PROLOGUE173rd Year of the People’s Age, beneath the citadel of Triah
KOSARIN LOTHGARDE HATED IT when they asked questions.
The man tied to the wooden table before him squirmed and wiggled against the ropes, pleading hoarsely in a heavy Alizian accent.
“Who are you? Why are you doing this? Please, answer!”
Discomfort had long been a stranger to Kosarin, and these pitiful questions were not about to reacquaint him with the feeling.
Not that the man’s questions weren’t justified. If Kosarin had spent a year in isolated imprisonment only to be knocked unconscious and then suddenly and unceremoniously tied to a table by a mysterious man deep underground, he might have a few panicked questions as well. In any case, the man’s grasping desperation would not last much longer. His life was an unprotected candle; Kosarin was a hurricane.
Kosarin cleared his throat, and cracked his neck from side to side with two solid pops. The psimancer Wyle stood across the table, face pale, eyes wide as he stared at the man screaming between them.
Kosarin extended a single tendron outward and into the Alizian’s mind, and the man fell immediately, blessedly, silent. As he made contact, his vision erupted in a burst of light. He could still see the Sfaera, but everything around him dimmed just slightly as the
remnants of the light explosion settled all around him.
He was in his body, here in the Sfaera, but somehow he also saw the Void.
It was a strange phenomenon, which had only begun occurring in the past eighteen months. He liked to think it was due to his own increasing power; he could access two more tendra than he could eighteen months ago. Not a huge increase for him, relatively speaking, but he was always pleased to see his powers augmented. But the realist in him assumed it had something to do with Winter, the Nine Daemons, and the other extraordinary events happening on the Sfaera.
“You’ve located Code?” Kosarin said, speaking to Wyle. His single tendron wrapped around the Alizian’s mind. He could not see it in the Sfaera, but in the Void his tendron took the form of a delicate, hazy tendril of violet smoke, extending from Kosarin to envelop the pinpoint of light—a strong yellow color—that represented the man’s sift.
Wyle nodded. “We have, Triadin.”
Kosarin, as the Venerato of the Citadel and the Triadin of the Nazaniin—and, he could admit with simplicity, one of the most powerful people on the Sfaera—always had more business that needed attending, and Code was the latest hiccup in his plans. Kosarin had known Code would attempt to take the sunstone—Rune had told him as much, as had his own insights into Code’s sift. That was why he’d sent Anthris, Tarbin, and Methasticah—one of his most trusted cotirs—to deal with his wayward agent. But then Anthris, Tarbin, and Methasticah had all been found dead. Kosarin would have suspected Code, but the three had clearly been killed by an acumen, not a telenic. Either Code had
help from some unknown psimancer (Kosarin sincerely doubted he’d befriended the Chaos Queen, but who bloody knew at this point), or there was another party at play. Rune, strangely, seemed unsure in the matter.
Either way, finding Code was key to finding the sunstone—either he had it, or he would have some clue as to who did—and Kosarin needed that particular rihnemin for his plans to continue forward.
“Good,” Kosarin grunted. “Get a team in position. I want him alive—and his friends from Maven Kol as well, if possible.”
“The team is already prepared, and awaits your orders, Triadin.”
Kosarin’s tendra paused as he looked up at Wyle, allowing a brief smile to cross his face. “Thank you. You have proved a valuable instrument. I could not have done this without you.” That wasn’t exactly true, but Wyle had at least expedited the process.
“I live to serve you, Triadin.” Wyle stood still, but Kosarin could sense the young man watching from the Void. After months of practicing, Kosarin was finally ready to make a real attempt, and he figured he owed it to the young man to at least let him watch. Wyle had procured the information that made this process possible in the first place. By delving Knot—the strange conglomerate sift that occupied Lathe Tallon’s body—Wyle had gleaned what the Ceno order and Rodenese psimancers had done to the man to make him exactly what he was. While the idea was innovative, the Rodenese had done a hack job of it, a brand-new sift the inexplicable byproduct of that botched experiment.
But after studying the information Wyle had given him, Kosarin knew exactly how to
put such procedures to use. The Rodenese had been attempting to create some sort of super soldier, with the abilities of a Nazaniin psimancer, the expertise and fighting prowess of a great general, and various other qualities from other sifts. But their mistake had been in smashing each sift in its entirety into Lathe’s body. A maladroit approach. The Rodenese had used their power like a hammer, cramming their pale excuse for an experiment together, patches and leaks everywhere.
Of course, one could not expect too much from them. They were novices, hardly aware of their own capabilities. Kosarin was the Triadin of the Nazaniin, and he used his power like a surgeon’s blade.
He’d separated the experiment’s sift from the body, now, and the body before him was nothing more than an empty shell: a lacuna. Kosarin concentrated on the sift he held in his tendron, the tiny yellow light in the Void, and went to work.
In his younger years, Kosarin had taken up the hobby of whittling chunks of wood. He’d crafted the figures of a king and queen, crowned and square-shouldered, for his parents. Kittens and bunnies and dolls for his sisters. Dolls for himself, too, until he had an entire army of them. An army he could control and manipulate, every soldier bending to his will. He’d always preferred blackbark—a material even his own wealthy family came across sparingly—but would work with whatever wood was available to him, using a variety of blades of different sizes and edges. He’d become quite good at it, the minuscule details and features of each model becoming more lifelike with every attempt. The materials’ essence and potential cried out to him, and he began to discern what any block
of wood might become before even taking a knife to it. He embraced what others would discard, shaping the scars and knots in the wood into the strongest aspects of the figure it would become.
Eventually the cultivation of more important duties and talents had eclipsed his carving, but Kosarin felt a great deal of nostalgia—and pleasure—as he worked with his tendron now, whittling away at this man’s sift. He could see the essence of exactly what he wanted, the barest sliver of magic embedded in this man’s being. He’d practiced this exact procedure on dozens of test subjects over the past few months, the process both tedious and full of errors at first. Eventually, he’d rediscovered his ability to see a material’s worth, the flaws and flourishes that made it special, and exploit them. A street urchin’s perspicacity here; an old man’s stone will there; a young woman, with no family, whose crocheting ability surpassed all others. While the initial products were too rough and uneven to prove serviceable—they’d just been practice, after all—eventually Kosarin got to a point where he’d begun inserting these shards into other minds, other sifts. He’d placed a few in other experiments, just to make sure it wouldn’t kill them. Then he’d inserted a few into Wyle, as a reward for his service. Nothing spectacular, of course, but a greater capacity to problem-solve, and by Wyle’s specific and profoundly uncreative request, an increased ability to entice and woo the opposite sex.
Finally, Kosarin had begun placing the shards—crafted sculptures, now—into himself. And, unlike what the Rodenese had done to Lathe by cramming sifts together without purpose, without intent, Kosarin had
refined his work until he could place these sculptures with such precision and gentleness that only the most trained acumen could tell where the old sift ended and the new, inserted fragment began.
It was a short skip from there to this moment, what this process had all been for, as he shaped the sift before him.
It had been Code Fehrway himself who had brought the man on the table to Kosarin, shortly after the former Nazaniin had returned from Arro Isle. According to Code’s report the dead had begun to rise on Arro, resurrected by the power of the Daemon Hade, and while Kosarin had been skeptical at first, recent events had forced him to reevaluate what he considered within the realm of possibility. This man allegedly had been one of those endowed with Hade’s power, and as Kosarin had studied the man’s sift over the past year, he thought he’d discerned the exact section that housed that power.
The section he’d now shaped into a fragment in the Void before him.
Deftly, he inserted the shard into his own sift. The process was simple, with far less pomp than it deserved, and then it was done.
Kosarin felt Wyle’s wide eyes on him.
“Did it—”
Kosarin drew the long dagger at his belt and slid it across the neck of the lacuna on the table. Arterial blood jutted into the air between Wyle and Kosarin. Kosarin took a step back, avoiding most of the gore, but Wyle spluttered as he stumbled away, his face spattered with crimson.
The body convulsed once, but the face registered no pain, no shock or surprise. Kosarin had taken his sift; there was nothing
left inside the lacuna to process feeling or emotion. But the body had still been alive, at least until Kosarin had cut the thing’s throat. As the last vestiges of life seeped out of the lacuna, Kosarin stood his ground, and waited.
He did not have to wait long.
Before the blood stopped leaking from the corpse’s throat, Kosarin felt a connectiondevelop between them. Something linked him to the body, something reminiscent of an acumenic tendron but at the same time altogether different. Invisible, intangible, but Kosarin felt it there nonetheless. A tether, running from his mind, his sift, to the corpse before him.
Gently, Kosarin strummed the link. The moment he did so, he felt something move, very far away. He felt it in the back of his mind, and he felt it deep in his bowels. He felt a gray skull turning slowly to lock onto him with great, gaping black eyes.
Kosarin ignored the sensation—he had an idea what that was about, but he had time to deal with that yet. At the moment, he was far more concerned with the corpse on the table.
The corpse that now swiveled its head to look at Kosarin.
The corpse’s eyes were still open—neither Kosarin nor Wyle had bothered to close them—but the moment Kosarin strummed the tether, the moment he felt the gray skull fixate on him, the corpse’s once blue eyes had shifted to a dull, dark gray, as if great rolling storm clouds had thundered across a clear blue sky with unprecedented speed.
The corpse’s head turned again, this time toward Wyle. A low, empty groan emanated from the body’s throat. It strained against its
bonds, snapping its jaws at Wyle, who shrank back, yelping softly as he backed into the far wall.
“I’ll be damned,” Kosarin whispered. His own surprise surprised him; what outcome other than success could he reasonably have expected?
Wyle asked him a question, but Kosarin dismissed it out of hand. Plans tumbled rapidly through his mind, plans he’d been unsure whether he could put into motion. Unsure, until now.
“We have more work to do,” Kosarin snapped. He looked at Wyle, then nodded to the corpse. “Put a sword through the corpse’s brain. Code said the only way to kill these abominations was to go for the head. This one we can disregard; I don’t imagine we’ll have any shortage of them in the days to come.”
Wyle, having more or less recovered from his previous scare, stepped forward, sword held high.
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