Chapter 8 Brothers in Arms
By the time High Commander Elias Blackwood signed all of the steward’s contracts and reviewed the banquet's menu, the girl was gone.
She had slipped off as quickly and mysteriously as she had appeared.
It was . . . irritating. He was used to dealing with military men—soldiers of the Daemonguard who obeyed his every order without question. If he were at Firehelm Fortress, where he spent most of his time, a dozen men would have jumped at his command—“Seize her!”
But the servants at Gravenmere were an unpolished lot.
Walking at a fast pace, his black coat swirling about his boots, Elias blew into his study and slammed the door behind him.
Despite being heavily used, the room held a distinct air of abandonment.
A layer of dust covered the unused chairs and settee that filled the center of the room.
Along the walls, the ghostly, pale impressions of missing portraits were visible against the dark damask wallpaper.
A conspicuously large spot on the wall behind his desk was empty.
Three mirrors, two for decoration and one for dressing, were each covered by a heavy muslin cloth.
Dreary shadows obscured the rest of the room, hiding the cluttered bookshelves, the vases of dead and dried flowers, the soot-stained gas lamps and the broken grandfather clock that stood in the corner.
Elias didn’t allow the maids into his private study, and he didn't mind the gloominess of the room.
He had spent years fighting abhorrent monsters in the twilight conditions of the Abyss.
The sun at high noon bothered his eyes far more than a shuttered window.
Elias crossed to the claw-footed executive desk at the end of the room—a behemoth of black walnut and ebony inlays that could have doubled as a dining table.
It was swimming in stacks of unsorted papers, opened letters, writing tools and inkwells.
As the upcoming head of the Blackwood family, his tasks were without end.
He had already taken over much of his father’s work.
Magistrates from across Gravenmere’s domain sent him difficult queries.
Truly, the life of a future duke was one of making decisions.
The townships on his father's land always needed him to sign a document, allocate funds, or approve an addendum. And he was happy to do so.
Until he lost his patience.
Hands shaking, he set down the wooden box containing Meister Barbaros’s shined bullets and his new anti-mana pistol—the Starcaster. Then he hunched over the desk, gripping the edge of the wood, his pulse throbbing in his temples, his shoulders stiff with tension.
Searing pain lanced across his forehead.
The ground tilted. He gripped the wood.
He struggled not to lose consciousness.
Dark drapes covered the west-facing windows.
Still, the sunset found a way to pierce the curtains and stab his eyes.
A tick began in his clenched jaw as bolts of shooting pain traveled from his shoulders up his neck to the base of his skull.
With a grunt of frustration, he swept his arm across the top of the desk, smashing a collection of glass bottles and vials to the ground.
Expensive oils and tinctures soaked into the green carpet.
The potent scent of laudanum assaulted his nose.
He waited for the migraine to pass.
It would eventually.
Two years ago, the final Battle of the Abyss against the daemons was won.
But at a high cost. His entire unit perished in the hellfire that sprung from the Daemon King's maw.
The most elite Luminaries of the five kingdoms had turned out for the fight.
Without their Skytouched powers, the Daemon King would have broken loose from its underground realm and flooded the world with violent, bloodthirsty monsters.
Elias was one of five soldiers at ground zero whose mana talent finally subdued the beast.
He still bore the scars from that battle. The marks on his neck and left side were just part of the damage.
For six months after the Daemon King's defeat, he had remained in a military hospital, sucking down gruel through a straw, surrounded by Luminous medics and doctors.
They brought him back from the brink of death, though for what purpose, he couldn't divine.
His family had paid the king exorbitant amounts of goldlarks to save his life.
Then he was discharged, deemed unfit for service due to his disfigurements, adorned with no less than twelve medals, and given a cushy job as a paper pusher at a military training academy.
His days were filled with meetings, budget concerns, lesson plans and deadlines.
It was far from the life he was used to, but the war was won, and the kingdom was at peace.
He grimaced at that thought. What did soldiers do during a time of peace?
He didn't know. For the last ten years, his mind had been trained upon one simple, clear, unnegotiable goal: kill the Daemon King.
Kill it by any means necessary. Do what needs to be done.
He had never imagined what would happen after the Daemon King was defeated.
His life had taken on a slow, methodical, almost plodding pace. Repetitive. Quaint, really. It should have been nice—but he hadn't expected the stark, gaping hole of irrelevancy that yawned within him. When the emptiness became too brutal, he buried himself in paperwork.
A lot of paperwork.
There was plenty of work to keep himself busy around Firehelm Fortress. Testing was underway, and next year's Luminous recruits for the Daemonguard were about to be selected. Really, he had no time for a gala, courtship, high society or anything else.
The migraine surged again.
Elias held onto the desk like a drowning man clinging to a boat at sea.
He had only slept a few hours the night before.
After three years of training and seven years in the Abyss, he was used to patrols that sometimes lasted five to ten days straight.
It wasn’t good for the body, but old habits were hard to break.
His sleep schedule was one of many things still adjusting to life after the war.
At least the migraines were brief.
True to Dr. Shelley’s promise, the headaches were less frequent now than when he had first returned from the Abyss.
But they still occurred weekly. It had taken a small battalion of genius-level medics to heal him after his battle with the Daemon King.
He didn’t like probing too deeply into their methods.
Doctor Maeve Shelley had assured him he would live with functional mana, his head and heart intact as they should be.
All of the important bits worked as they should—he would live a full life, just like any other man.
Shelley had performed a miracle. He shouldn’t be ungrateful.
But some days, he was truly, unabashedly ungrateful.
Another burst of pain shot behind his eyes. Starfire, it blinded him.
He gritted his teeth as the tension increased along his forehead.
Between jagged bolts of pain, an image danced before his eyes: the bright sheen of the girl’s berry-colored hair.
Why it came to mind at that moment, he couldn’t say.
He hadn’t seen that color of hair in many years.
It was a striking feature of the Sera’nayan people.
During his time in the Abyss, he fought alongside many of their warriors.
He didn’t think his father had included any Sera’nayan families on the guest list. Not for lack of an alliance—the desert kingdom was on friendly terms with Forsynthia—but it was too far away for convenient travel.
Who was she, and which family did she belong to?
More importantly, why was she in the treasury?
Breathe.
Not many people understood the powers he wielded as the strongest mana-channeler in the realm.
He didn’t need to hear the girl rummaging around in the wardrobe to know she was there.
He had sensed her vital spark the moment he had entered the room, as natural as a draft from an unlatched window.
At first, he suspected a wayward servant hiding away.
But when the girl appeared, she was dressed like a lady of means.
She was . . . unexpected.
“You dusty bastard, pull it together,” he snarled. The pain was beginning to recede now. He sucked in another breath, forcing the red-hot daggers to sheathe themselves.
Just like a summer storm, the migraine passed as quickly as it arrived. It left him winded, wrung out, exhausted, and furious at his body’s betrayal.
But it wasn’t really his body anymore, was it?
He hushed the thought.
His mind returned to the girl. Whether by accident or intent, she had overheard his conversation with Meister Barbaros, which was classified information concerning the Daemonguard, the anti-mana pistol and the kingdom’s new factories.
Whoever this girl was, she might pose a risk to the kingdom’s security.
But . . . she seemed too clumsy and timid to be a spy.
How bothersome.
As the tension released in Elias’s neck, he felt the icy heat of his migraine pass from his body. His cramped muscles eased. He took a breath and stretched out his left arm, which always bothered him, then straightened his cravat.
He opened the lid of the wooden box and took out the Starcaster.
He immediately understood why Meister Barbaros had called it a cannon and not a pistol.
The design was unlike any firearm he had seen before.
The barrel was thicker and longer than the average pistol.
The length of the weapon spanned his forearm from elbow to wrist—heavy and unwieldy for one-handed shooting.
His eyes sharpened as he inspected the prototype from nose to grip. The dual-chamber action resembled something like an infinity symbol. Five bullets to a round—not much. But with Dust #210 Bloodglass, only one bullet should be enough to stop a daemon in its tracks.