The Hidden Illusionist Read online

  The sun shone so hot that sweat stuck his shirt to his back. There was no wind. No chirps of insects, no horse hooves pounding on the ground. It was as silent a place as he’d ever seen, as though the stone buildings were monuments in the graveyard of a forgotten city.

  “Where are we?”

  “Yutula-Na,” said Zaemira. “Or the Barrens, as it is now known.”

  “What are we doing here?”

  “I’ll explain. This way.”

  Zaemira crossed through the ruins, carrying herself with the poise of a queen. Dantis walked as normal, but phantom pain throbbed in his leg, as though his body couldn’t believe it had healed. Magical healing had its problems; it took a while for your body to adjust.

  She led him away from the stone buildings and half a mile across scorched earth. The land was full of tremor lines where the sun had spilt the dirt apart. In the distance, a lake glinted in the sunlight.

  His legs ached for rest, and thirst built in him so badly he would have slurped puddle water. He eyed the lake greedily.

  Zaemira stopped above a hole in the ground. It was six feet wide, a gaping mound in the ground leading into darkness. A spiral stone staircase twisted into the depths.

  Dantis backed away. Oh no. this was the worst place she could have taken him. Darkness? Underground stairways? Panic flooded through him.

  “Something wrong, boy?”

  A memory stirred inside him, a monster scratching at a door in his mind. He looked around, as if escape might have miraculously presented itself.

  “I can’t go down there.”

  “We must.”

  “I can’t, Zaemira. You don’t understand. I just-”

  She lifted her hand in the air. She positioned her fingers in the manner of a puppeteer holding a set of strings.

  He backed further from her. “I don’t like this, Zaemira.”

  He stopped. He wanted to move, but he couldn’t. A force held him in place. He screamed at his legs to obey him. Work, damn you, work!

  Zaemira twisted her fingers back and forth, and Dantis found himself walking. It made him want to vomit; he was a passenger in his own body, powerless to resist the flick of Zaemira’s fingers.

  “Stop it! You can’t do this.”

  She snapped her fingers shut like a clam shell, and Dantis’s lips sealed together. She carried on moving her fingers, playing with him, making him walk further toward the hole in the ground.

  Standing on the first stone step, his stomach turned to water. His knees wanted to buckle, but Zaemira wouldn’t let them.

  “This will be over soon,” she said.

  She marched him into the darkness. An animalistic fear flooded him. The urge to run screamed in his head, but it went unanswered by his legs. As he took each step further into the bowels of the earth, Zaemira’s delicate footsteps followed.

  After everything he’d done for her. He’d saved both their lives, he’d let her drain from him, and this was her gratitude? He wished he had Ethan’s sword, and the skill to use it. He wished violence didn’t make him sick, so he could kill her the instant he regained control of his body.

  At the foot of the stairway, everything was dark. A breeze whistled around him. He couldn’t see, but he got the sense he was standing in a cavern. The darkness played tricks on him, and he imagined he saw shapes scuttle within it, and that something hissed from the black, where his eyes couldn’t penetrate. An odor of dank mud made him wish for a blocked nose.

  Zaemira touched his shoulder. If she weren’t controlling him, he would have flinched. “This way,” she said. “Not long now.”

  Not long until what? What was she going to do?

  Zaemira clapped her hands. One by one, torches lit. They illuminated walls covered in archaic drawings and runes. There were a few stone slabs lined in a row in the corner. Whoever decorated this place had spent a lot of time in tombs.

  She forced him to walk to a stone slab. He watched, a prisoner in his own flesh, as she made him lay on it.

  She loomed over him. Torchlight flickered on her face, illuminating the same wrinkles as earlier, when she’d drained him. A sense of doom overtook him. He was peering into the face of death itself. No, something worse than death. What was she?

  “You have magic in your blood, Dantis,” said Zaemira, in an all-too-cryptic voice.

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  “And that is important to me.”

  Power radiated from her, wisps of it, like shimmers in the horizon on a hot day. An aura built around her. The worst thing was he could taste it on his tongue; stale smoke and spent matches.

  “I am sorry about what I will do to you,” she said. “But it is necessary.”

  Zaemira raised her hand. She held a large, thin, white object. It resembled a crooked finger bone, except it was half the length of her arm. Purple liquid dripped from the tip. Whatever weird, giant-fingered creature she’d taken it from, he didn’t want to know. When she pointed it at him, his skin itched.

  Quit it! Stop it, you bitch!

  She mumbled in a language he couldn’t understand. The aura of energy grew, thickening around her shoulders and head, like mucus. It was a deep, blood red.

  His stomach twisted. It felt like Zaemira had reached inside him and squeezed it like a dishrag. The exit was ten feet behind her, but seemed far, far away.

  He’d wanted to escape from the auction house, and from the Brotherhood of Fire acolyte. Now that Zaemira had granted him escape, the truth hit him with the force of a sledgehammer to the face. He’d escape from one danger into something much worse.

  Before Dantis could do anything, Zaemira stabbed the bone into his neck. His stomach gurgled. His blood stopped rushing through his veins, and his lungs stopped mid-breath.

  “Your old life is over now, Dantis,” she said. “You are something else now.”

  Chapter Eight

  Zaemira

  The turnlings were quick to smell the boy.

  They scampered from a nearby cavern mouth, quiet as a whisper as they padded their bare feet on the ground. A layer of dust covered the tomb, and their feet were the first to disturb it. They picked through the darkness, threaded through the stone slabs, passed rune-covered walls that echoed no sound, to where Zaemira waited.

  Turnlings hated everything that was good. Evil drew them like a fog horn. The scent of blood filled their bellies with hunger. They fought one another to stave off the boredom as they waited for blood, prizing defeat above victory. Defeat meant pain, and they loved pain above nearly everything.

  They went great lengths to devise new ways to harm themselves, using the little intelligence remaining to them to conjure fresh methods to scar their bodies. But above all that, they never missed a chance to drain.

  One of the turnlings urinated on the corner of an empty slab. Another climbed atop of it and lay on its back, widening its eyes and opening its mouth to mock Dantis, who lay opposite. A daring turnling scampered nearer to Zaemira, close enough that the others sensed it was breaching the rules, and they dragged it back and beat it in the head and stomach.

  Torchlight flickered of the runes on the walls, breathing on patterns that would have looked incomprehensible to others. Zaemira saw history; ancient stories, long-gone settlements, legendary vupyrs who sought refuge in the depths of the ground and hadn’t yet emerged to kiss the sky. Centered, and larger than them all, black rune marks showed the Barrens, the grand city of Yutula-Na, a relic of what was once the most powerful vupyr settlement of them all.

  The turnlings formed a semi-circle, as close as they dared get to Dantis, yet far enough to be safe from Zaemira’s ire. The oldest were standing the closest; these were the turnlings who had lost their human form much earlier than the others, who lived in their corrupted skins long enough to know boundaries. Newer turnlings jostled at the back, snapping at each other, scratching skin. One, skinnier than the rest and with a crooked back, bit his own arm, smiling as its flesh tore, squealing in a toxic mix
of pain and pleasure.

  They watched her now, acknowledging her authority, waiting like dogs expecting scraps.

  “They’ll be no draining today,” she told them.

  They hissed at this. They snarled at her.

  They had lost their right to be called human, but underestimating their intelligence would be a mistake. They understood her. Perhaps not her words, but her tone; they knew they would not be nourished today.

  An ancient voice spoke to her. Zaemira shook as though an earthquake hit the tomb, but the walls were still. No dust fell from the ceiling, the turnlings didn’t move from their squatted positions. It was inside her, travelling on her own thought-waves.

  The turnlings are dangerous, woman. They’ll attack you before long.

  And what? I can take care of them.

  Destroy them.

  The turnlings are staying. Have a heart, you old grump.

  If I had a heart, I’d tear it out and grind it to dust.

  Go back to sleep, Tula. You’re getting crankier by the day.

  Stupid sorceress.

  Stupid sorceress who’s restoring your damn city, you ignorant bastard. Get out of my head.

  Stubborn as he was, he left. Tula’s body died centuries ago, and it took every ounce of his spirit to live on, even if his current existence was as ethereal energy trapped in a stone in the city. Their chats were always brief, because Zaemira and the Lord of Yutula-na had never gotten on.

  She would be done soon. She would restore Yutula-na and bring her sect back to its glory. It would be the Barrens no more; life would stir in the stone city, and the Fire Isles would tremble at its rebirth. Then, finally, Tula would piss off and leave her alone.

  Freed from the voice, she focused to the stone slab in front of her. Poor boy. Stripped of his clothes, the red welts stood out on Dantis’s skin. So many, but what caused them? A simple empathy spell would have let her see the lashings, if she wished. A stronger one would allow her to feel them, to live in his body and feel his memories as he got them.

  Did she really need a spell though? She knew welts like this all too well. Her childhood had been no better than the boy’s. Her father, usually drunk and always angry, whipped similar marks onto Zaemira’s skin. He beat her until pain meant nothing; it was just something she had to endure daily.

  It was only when her gifts surfaced that she gained salvation. That fateful day when her father approached her, belt in hand, and she thought, no. Not today. Not today, you bastard!

  An energy had flooded out of her like blood from a slit throat. It exploded across her father’s chest, send him flying across the room. Sparks of blue snapped in the air, sizzled on their wooden furniture, then spread as flames through the house.

  The mages came for her after that. On her first night in mage college, in a dorm she shared with other girls her age, she realized her father’s violence wasn’t normal. Other children didn’t live in fear of their parents.

  Well, that was long, long ago. Two lifetimes ago. No use dwelling.

  Focus on the boy. Should she watch his memories? Should she see how their pasts compared?

  No time for that. Tula had a one-track mind, obsessed solely with restoring his city of Yutula-na, but he was right; as the turnlings watched her, the tension thickened.

  The creatures angered her and saddened her at the same time. They were human once, then changed into vupyr, and were then prevented from draining until day by day, year by year, their intelligence fled their brain, leaving animalistic urges behind. Then, their lack of spirit turned them dark. What was once evil seemed good, the unpleasant became delicious. Happiness, jokes, smiles, they sickened the turnlings.

  “Okay, my boy,” she said.

  It helped her to talk as she worked; it made her feel like her subjects were willing participants, and not victims. It was the only way. After two hundred years, guilt still took root inside her, and the only way to banish it was to pretend she was doing nothing wrong.

  “Where do we start with you?” she said.

  To begin with, she conjured four spheres in the air. They hovered, translucent, above the boy, buzzing with energy. She filled each with mana until blue light brimmed inside.

  Her spheres ready, she set to work with her spells. First, she drained the layers of his personality. As the spell worked, she connected it to the first sphere, so the mana would seep out of its own accord, fueling her spell and letting her focus on the next.

  She smiled. A successful spell, no matter how simple, no matter how many times she had cast it before, always made her happy. Magic gave her an identity. It was the only thing that warded the gloom in her heart. But for how long?

  Don’t lie to yourself. You know what is happening to your mind…

  Next, she cast a spell to delve deeper, sucking his more primal instincts from him; his fears, hopes, loves, hates.

  Her first attempted fizzled in a spurt of blue light. Damn it! Another failure so soon after the last? That was the third time this month that one of her spells had gone awry.

  You know what is happening…

  Shaking away her doubts, she tried again. This time the spell bloomed, and she felt the boy’s persona drain from him. She connected this to the second mana sphere, where a quarter of the mana light disappeared in a puff.

  “My,” she said. “Full of fears, aren’t you?”

  If only she had time to watch some of them, to see what the boy was scared of. Not only that, but she needed a little light in her life too. What were his hopes? Who did he love?

  No. Best not to go there. Not when she was taking it all away from him.

  The city. It’s all for the city. To restore what was taken.

  At the rate her second sphere drained, she had less time to work than expected. Not to worry; her spells were so strong they would have taken some mages a lifetime to learn. In fact, they had taken her two lifetimes, and she had worked and worked and worked at them until they were but a trifle. Still, she had to finish in this one session; she couldn’t wait for her mana to restore.

  She took a moment to rest. Spells taxed her more than they used to. Tula might have granted her life beyond mortal years, but there was always a price, one that went further than what she’d already agreed.

  Magical dementia. No use hiding from the name.

  That was why she needed the boy. It was tough enough to keep her own wide array of spells in check, let alone learn a new discipline. Illusionism, something that would once have been a parlor trick, was lost on her.

  A turnling inched forward, its calloused knuckles dragging on the stone. Torchlight spread across its face to show a crisscross of scars, as well as lumps where it had gouged flesh from its cheeks.

  They’re getting braver. Or more desperate.

  She’d used pain to train them at first. What a disaster. They loved it too much, so it became not a way of discipline, but a treat. Instead, converse to everything she knew about magical logic, she used something else.

  As the brave turnling edged closer, she cast a healing spell at it. The golden light, sweet-smelling and nourishing, hit the turnling as a puff. It shrieked, reared back. Another turnling dragged it away, while the younger ones hissed.

  “Let that be a lesson,” said Zaemira, “For the thousandth time.”

  They’d forget. Dantis’s spirit was too tempting for them, and they’d test their boundaries again. In her spheres, mana drained steadily out the first, while it left in uneven puffs from the second. Time wasn’t her ally.

  For her third sphere, she looked at the slab next to Dantis’s. On this was a physical form, a thatch work of vines and weeds, of green leaves and crusted straw.

  Now for the hardest part – making herself do it. Destiny…another young life…snuffing a flame that wasn’t hers to touch.

  What about his wounds and his past? Did her dreams mean more than his?

  If she did this, she was lost. She’d done too many already, and Dantis would have to be the last
. He would have to be the one.

  He’s not Dantis anymore. He’s grub. Don’t think of him as a person. Don’t use his name. If you do, you’re lost.

  Who am I fooling? I’m already lost. She cast her final spell, and the boy’s soul left his body.

  Chapter Nine

  Dantis

  Sunlight streaked onto his face, and it took three blinks until his eyes adjusted. Ugh. Feel horrible. Whatever I drank last night, it was potent stuff.