The Mirrored City
3. The Salon of Forgotten Gods (Maddox)
8. The Song of the Sea (Jessa)
19. The Libertine (Libby & Sword)
22. A Fistful of Seals (Maddox)
40. Scions of Patrea (Shannon)
Copyright © 2015 Michael J. Bode
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1517287146
ISBN 13: 978-1517287146
Edited by Karen Robinson of INDIE Books Gone Wild
Proofread by Tia Silverthorne Bach of INDIE Books Gone Wild
Cover and Interior Design by Inkspiral Design
A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to thank my fans and supporters for their support: Lindy, Ian, Stephen, Casey and Lozano.
This would wouldn’t be possible without the support of my editor, Karen Robinson, and my designer, Matthew Bright.
O
NE
Isik
THE NECROMANCER ISIK
followed the Patrean guard. The streets and narrow alleys of Dessim were still a mystery to Isik. The walls were riddled with tiny alcoves, shrines to any of the thousands of gods the people of the city worshipped as part of the Host. A god of tax evasion was currently quite popular.
“What’s your name?” Isik had a thick Volkovian accent.
“Fox,” the Patrean soldier replied.
They all looked alike, so it was impossible for Isik to tell if he should have known the guard or not. Fox was not a familiar name.
Isik nodded. “In Volkov, it was easy. The Patreans wear their names on their uniforms so we can tell them apart.”
“It’s not often people here even bother to ask,” Fox commented.
“Then what do they call you?” Isik inquired.
Fox shrugged. “Well, ‘Hey you’ and ‘excuse me’ are pretty common. But it gets more colorful when I make arrests.”
Isik sighed. “It is a shame. I think if everyone looked alike, the world would have far fewer problems.”
“If the world had less violence, I’d be out of a contract,” Fox quipped.
“And if fewer people were murdered, I may have to take up a craft,” Isik admitted. “Still, I think it’s a better world where you do not constantly have to interrupt the coroner’s dinner to drag him to the scene of a murder, yes? Perhaps we could make paintings.”
Fox chuckled. “I’ve only ever been good at fighting.”
“And I have only ever been good at necromancy. But with all the fighting and dead people, who has time to discover other interests?”
Fox led Isik down a narrow alley. “You were there. At Rivern. What was it like?”
“Ugh,” Isik groaned. “Watery tentacles rose from the riverbed and tore the city to pieces. People were dying by the droves in their sleep from a plague of Harrowers. I came here to get some peace.”
“I hear the heroes of Rivern are in the city,” Fox said.
Isik offered a silent prayer to the Ancestors. “They were too late to be heroes. Rivern is a disaster, and so many are dead. It will be decades before it is whole again. That is why I came here. The river is small.”
“The new Stormlord is a citizen of the Protectorate. That gives us a fighting chance.” Fox sounded encouraged. The Fodder couldn’t have been older than twenty summers, maybe less given how quickly they reached maturity.
“No one person should have that much power,” Isik complained. “I am somewhat powerful, but even the infamous necromancer Pytheria cannot destroy a city in a single evening.”
“We’re here,” Fox said.
Isik looked at the colorful marquee above the poetry café. He shuddered with inward revulsion. The nuanced theater in Volkov was the sole aspect of his home city-state he actually missed. He preferred the sterile mechanical contraptions of Rivern to the flowery wordplay of the Dessim poets and novelists.
Isik threw open the door. What he saw froze him in his tracks.
A male, early twenties, hung by his leg from the ceiling over a stage at the back of the café. He was naked from the waist up, with bare feet. The ligature discoloring around his ankle indicated he had been hung within the past day.
Darla, the red-robed blood mage, was already there, swirling a sample in her copper dish. Her discipline dealt with life whereas Isik’s dealt with death, but they found complementary alignment in murder investigations. Isik had to admit she was quite attractive for a woman approaching middle age.
His attention returned to the body. A pair of black wings were affixed to its back, upside down, the tips stretching toward the ground. Isik neared the young man and noted a circular tattoo on his chest. He was a seal mage, probably part of the Guild of Correspondents. The mark on his chest would have enabled instantaneous long-range communication with anyone who bore a similar mark.
“Did he call for help?” Isik asked.
Another Patrean, a lead inspector by his badge, replied, “Not that we’ve determined so far. We’ve sent investigators to the Guild, but no one’s stepped forward with any information. Many of them are still asleep.”
“How does that work? Can seal mages communicate when one party is asleep?”
“Not reliably,” Darla answered. “But the Guild operates continuously, and he should have known at least one of the mages on duty.”
Isik nodded and approached the suspended corpse. He needed to see the eyes. His art had many applications, but the primary reason cities employed necromancers was for their talent to see the cause of death in the eyes of a corpse. Murderers generally knew to remove the eyes or hide their faces, so determining foul play was a straightforward endeavor.
Isik gazed into the man’s cold dead eyes.
A second later, he stumbled back. “Fuck.”
The inspector asked, “What did you see?”
Isik glanced sideways at the inspector. “A room full of dead bodies, hung upside down. Pieces missing from most of them. The killer came from behind. The room looks like a warehouse: peaked roof, wooden rafters, at least twenty feet long. It’s so dark I can’t see the end. The body across from me looks Genatrovan, but the face is cut off. Seven other bodies are hanging, all male. One of them is missing an arm.”
“Fuck,” the inspector said.
“There’s a fucking crazy person killing people,” Isik concurred.
T
WO
The Binding
M
ADDOX
The first century of the Mirrored City’s history is marked by an endless cycle of revolt and oppression. The Ohanites, a devout splinter religion of the Hierocracy, believed in moderation, purity, and social conformity. The anarchic Omnitheists, who were mixed believers of all other religions, believed in exactly the opposite and prized individual freedom.
King Sulidan the Wise, whose parents were of differing faiths, was concerned only with which path would yield the greatest social good. To quell violence, he authored a social experiment, known as the Compromise. The city proper would be split into two halves, one for each side.
Nearly four hundred years later, no conclusive answer has been reached. As part of the Protectorate, each government alternates sending representatives to the Grand Assembly. As this representative holds the influential swing vote, the proposals put before the Grand Assembly often wait for a year that favors a particular policy.
—
DORIAN BRAND VIII
, HISTORY OF SARN, VOLUME SEVEN: THE LONG NIGHT AND AFTER
HEATH LOOKED OUT
across the Mirrored City as the sunrise painted long intricate shadows from the railing of his balcony. Like all buildings in Dessim, the apartments were hewn from black marble. Across from his building, over the wall that divided the city from Baash, an identical five-story tower of white marble looked back at him. On a matching balcony, a man in a long white tunic and pants was smoking something.
Each side had been given the same buildings and infrastructure. And each side had been given a mission to prove, once and for all, which way of life was best. In Dessim, Heath’s building served as long-term housing for visiting dignitaries and merchants. Judging from the white laundry hanging from some of the balconies, it was family housing in Baash.
Heath sipped his bitter herbal tea. He almost gagged every morning he drank it. Maddox had convinced Heath it would help with the cancer growing in his stomach. It had, in fact. But it left him feeling weak for several hours a day. He finished it and went inside.
Maddox was dead, slumped in an overstuffed purple chair, staring vacantly into an empty fireplace. The mantel was littered with figurines of nearly every hearth deity in Creation.
“You alive yet, buddy?”
As if on cue, a golden light flickered over Maddox’s body. Color returned to his skin, and his dead eyes blinked. He made no effort to move.
“Maddox,” Heath asked. “How are you feeling this morning?”
“Like I want to be dead again,” Maddox stated dully. “Where’s my Sword?”
Heath stood in front of Maddox, kneeling to look into his sad green eyes.
He’s responding. He’s coming back, but it sucks to see him like this.
Maddox had been temperamental, belligerent, drunk for a good portion of the day, and very rarely, quite charming. The Inquisition had squeezed all of that out of him, turning him into a hollow shell because they were afraid of his immortality and knowledge of the Grand Design, the Seal of Seals.
Heath said, “It’s going to be fine. You’re recovering, Maddox. You have to start feeling some of the bad stuff before the good stuff comes back.”
“It’s all bad stuff. My whole fucking life. I don’t want any of it,” Maddox said.
“You’re a well-regarded hero of Rivern and a personal friend of the empress. You have more gold than you could spend in a lifetime. It’s not all bad.”