‘If Rigel hadn’t been there to deal with it, it would have devoured the population and then went searching for more people to eat. It would have terrorised the surrounding towns and cities.’
‘But your acolyte dealt with it. And if it had bettered him, you would have destroyed it — you are more than capable of doing so.’
‘So you’ll post a mage and acolyte down at the site to ensure the safety of the Firadon people? So that if another one of these demons appears it can be stopped?’
‘You said yourself that there was no sign of another demonic creature. A pointless posting in case another arrives is a waste of time and manpower. War has broken out between the Kyzantium Empire and Murukia, and the Murukans have sought us out for assistance. And just two weeks ago one of the Fourth Circles burnt out and destroyed herself trying something dangerous in the middle of the night.’
Carina didn’t fail to notice that the Council mage put the same weight on the mention of war as the death of a mage. The tone of her voice was neutral and non-committal and showed she was so out of touch with life outside the Academy.
‘Well how many are we committing? Is there anyone already involved?’
‘The Council have yet to decide if we will participate, let alone the numbers. And in any case, the Council would not involve a Seventh Circle to be part of that decision.’
‘Who is already there?’
‘There are three Academy magi currently involved in the conflict, two of which were visiting Buckthorne and were dragged into the opening battle, the other had travelled north–west for a research project. For the time being, we believe they are capable of representing the Academy’s interests.’
Ara popped instantly into her head and Carina instinctively knew that the other Seventh Circle mage was already involved in the war. She had no idea what Ara was playing at but it clearly had something to do with surpassing her. Cursing under her breath, Carina had few precious seconds to think of what she could do.
‘When you do decide to send magi to aid the Murukans, I’m volunteering to go.’
‘The decision to go will be up to the Council and whom we will send.’
‘Send magi who are willing to go, Elder Kilke, they are the ones more likely to return.’
Kikle reluctantly nodded her head and dismissed her with a wave of her hand. Carina led the way out of the office, Rigel right on her toes.
‘We’re going to war now?’ he asked.
‘Soon enough. That’s where Ara is, and she’s up to something. I need to figure out what that is. But first we need to find somewhere away from the Academy so I can begin casting these new spells away from prying eyes.’
Patric had been feeding him any information he could find, and Chase’s ears on the street had been informing him that the Church had ramped up their anti-magic campaign to such an extent they were recruiting soldiers left right and centre by scare tactics.
Thousands had re-enlisted in Dagenham alone and entered the training camps to adapt back into military life. There were steady streams of caravans moving south across the Empire that would eventually find themselves in the mountains or down in Murukia.
Chase was sitting at the desk that had been delivered upon his request to the Stony Feather and was opening the correspondence from Redisberg. Alina was writing him letters, offering her condolences about his posting and doing her best to convince him to let her travel to the capital to be with him. He knew it would be nice to hold her in his arms again, but travel in the southern countries of the Empire were dangerous with the rogue Murukan unit riding behind their front lines. More so, he was concerned about the dangers of the city itself. The more reports he read, the more danger he considered himself to be in.
His main concern was the eye witness accounts from Tarkinholm, where the few survivors, the ones who hadn’t mysteriously vanished from the city, had changed their statements. In the earlier comments, all of them had said the cell was comprised of three men, but when members of the Voice of God had gone to investigate and clean up the mess in the tunnels, they had explained away their mistakes and now reported that it was two men and a woman — and that she was the spellcaster. That they all saw
her
throwing fireballs around the city and summoning lightning from the sky.
He found it interesting that in the space of a week their statements could have changed so dramatically, especially when they were so adamant in the beginning that the mage was a man. Some of the descriptions were so vivid, and so consistent — bald head, robed, tattoos on his arms — and now a woman who varied in height, colouring and description.
Chase knew that someone had gotten to the witnesses, and he had his suspicions.
Some of the other reports that had passed his desk were more illuminating. The fighting was heavy. He hadn’t expected otherwise, but where it was happening was the surprise. He had expected Black Claw to fold the quickest, it was a large compound and only supported by a small number of rotated personnel — but the resistance was the strongest there. They had defied wave after wave of attack and were holding with minimum numbers. He hadn’t even heard of their commander before the war had started, apparently he was some young man named Fallon who lived on the wall with his men. And he wasn’t the only name to have come from Black Claw, the battlefield was creating some legends.
The Gorgon Pass was a stalemate, Riles had done as he was instructed and was ensuring that Duncan stayed inside the bastion. But the twins had stumbled their way south through the third pass and would besiege Gravid’s Drift after annihilating the earl and his men in the field.
The most interesting thing, above all else, was the reports from the camps about the presence of the Church of the One God. The injured were being healed at an alarming rate and being sent back to the front. The bishops were trawling through the infirmaries and muttering their healing prayers and the wounded soldiers were up and fighting the next day.
The Church had always felt that the prayers they offered to the One God granted them the power to heal the faithful and destroy his enemies, but in Chase’s opinion channelling the One God’s power closely resembled the magic of the Murukan magi. The witches could heal, there were stories from the legends where a touch from a mage had sent the giant Dimitri back out onto the bridge after his third opponent had opened his chest. There was another instant where King Adam had taken an arrow in the lung when he was a boy and one of the witches had healed him and granted him long life.
Chase hadn’t seen the devastating power that the bishops’ commanded but had been present when they had activated their shields over the camps, or the marching columns as they had advanced upon their enemies. They were an effective tool, but he didn’t think they were sent from the One God. With every passing day he was beginning to believe that the bishops of the Church were throwbacks to the banished magi from centuries ago.
After Rayn’s downfall and the fallout of the Academy’s Council, the male magi that supported him and his path were hunted down and destroyed, for better or worse, but Chase had always suspected that they would have never found every last one of them. The ability to cast, as his military textbooks had indicated, was a genetic skill, not one that you were trained for. More could have been born, others just slipped away unnoticed.
What he considered as a much more likely outcome, was that some of them slipped into the clergy of the One God. The powers that they insisted were a gift from their faith were nothing more than their own ability to cast. As the centuries passed, the clergy could have welcomed their former brotherhood in under the safety of the Church, more so in a magic-fearing Empire, where the hunters would never be able to come after them directly.
They adapted their powers, focused more on the healing attributes and defensive spells that the Church preached defined their One God and as such become better known as the Hand of God. But that God now seemed more likely to be one associated with the dark arts rather than the all powerful deity that the Kyzantine people believed in.
However, he couldn’t share these findings with the Emperor’s advisors, not now that the majority of the council were members of the Church. His hand covered his mouth as he scratched his cheeks. There were few people in the capital he could trust apart from the entourage that he had brought with him from Redisberg. The phalanx of guards had been in his service for years and he knew their loyalty was unwavering.
But that didn’t mean that the information they gathered hadn’t been intercepted somewhere along the line. Others could have been reading all of his reports, forming their own conclusions and calculating where his analysis would lead.
Strangely, he had always thought that the Church might have been behind the assassination attempt, but had never sought to confirm his suspicions. He would need to prove that they could cast without prayer, one would assume that should be easy enough. If it came down to their life, he was sure they were selfish enough to save their own arses.
‘Todd, send word to Patric, I need to speak with him urgently.’
As Todd ran off, Chase knew that was the best possible way to get in contact with the Emperor. He alone needed to hear what he had discovered. He would know who could be trusted, how the Church could be found out.
Chase paced his office, looking at the clock on the wall every five seconds, waiting for the appointed time. He rubbed his wrist, clenching and unclenching his left hand repeatedly, in an attempt to release the tension. He sat back down at the desk and shuffled through the papers again. It was all there for anyone to see, it had just taken him forever to link it all together. How it had escaped every other person’s attention for the better part of five centuries he had no idea. Either they were bought off to stop revealing the secret, or they disappeared.
When he had accepted the Emperor’s request, he honestly hadn’t expected it to end here. The names of Derrick’s killers — Chase scoffed at the bishop’s folly. There had been no ownership of the murder from inside Murukia. No celebrations of the Prince’s death that suggested it was an authorised hit. No mage had suddenly risen to power, nor was there a recent appointment to the Academy Council. No, this attack had not come from the south, that was conclusive.
Which only meant one of two things. That it had come from another country or within his own. The fact that the caster was a male — of that Chase was now one hundred percent certain — meant that either one of the southern countries were harbouring a supposed terminated cult. Or the more obvious answer and thus the more likely: that the bishops of the Church were actually magi themselves and that one of them had been responsible for the murder.
To find a name, as was his specific task given to him by the Emperor of Kyzantium, meant that he had to infiltrate the Church and expose them for what they were: hypocrites. And that was bound to be impossible.
He stood up again, scattering the pages across his desk in his nervous haste. Chase sighed, the wait was getting to him, and he collected the loose pages and neatly stacked them carefully in the top drawer of the desk before locking it and hiding the key on the underside of the drawer below it. He sat back down, drummed his fingers against the wood and stared down the looks of Abe and Pete who were sitting in the office with him. Chase sensed his restlessness was impacting their own states of mind and he inwardly promised if they got out of this alive he would make it up to them.
If this went according to plan, he would be bringing down the Church of the One God, an institution that had existed in the Kyzantine Empire for centuries. He would expose their greatest secret, a crime punishable by death as decreed by the Emperor and the One God’s will. Chase smiled at the irony of it. However, if this didn’t go right, then they would find his body floating face down in the sewer somewhere.
This was the kind of information that got people killed.
Chase had thought about this long and hard before he had approached Patric. What if they threatened Alina and Rachel? What if they used his wife and daughter to force him to be silent, just kept it contained until they could arrange for him to have an accident.
He wouldn’t let that happen. Chase couldn’t. He would act before they could rally against him. That was all there was to it.
Patric had organised for him to get into the palace unseen, where he would be able to meet with the Emperor alone and without prying ears. He’d mapped out a route to a small hovel in the slums of the capital where his contact would meet him and from there they would go in the disguise of tradesmen. Patric had vouched for the confidante, had complete faith in the man’s ability to move unseen through the town.
Patric’s reassurances led to more questions, and Chase wondered exactly how the young man had risen in the court when so many others had failed and been crushed by the existing power brokers. His mysterious web of eyes and ears must have had something to do with it, but Chase knew that someone would be watching him. You couldn’t cause a ripple in the pond without people noticing.
Chase was uneasy about the whole thing. Of late the Church had been pressing their message harder. Or maybe it was just grating against him now that he knew. Maybe their daily pestering had always been so hypocritical, so conflicting. Only the other day a group of clergymen had actually accosted him and his entourage in the street demanding that he publicly pledge his allegiance to the Church like the other citizens were doing. He conceded when the armed soldiers supporting the bishops moved toward him, Abe and Hugh and the three quickly dropped to a knee and with heads facing the floor, swore allegiance to the Church, as the first bishop chanted the One God’s prayer and the other splashed water over the congregation gathered at their feet.
That was the first time Chase had actually felt dirty after walking the streets of the city, even the slums where he was headed tonight. Despite the filth of the streets, despite the poverty and the destitution, he didn’t get the same feeling of grime coating his skin and his soul. He cringed at the memory and rubbed at the spot where the water had touched the back of his hand in another attempt to remove it.
Dagenham just felt tainted to him now. The corruption, the political and religious backstabbing. Everyone had their own agenda and none of it was for the betterment of the Empire. He wanted out. He just wanted to go back to Alina and protect Redisberg from a Murukan threat that his own countrymen had provoked under the false pretences of the Church. All he could do now was warn the Emperor of the threat presented by the majority of his own counsel and go home and protect his people.
There was a double-knock on the door, a slight pause, and another double-tap. The time had come. Abe and Pete were on their feet the moment the first sound of movement was heard on the other side of the door. Abe had served as his personal guard for near on twenty years. The scars on the man’s face were a reminder of all that they had survived. Pete was almost the opposite, a quiet youth, he had proven himself in the rankings and had challenged for the role when Hector had retired to raise the swarm of bastards he had sired across the width of the Empire. To look at him, he appeared kind and gentle but Chase had seen him destroy adversaries with a ferocity that burned deep inside his soul. Both men fell in behind him as Chase moved impatiently through the tavern, the collar of his jacket pulled up covering his neck and the bottom of his jaw.
It had been a simple decision to increase the number of guards that accompanied him. With the knowledge that he possessed he was certain people were going to want him dead. He didn’t need Patric to advise him on any such thing, despite the younger man’s good intentions. After the incident in the street, the gall of the bishops to approach him in public, he wouldn’t put it past them to do anything.
Todd and Grant had moved on ahead, never out of sight and a strong presence. Abe and Pete flanked him in unison, aware that their charge was now the most attractive target in a city, where any citizen could prove deadly and a Church fanatic could be disguised as a common peddler on the streets. They were all armed and alert. Tonight something was going to happen — there was no doubt about it. Tonight the Empire would change, Chase just hoped that he was still alive to see it.
Chase had left the map upstairs so as not to implicate the maker or Patric if he was caught, along with all the documentation of what he believed the Church to be doing. He firmly believed that he could convince the Emperor of what he had learnt without it and they could travel in an armed convoy back to the tavern to retrieve it then. It was too valuable to fall into the wrong hands. Chase just hoped that the Emperor wasn’t too under the sway of the Church and that he would see reason.