Chương 101: Chapter 90 - Temptation and Hope

++Any good lich knows how to both guard against, and take advantage of, betrayal. ++ - From the writings of Isabel Vornholt, 'The Great Lich'. 1, 891 A. E. Isabel Vornholt had left, and put Nesariyah in charge of her—their—research. This was fine by her. Of the many things she'd been expected to do, cooking, cleaning, attending to her like some common servant, this task was actually refreshing. It was a reminder that Vornholt didn't quite see things the way other people did.

In Vornholt's mind, Nesariyah could do a servant's work without degrading herself, simply because the difference between Vornholt and every other human—from the lowliest slave to the greatest king—was essentially equal. They were all infinitely closer to one another than any of them were to her. And that was why she could simultaneously order Nesariyah to wash her clothes, and to keep an eye over the product of their long, agonizing efforts. It made her hate the girl less.

Nesariyah wasn't sure when that had started, she'd certainly felt nothing but burning hatred to begin with. It had been Vornholt, in fact, who had killed her father. Done it before Nesariyah herself. But that had been the least of her pains, lately. Her father had been more High Priest than parent and seeing the culture of her people trampled and burned had stung more than watching his demise. Seeing Vornholt do what she could to lessen that damage had almost… what, cancelled out the murder?

It felt ridiculous to say. Felt wrong and evil, should a daughter not loathe her father's killer? A daughter should do lots of things, and a Priestess in training lots more. Nesariyah had already failed on every account, so what was one more? Indignity was just less of a problem for her than death. That was what it came down to, and here Nesariyah was soaking up more of it as a result. Still, she reminded herself, it very much could have been worse.

She still remembered the sights of Orapathaqi's streets that night, the carnage. She tried to stop remembering and focus more on her work, not that there was much to focus on. Vornholt had left their most dangerous experiments inactive, due to her own absence, so Nesariyah was mostly just on stand-by. This meant that she didn't have any trouble at all feeling the magic when it started drifting up and caressing the room, beckoning to her from the street below. No trouble, but a great deal of panic.

Nesariyah's first instinct, honed from living through one siege already, was to duck back and hide. That felt right, but it would not have served her very well in the current predicament. Whatever this magic was, it wasn't at all hidden, and Nesariyah's training had lasted long enough for her to feel exactly what it was trying to do. Nothing. Nothing overt, that was. Just signalling out to her, catching her attention and snatching her wits.

It wasn't an aggressive spell at all, but it had the same power over her that any sign did. She was a human, wired to notice things, and once noticed curiosity followed. The curiosity involved here was pretty strong; why in the world was someone trying to get her attention? Several possibilities passed through Nesariyah's mind, none of them good. It could've been Isabel Vornholt, right? No, she dismissed that after a brief moment of consideration.

Vornholt's magic was like nothing human, so dextrous that Nesariyah knew, as skilled as this working was, the two were totally incomparable. It was like comparing the steady hands of a surgeon to some bumbling toddler's fingerpainting. That narrowed the options down, and Nesariyah did not at all like what she was left with now. Garamon magicians seemed like the second most obvious. If it was Garamon magicians, Nesariyah could imagine nothing good coming from this.

They'd probably be investigating the place for necromancy, which she'd learned already was not permitted in their society. No, nothing to do with the sacred dead seemed allowed at all. They burned their corpses, and in so doing doomed the souls within to a miserable afterlife spent trying to reconfigure their flesh as they were left raw and exposed to spiritual corruption. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. It almost seemed redundant, corruption of the foreigners.

How could they possibly be worse than in life? And yet as bad as this thought was, Nesariyah knew she couldn't avoid it. The magic had been made deliberately strong and obvious enough for her to feel, it was, as she'd noted already, a coaxing. If she ignored it, she might just encourage the people responsible to venture closer. She might even make them angry.

She'd already seen what the men of Garamon did when they were angry, and the memory sent her walking over to Vornholt's balcony before her conscious mind could have any say in the matter. From there she looked down into the city below and saw the alleyway between two smaller buildings, maybe four stories lower. It was here the magic had emerged from.

Nesariyah still wanted to flee, but she'd already exposed herself now and she knew the crime of necromancy would bring her a worse fate than virtually anything that might await her through interrogation alone. She was Vornholt's servant, ostensibly beyond harm. She tried to remind herself of that as she leapt from the balcony. Gravity took hold fast and did its best to kill Nesariyah. With only hard sandstone slabs awaiting her fifty feet below, it would probably have managed it. That was what her magic was for.

One spell to quickly draft out a patch of aether around her, another to bind it to her body. This material wasn't made with combat in mind, and lacked the iron-hardness Nesariyah could otherwise have managed. Instead it was almost as light as air itself and just strong enough to catch the winds of her falling without being torn. The descent was rocky, Nesariyah did a lot of spinning and shaking before her capsule dissolved with a thought and let her touch down.

Still, her feet landed as softly as if she'd hopped from a ground floor window. It wasn't that she couldn't do magic, after all. She could do it like few others. She'd just never been prepared to do it while others attempted to kill her. Nesariyah made herself stride towards the alley now, keeping an eye on the building above as she went. No choice, she reminded herself. She had to keep whoever was calling from getting too close to the research.

That was where her death warrant lay, and it would only take one witness to sign it. The alley was a lot less dark up close, but Nesariyah still conjured a bead of light to better see by. As soon as the illumination blasted out, she clearly saw six men ahead of her, then the shadows of two more as they closed around the mouth of the cave. She ignored most. Only two of them, just those two, had her skin crawling and her gut sinking.

They were the dark robes and insignia every young Priestess was taught to avoid with her life. The Cult of Sakhent.

"Good evening," the leader of the robed men began.

"You are Nesariyah, yes? Next in line to be the High Priestess of Orapathaqi, and, currently, acting servant for the invader Isabel Vornholt." Nesariyah didn't answer, just focused on controlling her breathing, on making both lungs do as she said exactly when she said it. On keeping herself from breaking out into a panic and sprinting for the men behind her, knives forgotten in her desperation to be free. The cultist gave her some time, then continued when it became clear she wouldn't answer.

"I assume you recognise our attire," he noted.

"We would like to invite you to speak with our leader in this city, she has heard much about you and believes that you and her could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement." Knives were visible within clothing, well-made, thin steel teeth seated in ivory handles. They all looked simple enough, but Nesariyah could feel the hum of magic in them. Of their many crimes, the Cult of Sakhent was noted for ignoring the ancient laws controlling when and for whom enchanted items could be produced.

The weapons hadn't been drawn. Yet.

"Invite me," Nesariyah echoed dully. She could barely even hear his answer over the sound of blood pounding in her ears.

"Yes, invite. Provided you don't do anything to make our invitation into… something else." Nesariyah had been dreading this since the night she met Vornholt, had woken in the dark sweating and screaming in fear of being surrounded and helpless against violence while her powers ignored her. But those powers answered now, because she'd spent the weeks since then honing them to make fucking well sure they did. Aether cocooned Nesariyah, a wall of magic every bit as strong as she could make it.

One of the men, the quickest among them clearly of the warrior caste, lunged and sank his enchanted dagger into it. Ordinary steel would have broken, but the enchanted metal held enough that it punched through the barrier… by an inch or so. The rest of its momentum stopped dead, and before its wielder could pry it free Nesariyah was sending mana through the gap he himself had made to strike a fist of force into his chest and fling him back.

He struck his allies five paces behind him, knocking down half the group in one go like grass before galeforce winds. More moved, some drawing daggers, others guns. Nesariyah froze with panic when she saw one of the imported rifles people down in the southernmost parts of the continent used to hunt elephants.

"No!" one of the cultists snapped.

"No shots!" So they wanted this to be quiet. Nesariyah could work with that, she began building mana for a pulse that, if nothing else, would be silent as it stripped the energy out of her enemy's very nerves and left their withered husks to fall like dead leaves. Before she could unleash it, the lead cultist spoke again.

"Wait!" he urged her.

"We're not here to fight, and we'll stand down. But you need to hear our offer, please. It's the only chance at freedom you're going to get in this city, maybe anywhere." Nesariyah paused, despite herself, even feeling certain it was a mistake.

"Speak," she growled. There was a certain rush to seeing all these dangerous men scared of her, and in that moment she understood why casters gravitated to warfare. The man's voice banished those thoughts with the weight of his message.

"We are here on behalf of the Orapathaqi resistance movement, and we want to invite you to join us."