The Blood Sigil (The Sigilord Chronicles Book 2) (40 page)

"Just before Urus saved us from certain death, we were about to be overrun by creatures. These creatures were not from one of the banished realms, not from hell."

Murin paused, stroking the tiny bits of white hair that passed as his beard.

Likely deciding which of his secrets he is still going to keep
, Urus thought. One day, he was going to go back into Murin's mind to search and get all the answers he wanted.

"I surmise that Autar and Anderis have created an abomination known as a blood sigil," said Murin. "This is terrible magic that should never be wielded, by anyone. It is magic like this that the arbiters use to justify their genocidal war on those with magical abilities."

"What does a blood sigil do?" Urus asked, though deep down a part of him knew the answer to that question. He remembered the rotting flesh dangling loose on the bones of the creatures that swarmed up out of the water. It all made sense now; terrible, dreadful sense.

Murin nodded. "A blood sigil is used to raise the dead."

"Which dead?" Choein asked from his post at the door. "How many enemies are we talking about? How many dead?"

Murin turned to face the radix, his expression dark. "All of them."

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Cailix kicked the makeshift raft away from the pier and into the fog-smothered waters of the bay. The island was teeming with strange creatures and worse, the risen dead. If she had any hope of ambushing Anderis without the protection of minions or Autar, she had to get off the island. A few planks of wood and some rope from one of the debris piles nearby had made it fairly easy to build the raft.

It had been easy because she was strong.
So
strong. The power was unlike anything she had ever experienced when wielding blood magic the way Anderis had taught her. Filled with the warmth of freshly drunk blood, she was invincible. She could breathe in the cold air of the harbor, fill her lungs with it, and feel rejuvenated.
 

Finally she had the tools she needed to defeat Anderis in a proper fight.
 

She crawled onto the raft, careful not to slip off and fall into the frigid water. As she was about to use her blood magic to conjure a wind to feed a current that would take her to the main city, dark silhouettes moving through the fog caught her eye.

Several tall, robed figures had gathered among a group of soldiers, apparently in the middle of a heated discussion. They stood only a short distance away, clustered by the side of a decaying stone building. Their shouts echoed off the bay and hollow buildings.

They're not hell creatures or undead
, she thought, trying to listen to the conversation, hoping they hadn't noticed her.

"Autar Kelus is near," said the group leader, his voice gruff and angry. As the cold wind blew the fog out into the bay, their silhouettes materialized into familiar shapes. Cailix had seen several of the robed men before. Six months ago, they had stepped out of the shimmering portal, accused Urus of unpronounceable crimes, and then kidnapped him, taking him back with them through their portal.

"You are to kill him without hesitation," ordered another of the robed men. "He must not be allowed to live."

It's the arbiters
, she thought.
Autar and Anderis have been waiting for them.

It was the perfect opportunity for an ambush. If Anderis wanted the arbiters, she could follow them and wait for him to show up. The distraction of a battle between Autar's forces and the arbiters might provide all the cover she needed to kill her former teacher—at last.

She slipped off the raft and made for the nearest alley, using what little remained of the fog to cover her approach.

The arbiters and their soldiers marched in close formation along the main thoroughfare toward Findanar's inner circle. A moment later the soldiers drew their weapons, and brilliant, green and yellow human-shaped creatures seemed to erupt from their blades.

Those are just like the ones I saw fighting with Urus
, Cailix thought.
What is going on here? Where is all this magic coming from?
Before she had met Anderis, magic had been a myth, lore told to children in bedtime stories. Now she wielded the power of a blood mage, and her only friend in the world commanded an army of soldiers, both human and magical.
 

Close enough to overhear their conversations, she was also close enough to feel their pulses. The blood called to her, not like it used to when she was just a weak blood mage, but more strongly now that she had become…something more. It was all she could do to suppress the urge to slaughter and consume everyone in the street, but she knew she had to stay hidden until Anderis made an appearance.

It didn't take long before Autar's forces appeared, a swarm of skeletons hung with putrid flesh, surging out of the mist from all directions. Cailix leapt through an open window and ducked down just in time to avoid a throng of undead approaching from the rear.

The animated corpses swarmed like ants, blindly rushing up against their opponents, swinging and bludgeoning in an attempt to overwhelm through sheer numbers. The soldiers, with their magic swords and glowing companions, sliced through the horde with ease, littering the street with mounds of smoldering, twice-dead corpses.

"Burn them!" shouted one of the arbiters. "Burn them all, or we will have to fight them again!"

As the arbiters and their guards set about burning the writhing piles of undead, Cailix sought higher ground. She made her way up what little remained of the stairs in the home and peeked out through an opening onto the roof.

Dark, winged shapes filled the air, circling above the section of the street where the arbiters held their position. She had fought, and killed, many of those creatures before, when she had kept them at bay while Urus and his companions escaped.

I am so much more than a blood mage now
, she thought.
I could kill these arbiters and their magic swordsmen before they even saw me coming.

Not wanting to be seen by the hell birds, she slinked back into the building and made her way to street level. The creatures dove at the group, over and over, spitting a black acid from their mouths that burned the buildings, the street, and anything else in the way.

The soldiers swung wildly at the air and broke formation, heading for cover in whatever building was closest. Cailix had a difficult decision to make. Anderis and Autar wanted the arbiters dead, and the arbiters wanted them dead. She really should sit back and watch them all kill each other. The arbiters were no friends of hers after what they had done to Urus. She owed them nothing.

From her hiding place in the building, she watched the battle for a few more minutes. The arbiters didn't stand a chance. Another wave of the clacking skeletons shambled toward them and herded the soldiers back into the streets, just in time for a pair of the massive, tentacled wolves to charge down the main road, followed by one of their handlers.

If they die too quickly, Anderis won't even bother showing up
, she thought.
I need to prolong this battle, at least until Anderis arrives.

She focused on the enormous hulk of a man making his way toward the battle, the man who held a whistle that must be what controlled the wolves. She felt his blood, alien though it was. She called to it, controlled it, and made it her own. It took but a thought to make the man's blood boil beneath his flesh.

He dropped to his knees, hands clawing at his face. Moments later a cloud of steam swallowed the man as his now-boiling skin made contact with the cold air. The oily-skinned, purple wolves skidded to a halt and looked blankly back at their fallen master.

This was all the time the arbiters' soldiers needed to surround the creatures and quickly slice them into dozens of pieces, which they threw onto the growing pyre of flaming skeletons in the street.

The arbiters seemed irritated by the sudden death of the wolf handler, arguing with each other as their soldiers continued cutting up and burning the remaining bodies.

"What happened?" one asked.

"A bile wolf handler doesn't simply drop dead for no reason," another complained.
 

The bleat of a horn off in the distance put an end to the argument.

"Autar's army approaches," said the leader of the arbiters. Cailix recognized him from the beach the day they had come to take Urus away.

I should let him die
, she thought.
But if these arbiters all die, Anderis and Autar get what they want. What am I to do?

The decision was made for her when a bile wolf crashed through the door into the room where she had been hiding. As it slid across the floor and slammed into a nearby wall, Cailix got up and leapt out the window.

As she landed, then rolled to her feet, she realized that the arbiters and their soldiers were all standing in the street, staring at her. She paused for a moment, regarding them, steam puffing from her mouth and nose into the cold air. She felt exhilarated, powerful, and finally in control.

The wolf burst through the stone wall as though it were nothing more than a bale of hay. Cailix reached out to the creature's blood and tried to take control of it. The blood felt strange, hot, and horribly wrong. It was as if the creature's blood were made of the same awful liquid found in the pit of her stomach.

That didn't stop her from controlling it, however. Transmutation was the easiest form of blood magic, and with a mere thought she converted the creature's hot, pumping blood into solid chunks. It spasmed and twitched, howling and flopping about on the street like a freshly caught fish.

She looked up from the writhing corpse, facing the wide-eyed group of arbiters and their soldiers. Some of the arbiters visibly shook in their robes. Accustomed to other people doing their dirty work for them, they did not seem mentally prepared for a direct confrontation, least of all with a female blood mage.

The purple flames shooting from the throats of the creatures flying above cast flickering shadows on the alley, and the stench of acid-burned flesh and stone filled the area.

"What are you doing here, girl?" asked the leader of the arbiters. "I did not ask the blood mages for assistance."

He doesn't remember me
, she thought.
He doesn't remember that day on the beach at Aldsdowne when they came to take Urus.

"I just happened upon your group," she said in a casual tone. "You seemed to need help and I didn't want to waste time waiting to ask if you were in need."

"Well, since you are here," the arbiter said, "we are hunting a sigilord and could use some assistance. May I assume you will honor the old agreement between our people?"

"The agreement," Cailix said, wondering what the old man was talking about. "Yes, of course."

"I am Chancellor Vogon," the man said. "And these are my companions and our radix soldiers."

Cailix had no idea what a radix was, but she wasn't about to ask and give the man reason to doubt her. "My name is Aerlissa." She didn't trust the arbiters any more than she trusted Anderis, so she wasn't about to give them her real name either.

"A name with true pedigree," remarked Vogon. "Millennia ago there was a blood mage named Aerlissa. She was quite possibly the most powerful of your kind ever to have lived."

I wonder if that's where Anderis got the name
, she thought. When he had taken her as his apprentice, Aerlissa was the name he had insisted on calling her.

Again the horn of war blared in the distance.

The man standing just behind Vogon pulled a device from his robe and placed it against his eyes. "Autar's army marches across the bay. It appears Autar has created a bridge."

"Is Autar among them?" Vogon asked.

"Not that I can see," replied the arbiter, the strange device still affixed to his face.

"Then let them march."

"You're not going to stop them?" Cailix asked. "What about all those people?"

"What about them?" Vogon replied. "We are here to kill Autar Kelus, something that should have been done thousands of years ago."

She was reconsidering her decision to let the arbiters live when a huge black shape blotted out the sky above them. She craned her neck to see an impossibly large creature that looked like a long, fanged snake with the wings of a bat, but large enough to support a saddle and the red-skinned rider who sat astride it. Other than the red skin not covered by the rider's dark plated mail, it appeared to be human—mostly.
 

She didn't want to wait around to find out the kind of damage that beast was capable of doing. Cailix's mind reached out for the nearest source of blood she could find, but was interrupted by what sounded like a stampede of wild horses.

A horde of undead spewed onto the street from all directions. As the crush of decaying bodies slammed into her, she scanned the sea of skulls to see Anderis in a saddle on the back of one of the tentacled wolves. As he met her gaze, she thought she saw something strange in his eyes. Was it worry? What would he be worried about?

The undead tide bowled her over, their own density and numbers preventing any of them from gaining enough room for a strike. The strong, sturdy pulse in the veins of the radixes nearby drummed in her head. They had truly potent blood.