Revelation (Seeds of Humanity: The Cobalt Heresy) (27 page)

Pi’Vari’s screams ceased, which was the only reason I broke my concentration long enough to see him reach into the small pouch containing the single use, explosive spell tokens. I didn’t have time to cast another spell before he could activate the enchanted grenade so I reacted out of pure instinct, shielding Dancer’s body from the blast.

If I had been able to think about it for a few moments I would have dived behind the small iron box, or even tried to get clear of the room entirely, but it was one of those thoughtless reactions which didn’t make a whole lot of sense in retrospect.

Fortunately, Baeld was alert to the situation and just as Pi’Vari squeezed the grenade and hurled it directly at me, the black-skinned statue of a man interdicted and the grenade bounced off his armor and clattered back toward my herald.

We had only a second or two before the blast would envelop the entire room, potentially killing everyone in it. And while I doubted that Baeld actually knew this, he did the only thing he could do when he literally fell on top of the grenade. I had no idea if smothering such a potent device would actually succeed in saving anyone in the room, but for Baeld to survive seemed to be impossible.

Not an instant after he landed on the grenade the spell went off, and Baeld was launched at least six feet into the air by the concussive force of it. The shockwave was far less than I had feared, but it was still enough to knock me into the far wall where my head struck the stone surface and I lost consciousness.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of my brother’s pickup, gingerly holding the back of my head where a lump had already formed.

Adam was driving me home, and we hadn’t spoken a single word since getting into his truck almost twenty minutes earlier. We were more than halfway home and the silence was getting to me.

“What are you going to tell Dad?” I asked suddenly without forethought.

Adam looked over at me and clenched his jaw tightly. I had seen that expression, and it usually indicated that I was about to get my nose bloodied. But he just looked back and forth between me and the road a few times before replying.

“What do you want me to tell him?” he asked bitterly. “Do you want me to tell him the truth: that you took the ’65 Mustang out of the garage in the middle of the night and flipped it on Dead Man’s Corner? You’re barely fifteen, Aaron; you don’t even have a learner’s permit yet, let alone your license
or
permission to drive that car!” he yelled, punching the steering wheel in anger.

“I know,” I replied sheepishly. It was all I could come up with, and it was pretty pathetic.

“You’re lucky to be alive!” my brother screamed. “Do you know what will happen to you when he finds out about this? You won’t get your first car until he’s ready to kick you out of the house, and even then it’ll probably just be some five hundred dollar beater he saved from the scrap heap that’s just good enough to get you across state lines before it dies!” Adam was really fuming now, and I knew that this wasn’t going to end well for me no matter what I said so I kept my mouth shut.

“That was mom’s car,” my brother continued in a rage, “you’ll be lucky if you can get out of bed the next day with the beating he puts on you for this! That car hadn’t moved out of the garage more than once a year since she died three years ago; he only drives it for their anniversary, you idiot!” Adam’s cheeks were lined with tears now, and I actually thought that I should suggest we pull over so I could avoid two wrecks in one night.

Adam screamed wordlessly as he pulled back so hard on the steering wheel that I was afraid it would come off, but somehow he managed to keep us on the road. Apparently, he agreed with my silent assessment that driving like this was a bad idea, so he pulled over into a wide patch of dirt alongside the road and slammed on the brakes, giving me a dose of whiplash to add to my already bruised and battered body.

We sat there in silence as the engine idled, and Adam’s fuming breaths were actually fogging up the window beside him. When I could no longer see out of it for all the condensation my brother pulled the emergency brake and turned to me, having apparently regained control of his temper.

“When Dad gets back tomorrow,
we
are going to tell him that
I
was driving the car when it rolled, and that you were in the
passenger seat
without your seatbelt on,” he seethed. “I’ll blame you for the idea, but we both know who’ll catch the worst of it.”

I was speechless. I hadn’t even considered that Adam would offer to protect me from Dad’s anger. I had just been grateful for the ride home in the middle of the night after texting him what had happened. No police had shown up, since apparently nobody had noticed the damage to the guardrail at one o’clock in the morning.

I was numb from head to toe with what he had said, and after collecting my wits I began to protest, “Adam—”

“No, Aaron!” he roared. “I’m not talking about this ever again!
I
,” he reiterated, jabbing his finger into his chest repeatedly for emphasis, “was driving the car, and
you
were in the
passenger seat
without your seatbelt on! Do you understand me!?” he screamed, spittle flying from his lips.

I realized that I had cringed back against the door, and all I did was nod in agreement. It was one of the moments in my life that I truly regretted allowing to happen the way it did…if only I’d shown a little more backbone…

Adam fixed me with a cold stare for what seemed like an eternity before putting the car back in drive and proceeding the last few miles to our house.

“I won’t forget this, Adam,” I said quietly.

My brother snorted and we continued the rest of the way home in silence.

I awoke from my daze, remembering that scene from years before since the pain in my head felt almost exactly like it had that night.

Baeld was kneeling over me, which gave me the brief thought that maybe I had died and we were going to enter the afterlife together. But then I saw the ragged mess his armor had become around his abdomen and I realized that somehow his mythicite-impregnated armor had shielded his body from the worst of it.

I snapped to attention and saw Dancer lying a few feet away, apparently having been sent there by the same blast which had knocked me out. He was still breathing, so I looked across the room at Pi’Vari.

My herald’s bluish hair was singed black at the tips, and his skin was even more pale than usual. There was a puddle of blood beneath his leg, but he was applying pressure to the wound and appeared to have controlled the worst of the bleeding.

With Baeld’s silent assistance, I slowly got to my feet. When I was standing, I made my way to Dancer and decided to try a healing spell on him. I cast the spell properly but it didn’t seem to have that much of an effect, and since he was already breathing evenly I decided to go check on Pi’Vari.

The gash Dancer’s spear had opened was deep, and I was almost certain that I could see bone at one point during my inspection. There wasn’t much I could do about the muscle but I could at least staunch the bleeding some, so I also cast a spell of healing into his leg. The bleeding seemed to stop, and when he released the pressure the wound appeared to keep together.

After I took the pouch containing the last grenade from Pi’Vari’s hands, we bandaged the wound tightly and Baeld helped my herald to his feet before we turned back to the center of the room, where the iron box lay a few feet from the center pedestal.

The box was on its side, and only on this inspection did I see the multitude of sigils and glyphs inscribed on its surface. I closed my eyes and cast my Third Eye spell. When I opened them again, I could see literally dozens of spells at work on the surface of the box. Most of them I recognized as containment spells, but there were a few I didn’t recognize at first glance.

I really didn’t want to open the thing, but there was a chance that whatever it was had been rendered unconscious or otherwise unable to function by the same blast which had taken the rest of us out, and I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to rid myself of such a dangerous creature.

Tracing the connections between the various glyphs and runes, it appeared that opening the levers in the proper sequence would deactivate the various enchantments sequentially. Failure to follow the right order would result in a chain reaction which, based on the total amount of energy imbued in the various spells I was looking at, would probably be enough to collapse the entire room, crushing us all instantly, but that would only be a problem if we somehow survived the initial explosion.

I studied the glyphs intently for a while, and before I realized it I was down to less than half of my total magic reserves. I tried not to panic but while the drain of my Third Eye spell was insignificant in short bursts, maintaining it for twenty minutes was enough to drain my completely—and I had already spent a significant amount of my power on the healing spells and Spell Key.

I studied for a few more minutes until I was certain I had found the proper sequence, at which time I had Baeld pick up the box and place it on its stone pedestal. Once it was there I began opening the levers and I knew I had chosen the correct order when only one lever remained.

Without pause, I twisted the lever and was rewarded with a hiss and a high-pitched squeal as the various spells imbued on the surface of the box dissipated harmlessly. I could feel the hairs on my arms stand up, like they were momentarily charged with static electricity, but the sensation quickly passed and I was left with a heavy, iron lid to remove.

I motioned for Baeld to do the honors, and he complied by lifting it one-handed by one of the levers and sliding it to the side.

Inside was a small, desiccated corpse which at first glance looked to have belonged to a child no more than three years old. But its inhuman characteristics became quickly apparent when I examined its sharp, angular facial features and long, bony fingers which ended in pointed, black talons instead of fingernails.

I really didn’t know how to dispose of the body but I figured that brute force might work, especially since a concussion appeared capable of rendering the creature unable to work its magics.

I motioned to the heavy iron lid. “We need to fasten this lid as quickly as possible,” I explained after making eye contact with Baeld as I peeled the outer layer of wrapping from one of the remaining grenades.

Baeld nodded and he placed the lid halfway over the box, ready to slide it into position at my instruction.

I finished peeling the outer layer of the grenade and again made eye contact with Baeld as I gently pressed a fingernail into the second layer of the grenade’s wrapping. “Now,” I said as I pressed my nail hard enough to break the surface, causing the device to emit a faint hiss before I threw it into the box.

The body inside the box convulsed and its eyes turned toward me in the instant before the door slammed shut, and I knew with certainty that what I had seen behind those eyes was far from human.

We quickly locked the levers in place and stood back when all six were secured. There was a furious series of thumps inside the coffin, which continued for about ten seconds after I had activated the slow-burning ‘fuse’ of the grenade. After those ten seconds were up, we were rewarded with a muffled bang from inside the iron coffin which actually blew one of the corner handles completely off the box, sending it crashing into the ceiling before a small, steady stream of smoke escaped through the tiny crack in the coffin’s previously sealed lid.

Pi’Vari nodded and smiled thinly. “I should hope that would suffice,” he joked.

“Do you really think it’s dead, Pi’Vari?” I asked hesitantly, going back and forth on the idea of opening the box for further inspection.

“I do, Jezran,” my herald replied. “The creature was clearly still in its larval form and had only just begun its first sequence of physical transformation, which requires the sacrifice and partial consumption of both parents. If I remember correctly,” he said with a hint of pride in his memory even through what must have been severe pain, “their vulnerabilities to physical destruction are similar to our own until they successfully complete at least their second transformation, which requires the presence of its true parent creature to initiate.”

“So,” I mused, “if we assume that this thing actually
did
manage to get its birth mother to sacrifice herself for it, and we also assume that the physical father destroyed himself rather than allow this monster to complete the first transformation, then this creature was definitely still somewhere in its first stage?”

Pi’Vari considered what I had said, then nodded affirmatively. “Yes; if events occurred as you describe them, then this creature is completely dead. Even if events were not precisely as you describe,” he continued, “the supernatural father of that monster would need to have been present here in its child’s presence for a considerable amount of time to initiate and complete the second stage of transformation, the signs of which would have been easy to see.”

I was satisfied that the thing was dead, and I really didn’t want to go rooting around in its gore for further confirmation, so I left the box alone and went to examine the pedestal with the book.

The tome was smaller than I had thought it was at first glance, and it had remarkably remained in the middle of the pedestal’s circular top in spite of the blast from the magical grenade. That suggested to me that it was magically secured somehow, and since most everything else in this house appeared to respond to the magical items I possessed, I touched the surface of the book with my hand gently.

Once again, I felt a rush of energy as a low-pitched droning sound at the very edge of my hearing emitted momentarily from the book before dissipating into silence. I gingerly opened the brown, leather-bound tome and read the opening passages.

After a few moments of reading, it became obvious that the book contained a spell, and an incredibly complicated one at that. The tome itself was very old, at least a few hundred years, and the spell detailed within might not even be considered a spell in the traditional sense.