Chapter30
A Violation So Egregious
With a jolt, I came to alertness.For several terrifying moments, I believed myself back underwater, in my tomb.It was impossibly dark.Unrelentingly cold.
The overwhelming absence of my bond to Teo made the darkness darker, the cold colder.Desperation squeezed the air from my lungs as I wished not to feel anything at all.
Before Teo’s loss, I’d never once wanted to die, not even in the fighting pits when I was bloodied and battered, and welcoming death seemed like the wise, sensible thing.Knowing most everyone else would have given up made me fight all the harder.
Trembling continuously, I made myself breathe.Breathe.Breathe.
I obviously wasn’t actually underwater.
Where…?Ah.
I remembered.I’d missed Alobaz’s heart by a hair.Had I managed to kill him?Had I fulfilled my promise to Teo?
The memory of the emperor’s evil general slashing my midsection once, then a second time—as if the first hadn’t been deep enough for my entrails to spill out—had me reaching to check the wound.
I couldn’t.My hands were bound at my sides.My feet were similarly fettered.My neck, too.I lay flat on a hard surface, likely metal.I struggled against the ties but only managed to cause a sharp tug of pain in my abdomen.I’d healed some—a lot, even—but not fully.
How long had I been out?And where the scorch was I?
The space, whatever it was, recalled the glimpse I’d gotten into the abyss.It was so improbably dark that even my superb sänglure vision couldn’t assign definition to its edges.
I listened and smelled.The walls, floor, and ceiling all creaked like a wooden boat at sea—a rolling, continuous groan, gentle so as to fade into the background.Beyond it rang a faint tune birthed by stringed instruments.The melody felt vaguely familiar though I couldn’t name it, a haunting music that made me want to weep, to feel all I usually made myself not feel.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
I smelled a damp electricity in the air, like it was about to rain; the stale remnants of spilled blood, but no accompanying fear; and impure, crusted ice.Beneath those scents were others, lots of others.But they were old.They reminded me of the dungeons below the Palace of Zaraga, where the stench of bodily fluids and waste, of the dead, putrid and decaying, made any visit unbearable.I almost preferred the cage to any length of stay in the dungeons—almost, but not quite.
When the palace became mine to rule, my first order would be to cut the cage free of its perch along the cliffside to plunge it to the bottom of the StarRay Ocean.There it would remain until it was grown over thick with sea life—until it held no power over me.
From the deep, consuming darkness of wherever I was, there were no sounds of my captors to pluck out.No smells of people.Not even of whoever had brought me in here—and there should have been.
An ordinary sänglure was able to scent as well as any hound, and I was far from ordinary.Someone had carried me here and tied me up.I should have been able to smell them with such detail that I’d know whether they were male or female, what kind of creature, and how strong.I should have been able to paint a picture of them in my mind, informing myself, preparing myself to attack when they returned.
But there was nothing.I hadn’t been able to hear Alobaz speak with the whores either.
As I worked to moderate my trembling, I recognized a familiar—and disturbing—feel to the cold.It felt like … fuck, it felt like dark magic.Like sorcery.I detested sorcery.In a world filled with unnatural elements, dark faithum felt like one of the worst.It had a way of settling inside me as if I’d never be free of it, as if it fucking belonged inside me.I would rather die than give myself over to dark faithum, and willingness was its basic tenet.Every dark sorcerer alive had traded their everlasting essence for power in this world.
They were scorching idiots.There were numerous ways to become powerful in this lifetime without giving up the security of the next.
Spells would account for the masked scents in this room and for my inability to hear Alobaz speak with others.
But I had a secret advantage.
A smile edged around my teeth, clamped against my shivering.
Neither the prick Alobaz nor his blindly trusting friends knew who I was.Which meant they didn’t know what I was capable of.My power would get me out of this scrape, just as it had saved me countless times before.
I steadied myself, willed the trembling to ease, then reached for the power that flowed through my veins.It was as constant as my blood, ever present.An innate part of me.
Relief began already to settle over me as I called on my power…
My relief dissolved.
My power, which had been there for me as long as I had memory, which lived inside me, a very part of me … was gone.As if it had never been a part of me at all.
