Matabar

Book II. Chapter 71 - The Heavy Knight

Chapter 71

Behind the Heavy Knight, who kept his blazing gaze fixed on the hill where the group of Cloaks had positioned themselves, people bustled about. They ran around the charred emitters, tried to repair the smoking generators, but to no avail. However complex and cumbersome their stationary shield had been — just recently capable of counteracting dozens of varied parameters — strategic magic had swept it aside like a speck of dust from a soiled lapel.

And not so much because of its absurd power, but because in that seemingly crude spell that served as artillery, the attacking parameters were so numerous that Ardan couldn’t even imagine the mathematical systems used not only to calculate them but also to assemble and debug them.

“Why aren’t they attacking?” asked the local lieutenant-investigator.

He was right — despite the obvious readiness for battle of the Selkado swordsman cloaked in Ley-armor, the laboratory that had until recently been hidden under the shield – built around the excavated entrance to the shrine – was more preoccupied with… excavation.

Like ants, the workers fussed around the jagged excavation pit, strewn with mounds of stone and earth. Numerous hastily assembled ladders and a few rails with mechanical sleds led down into it.

“Let’s find out, then.” Mshisty struck his staff against the ground, and a green sigil flared under his feet. “Klementiy, Parela — you two take a team.”

Thick vines burst through the soil beneath the major’s boots and, lifting him half a meter off the ground as they stretched out like an endless ribbon, bore him forward. The Heavy Knight, for his part, shouted something, and several people behind him scurried around a buzzing apparatus hooked up to yet another generator.

A transparent, barely visible film once again shrouded the dig site. Parela and Klementiy did not waste any time either. Striking their staves against the ground, they raised a double, shimmering dome over their group, which occasionally flickered with the outlines of indistinct silhouettes.

Ardan had read about such tactics in war manuals — when a complex dual-component sigil was split between two mages. It required an incredible level of mastery in the art of war, as well as an equally high degree of coordination between the two casters.

The Cloaks, having collected themselves, were already hefting rifles to their shoulders, checking that their sabers slid easily from their scabbards, and were primed to tear off after Mshisty. Likewise, behind the Heavy Knight a number of gentlemen were gathering with a very characteristic, crazed and nonchalant air. Dressed in whatever they could throw together, armed with steel not only from different gunsmiths and factories but from different eras.

Ardan hadn’t seen mercenaries often in his life, but even the brief experience during Boris’s kidnapping and the attack on the train when he first traveled to the Metropolis had been enough to recognize the fringe scum whom even bandits treated with contempt.

But in the next instant, there was no room left for thought at all. Two Pink mages, under the cover of night at the very edge of the endless Empire, met in mortal combat.

Mshisty, still maintaining concentration on a very complex sigil, struck his staff against the palm of the grapevine. The focus crystals on his bracelet flashed, and a basic version of a tri-component sigil glimmered on the staff.

The Knight, meanwhile, simply… ran. Though such a word hardly fit the scene unfolding before Ardan’s eyes. He knew that the Selkado Swordmages essentially operated on the principle of layered enchantments. Only their enchantments were, in the most literal sense, carved directly into the mage’s flesh, muscles, and bones—sigils they carried with them their entire lives. This allowed them to multiply the speed of Ley usage, drastically simplify casting, and just as sharply shorten casting time, but in doing so, to unimaginably narrow a mage’s arsenal of abilities.

When a sigil is carved into your very bones, it’s nearly impossible to manifest anything else beyond the one you carry as an integral part of your body. Who would agree to that? A soldier raised from childhood with only one purpose and task: the destruction of Classical Star mages.

In essence, the Selkado Swordmages—who took the place of the country’s military branch of Star Magic—functioned as a highly specialized and powerful weapon. That’s why, when complex chains of runic connections flickered on the Knight’s legs as if burning through his skin, sparks of lightning coiled around the Knight’s feet.

Yellow, razor-sharp and just as scorching, leaving narrow black scorch lines across the ground, they took the shape of… ice skates. The very kind used in a game of hockey. The Knight, who didn’t even need to maintain active focus on his enchantments, slid forward on those sparks across the already charred earth.

With a speed a mail train would envy, he hurtled straight toward Mshisty. And from Mshisty’s staff, three flashes of different colors had already burst forth: red, black, and gray. Coalescing and accelerating, they whirled as tiny spheres above the tip of his staff.

Ardan could barely fathom the discipline and training a mage’s mind must possess to maintain not just one, but two immensely complex spells… for this was no Knight, who only needed to feed Ley into the sigils of his “armor” that had become part of his own body.

The Knight suddenly changed direction, slicing through space in a zigzag and, pausing for an instant off Mshisty’s left shoulder (instinctively attacking from the side where the wizard’s empty sleeve fluttered in the wind), he swung his sword. On the flat of the blade one could discern the engraving of several sigils with the naked eye, but those were used by Knights only as the most serious of arguments; for the most part their tactics boiled down to…

“Eternal Angels…” Parela breathed.

And Ardan was in complete agreement with her. The flat of the blade, forged from an Ertalain alloy, blazed with bright light and then, a moment later, tore loose in a wide arc. No sigils, no incantation. What the Knight wrought didn’t even, in essence, belong to the canon of Star Magic.

It was pure Ley. His own. Torn from his own star, driven through the charms of the Selkado Seal Armor, and sent flying. Naked, destructive force. Such manipulations with Ley and one’s own stars would have turned an ordinary mage, at best, into a drooling invalid — but not a Knight.

Mshisty did not twitch his staff, did not utter a single word, did not even arch an eyebrow. Yet at the same time, as the gleaming scythe that refracted the moonlight around itself streaked across the ground in a sudden flash, the major was ready. Several grapevines burst from the earth at his feet and, weaving into the form of an ancient shield, solidified in the scythe’s path. It cleaved the first layer, scorched the second, and shattered on the third like broken glass. The fragments, falling to the ground, vanished into shimmering dust as they sliced through the thinning grapevine stems.

Ardan had no doubt that the major had used a complex defensive sigil of the Yellow Star, one with multiple functions — a mental link to the mage himself, which allowed Mshisty to control the barrier’s positioning and an active defense that reacted on its own to the parameters of an intruding energy.

But maintaining an active mental link, as in that Davos Seed Lash back at Irigov’s manor, demanded far too much Ley to sustain. Not even a second of the duel had passed before one of the focus crystals on Mshisty’s bracelet crumbled into the same dust as the Knight’s Ley-scythe.

And the Knight was not standing still. Exploiting the primary weakness of Star mages — the need to assign parameters to a sigil’s target — he moved tirelessly across the field. His lightning-skates blazed with yellow fire, and the armor around his body seemed to capture the starlight. It tangled around the ghostly plates like woolen threads around a spindle until, finally, the Knight halted and crossed his blades.

As if pushing something away from himself, he strained to fling apart the sigil-etched swords, and from the intersection of the two steel fangs a comet tore free. Leaving behind a misty trail of cold, mesmerizing light, a buzzing sphere — forged of ice and entwined with liquid silver — hurtled toward Mshisty.

Apparently, a single exchange of spells was enough for the Heavy Knight to stop sparing his strength. His entire arsenal was essentially limited to the sigils engraved on his blades and nothing more, but for most battles such a set is more than sufficient.

Most battles…

Mshisty’s feet touched ground, and the palm of grapevines suddenly bloomed into a broad, pink blossom. Five petals, each as wide as a festive tablecloth, began to dance a merry roundelay around the major who had created them.

They intercepted the silver-breathing sphere of that celestial wanderer. They entangled it, enveloped it, swaddled it as if it were a lost child that had forgotten it belonged to the distant sky and had for some reason come down to earth.

The next thing Ardan saw was a blinding flash of light and a crater a few meters across that formed between Mshisty and the Selkado Knight. An astonishing amount of kinetic energy… it’s hard to imagine the scale of destruction if such a spell were used amid city buildings and there was no Pink battle-mage nearby. And not an average one (if such words even apply to Pink mages), but someone with Mshisty’s level of ability and power.

And yet, despite all his regalia, the major was left defenseless. Another focus crystal on his bracelet burst, and Mshisty found himself without a shield, directly in front of the Knight. The Knight, his expression stony and his gaze intent, charged forward.

With the speed and zeal of a predator that has seen its prey’s exposed belly, he rushed at Mshisty. With each passing moment his armor shone ever brighter, until it took on the shape of the upper half of a three-meter-tall suit of plate armor, wielding equally colossal blades. Nearly the entire body of the Selkado Knight glowed as brightly as a Yuletide tree — dozens of sigils carved into his flesh and beneath it flared with Ley energy.

The Knight moved faster than even the eyes of a human — or a matabar — could follow. Only from the brief flashes of his lightning-skates could one determine where the Selkad was. And it seemed that any moment now the Black House would lose its second-best battle-mage.

The three spheres swirling around the tip of Mshisty’s staff trembled. The red sphere merged with the gray, and a torrent of lava — crackling as charred stone fangs shot from its depths — fanned out before Mshisty.

He did not trouble himself with calculating precise target parameters, instead blanketing an area in magic, aiming by direction rather than exact values.

The lava devoured the already-suffering earth like a fiery monster, and the shards that relentlessly flew off to the sides occasionally reached even the hill — and the shrine beyond. Now Ardan understood why both sides had hurried to erect shields. If not for those, the duel of the two Pink mages might, in the end, have left not a single observer alive…

The Knight’s blades, slipping from the tenacious grasp of the lava’s embrace, dimmed. Not the ones in his hands, but those that had frozen like a haze in the phantom gauntlets of his spectral armor. In exchange, his plate armor shone all the brighter and, upon taking the direct hit of several molten stone fangs, it turned them into nothing more than harmless pebbles.

The Knight had nearly vanished again amid sparks of yellow lightning when, this time, Mshisty’s black and red spheres combined. With another soundless crunch a focus-crystal disintegrated, and above the tip of the major’s staff an orb flared to life, swelling larger and larger. Inside it, waves of black oil and something like paint rolled over one another. And the orb swelled and swelled, until it burst like a spring bud.

Only instead of leaves, countless beams gushed forth into the air. Straight, endlessly long arrows the color of dried blood, they traced jagged lines through space. And wherever they touched physical objects, those objects immediately began to shudder and disintegrate. Not into ash, not into dust, not into anything that would explain the nature of the spell, but simply — to fall apart. As if the rays were slicing through that invisible force of attraction that allowed the physical world to exist in the form in which it was seen and felt by everyone watching the battle.

Once again the Knight was forced to feed Ley into his armor, but when one of the beams brushed the ghostly plate, a ragged, ghastly wound opened across the Selkad’s chest — nothing like what a knife blade or a glancing bullet might leave. No, this bleeding mash of torn flesh and tattered cloth looked entirely different.

The Selkad froze, looked down at his chest, then up at Mshisty — who looked… bored. Yes, in fact, the face of the major, which moments ago had gleamed with a mad lust for battle, now showed only a shadow of disappointment, subsumed by an all-encompassing boredom.

Without so much as a glance toward the commotion at the shrine, the Selkad turned toward the lake. His armor had dimmed almost completely, but the lightning that had looked like skates slithered down his calves until it refashioned itself into cavalry boots. The Knight took a single step forward and, by the time Ardan could register his silhouette, it was already a hundred meters away.

The Knight was running. Along the shoreline, skirting the lake’s glassy surface, he raced as fast as his Ley fueling the Armor would allow.

As for Mshisty… yawning, not theatrically but quite sincerely, he gave his staff a lazy swing. All three spheres merged into one and shot into the sky as a pillar of murky radiance, nearly imperceptible against the night sky. And just as moments ago a starry comet had streaked toward the major, now a crumbling firmament cascaded down upon the head of the Knight sprinting along the sandy shore.

Dozens of dark, flaming fragments poured down on the lakeside like rain. The pops of explosions rang out, each accompanied a moment later by hazy domes of light expanding where the fragments struck the ground. The Knight darted and zigzagged among them, time and again veering aside at the last moment, but the rain grew heavier and heavier until, finally, it turned into a deluge—a deluge that pocked the beach into a sieve. It was as if some enormous, invisible being was tirelessly hammering the sand with a mallet, punching deep, perfectly round craters into it.

The Selkad’s body was not turned into a mash of bones and blood. It wasn’t shattered so badly that even a cheap toy in the hands of a careless child might envy it. It didn’t crack like spring frost on the surface of a puddle.

It simply vanished. When the Selkad disappeared for an instant in yet another flash, then as soon as it dissipated, only broken blades remained on the sand. And nothing more.

The destructive rain of shattered sky poured down for a few moments more, then dispersed. Mshisty, swaying, managed to stay on his feet. No matter how bored he had appeared, such a duel — however brief (and coming immediately after casting a strategic magic sigil) — could not leave a mage unscathed.

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Another focus crystal fractured on the mage’s wrist, and Mshisty himself seemed to struggle to keep his eyes open. For him the battle was over, but for everyone else the night was only beginning.

The mercenaries — about twenty of them — opened fire. Previously they hadn’t shot, so as not to draw undue attention from the Pink mage, but now, seeing that the battle between these titans of Star Magic was over and that the victor was not in the best condition, they were eager to snatch the laurels. And along with those laurels, the head of Mshisty.

On the major’s body, clearly weakened beyond acceptable limits, his defensive medallion didn’t even react at first. At his belt, a medallion resembling folded beetle wings suddenly flared and crumbled, and at the same time the earth bucked up around Mshisty. Two stone slabs, precisely matching the medallion’s pattern, rose and covered the exhausted mage, hiding him from the hail of bullets.

The Cloaks, who had been preparing for a shootout all this time, were quick to respond in kind. Even before the first lead “wasps” buzzed out from the mercenaries’ overheated barrels, return fire erupted from the hill.

Ardan’s ears rang from the thunderous echo of the cannonade all around; his nostrils were slashed by the razor-sharp, acrid smell of gunpowder; before his eyes the air was veiled by a caustic white-gray haze, through which sparks flared here and there.

The mercenaries’ bullets, striking the walls of the stone cocoon of folded wings that sheltered Mshisty beneath its dome, burst apart into leaden shrapnel, sparking amid the starry sprawl of the weary sky.

At the same time, the Cloaks’ bullets—by then nearly spent—thudded into the barely visible wall of the shield that still covered the dig site and ancient shrine. After exchanging the first volley, the mercenaries set about reloading, while the Cloaks, swapping cartridges in their rifles and cylinders in their revolvers on the run, charged down the hill. Half a kilometer was hardly a distance from which one could fire accurately without specialized rifles and equipment.

“Move it, Klementiy!” Parela hissed through labored breaths.

Only the mages remained on the hill now. The lieutenant and the captain scrambled around a complex device that a stammering mage was frantically assembling, and Ard… he simply didn’t know what to do.

No further orders had come, aside from helping with the strategic magic, and he himself had rarely found himself on a Black House punitive raid. This was, in fact, his first experience. He truly didn’t understand what exactly he was supposed to do and, furthermore, he had no desire to throw himself into flying bullets.

“What are you standing around for, Corporal?!” Parela barked.

“What should I do?” Ardan asked, bewildered.

“Help—” the captain began, but then, glancing from the device to the shrine and back to Ardan, she simply waved a hand. “Just try not to get in the way.”

The mercenaries whooped and fired wildly in all directions, not really aiming. They relied entirely on the shimmering, twilight-patterned veil of the shield. It protected those lovers of bloody thrills from the Cloaks’ barrage.

“Ready!” Klementiy shouted.

The lieutenant yanked one lever, turned a small gear, flipped a few switches, then manually aimed a steel dish with a long spike — which had emerged from the depths of the device — toward the shrine.

Together with Parela, they inserted the bases of their staves into the apparatus’s technical sockets and simultaneously manifested sigils. Something from the Blue Star’s arsenal, dealing with the elements and gravity.

At first nothing happened, and then from the center of the dish, gathering at the edges of the circle, crackled Ley discharges the color of an overripe watermelon. They converged around the central spike, swelling and growing until they shot out as a bending ribbon of light.

The ribbon-beam flew over the Cloaks’ heads — some of whom were already lying on the ground, clenching bandages in their teeth as they tied off wounds.

Coiling into a tangle, the ribbon-beam swirled above the shield’s dome. Expanding and thinning, Parela and Klementiy’s spell suddenly split into several parts. Four stone boulders, reminiscent of giant screws, spun around their axes and hurtled down with such speed that the shockwave knocked the nearest Cloaks off their feet and a cloud of thick dust blew the top layer of soil apart.

When a lake breeze dispersed the gray cloud, the shield over the shrine was gone. Ardan didn’t really understand which parameters had been employed or, evidently, amplified by the strange device, but at that moment it didn’t matter in the slightest.

“Let’s go!” Parela shouted.

Leaning on each other’s elbows, she and Klementiy jogged down the hill in a shaky trot. Their faces were so pale they looked almost whiter than the moonlit path on the lake’s troubled surface. The still-glossy, hastily wiped streaks of blood beneath their noses and ears only completed the picture.

As they went, the captain and the lieutenant manifested simple healing sigils to aid the Cloaks. Unable to assess the severity of injuries on the fly, they repeatedly used the same basic Green Star construct: a painkiller and a boost to one’s own regeneration.

The Cloaks, dusting themselves off, got to their feet. It was as ghastly as it was impressive. Sometimes missing chunks of flesh where bullets had been gouged out, sometimes with shattered arms, often bleeding profusely — still they pressed on. They racked the bolts of their rifles, cocked the hammers of their revolvers, fired, and advanced. Clad in black, their belt buckles glinting like silvery fire at the center of each dark, tireless silhouette.

From the mercenaries’ side wafted a wave of fear. Pure and unalloyed. They might have followed the Selkad’s example and, throwing down their weapons, bolted in retreat, but they knew perfectly well they wouldn’t make it.

And so they continued to fire. They hid behind ancient ruins — massive fragments of granite stelae and walls that once surrounded the entrance to the underground chamber — and kept shooting. Often without even looking. They just stuck their guns out from cover and squeezed the triggers at random. Mostly — they shot into the sky.

Parela and Klementiy, still on the move, struck their staves against the ground in unison. From the tip of the captain’s staff burst a half-transparent figure, disfigured in a silent scream, molded from acrid gray smoke. Spreading its clawed, unnaturally skeletal arms, it sped toward the shrine. And wherever it passed, the earth became coated in a cracking crust.

The lieutenant, for his part, created not twelve, but almost six dozen disks that were painfully reminiscent of Orlovsky’s Shield. It was probably that very spell — which cost the lieutenant one of his focus crystals — just an enhanced and modified version.

The disks whirled in a swift dance around the battlefield, shattering and disintegrating under those few bullets that might have found a mark in the tireless black-clad figures.

But with each passing moment, with each movement of the phantom figure of Parela’s spell raging on the far side of the mercenaries’ cover, the mercenaries’ gunfire faltered. As did the shouts of the frenzied workers. Second by second the clamor fell silent, thinned, faded, until finally a searing, unpleasant silence reigned over the lakeshore. The kind that descends not when silence is gently broken by the measured breathing of someone lost in thought, but when your ears are struck by the ringing of something… not alive.

“Did you leave any witnesses, Captain?” Mshisty asked as he approached them from behind.

Only now did Ardan notice that Parela’s eyes, all this time, had been devoid of pupils or irises. Bloodshot whites, and nothing more. And as the silhouette of the screaming horror was drawn back into the head of her staff, through the milky haze emerged sharp, dark eyes like an eagle’s.

Ardan had no doubt — he knew exactly that Captain Parela, a Black House operative-mage, had just used magic forbidden by the Al’Zafir Pact. A malefication at the level of the Blue Star. Remembrance of Sorrow — that was the name of a magic capable of destroying the bonds between water molecules. Ardan had come across mention of it in the literature he’d been forced to read in the Great Library.

And, judging by Mshisty’s reaction, he didn’t object in the least.

“In the excavation,” Parela panted, pointing a trembling hand toward the dig. “One… left.”

“A mage?” Mshisty asked curtly.

The captain nodded.

“See to the wounded,” the major ordered.

The Cloaks had already dispersed around the shrine’s perimeter. Some of the unlucky had been laid out on the ground, and over them Parela and Klementiy — armed with special measuring instruments and Elissaar’s sigils — began their work.

Those who were unhurt or only lightly scratched inspected the bodies. If those twisted, char-black empty eye sockets; those thin slits where lips once were, and the straw that had replaced hair — those piles of desiccated mummies, faces forever frozen in masks of unbearable pain and equally unbridled terror — if those could even be called bodies.

They had felt everything before they died. And, what is perhaps even worse — they understood the inevitability of their fate. But they could only pray, pray and wait for the torture to end.

Ardan turned away.

It’s one thing to know why certain areas of science are under strict taboo across the world, but quite another to see with your own eyes the reason for such bans.

“Do you condemn it?” Mshisty asked, as terse as ever.

Ardan kept silent. He didn’t want to lie, nor to rely any more than necessary on Skasti’s science.

“Come along,” Mshisty — still as pale as first snow — prodded Ardan in the back with his stump. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind… and justify the resources spent on your assignment.”

The major never let go of his staff for an instant. Just as Ardan never let go of his doubts about the necessity of his presence here. The Second Chancellery had at its disposal, if not an impressive number of operatives, at least enough that they could have sent someone to the edge of the continent other than a second-year student of the Great University.

“Stay alert,” Mshisty croaked in his earlier curt tone. Leaning heavily on his staff, paying no attention to the corpses, the scattered tools or the mangled apparatus — something reminiscent of Klementiy’s handiwork — Mshisty began to descend into the excavation. Stepping carefully down a wooden ladder cobbled together from dry planks, the major sank into darkness.

In the most literal sense.

Despite the fact that somewhere below, oil lamps were clearly burning, Mshisty seemed to be descending into a pool. One filled with ink or viscous tar, yet weightless and practically imperceptible.

Ardan, however, had only just set foot on the rough wooden plank when he felt… something. Not pain in the familiar, gut-wrenching sense of that unpleasant word, but something entirely different. Something pulling, pressing, choking him so ferociously, as if his very existence were causing some invisible being the apotheosis of suffering.

Despair.

Ardan felt despair.

Like a rotten veil scratching at his soul and bones, it wrapped around Ardan from all sides. It entangled him in threads at once thin and razor-sharp, yet at the same time strong and massive. It—

“Everything alright, Corporal?”

Mshisty’s voice forced Ardan to shake off the Speaker’s sensations and step into the dimly lit excavation. The first thing that caught his eye was that in a shallow subterranean cavern, reinforced around the perimeter with limestone boulders, there stood stelae in the center. But not of limestone or granite — of marble. Whiter than pearl and brighter than gold, it shimmered in the glow of numerous oil lamps arranged on tripods around the shrine.

Their shadows framed niches in the walls where, once upon a time, the artifacts of a forbidden religion of the past had stood. Here mortal warlocks and witches of old—having neither the innate gifts of the Hearing nor the knowledge of Star Magic—performed their bloody sacrifices and thoroughly rotten rituals. Not because they breathed or fed on evil, but simply trying somehow to save themselves from the yoke of the Primordials. And so they stepped into darkness. At first, perhaps even with good intentions, and then…

On the snow-white stelae, scenes of the crimes of the past were rendered in bas-relief with molten steel. Uplifted hands of the beheaded, raised in supplication; disemboweled bellies, stuffed with the entrails of tortured beasts slaughtered beside them; the screams of martyrs as their skin was flayed from them alive still echoed inside the stone; those who had felt the touch of boiling oil — pouring into their nostrils, burning out their eyes and searing their ears — still flailed their palms absurdly in the air in one last, most desperate attempt to escape.

A shrine?

More like an ancient torture chamber, where wretched prisoners were interrogated not to extract answers or force confessions. They were simply tortured. For the sake of the very act of torture.

And in the center of the underground chamber there still towered, as if in mockery, the same snow-white stela, carefully scrubbed clean of blood.

Ardan wished he could say that the horrors ended there. That only thanks to the art of Ean’Hane was he hearing the echoes of torments long since worn away by unyielding, inexorable time.

But that was not the case.

They skirted the stela and entered a narrow corridor lined with a whole row of cells. Ardan had seen such cells before. In the dungeon of an ancient vampire. Not surprising. Here, as there, Ardan was treading on shards of a past that everyone in the Empire strove, of course, not to forget, but also not to recall unnecessarily. Yet someone, of their own will and reasoning, had slashed open an almost healed abscess and, instead of a cure, filled it with new, even more horrific pain. With despair.

Sorrow…

Sorrow for the gentle, caring hands of a mother. Sorrow for the reliable, sturdy shoulder of a father. Sorrow for home, where for the last time before the endless night they had seen the sunlight.

In the cells lay bodies.

Little girls. From twelve to fourteen years old. Those who had just barely greeted their first spring not as children, but as adolescents.

Ardan had long since ceased to feel the nauseating lump rising in his throat, clawing at his gullet and tying his tongue in a knot. He had seen too much… or so he thought, until he descended into this… this… tumor. A rent in the flesh of a country that, while far from perfect, was striving to become better.

“Major, we…,” came a voice from behind.

“Klementiy!” the major barked. “Keep the captain away from here! And get the investigator!”

“Yes sir!”

Ardan was certain that Mshisty wasn’t truly concerned with Parela’s “feminine peace of mind.” The purpose of that order lay in something else.

Together with Mshisty, he walked along the rows of bodies. Ten. Sixteen. Twenty-three… Ardan lost count. He tried not to look, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away. In his consciousness, like that same metal bas-relief on the stela, scenes of atrocity were being seared.

Disemboweled bellies. Severed hunks of flesh. Women’s organs turned inside out. Metal tables awash in blood. Smashed jars of formalin. Coils of Ley-cables and broken apparatuses.

Ardan had seen something like this before.

To the southeast of here.

At the Larand Monastery.

“Sestrova talked…” Ardan managed to choke out. “They didn’t tell us…”

“They didn’t tell you,” Mshisty confirmed. “Such is the job… But she didn’t talk. Corporal Rovneva wasn’t setting you up. Our eggheads in the science division managed to get under the sigil on Sheriff Sestrova’s mind — briefly. Got a couple scraps of information before her brains turned to jelly. Here…”

“They were performing vivisections,” Ardan stopped at one of the cells. Naked, doll-like, with a belly inflated like a water balloon, a little girl with glassy eyes was staring toward the motionless youth. “Pregnant… they performed vivisections on the pregnant…”

“And experiments on their fetuses,” Mshisty added.

Ardan clutched at the wall. His head spun.

He wanted to push it away, to drown it out, tried to force it to stop, but Marta Borskova’s words inevitably found the smallest breach, seeping into Ardan’s mind like rotten, putrid mire:

“You can’t even imagine, boy, what Star Magic is capable of when it isn’t bound by state bans on all manner of inhumane experiments.”

And is this what Ardan had dreamed of since childhood? Is this what the students of the Great University — who pored over textbooks and scientific literature day and night — yearned for? Is this the glory of the modern world?

In mutilated, mangled bodies?

“Breathe, Corporal, breathe…” Mshisty stood beside Ardan. “Believe me, I’ve seen worse.”

“Worse? What could possibly be worse, Major…?”

Mshisty did not reply. He merely stood silently nearby until Ardan finally managed to push himself off the wall. They continued on, leaving cell after cell behind, striding through a labyrinth where in the silence lurked children’s screams that had never torn free of their lips.

At last, they passed the final branching and found themselves on the shore of an underground pond. Here, beside the cold, dark mirror of the water, stood a stone pedestal bearing unhealed marks from sacrificial knives. It was here, on this granite slab, that blades were driven into the bodies of the doomed, and a madman in blood-soaked robes offered up prayers to that which never existed.

Dark Gods. Gods of the Past.

All of it nothing but inventions. Delusion. Illusion. Often fabricated, for amusement, by the Fae and their Sidhe. And the people of the past believed. Fervently and sincerely. So much so that they were willing to kill and torture. Indiscriminately. And without remorse.

At the foot of the sacrificial altar lay Inakov and Nudsky. The former had already turned into a mummy, clutching a photograph in his hands. In it, he himself — the former lead engineer of “Derks” — was embracing a young wife barely older than Ardan. In her arms lay two infants swaddled in ribbon-tied blankets. A boy and a girl. Inakov’s children.

What dark irony…

Nudsky, however… was still breathing. Laboriously, fitfully, with whistles and rattles in a shriveling body that was, before their very eyes, shedding all its fat, mucus, blood, and other fluids. Layer by layer, his skin desiccated, flaking away in foul-smelling clots. His eyes grew dim and sank deeper into his skull. His teeth protruded and wobbled in his waning gums.

But Nudsky was still alive. Still clinging, like any drowning man, to any, even the thinnest straw — if only it might lead him to salvation.

Mshisty lightly tapped his staff against the ground and, barely staying on his feet, manifested a simple healing sigil. The dwarf-blooded man howled immediately. Whether from pain or a sudden surge of hope was unclear.

The withering of his body halted. Or rather, paused. The sigil still glimmered beneath the major’s feet and, apparently, at his whim the torment could resume.

“Ki… ll… me… pl… ease,” Nudsky barely managed to croak.

The once outspoken champion of chastity and high moral values now lay prostrate in this underground kingdom of death — of children’s death.

Yet another dark irony…

Ardan, in truth, had misinterpreted Odurdod’s intentions. He assumed the dwarf-blood was trying to survive, hoping to postpone the inevitable, but it was exactly the opposite. Nudsky wanted to be rid of his suffering. To die, as quickly as possible. And that was precisely what Mshisty refused to allow. The major was keeping Nudsky from meeting the Eternal Angels, but the pain… the pain did not go away.

“Corporal.”

“Yes.”

“Get inside his mind.”

Ardan stared at Mshisty, stunned.

“Come on, move it, I can’t hold this for long,” the major rasped. “Remembrance of Sorrow weakens the sigil’s effect. You’ve got a couple of minutes.”

So that’s why Parela used forbidden magic… in principle, it made sense. Because the destruction of the brain’s structure caused the original parameters of the spell the Puppeteers used to guard their secrets to start malfunctioning.

Ardan, without wasting time, dropped to a crouch beside the dying Nudsky and, cradling the dwarf’s head in his hands, peered into his desiccating eyes.