but Rabu was younger and stronger. Taking him alive would be near impossible.
Rabu’s first swing missed but demolished a bookshelf. Math felt a spike of panic, but no cries followed; the children were hiding elsewhere.
Math worked around the edges of the fight, dashing in to breach Rabu’s defenses and make small cuts that he could only hope would have a cumulative weakening effect. Tanxi was making quick work of many of the smaller trees, but she was tiring.
Rabu’s second swing landed with a gut-wrenching crunch against Master Wadera. Despite the obvious injury, the elderly knight stayed on his feet, slamming his staff against Rabu’s shoulder. The captain staggered, but fury replaced the pain as the captain rallied.
But Math had lost track of the Queen in the chaos—a costly mistake.
The ground under Master Wadera vanished. Wadera fell five feet before the stone returned. The old master screamed.
Math screamed too. He rushed forward, hoping to distract Captain Rabu from killing the man who’d raised him.
Math was as surprised as anyone when he slipped his sword under Rabu’s arm and found a weak spot in the man’s armor.
A second later, Rabu shoved Math away with casual disregard, tossing him backward, straight against Kaiataris’s marble slab.
The captain turned back to the still-struggling Master Wadera and raised his hammer.
The sound of Master Wadera’s death would haunt Math forever: a slick, wet splatter and a crunch of splintering bone. What remained no longer looked human. It was nothing more than meat.
Math found no comfort in the way Captain Rabu staggered after, as if he’d finally noticed his own fatal injury.
Math grabbed the edge of the marble slab and pushed himself to his feet. He glanced at it, distracted. Then a cold spike of fear pierced him, washed away any anger. The marble slab lay empty.
The necromancer’s body was gone.
Math shoved down his panic, an emotion that helped no one. He would deal with the implications later. He would—
A woman’s hand, clad in gold jewelry, touched his shoulder.
Time stopped.
Math glanced up and stared straight into the necromancer’s eyes.
He’d been right about their color—blacker than the deepest woods at night.
He could scarcely describe the feeling of looking into her eyes, a strange combination of horror and fascination.
The sort of allure one might feel at the top of a cliff when some darker, destructive part of the soul whispered how easy it would be to step off into the abyss and lose oneself forever.
“Worry not, fair knight,” she said to him, oh so gently. “I did not expect to be woken by the sounds of battle, but you have done your job this day.”
He should attack her. He knew he should attack her, but—
A child screamed.
Math’s head whipped back to where the trees had pushed aside a stone bookcase to advance on the children. Jaiik stood in front of the group, trembling but defiant, holding a javelin that crackled with lightning.
Jaiik’s resonance was Storm. He’d manifested his weapon.
It wouldn’t be enough.
“Get away from them!” Math shouted.
Then a soft voice cut across all others, as if every other sound belonged to events happening miles away.
“Has it truly been so long that you have forgotten what it means to attack a graven wizard in her own domain?” Kaiataris floated above the slab, her hair rimmed with ghostly light.
Her eyes rolled back into her head, revealing whites glowing the same hue.
Crackling pops of energy, something that might have been mistaken for lightning without Jaiik providing a reference of the real thing, danced over her metal jewelry before radiating out to touch the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Those surfaces, too, glowed with fine lines, forming traceries that merged into symbols and glyphs, raced from her fingertips to encompass the totality of the room. The walls—the maze itself—pulsed with her power.
The trees burned.
Something else was happening, too. A feeling of abandoned graveyards and the hair-raising certainty that something ugly and unnatural had just opened its eyes.
A dead knight rose back to his feet. He began attacking the tree people he’d been helping before Tanxi had slain him.
He was only the first. Others soon followed.
Captain Rabu staggered and fell to one knee.
He bled freely, a steady stream of red coloring his silver armor.
The captain choked, although not from any obvious cause.
Then Math noticed that sweet, sad little Satu had poked his head from behind Taris’s leg, his face twisted with hate in a way that Math had never seen before.
Tears streamed down the little boy’s cheeks.
Satu wasn’t summoning a weapon. He was summoning water—inside Rabu’s lungs. The Captain of Swords was drowning on dry land.
The exact moment of the captain’s death was easily pinpointed, too, because Rabu barely collapsed to the ground before he was rising again as one of the dead. His hammer vanished, but he didn’t seem to notice or care, instead using his bare hands to tear apart bark and flesh.
Then the Queen screamed.
The sound was a piercing stab inside his head. Every tree or controlled person on the battlefield recoiled. The Queen thrashed as she tried to run, but the maze had her trapped. She turned into a pyre, collapsing to the ground with the scent of burning wood.
Math turned to Kaiataris.
The grim lord no longer floated, but stood atop the marble slab, staring at the scene with distaste.
“Was Ice Falls destroyed?” she asked Math. Her accent was archaic, but her manner was congenial, as if she was catching up on gossip with an old friend. “All of it, destroyed save for these small spaces: my sanctum and the maze?”
“You keep away from him!” his sister yelled as she ran over, brandishing her sword.
“Tanxi, stay back,” Math warned. He hadn’t forgotten how much damage the necromancer had done and how easily she’d done it. How she’d animated the dead—for all he knew, was still animating the dead.
Said necromancer gazed at his sister with bemused ambivalence. Math could feel the frustration and annoyance boiling off of Kaiataris for all that none of it showed in her expression.
“It is done,” Kaiataris said.
A further disturbance from the antechamber drew everyone’s attention. None of them wanted some magical surprise that might turn their hard and painfully won victory into an equally bitter defeat.
Luck was with them, however. Instead of more trees, more knights arrived, knights Math knew weren’t infected, including Lieutenant Nuhzar and Commander Talu. Much as Math was pleased for the reinforcements, he couldn’t help but feel dread: Math wasn’t supposed to be there.
As he tried in desperation to come up with some excuse, any excuse, that might be acceptable, he heard a sharp exhale from his sister. “What the…”
Math turned around and stared.
The grim lord Kaiataris Von had disappeared.