Necromancer Falling: Book Two of The Mukhtaar Chronicles (20 page)

“The red door,” Torgar said.

“No,” Kaitlin said. “I told you, I can’t. It’s pushing me away. Toward the blue door.”

Torgar stood and backed away, making a sound Nicolas had never heard a cichlos make before. It was the startled cry of fear and disgust a person might make if they reached into a box filled with spiders.

The bench beneath Kaitlyn vanished, and she crashed to the city floor. All three chimeramancers looked at her as if she were a poisonous snake; equal parts fear and a desire to kill or run.

Nicolas cast a chord of necropotency forward and lifted her to her feet. He stepped between her and the chimeramancers. If they were going to try anything, they’d have to go through him.

“What the hell did you do?” Nicolas said.

“Get her away!” Torgar yelled. “Don’t let her touch anything, not even the floor!”

Something sharp pushed against the chord of necropotency. Whatever it was, it wasn’t any good.

So Nicolas pushed back.

A chimeramancer fell backward and landed on the barrier next to his reclined seat.

“Did you seriously just try to kill her?” Nicolas said.

He embraced the anxiety that bubbled up inside, letting it turn into a torrent that flooded his mind, and he opened a pathway between his well of power and the skull symbol. His mind flooded with images.

“No, Nicolas!” Lamil shouted.

A shield materialized around Nicolas’s well, cutting him off from his power.

Dead Kagan lunged for Torgar and five undead cichlos materialized around him and dragged him back toward Lamil.

“Enough!” Lamil yelled.

How the hell had Lamil summoned five penitents in such a short timespan without collapsing? They were pure summonings, too. Far more difficult than raising a corpse.

“Your cet, Nicolas,” Lamil said.

Nicolas took a deep a breath and tried to calm down. His cet was there somewhere…hidden behind images of ripping Torgar’s head off.

“What have you done, Lamil?” Torgar said. “The entire city may be imbued now. We have no way of knowing!”

“What are you talking about?” Nicolas asked. He faced Lamil. “What is he talking about?”

“He’s right, I’m afraid,” Lamil said. “If she cannot approach the red door—”

“How could you bring a cognitomancer into our midst?” Torgar said.

“A cog
what
?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Even her footsteps could be imbued,” Torgar said. “What would happen if one of us touched them and she took control?”

Lamil’s eyes made a complex circuit of independent rotations.

“She hasn’t Awakened yet,” Lamil said. “She could no more imbue her footsteps than you could.”

“What is he talking about?” Kaitlyn said.

“This is worse than I feared,” Lamil said. “I must seek Gormala’s advice.”

“The witch is under no obligation to her,” Torgar said.

Lamil faced Nicolas. “That is for Gormala to decide, not you.”

“We are finished here,” Torgar said. “And if you had the best interests of Aquonome at heart, you’d allow Gormala to
make
no decisions.”

Torgar returned to his reclined chair.

“You never mentioned any
Gormala
before, Siek,” Nicolas said.

“The list of things I have not mentioned to you is larger than the list I
have
. Is there an obligation I am under of which I am currently unaware?”

“Can this
Gormala
help me?” Kaitlyn asked. “That’s what you implied, isn’t it? That’s why Torgar is so upset?”

“A single cognitomancer killed tens of thousands of cichlos. That is why Torgar is
upset
, as you put it.”

“How?” Kaitlyn asked.

“It was not the result of malicious intent,” Lamil said. “It was the result of ignorance. Ignorance and an imbued bed sheet destroyed the city of Meculor.”

“But what do you mean by
imbued
?” Kaitlyn asked. “Are you saying something was
added
to the bed sheet? Or the sheet was infused with something?

“That goes to the heart of what a cognitomancer does,” Lamil said. “Humans call them
enchanters
, and for good reason. They enchant objects and people with nothing more than the power of their mind.” Lamil walked past them toward one of the small barrier tubes leading away from the central dome. “Come. We can discuss matters while we walk. We don’t have far to go.”

The cichlos in the central dome had returned to their routines, but they parted around Lamil as he led the group into a small barrier tube. It was a different tube than Nicolas had entered when he’d first arrived in Aquonome a year ago. But so much about it was the same.

Columns of multi-hued barrier energy formed rooms—
apartments
, judging from the families who came and went from the circular, dilating doors. A small cichlos—a child, whose head had not yet grown sufficiently to accommodate his full-sized cichlos eyes—hopped from one side of a dilating door to another, until his father took him by the hand. Nicolas didn’t recall dilating doors from his last trip, but much of Aquonome was transitory in nature. The cichlos chimeramancers used barrier energy to form chairs, tables, and even these rooms, on an as-needed basis.

“What, exactly, does an imbued object do?” Kaitlyn asked. She strode next to Lamil, as if daring someone to comment on her feet touching the city floor.

“Chimeramancy and Cognitomancy are two ends of a single spectrum,” Lamil said.

“Like Necromancy and life magic,” Nicolas said.

“Correct. Chimeramancy takes what is in the chimeramancer’s mind—the chimeramancer’s
dreams
—and manifests it as reality. Cognitomancy is similar, yet different. A cognitomancer projects an image into another person’s mind, changing the other person’s
perception
of reality.”

“And
that
was enough to cause that massive freak out back there?”

“Do you see the tube ahead?” Lamil asked. “See how it curves ever-so-slightly in the distance?”

“Yeah,” Kaitlyn said.

“Now imagine the tube exists only in your imagination. A trick of the mind that led you to believe you could leave the central dome in safety.”

“We’d all be swimming right now.”

“You and Nicolas would be
dead
right now, crushed under the weight of Lake Caspar. This is what cognitomancers can do to other people.”

“I’ve felt it,” Nicolas said, looking at Kaitlyn. “That first night back at the Pinnacle.”

“You will have an unparalleled ability to connect with other living beings,” Lamil said. “Through physical contact, you will understand things about people they do not understand themselves. And it will change you.”

Nicolas looked from Kaitlyn to Toridyn and back. “Any chance this
unparalleled ability
can help them speak a foreign language?”

“I suppose it is possible.”

“That city you mentioned,” Kaitlyn said. “Meculor. You said it was destroyed because an enchanter imbued a bed sheet. I understand that enchanters can put some kind of image in another person’s head. But where does the bed sheet come in?”

“Powerful cognitomancers—enchanters, as you call them—can store an image of an alternate reality in an object. Anyone who comes into contact with an imbued object receives the stored reality, and remains in that reality until the enchanter releases them.”

“And so an enchanter stored an image of an
alternate
Meculor in a bed sheet?” Kaitlyn asked.

“It was not done with malicious intent,” Lamil said. “A cognitomancer who wasn’t aware of her own power allowed a dream to imbue her bed sheets while she slept. Those sheets found their way onto the command bed of one of the chief chimeramancers of Meculor. The surviving conjurer told us the dream depicted Meculor above the water. In realty, however, Meculor was
below
water. These images invaded the
guiding
dream.”

There was that term again.
Guiding dream
. Nicolas hadn’t heard anything about a
guiding
dream during his previous stay in Aquonome.

“But there’s more than one chimeramancer,” Kaitlyn said. “Wouldn’t the others have noticed and done something about it?”

A group of cichlos priests emerged from the lake beyond the barrier wall. They carried fish in small nets and began sorting them on the city floor as Nicolas and the others passed by.

“Chimeramancers must work in tandem to maintain a city this size,” Lamil said. “They exist on the border between the waking world and the dream world, flowing freely among each other’s dreams. But there is always one in command. One
guiding
dream. When the guiding dream revealed an image of Meculor above water, the other dreams changed to match the guiding dream’s reality. The chimeramancers dropped the city’s primary environmental defenses that hold the waters at bay. Meculor imploded from the pressure, killing nearly everyone. Only two survived to tell the story. One is the most powerful chimeramancer our people have ever known. And you’ve met him.”

“Torgar,” Nicolas said.

“No wonder he acted like I was going to kill everyone,” Kaitlyn said.

“
One
of the reasons, yes,” Lamil said.

“And what’s the other?”

Lamil stopped in front of a rectangular section of barrier energy that formed a room on the side of the tube. There was another iris-like door, approximately ten feet in diameter, at the center of the rectangle. He faced Kaitlyn.

“Gormala was the cognitomancer who destroyed Meculor,” Lamil said. “She was the other survivor.”

The door dilated without a sound, and Nicolas peered inside.

The rectangular room was the entrance to an elaborate system of barrier chambers extending into the lake. In some ways, it reminded Nicolas of his Hall of Power. Each room had two doors.

Nicolas focused on the room beyond the iris door. A bed was pushed against the wall on the left, and a structure that looked like a desk—a flat surface with a chair behind it—stood against the far wall. The walls periodically changed color, gradually cycling through the visible spectrum. Nicolas found it soothing.

“Welcome,” a voice said. It was higher-pitched than Lamil’s, but still deeper than a human’s. Nicolas couldn’t see where it had come from.

“Please, enter,” the voice said.

“Thank you, Gormala,” Lamil said. He entered the rectangular room and gestured for the others to follow. “It has been some time.”

When Nicolas stepped across the iris’s threshold, he saw Gormala rising from a large barrier chair on the right side of the room, opposite the bed.

“Siek,” Gormala said. “You honor me.”

She bowed toward Lamil as they entered, but her eyes, which didn’t protrude as far from the sides of her head as Lamil’s did, stayed perfectly still. In a culture of people who expressed emotion with eye movements, she must be impossible to read.

That or she was emotionless.

When she stood tall once more, she was shorter than Lamil. But not by much. And she wasn’t as broad across the shoulders. But other than that, she looked much the same as Lamil. In fact, she had the same sagging orange skin as Lamil. But where Lamil had black striations, her skin was uniformly orange. She wore a blue cowl that extended to the middle of her chest, like a scapular.

“Honoring you was not my intention,” Lamil said.

If Gormala was insulted by Lamil’s remark, she didn’t let on. Her eyes remained focused on the siek.

“I come to you because this young woman is in grave danger,” Lamil said. “Perhaps we
all
are if you do not help.”

“I am very sorry,” Gormala said. “I hope you know that.”

Lamil’s eyes made two slow circular motions toward the front of his face. He was calming himself down.

“No apology is necessary,” Lamil said. “Tamil would not have held you responsible for her death. And so, neither will I. But you above all know how important this is.”

“Of course. And thank you.”

“You can help me?” Kaitlyn asked.

“Siek, you’ll want to leave her alone with me for this,” Gormala said.

Lamil nodded. “Sab Toridyn, come.”

Nicolas handed Toby’s leash to Toridyn. “I need to stay. I mean, if that’s okay.”

“I have no objection,” Gormala said.

Toby wagged his tail as he followed Lamil and Toridyn through the iris door.

Gormala waved her hand and an elaborate bench rose from Aquonome’s floor like water pouring upward. It was the size of a small, padded sofa. When it reached a comfortable height, the liquid energy solidified.

Gormala touched one of the two padded armrests. “Please, take a seat. Both of you.”

Kaitlyn sat and made a gasping sound.

When Nicolas touched the sofa, the room changed.

Gone was the iris door. In fact, gone were the doors leading to the multitude of other chambers.

Cool mountain air blew across his face as he and Kaitlyn stood on the precipice of a cliff overlooking a city.

Nicolas instinctively stepped back, but he tripped and fell.

Instead of landing on rocky ground, however, he landed on the cushioned barrier bench in Gormala’s chambers.

He blinked and looked around. The iris door had returned, as had the bed, desk, and two other exits.

“What happened?” Nicolas asked.

“That was trippy,” Kaitlyn said. “I could
feel
the mist from the ocean on my face.”

“I was on a mountain,” Nicolas said.

Kaitlyn ran her hand along the armrest and down onto the seat cushion. “This is imbued, isn’t it.”

Gormala ambled to her desk chair and sat. “I can help you.”

“Forgive me if this is inappropriate,” Nicolas said. “I hear a
but
on the end of that sentence.”

“You are of a higher caste, Sab,” Gormala said. “Your statement was not inappropriate. Nor was it false.” She faced Kaitlyn. “I
can
help you. But there is a cost.”

Nicolas raised an eyebrow. Was she seriously trying to
hussle
them?

“I’m…not sure I can pay,” Kaitlyn stammered.

“You misunderstand. The magic will exact its cost. And you can rest assured it is both something we possess and something we would rather not lose.”