Radiance (Wraith Kings Book 1) (24 page)

Brishen had guessed correctly and didn’t flinch when he saw what lay inside Secmis’s gift box.  His eye, shriveled to a withered, ocherous orb, rolled back and forth inside the box like the carved pebble in a child’s game of Heckle Stones.  He put the lid back on the box and threw the entire thing into the fire built in the hearth.  Flames devoured the container, shooting hungry sparks against the grate.

“She must have been bored in Haradis.”

Ildiko scowled at him, her tone waspish.  “How can you not be angry?  I want to punch her in her smirking face.”  She fisted her left hand and smacked the palm of her right hand with a hard thwack.

Brishen turned her so that she fully faced him.  The silk sleeves of her shirt rode smooth under his hands as he stroked her arms in a soothing gesture.  “Because she’s predictable.  She has yet to do anything I didn’t expect.”

Tears turned Ildiko’s eyes glossy, and she blinked hard.  “She would have let you die.  Perched on that throne like some great bloated spider and let them kill you!”

“Remember, wife.  I’m the spare of no value.”

She lunged for him and wrapped her arms around his waist.  Her soft breasts pressed against his chest as she hugged him as hard as she could.  “You are of great value to me,” she said into his tunic.  She raised her head, her eyes narrowed and still teary.  “I wish I could kill them again, Brishen.  I wish I could kill her.”

He threaded her hair through his clawless fingers before bending to kiss her forehead.  “I love you, my blood-thirsty hag.”

Ildiko sniffed and offered him a watery smile.  “That’s a good thing, because you’ll have to suffer through dinner later.  I thought your mother would be here another night, so I ordered potatoes to be served.”

Brishen threw back his head and laughed.  He lifted Ildiko off her feet to spin her around.

She was breathless when he put her down and managed to wiggle out of his embrace with a dizzy stumble.  “I have something for you as well,” she said.  “And it isn’t a body part.”  She retrieved a velvet pouch from the chest at the end of their bed and handed it to him.  “The jeweler from Halmatus township delivered it along with my necklace while you were healing.  I’d forgotten about it until Sinhue and I were checking the wardrobes for hidden scarpatine.”

Brishen opened the satchel and upended its contents into his palm.  His breath caught at the sight of a cabochon half the size to the one Ildiko’s mother had given her.  This one was cut from citrine quartz and as bright as a Kai’s gaze at midnight.  A spark of deeper orange pulsed within the stone’s depths.  A recolligere.  Ildiko had managed to find a memory jewel. He glanced at her.  “How did he come by one of these?”

Ildiko shrugged.  “He said they were rare.”

“They are.” If this stone held what he thought it did, he was going to revisit Halmatus township and the visit wouldn’t be friendly.  “Ildiko, the spell used to make these work is dangerous, unpredictable.  You didn’t...”  She nodded, confirming his fear.  “I’m going to kill that jeweler.”

Ildiko huffed.  “It was perfectly safe for me.  Memory madness only affects the Kai, and I’m not Kai.  Neither one of us thought the spell would work.  I think he was as surprised as I was that it did.”

Her fingers drifted over his, over the stone, hesitant, unsure.  Her strange eyes pleaded with him to accept her gift.  “If I die before you, I have no mortem light for you to carry to Emlek.  That recolligere holds one of my memories.  You can take that instead—a paler light.”

She made him strong; she made him weak, and in that moment, she nearly put him on his knees.  Brishen gathered her into his embrace, the recolligere clutched in his hand.  He kissed her cheeks, her temples, the corners of her eyes wet with tears.  When he reached her mouth, he paused.  “Not a paler light,” he said.  “A radiant one, from a woman in whose presence I will never be blind.”

“Love me,” she whispered against his lips.

“Always.”

EPILOGUE

In chambers far below the public rooms of the royal palace, Queen Secmis cut the heart out of her latest lover’s dead body and dropped it into a pewter basin

Blood still pumped in sluggish streams from the severed arteries to half submerge the heart in a crimson pool.  Secmis dipped her fingers into the bowl and sketched arcane symbols on the body stretched across the gore-soaked bed.  She spoke words, neither bast-Kai nor Common, but ones that lacerated her tongue with every syllable uttered.  The flavors of iron and salt filled her mouth and she spat between sentences so as not to choke on her own blood.

The Kai’s butchered body twitched and began to flail while the exposed lungs did the impossible and bloated with air.

It was working.  Her incantation was working!  So many years, so many failed consecratives.  Finally!  She laughed, a gleeful sound as sweet as a child’s, as mad as a demon’s.

No longer would she just be queen of a fading race.  She would rule all kingdoms, all people—Kai and human.  And she would do so for thousands of years.  Undying, never aging, all-powerful.  A Night Queen instead of the weaker Shadow one.

The power she invoked had slept for longer than even the memories of the oldest mortem lights in Emlek.  The spell to awaken it had killed more than its share of mages.  It required blood and fear, memory and innocence.  Secmis thought she held the final ingredient when she’d birthed a daughter—a child born, not made, deformed and pushed from her womb.

She growled even as she drew more bloody symbols on the thrashing body.  Secmis never discovered who had taken the infant she’d marked for this ceremony, but she suspected.

Brishen had been a cheerful, congenial child.  He did as he was told, never rebelled or shown any ambition to replace his brother as heir.  Secmis had noted his character and promptly forgotten him.  Only when he’d grown older had she caught hints of a hidden strength, an implacable will and a cold, reptilian hatred that flickered in his eyes any time she met his gaze.

His response to his new sister’s unexpected death had been a shrug before he resumed his mock battle with Anhuset through the palace corridors.  He’d given Secmis a wide, frightened stare when she’d raged about the infant’s disappearance and yawned through the memorial they held for her.

Still, Secmis always wondered.  Her younger son was far more layered, far more complex than she gave him credit for, and far more intelligent than the pliable heir apparent.  He had cheerfully married that repulsive Gauri girl and gone about the business of settling her at Saggara without complaint.  He hadn’t confronted Secmis about the scarpatine in his wife’s bedroom, preferring instead to pack up and leave.  He’d outmaneuvered her by obtaining Djedor’s permission first.

His was a quiet rebellion of strategy, manipulation and an unruffled demeanor.  Only that glimmer of loathing in his gaze every time he looked at Secmis gave him away.  When a Beladine messenger carrying demands for negotiation of his release handed her proof of his capture, she’d stared into that mangled eye and seen the expression stamped there in the flat, yellow gaze.

His torture had not broken him.  She’d seen it herself.  Scarred and half blind, Brishen still ruled Saggara with a firm hand and commanded both the respect and fierce loyalty of his followers.  Secmis hadn’t lied when she told him he would have made a magnificent consort.  But only if they shared power, and Secmis was through with sharing power.

She completed the last of the spell.  The dead Kai, a lesser ambassador of the royal court, stilled beneath her hands.  His mouth was still warm as she pressed her lips to his and exhaled.  Oily black smoke poured from her mouth into his before swirling out through his nostrils.  His lungs expanded, contracted and repeated the process.

Secmis stepped away as the dead sat up.  “Speak the words,” she commanded.

The speech uttered was none ever spoken by the living and desecrated the dead who did.  A wet coldness settled in the chamber as the dead man recited unintelligible words that tore jagged wounds into his skin and wrenched cracks in the walls and ceiling.

One crack widened to a gaping splice of darkness even thicker than what already existed in the chamber.  It spilled out of the crack, thick as lamp oil and reeking of a charnel house.  Secmis laughed and clapped her hands as the viscous black oozed up the walls and across the floor, spawning writhing silhouettes with crimson gazes.  She’d done it!  Rent the veil between worlds and brought forth an unconquerable legion bound to her commands.

“To me,” she ordered, spreading her arms wide.

They came to her as she commanded but not as she hoped.  One slippery shadow twined around her and struck with a gaping maw.  Secmis yelped, suffocating in the thick sludge as the entity forced its way down her throat.  She clawed the air and tried to scream.  More of the sinuous shapes wrapped around her, seeking gaps in her clothing, every entrance to her body until she was nothing more than a choking, dancing puppet slammed one way and then another as the shadows shrieked and laughed and cavorted.

They fell silent for a moment, unfurling and creeping away from the grotesque jumble of bones and bloody flesh that had once been a queen renowned for her beauty and feared for her power.  The shapes whispered among themselves, adding sibilant voices to the voice of the dead man with no heart who still incanted the words of a poisoned language.

The crack in the wall widened, spilling more of the demonic phantasms into the chamber.  They eddied around the dead Kai, undulated across the floor and crawled around the door, seeping through the cracks between wall and frame.

The dead Kai spoke on, even when the first screams of the living resonated through the stones.

~!~!~!~!~

END

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In a bid for more power, the Shadow Queen of Haradis has unleashed a malignant force into the world.  Her son Brishen, younger prince of the Kai royal house, suddenly finds himself ruler of a kingdom blighted by a diseased darkness and on the brink of war.  His human wife Ildiko must decide if she will give up the man she loves in order to secure his throne.

Three enemy kingdoms must unite to save each other, and a one-eyed, reluctant king must raise an army of the dead to defeat an army of the damned.

A tale of alliance and sacrifice.

EIDOLON

Coming Soon

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Discover other titles by Grace Draven

Master of Crows

Entreat Me

All the Stars Look Down

The Lightning God’s Wife

Drago Illuminare

Draconus

Wyvern

Arena

Courting Bathsheba

Connect with me:

website:  http://gracedraven.com/

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/grace.draven