*
“Not by a long shot,” Joachim said several days later as they all gathered in a semi-circle in front of a blazing fire in the Count’s private office. Niam had to be pushed there in a wheeled chair because he was still weak and sore. “Too many matters are still up in the air.”
“Like my head,” Niam said with a lazy, lopsided grin slanting across his face.
“Don’t get to liking that that syrup of poppy too much Maldies,” Joachim warned him. “I’ve seen what it can do to people. You’re going off of it sooner than you want to.”
The world was a merry place as long as he was on the syrup, but when he went off . . .
“You’re bedside manner is as bad as Kreeth’s,” Niam frowned.
Joachim ignored this. Davin wanted to know what they were going to do about tracking down the men who had helped Kreeth by setting the fires in Pirim Village. “Someone assassinated all of the men we caught the night everything went down. The only ones we interrogated were common criminals and had no clue who paid them.”
“Which means there were professionals involved,” Gaius said sourly. “But we already knew that.”
Joachim nodded his head slowly. “Indeed. Some of the men were . . . I suspect, from Kalavere. We’ll never prove it, though.”
“On account of that damned Eason,” Gaius said in disgust. “He’s hid all of the evidence by now.”
“No, my friend. Fortunately for Eason, you are wrong.”
Everyone looked up at this. “Fortunately how?” Gaius demanded.
“Fortunately for him that he is dead,” Joachim said coldly. “His days were numbered after what he tried here. I wasn’t going to let him hide behind the backs of my enemies in Pallodine, but it wasn’t me that got to him.”
“Who was it, then?” Niam asked.
Joachim made a sour face. “Eason was too greedy and intent on getting back at me for something I did to him years ago to realize he was in over his head. Now I’m afraid Dosir has been appointed as interim magistrate over Kalavere.”
The room grew uncomfortably quiet. Kalavere’s province was now in the hands of their enemy.
“Where’s Kine?” Niam asked brightly to lighten the mood. “I miss him, don’t you?”
Niam felt Davin’s hands close around his mouth, but continued trying to talk until everyone looked at him and he grew quiet. When Davin removed his hand, Niam managed to say, “This is great stuff,” before Joachim threatened to have his tongue removed.
“Jolan Kine has gone away for a while,” Joachim said once everyone was quiet again. “We have to move quickly before our enemies can regroup. Kreeth had allies in the court, toads that were willing to give him their backing. Good thing for us that you three interfered with Kreeth and that Eason moved too quickly. Otherwise they might have succeeded. Mr. Kine is already in Pallodine. There are things happening there that concern me—and I have to try to put down as many rumors about you three as possible. IF it’s even possible.”
Niam raised his hand. Too many things were swirling around inside his head to keep them together. Davin shushed him again, but Joachim sighed and said, “Go ahead Mr. Maldies.”
“Was it better for us when we just had tralls trying to kill us, sir?”
Across from him, he saw Gaius stiffen and frown. His eyes shot toward Maerillus. In an instant, Niam knew even in the state that he was in what the answer was, and what it meant for the youngest Sartor in the room.
“I’m sorry,” Niam said, but Gaius spoke up.
“In your own unique way, you are right,” he said. “The danger for you three hasn’t gone away. You’ve managed to throw the covers off of something that threatens us all.”
“And now that the people behind this might be exposed, you managed to grab a great many enemies for yourselves,” Joachim said in a sober voice. “With any luck I can focus their attention on me for the time being.”
“But what was Kreeth up to? He wanted something other than the Khadihar, something else.”
This question seemed to irk Joachim, whose face twitched as Niam spoke. “I don’t know, and we need to find that out,” the count said unhappily.
“As to that . . . what is a Khadihar, and is there any way to put the thing down for good, or is it going to stay there like that below the ground?”
“Another question in a long line of things we have no answers for,” Joachim said flatly.
“What do we have answers for?” Niam asked.
Joachim’s face grew dour. “That there are problems in the east again, after hundreds of years . . . and that is worse by far than anything we’ve seen here.”
“He said something about the Necromancer Kings,” Niam said with a shudder. “He told me that he was making himself more powerful than they had been . . .” his voice trialed off as another memory occurred to him. Suddenly the effects of the poppy didn’t seem to be working as well. “Great Lord!” he exclaimed. “This started in the east. He told me what happened, that his family were traders, that they stumbled across something in the mountains. He made a deal with the things they found . . . his family refused and they were killed for it.”
Joachim nodded his head. “Everything I’ve been able to dig up about Kreeth supports this.”
Davin spoke up. “Sir, the Necromancer Kings—the Dread Lords fought them. Those wars destroyed civilization.”
“That would be correct,” Joachim said gravely.
Niam noticed that across from him, the color drained from Gaius’s face. Maerillus saw this, too, but clearly didn’t know what to make of it.
Niam, however, was like a dog with a bone and did not want to let the topic go. “Besides partially explaining why Kreeth was here to begin with, what does this have to do with us? We’ve been give these abilities for a reason, so what is this all about. I don’t know if we’ll be able to survive another sorcerer.”
“And Kreeth did say he wasn’t alone,” Davin observed.
Gaius and Joachim looked at one another for a long moment. Gaius looked back to his son with an expression of worry.
“What is it?” Maerillus asked. If there’s something we need to know, I think the truth needs to come out. “It’s not like we are some kind of Dread Lords meant to fight things like necromancers and sorcerers. We barely survived.”
“My grandmother had a rare gift,” Joachim said slowly. “Sometimes, for special occasions or events, she had the ability to speak the truth of things to come. Many years before you three were born, on her deathbed, she gave up her last prophecy in the presence of several other people. Your parents.”
“What did your grandmother tell you?” Niam asked quietly enough for his words to be swallowed by the crackle of fire burning in the hearth in front of them.
Joachim’s features appeared more angular and gaunt in the orange glow of lamps and fire. In this light, his face seemed too sharp, as pointed and cutting as the words he spoke. “She said that a shadow from the east was growing, and that people would be born to stand against it. You three are the first of many, and it will be up to you to find the others.”
Niam looked at his friends. The look on their faces became grim and stony. “We’ll never have normal lives,” Davin said.
“This is why I was always treated differently,” Maerillus said.
Gaius nodded his head. “We knew it was important for you three to remain close.”
The more Gaius talked, the more Niam slowly felt a hot lump welling up deep within his guts. At last he could hold it back no more. “My mom and dad knew, and they let me to fend for myself and pushed me off on your families,” he said bitterly. “That’s just great!” he blurted out.
Joachim’s words hit him li
ke a slap across the face. “Not another word! Your mother and father have had to endure the one thing everyone in this room has feared!”
“But they haven’t been here for me . . . not since—” and there he stopped, unable to finish his sentence. He wanted to scream, to yell, to summon the wall of force he threw at Kreeth and break everything in the room, but he just sat there in the chair and gripped the edges of his seat instead. “They left me alone,” he said, unable to tell whether anger or grief made his words falter.
Joachim sighed. “I sent them away,” he said at last. “They did the best they could do. Your mother wanted to take you and run. I convinced her otherwise. She and your dad are trying to protect you right this very moment. I have asked them to travel east where I have a number of contacts who keep an eye on things beyond the Shakta waste, and I think it would be nice if you showed them a bit of respect.”
Niam was incredulous. “Why them? Why did you send my parents east?”
“Because that is where your mother was born,” Joachim said.
Niam felt as if his head were filling with information too quickly to be able to sort through what Joachim was telling him. His voice came out heavy and thick, and he raised his hands in exasperation. “What else don’t I know about my family? Did my father grow me from magic watermelon seeds? The next thing we know you’ll tell us we are actually a bunch of Feythean changelings or that we’ll start molting on our eighteenth birthdays.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.” Joachim said testily.
“There’s not enough poppy in the world for that!” Niam shouted.
Joachim interrupted Niam before more anger had a chance to build up. “When your mother was a little younger than you are now, my father met her family close to the edge of Shakta territory. They were slaves in the lands where people can be bought and sold as cattle. Your grandfather saved my father’s life. Out of gratitude, he paid their owner a small fortune, purchasing their freedom and bringing them back here to live. Your mother told only a handful of people what she had once been. It was a thing she hoped to put behind her.”
“And a thing I sent her back into the heart of—for you three,” Joachim said in an arched voice.
“I should never have found out this way,” Niam insisted. The throbbing aches spider-webbed across Niam’s body began insistently making their presence known. “I need more medicine,” he said, wanting nothing more than to go to bed and stay there until the world dissolved like salt in a bowl of warm water.
“When they return, I think you need to talk to them instead of focusing on things from only your perspective,” Joachim said, but not unkindly.
“Sure,” was Niam’s only reply.
For the rest of the evening he said little, speaking only when spoken to, and then only with short answers. Everyone gave him his space, though he could have cared less whether anyone was put off by his reticence. Before bed he was finally given more medicine to ease his pain, yet despite the relief it brought, sleep was a long time coming.