Page 32 of Turncloak

The other mage waved her hands in various impenetrable patterns, hushing and murmuring for her companion to quiet. But the drunker mage either could not or would not, caterwauling about how she could not perish yet, because she hadn’t made her Ülam Kasit. Final bargain.

Her fear was real. This was a mage who had met with her chosen deity and failed to win his favor.

“Çarlak rädma! Çarlak rädma! Çarlak rädma!”

Levan raised his wand, aiming it at one of their temples, frightening the shrieker into silence. “M’al net vehça kamet rel.” I’m not going to hurt you. “I just want to see the pocketwatch.” He took it without permission. Even through the synthetic skin of his golden palm, the pendant trembled like a caged beast, the magic inside rattling at the bars of its confines. “Midar çi takhes?”

“Summoning device,” the more levelheaded of the two grunted in Vallish. “When the blood of the recently departed spills into it, Halant appears to resurrect them.”

Levan traced a fingertip over the intricate engravings, the shallow notch labeled saveri. Blood. “Is there a way to summon Halant without a fresh corpse?” The less drunk mage shook her head, lank black hair falling into her sallow face. “How does he get here?”

“Portari. They don’t strip out spells in Nomaden.”

“A long way to portari. A thousand miles, almost?”

The Disciple tilted her jaw upward with something like pride. “He’s a powerful mage.”

“Thank you for your candor.” Levan smiled genially, then withdrew his wand from his belt and aimed it at the drunker mage’s heart.

Guilt pulsed somewhere deep in his belly, but the death wouldn’t stick—Halant would arrive to resurrect her, and she’d spend the rest of her days as a magicless Risen. Levan might not even have to carve the kill mark into his arm, though perhaps for ritual’s sake he would anyway.

The only undesirable matter was that the kill was being made publicly, but the prospect of abducting multiple mages to go somewhere more discreet was no less conspicuous. Çernasti wouldn’t report Levan’s crimes—his was an establishment so disreputable that he wouldn’t want to attract Silvercloak attention—and the lutist wouldn’t willingly insert himself in a Bloodmoon feud. Most common folk had more sense than that.

“Sen ammorten.”

Levan expected the killing curse to fork into his victim’s chest, but instead the incantation sort of…fell from the tip of his wand. Tumbled to the floor without finding its mark.

He tried twice more to no avail.

Fear and confusion fogged his mind—surely his well was not so empty that he could not cast?—as he plucked a dagger from a sheath sewn into his cloak pocket and cut the mage’s throat instead. She crumpled to the dark, stained floorboards in a pathetic heap.

“Nar! Nar! Pulan!” bellowed the surviving Disciple, dropping to her bony knees beside her fallen companion.

Confused and disquieted, Levan probed the dark depths of his internal well, searching for a reason his magic had failed him. Although he’d been wholly depleted after killing his mother’s wand, he’d done his best to replenish, barely casting a thing until—

—hold on.

He’d killed his mother’s wand.

More superstitious mages believed such an act would cause future magic to revolt against the destroyer. He’d dismissed this as parochial nonsense, but now…

A wave of panic crested in his chest. Not just at the prospect of his power turned unruly, but at the thought of other mages witnessing his botched attempts at a basic spell.

Pulse roaring in his temples, Levan held the pocketwatch to the parted flesh of the woman’s throat, watching the blood trickle into the shallow saveri notch in Halant’s pendant.

The shrill frequency ceased at once. The pocketwatch drew in the air in the tavern, as though the entire room orbited around it. Everything seemed to tilt, shudder. Glisten.

The second Disciple looked up, cheeks glazed with tears, an expression of deep existential horror on her gaunt face.

“Time to barter for your friend’s life,” Levan said darkly, as a shriveled necromancer in a violet cloak appeared a handful of yards away.

18

• • • •

Haïl Halant

As the necromancer Halant appeared in Çernasti’s tavern, Levan stepped back into the shadows. He wanted to capture the violet-cloaked mage, of course, to bargain until the blood ran warm and vital through Lorissa Rezaran’s veins.