Chapter 17 The Final Bargain
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The Final Bargain
Dubias Row was home to crooks and criminals, scorch-marked buildings and defaced murals, puddles of orange lamplight and blood-slicked cobbles.
It was also home to ?ernasti’s tavern—a dingy, disreputable establishment where the bitterale was watered down, the patrons wore shabby cloaks, and the house stew was an embarrassment of red-brown slop.
Coiled ropes, black with soot and grime, hung from the ceiling for no discernible reason.
Levan loathed the place, but needs must.
“Why are we here?” asked the mage who was, in another life, almost certainly Levan’s grandfather.
Miret Tomazin had a long, pale beard down to his waist, knotted with turquoise and gold beads. Hailing from the deserts of Eqora, his skin was brown and crinkled, his pale blue scholar’s robes disheveled, his half-moon spectacles perpetually askew.
Levan sipped his ambertea, wincing at the cheap, sour tang of the leaves. “I suppose you already know.”
“Ha. Taqin.” True. Miret downed his liquor in one determined gulp. “We are here to find a necromancer. With not one but two parents lying in the crypt, the fervor with which you seek the maligned art has intensified. Even though you have seen firsthand what it has done to Sando Segal.”
A gaggle of tipsy mages entered the tavern, trailing behind a red-haired musician hauling a lute case.
“Did you know the Risen would be like that?”
“I had my suspicions.”
“And yet you didn’t voice them.”
“Sometimes I fear your dogged pursuit of a necromancer is the only thing holding you upright.”
The precision of this assessment knocked the wind out of Levan for a few beats. “So why are we here? In ?ernasti’s.”
“If I had to make an educated guess—”
“Do you make any other kind?”
“I would say that in a fit of unparalleled insanity and desperation, you wonder whether the Disciples of Halant might be on to something.”
Levan couldn’t resist the smile. “Nothing gets past you. Tell me what you know of Halant.”
“Very well—with the strong caveat that almost all of what I’m about to say is, at best, urban legend.”
“The same could be said of your beloved Saints, could it not?”
Miret laughed his mirthful chuckle—one of Levan’s favorite sounds in the world, as luminous as sunlight hitting a crisp blue lake.
“Right you are. So, the necromancer Halant. Born and raised in Tarsa, proficient in death magic from the day he received his first wand. Resurrected birds and bees, flowers and great oaks, until their garden in Amuilly’s Vale was a riot of life and color.
So far, so wholesome, until he discovered two things.
First, that his gift was outlawed. And second, that it offered him an immense social currency.
“He began trading in promises with other children in school. Yes, I’ll bring back your mother if she passes of the bloodblight—if you are loyal to me always, if you do my bidding, if you act as my servant and my confidant.
Yes, I’ll save your brother from the blackfever if you bring me a sack of ascens and a cup of sugared ambertea. Et cetera.”
So the fabled necromancer’s work could be bought, bargained for.
“Did he make good on his promises?”
“Indeed. By eleven years old, he was interested in little else. Started killing and then resurrecting mourncrows just to scare the more skittish students. Eventually, the Pühti Vavra came knocking.”
Pühti Vavra. Pure Guard. The Tarsan police force.
“They arrested and charged him after he resurrected a local journalist assassinated by the Pühti Vavra themselves.”
Levan balked. “They imprisoned him? At eleven years old?”
A grave nod. “Unfortunately for them, he had amassed quite a following by this point. His worshippers orchestrated a jailbreak and led him into hiding on the isle of Nomaden. There, the Disciples of Halant were born.”
“So Nomaden is crawling with the Risen?” Levan asked, equal parts horrified and fascinated. Nomaden was a famously lawless land with little in the way of government, let alone extradition treaties. “How long ago was this? How old is Halant now?”
Miret pushed his wonky glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I couldn’t say with any degree of certainty. Everything I’ve just told you was learned through hearsay. It’s likely little more than folklore.”
Levan sipped at his appalling ambertea. The lutist struck up a surprisingly beautiful rendition of the Bone Queen’s Lament. “What if it wasn’t?”
Miret raised a hooded brow.
“Killoran and I walked past this tavern a few weeks ago. I’ve been learning the languages of the Eastern Republics, and two mages were sitting outside, drinking and jabbering—I caught snippets of rapid-fire Tarsan.
They were discussing what they might next offer Halant in exchange for resurrection.
Neither of them had yet offered him something he deemed valuable enough to trade.
Which implies they have direct contact with the necromancer—that he is more than peasant folklore. ”
“We’re here in anticipation of stumbling upon those mages once more?”
Levan nodded in the direction of two bickering Enchanters sitting by the fogged-glass window. On their table sat a silver chain with a pearlescent pendant emitting a high-pitched, bone-rattling frequency. “Do you have any idea what that pocketwatch is for?”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Perhaps we should satisfy your academic curiosity.”
Miret sighed as Levan stood. “No unnecessary bloodshed, child.”
“I’m no child,” Levan replied, although rather than bristling against the word, he felt oddly soothed by it.
Their eyes met, and the moment deepened, swelled. The lutist’s lament reached a sweet crescendo. When Miret spoke, his throat sounded thick. “I wish I’d known you when you were. Someone should’ve protected you.”
At the mention of his childhood, Levan’s internal guards slammed up, but not fast enough.
A series of images flitted through his mind’s eye like a deck of cards shuffling: Porrol Vogolan’s twisted face as he uttered sen doloran; the wet patches on Levan’s bedsheets each morning; the spot of black mold on the ceiling of the shack, where he always fixed his gaze in the moments before the torture curse was cast. The pain, the pain.
He tapped out a rhythm on his knuckles, counting in time with his quickening heartbeat. “It is what it is,” he said emptily. “It was what it was.”
Miret’s eyes softened. “Are you sure you want this? To bring them back, after all they did to you?”
“My mother never hurt me.”
Tap-tap-tap on his clenched knuckles, up and down an imaginary scale with each opposing finger, like playing a piano.
“There are many different ways to hurt a person. The torture curse is only one of them.”
“She was good.”
Levan had the sudden intense desire to press a blade into his flesh, to peel away the discomfort like the skin of an apple, physical pain to distract him from emotional hurt.
“Without your parents’ shackles, you could be one of the finest Healers this land has ever seen. I’ve seen the way you talk about T?lun’s work.” Miret gestured to Levan’s golden prosthetic. “You could be his equal, his peer.”
Something soared in Levan’s chest for the slenderest of moments before crashing downward. “No. I’m too far gone.”
And besides, he was fairly sure the brand’s magic worked in such a way that if he abandoned the Bloodmoons, it would constitute an act of betrayal.
He turned his back on the conversation and thought only of forward.
“Ter ?htu,” Levan greeted the Disciples at the window table, sharp edges of the Tarsan language forming clumsily on his tongue.
One of the mages looked up, swayed drunkenly, and shrieked.
“?arlak r?dma! ?arlak r?dma! ?arlak r?dma!”
Scarlet rot.
The other mage waved her hands in various impenetrable patterns, hushing and murmuring for her companion to quiet. But the drunker mage either could not or would not, caterwauling about how she could not perish yet, because she hadn’t made her ülam Kasit. Final bargain.
Her fear was real. This was a mage who had met with her chosen deity and failed to win his favor.
“?arlak r?dma! ?arlak r?dma! ?arlak r?dma!”
Levan raised his wand, aiming it at one of their temples, frightening the shrieker into silence.
“M’al net vehca kamet rel.” I’m not going to hurt you.
“I just want to see the pocketwatch.” He took it without permission.
Even through the synthetic skin of his golden palm, the pendant trembled like a caged beast, the magic inside rattling at the bars of its confines. “Midar ci takhes?”
“Summoning device,” the more levelheaded of the two grunted in Vallish. “When the blood of the recently departed spills into it, Halant appears to resurrect them.”
Levan traced a fingertip over the intricate engravings, the shallow notch labeled saveri. Blood. “Is there a way to summon Halant without a fresh corpse?” The less drunk mage shook her head, lank black hair falling into her sallow face. “How does he get here?”
“Portari. They don’t strip out spells in Nomaden.”
“A long way to portari. A thousand miles, almost?”
The Disciple tilted her jaw upward with something like pride. “He’s a powerful mage.”
“Thank you for your candor.” Levan smiled genially, then withdrew his wand from his belt and aimed it at the drunker mage’s heart.
Guilt pulsed somewhere deep in his belly, but the death wouldn’t stick—Halant would arrive to resurrect her, and she’d spend the rest of her days as a magicless Risen. Levan might not even have to carve the kill mark into his arm, though perhaps for ritual’s sake he would anyway.
The only undesirable matter was that the kill was being made publicly, but the prospect of abducting multiple mages to go somewhere more discreet was no less conspicuous.
?ernasti wouldn’t report Levan’s crimes—his was an establishment so disreputable that he wouldn’t want to attract Silvercloak attention—and the lutist wouldn’t willingly insert himself in a Bloodmoon feud.
Most common folk had more sense than that.
“Sen ammorten.”
Levan expected the killing curse to fork into his victim’s chest, but instead the incantation sort of…fell from the tip of his wand. Tumbled to the floor without finding its mark.
He tried twice more to no avail.
Fear and confusion fogged his mind—surely his well was not so empty that he could not cast?—as he plucked a dagger from a sheath sewn into his cloak pocket and cut the mage’s throat instead. She crumpled to the dark, stained floorboards in a pathetic heap.
“Nar! Nar! Pulan!” bellowed the surviving Disciple, dropping to her bony knees beside her fallen companion.
Confused and disquieted, Levan probed the dark depths of his internal well, searching for a reason his magic had failed him. Although he’d been wholly depleted after killing his mother’s wand, he’d done his best to replenish, barely casting a thing until—
—hold on.
He’d killed his mother’s wand.
More superstitious mages believed such an act would cause future magic to revolt against the destroyer. He’d dismissed this as parochial nonsense, but now…
A wave of panic crested in his chest. Not just at the prospect of his power turned unruly, but at the thought of other mages witnessing his botched attempts at a basic spell.
Pulse roaring in his temples, Levan held the pocketwatch to the parted flesh of the woman’s throat, watching the blood trickle into the shallow saveri notch in Halant’s pendant.
The shrill frequency ceased at once. The pocketwatch drew in the air in the tavern, as though the entire room orbited around it. Everything seemed to tilt, shudder. Glisten.
The second Disciple looked up, cheeks glazed with tears, an expression of deep existential horror on her gaunt face.
“Time to barter for your friend’s life,” Levan said darkly, as a shriveled necromancer in a violet cloak appeared a handful of yards away.