His Cure For Magic (Book 2) (28 page)

It put its hand to her head, and she began to feel dizzy. "
Be still, my Queen. Inciting the prozoa will only make it more painful.
"

She looked up from her kneeling position in front of it and stared into its blue eyes while her consciousness faded.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Silas

The words struck him like a hammer, pulling all of the air from his lungs and forcing him back a few steps. He closed his eyes, trying to make sense of it all.
 

Not human? He looked human. He felt human. He could remember making love to Alyssa by the light of the fireplace. He could remember the feel of her flesh against his, the warmth and the passion.
 

Rossum was lying. He had to be. Another of
his
lies, another effort to control.
 

"Let them hunt me," he said. "They won't have to try hard to find me. I'm going to find out where
he
is, and I'm going to kill
him
. I'm going to end
his
lies, end
his
oppression, and earn vengeance for the thousands of lives that have been destroyed." His hand tightened on the grip of his sword. "Let them come for me. Let them try. I'll put a blade in their hearts, and they'll have no one to put them back together."

He lunged forward. Rossum's hands came up, and he tried to defend himself, but he wasn't a warrior. He had never been in a fight of any kind. Silas' sword plunged through his chest and burst from the other side.

"See the truth, Talon," Rossum said, his face turning pale and tears building in his eyes. "See yourself in my end, if that is the only way you will see at all. Accept what you are, and make your report for the sake of what remains. I'm sorry, my friend. I'm sorry we failed you."
 

The life in his eyes faded again, and his body pitched forward. Silas caught him, pulling his sword from his chest and flipping him over. He laid him gently on the floor and knelt next to the body.

"I don't understand," he said.

Wilem knelt down on the other side. "I do." He had his own sword in his hand. "This isn't going to be pleasant." He jammed the blade into the dead man's chest, pulling it along and cutting it open. Red blood poured from the wound, and then mixed with black. Wilem closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and reached in.

"What are you doing?" Silas asked.

He opened his eyes and looked down, searching for something. He peered up at Silas when he found it, and pulled it out of the body.

An ircidium ball, with tubes running from it. He wiped it on Rossum's robe, cleaning it off, and then pushed on a small latch. The ball opened, revealing a shard of ebocite inside.

"I'm sorry, Silas," he said. "Eryn and I killed a juggernaut. We found one of these inside. He was alive because of this. If you're as old as him, I would guess that you are, too. He may not have been lying about Aren." He pushed the latch closed, and dropped the ebocite heart onto Rossum's abdomen.

Silas stared down at it. As much as he didn't want to admit it, that much had to be true. How else could he have lived so long? He lifted his shirt, running his hands along the scar that stretched the length of him. How else could he have survived such a wound? He looked at Rossum's face, peaceful in his death. He had no one to fix him. Now, none of them did.

If Aren wasn't his son... whose child was he? Did Alyssa love another? Did Alyssa exist at all? Was anything he knew real and true? He was lost. Completely, and utterly lost.
 

"I can't know what you are thinking or feeling right now," Wilem said. "The only thing I can know for certain is that a monster took Eryn and brought her to a place you called the 'core'. She's in danger, and whether you are related to her by blood or not, we both care for her. We can't leave her to die down there."

He put his gaze on Wilem. His words had meaning. His words were true. He nodded. If there was nothing else to hold onto, he would hold onto them. "She can't know about this," he said. "No good will come of it."

"My Lord..."

"No. Please, Wilem. I have nothing else to put my faith in at this moment. I need her to have faith in me. I'm... frightened... that she won't. If she knew that I'm a monster..."

"You're no monster, my Lord."

"I don't know that, and I can't believe it right now." He got to his feet. "If she's alive, we'll save her."

Wilem stood up. "I know. You're the First of Nine."

"I'm the First of One. The One who is going to right
his
injustices. Perhaps he was being truthful about Aren, perhaps not. I may have a crystal heart keeping me alive, but even some of his blood runs red. If I'm not wholly inhuman, then maybe he was wrong. I'll ask
him
myself, right before I kill
him
."

"What about General Clau?"

"He's made his report.
He'll
send him back for me, when he learns I'm still alive and didn't come report with him. We'll fight again, I suppose, unless I can convince him to help me."

"You couldn't convince him before."

Silas looked down at Rossum again. "We were all close once. All twelve of us. I don't remember how or why, but I remember that. I can't just kill him without giving him a chance."

"Are you sure you can defeat him? He already took you once."

"I was injured, and tired. We're both 'fixed', according to Rossum." His eyes were dark, his expression grim. "He can't win. Not in a duel. No, he won't come right at me. He's too careful for that." He was silent for a moment. "He brought three Mediators with him. Three, to keep Eryn contained. You said you met her at Waverly's, but you're wearing the blacks. What's left of them, anyway."

"I was with General Clau. I was supposed to kill her." He laughed. "I fell in love with her instead."

 
Silas smiled. "You spent too much time with her. She's like that, isn't she? She draws people in."

 
"She does. I've never met anyone like her."

Silas wiped his sword on Rossum's robe, and put it back at his waist. "I don't know if I have either. Come now, my friend. We need to find the monitoring room. There should be a map there that will help lead us to the core."

"You... You don't know how to get there?"

"There are so many memories of this place. They flit and buzz in front of my eyes like insects. They dance and intertwine, never slowing. I get only glimpses - a word or a single moment. I know there is a core. I know the reactor is there; the ebocite is its heart as well. The path to it... the details elude me."

"Then we'll find it together," Wilem said. "Do you know how to get to this 'monitoring' room?"

"I believe so. We may make a wrong turn or two, but I think we'll get there. Don't let your guard down. While my memories of this place may be faded at best,
he'll
make sure that General Clau doesn't suffer the same malady. He will lay a trap or an ambush for us. There's no doubting that."

He led them from the room, past the body of the juggernaut and down the corridor in the opposite direction that they had come. He paused at each intersection, ducking and peeking around the corner before moving ahead.

They kept a brisk pace, through stone and metal hallways, past hundreds of doors to hundreds of living spaces. A few times, Silas was sure he heard Clau's leather boots on the floor, but he knew that couldn't be right. The General wouldn't be foolish enough to make such noise.
 

As they walked, he tried to sort through his senses, his emotions, and his memories. What he had once thought was an amnesia brought on by drink and magic had turned into something else entirely. He wasn't just the old man he'd believed himself to be. He was as old as the Empire itself, kept alive by a power he didn't understand. He was here for a reason, but he had no idea what that reason was.
 

Not to kill women and children. Not to murder them while they sleep. Murderer.

"Wilem," he said, the thought jogging his memory. "What happened to Davin and Saretta?"

 
The color drained from the Mediator's face. "Dead." He stared down at the floor.

"How?"

"It... It was an accident. The juggernauts, they have power over us, over the magic. They... frighten it. I lost control of my Curse. I burned her face. I killed her. I didn't mean to." He looked up, eyes moist. "The juggernaut killed Davin, after he saved my life."

"Should I expect you to lose control of it again?"

"No. No, my Lord. I injected myself with the cure. It put the magic to rest, enough that the juggernaut didn't see me as a threat anymore, and let me live. The first time, it took us by surprise. We weren't prepared."

Silas turned around and put his hands on Wilem's shoulders. "Then stop blaming yourself. You couldn't have known what would happen, and both Davin and Saretta knew the dangers of this place. We all did."

"Yes, my Lord."

"And stop calling me your Lord. I'm nobody's Lord. Today, I'm only Silas."

Wilem smiled. "Yes, Silas. I can see why she admires you so much. I don't think I could manage what you have had to endure just in the last hour."

"You could, if the need was great enough."

"Like it is now?"

"Yes."
 

Wilem pointed ahead. "We're wasting time standing here. Thank you, Silas."

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Wilem

They reached the place that Silas had called the monitoring room without confrontation. There had been one tense moment when a juggernaut had passed close enough that Wilem could feel the Curse stirring, but Silas had led them on an alternate route that went wide around its footpath. Though he claimed his knowledge of Genesia was incomplete, he seemed to navigate the maze of passages without difficulty.

Wilem didn't know what to think of the room, but he didn't really know what to think of anything anymore. Since he met Eryn, his entire life had been rearranged in ways he could never have expected. He had become something he had never thought he would be, and his entire world view had been like a flipped coin.
 

He wouldn't have changed it for anything.

"The map has to be here somewhere," Silas said.
 

The monitoring room wasn't very large, but it was filled with dozens of shelves loaded with books and stacks of paper. Some of the papers were laid flat under the books, some were folded and tucked in vertically, and still others were crumpled and laying in dusty corners. There was a single, padded leather chair resting near the center of the room, faced in the direction of a pedestal, on which sat a large, round, perfectly white stone.
 

Wilem pulled one of the folded papers from between a pair of books and unfolded it. He couldn't read the ancient writing, but he was sure he would be able to recognize a map.

"Eryn would be beside herself if she ever had a chance to read all of these books," he said.
 

Silas pulled two of them from a shelf, shook them to make sure there was no map inside, and threw them into the corner. "Yes, I imagine she would. Perhaps we can give her the chance."

"Do you know how the stone works?" Wilem asked. He lifted a larger sheet of thick paper from a shelf and glanced at it. He was about to discard it as useless when he noticed the image drawn on it. "Silas, look at this."

Silas stopped his own search and joined him, leaning over his shoulder. He stared down at the paper for a moment, and then closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Wilem could see his eyes moving behind the lids, as though they were trying to catch something there. When he opened them again, he spoke. "That's a subroute. It's a pathway between places."

"How does it work?"

"I don't know exactly how. I only know it requires the energy from the ebocite. It is the reason all of the subroute pathways start inside reactors."

"Reactors? You mean there are more than one?"

Silas went back to the shelves and resumed his search. "I don't know. There must have been. Why make a door to travel between places, if there is nowhere else to travel to?"

Wilem looked down at the paper again. It was a drawing of a large square lined with crystals, with lines and words circling it. The inside of the square was shaded as though it collapsed inward. He folded the paper up and shoved it in the pocket of his pants, and then returned his attention to the stone. He wondered if it was similar to the farspeak stones in the Overlords' palaces.

He glanced over at Silas, who had increased his pace of pulling out books and papers and discarding them. He was sure he probably shouldn't touch the stone, but it must have had an important function to be placed in the center of its own room, and he wanted to know what it did.
 

He put his hand to it. It was as smooth as he expected, but also cold. The shock almost made him pull his hand back, but instead he summoned his Curse and eased some of his power into the ball.

"Wilem?" Silas looked up just in time to see the stone begin to glow. "Take your hand off of that!"

Wilem pulled his hand back, frightened by the desperate tone of his voice. The glow didn't subside when he did. Instead, it grew stronger.

"Hurry. Help me find the map. The juggernauts will feel the power."

Wilem realized how foolish he had been. What had he been thinking? "I'm sorry."

"Be sorry later. Help me now." Silas swept his hand across a shelf, knocking dozens of books to the floor with a loud bang. "We must assume it isn't wedged in any of the books. We may be wrong, but we don't have time to search them all."

"I thought you aren't afraid of the juggernauts?"

"I'm not afraid of one juggernaut. I can probably handle two. More than that... I don't know, and your magic is useless against them."

Wilem knew that from experience. He started to turn away from the stone, when he noticed that it was no longer white.

"Eryn," he whispered. The stone had changed into a top down view of a room full of all kinds of ircidium gears and rods turning and moving, powering some kind of machine. He could see her in the corner of the room, laying on a mattress.