Bone Lord 3 Read online

  “You’re still set on traveling to the Wastes, to see this so-called ‘Wise Woman’ of that reeking barbarian oaf’s tribe?”

  Elyse had a special sort of contempt for Drok. There were three things about him that really annoyed her. First, there was the fact that, in her eyes, he was a heathen, a pagan who outright rejected and loathed the Church of Light. Then again, so was I, and she’d managed to look past that inconvenient fact about me.

  Second, she was simply disgusted with his personal hygiene, or, rather, his complete lack thereof. As a berserker, he believed that to wash himself would be to quite literally wash away his strength as a warrior. Hence the stink. Elyse was a stickler when it came to cleanliness; she wasn’t quite a neat freak or petrified of filth, but she was close enough. Drok’s stench turned her stomach in a particularly intense way.

  Third and lastly, there was the fact that he’d been so insistent about me going to see the Wise Woman of his tribe. Elyse regarded this whole thing as a waste of time, a wild goose chase based on nothing but primitive superstition. It had taken quite some convincing to get her on board with traveling to the Wastes, but part of her still saw it as a fool’s quest that would end up being a gigantic waste of time.

  “That’s where we’re going, yes,” I answered firmly. I considered telling her about the most recent dream Drok had, but I decided against it; she’d already concluded that Drok’s dreams meant nothing and were merely inconsequential by-products of the cheap, nasty grog he was so fond of quaffing.

  “Vance, are you really, really sure about this? I mean, wouldn’t we be better off going straight after your uncle Rodrick? Making a beeline for him and hitting him hard and fast?”

  I shook my head. “We haven’t even pinpointed where he is just yet. And, I can’t explain it, Elyse, but I have a hunch—a very, very strong hunch, an unshakable intuition—that I need to see this Wise Woman. The old crone has some part to play in this story. I can’t tell you how, but I just know it. And when have my instincts about these kinds of things proved to be wrong?”

  Elyse let out a long sigh that told me that she wasn’t particularly happy about what I was saying but that she understood my reasons for saying it nonetheless.

  “All right,” she said, not sounding particularly convinced, “if that’s your decision, I’ll go along with it. I only hope and pray that your instincts are right.”

  “I’m pretty sure they are. By the way, we’ve got a few visitors coming. They should be here in an hour or two.”

  “Visitors?”

  I flashed her a cheeky grin. “Old friends. You’ll recognize ‘em, trust me.”

  “Well, okay,” she murmured, looking puzzled. Her uncertain expression only made her look even prettier, and I figured I’d best leave before I ended up getting too distracted by her.

  “I’ve got some things to take care of,” I said. “I’ll speak to you later. Like I said, dust off your mace and brush up on your magical powers. I think we’re going to need them.”

  Without further ado, I turned and strode out of the room and headed all the way back down to the lower levels of the Keep, stopping a servant on my way to tell him to retrieve my armor from the armorer. Once he scuttled off, I made my way down to the crypts.

  They’d been partially destroyed in the battle against Rodrick and his oblates, and a lot of my ancestors’ bones had been scattered by that asshole. Many of their tombs and coffins desecrated, but there were still chambers deep in the crypts where the ancient skeletons of my forebears lay undisturbed, as they had for a thousand years. It was down in the darkest and deepest of these chambers that I found Isu.

  I sensed her before I saw her; as a necromancer, she pulsed with Death magic. To me, she was like a glowing beacon in the dark. My ability to sense her presence was a relatively recent development though. Whether that meant her powers had grown stronger or mine had—or perhaps that we had both grown stronger—I wasn’t sure of, but one thing I was sure of was that I wasn’t about to trust her much further than I could throw her.

  I took a burning torch from the wall and carried it down into the chamber. The dancing flame threw twisted, moving shadows onto the walls, illuminating the old stone coffins with carvings of my noble ancestors in their knightly armor in tones of red, orange, and yellow. Soon, though, the firelight shone on a figure that was rather different compared to those somber, severe statues of stern-faced knights and lords.

  Instead, the orange light was thrown onto an hourglass figure, with long, shapely legs that flared out into seductively round hips and an ass that you could bounce coins off all day. Above this firm, generous ass was a slim waist, and above that a pair of large round breasts that defied gravity with what seemed like a magical force—even though the woman who owned this impressive pair of tits was no longer a goddess. Above those two very large, very firm orbs of fun, there was a pair of slender shoulders, over which a mass of jet-black hair gracefully tumbled. And then there was her face.

  Isu was stunning, to be sure, but in those eyes and the sharply arched eyebrows that crowned them, there was danger. And in the smirk she usually wore on her full lips was both arrogance and a dark threat. Most mortal men, despite drooling over her voluptuous figure, would cower before those piercing eyes. Of course, I was no mortal man.

  “Vance,” she purred, her lips curling into a half-mocking sneer, “so good of you to drop by and grace this lowly necromancer with your divine presence.”

  “Cut the crap, Isu,” I said. “What the hell are you doing sitting down here in the dark anyway?”

  “There is illumination to be found in darkness that the eyes cannot see,” she murmured cryptically, finishing off this statement with a dark chuckle.

  “If you say so,” I muttered. “Drok has had another of his dreams.”

  “Ah, sent by the hag in the Wastes,” she sneered, her voice dripping with contempt. “And what does the old bag have to say this time?”

  While Isu loathed Drok just as fiercely as Elyse did, Isu at least acknowledged, if somewhat grudgingly, that the “hag,” as she liked to call the Wise Woman, would prove useful against the Blood God.

  “If Drok is to be believed,” I said, “the Wise Woman is trying to let me know that time is running out; the Blood God and his followers are growing stronger, and if we don’t step up our game, it’s going to get to the point at which that asshole is too powerful to stop.”

  Isu nodded slowly, chewing on this information.

  “I should have foreseen this, all those years ago,” she muttered, half to herself.

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked as if she was coming out of a trance before she flashed me a strange smile and clammed up. “Nothing, nothing,” she muttered.

  I had a feeling that what she had just let slip had something to do with this whole thing with Xayon, who, upon being resurrected in Rami’s body and laying her eyes on Isu, had immediately become enraged and referred to the former Goddess of Death as a traitor. Some sort of very serious betrayal involving Isu had taken place, something to do with what happened to the Old Gods, but try as I may, I hadn’t been able to ferret the secret out of Isu, and whatever it was, she was doing her best to keep it under tight wraps. It was annoying, to be sure, but I’d long ago learned how stubborn Isu could be.

  “Well, whatever,” I said. “I just came to tell you that we’re going to be leaving Brakith at first light tomorrow and making for the Wastes. So, whatever the hell it is that you do down here in the dark, this is the last day you’re going to be doing it. You need to get your shit packed and ready; I’m leaving tomorrow at dawn, with or without you.”

  “I’ll be ready,” she said, in a somewhat haughty tone. “But before you go and busy yourself with your own preparations, there’s something you need to see, something related to, as you put it, ‘what I do down here in the dark.’”

  Okay, so this piqued my interest a little. “Go on,” I said, wondering whether she might finally admit that
she possessed a wooden replica of my cock.

  “I told you that there is illumination in the darkness beyond what eyes can see.” She smiled mysteriously. “Come with me, and I’ll show you exactly what I mean.”

  Chapter Four

  Intrigued, I followed Isu through the crypt, trying not to lose focus by staring too hard at those big, round, firm buttcheeks that shifted so enticingly in front of me with every step she took. She led me to the oldest tomb in the crypt, that of the first Lord Chauzec, who built the first castle on this site well over a thousand years ago.

  The old castle had been demolished a couple hundred years ago and replaced with this new, bigger Keep as the town of Brakith had grown, and these crypts were about all that remained of the original structure. Thankfully, this tomb—that of Uger Chauzec, the first Lord Chauzec—hadn’t been desecrated by my uncle or destroyed in the battle. However, when I reached it, I saw that Uger’s stone coffin had been opened.

  “Hey!” I said, sudden anger shooting through me. “What’s going on here, Isu? Did you open this coffin?”

  “I did, yes,” she answered coolly.

  “What the fuck?! That’s my ancestor’s grave! Who the hell gave you permission to do that? How could you just do that without asking me?!”

  “Curiosity.”

  Her eyes gleamed in the light, and her lips curved up into a smug smirk. She had done this just to piss me off. Well, if that had been her aim in doing this, she had succeeded.

  “That’s all you’re going to say about why you desecrated one of my most important ancestor’s graves… ‘curiosity’?! Are you fucking serious?!”

  “Come here, Vance, and calm down. Why, I had no idea you were so concerned about silly mortal customs. Strange for a god to be so concerned with the matters of mere mortals, but who am I to judge? I’m just a—”

  “I don’t want to hear that whole ‘I’m just a necromancer’ thing now, seriously. Okay, fine, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, but if there isn’t some seriously earth-shattering revelation at the bottom of what you’ve done, you’re in deep shit. And that’s no joke, Isu.”

  “Trust me,” she purred.

  “Just about as far as I can throw you,” I said.

  “Come.” She took my hand and led me up to the opened coffin. “Touch your ancestor’s skull.”

  I’d been practicing this ability of mine, which I’d first discovered in Kroth. Those first few times I’d done it—“traveling” back through time and “seeing” the past through the eyes of the dead, essentially experiencing their last few moments before they died—it had been a disorienting, almost debilitating experience. With a bit of practice, however, I’d gotten a lot better at it, and while it still kind of took it out of me, it no longer left me feeling like I’d been kicked around by a pack of cave trolls.

  “All right.” I stepped up to the coffin and placed my hand on Uger’s skull.

  With a zapping jolt, as if I’d touched a minor streak of lightning, my mind was sucked back a thousand years, my experience of the present melding with Uger’s ancient memories of his last moments.

  I—Uger—was on a bed, in a room with walls of stone on which tapestries and old-style shields were mounted. This had to be the lord’s chamber of the old castle. I looked down and saw my body half-covered by a sheet. It was the wrinkly, sunken body of a very old man. Surrounding me were some middle-aged men who sort of looked like me—my sons. There were also younger men, my grandsons, and some young boys, who were my great-grandsons. Also, there were a number of very young, very hot women, who, Uger’s memories were telling me, were his concubines.

  Nice one, great-great-whatever grandpa! Looks like a taste for sweet pussy was something that went a long way back in the Chauzec family line.

  Everyone gathered around the bed was crying; they knew these were my last moments. I’d obviously lived a long and good life, and I was almost ready to leave this world. But something was bugging me. Something very important. Something that wasn’t finished. There was something I needed to know before I passed, but what was it?

  Suddenly, a man pushed through the crowd around my bed—a foreign man, Yengish. This was interesting. Dressed in flowing red and gold robes of silk, he had a katana sheathed on his hip, and his long, straight black hair was tied into an intricate knot on the top of his head. He had long mustaches that hung down past the sides of his mouth almost to his chest.

  “Lord Chauzec.” He bowed low. “I am Tendo, grandson of Kemji.”

  Uger’s memories told me that this Kemji was a very close friend, but not just a friend—an ally, a partner he’d fought alongside on some quest that had consequences for all of Prand.

  I saw my—Uger’s—wrinkled, liver-spotted hand reach up. Tendo took my hand and clasped it, then touched his forehead three times to my knuckles in a gesture of respect reserved for great warriors in Yeng.

  What was this? My ancestor had been some sort of great warrior in Yeng? And he and some Yengish warrior called Kemji had vanquished some foe in a battle that, it seemed, had had major consequences for the entire world.

  “I am glad that I got to you in time, Lord Chauzec,” Tendo said. “I have not slept in days. I had to reach you before… before you…”

  “And I’m honored that you did this,” I—Uger—croaked. “But please, my boy… I have but a few moments left. Your grandfather’s gauntlets…”

  “It is done, Lord Chauzec,” Tendo answered. “My venerated grandfather’s gauntlets have been hidden, locked away in a labyrinth beneath an ancient pyramid, protected by many traps. The secret of the gauntlets’ location will, however, remain in my family and yours, passed down from generation to generation, just in case the Blood God rises again, and new Masters of the storm drakes must rise. I pray, though, that such a time never comes. What you and Kenji did for the world, defeating the Blood God and his Demogorgon will be a deed remembered for all time. And hopefully, it is one that will never need to be repeated. Now, my lord, go well into that eternal sleep and walk proudly into the Hall of Heroes!”

  One of the older men—my eldest son—came and gripped my other hand, tears in his eyes, and Tendo again touched his forehead to my knuckles. Now that I knew that the gauntlets were safe, I could leave. A bright white light appeared at the edges of my vision, growing steadily brighter, burning everything else away, accompanied by a blissful warmth…

  I staggered back from the skeleton with a jarring jolt like an unexpected kick from a mule. I was back in the crypt, with Isu staring at me intensely, her luscious lips curled into a strange smile.

  “You saw it, didn’t you?” she murmured.

  Feeling a little nauseous and disoriented, although nowhere near as bad as I had the first few times I’d done this, I nodded.

  “I saw it, yeah,” I grunted. “And I’m still trying to make sense of what it is that I saw. Uger… he fought alongside a Yengish warrior called Kemji. And together, from what I could gather, they fought the Blood God and the Demogorgon and won.

  “There was something Kemji’s grandson mentioned, gauntlets, to control something called a storm drake. They were hidden, locked away beneath some ancient pyramid. Tendo, the grandson, said that the location of the gauntlets would be a secret, passed down through our respective family lines, in case the threat of the Blood God rose again.

  “Well, it sure as fuck has risen again, but I was never told anything about Uger fighting the Blood God, or gauntlets that controlled storm drakes, whatever the fuck they are.”

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” she remarked with a strange grin.

  “I’ve got way more questions now than answers,” I muttered. “One thing that did strike me as weird, though, was the fact that it seemed to be this huge deal—which it was, of course. I mean, we know now how massive a threat the Blood God and a fully materialized Demogorgon is, and obviously this was something that actually happened in the past.

  “Tendo said that Uger and Kemji’s victory would be reme
mbered forever, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of it. Wouldn’t you think that something of that kind of significance would leave an imprint on our collective memory, even if it did happen over a thousand years ago? I mean, defeating the Blood God and his Demogorgon is something that you’d think the world would fucking remember, right?”

  “There are many things that happened in the past that have been forgotten,” Isu said. “And there are many things that should not have been forgotten but were erased by those who would benefit from the oblivion.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that someone deliberately erased this part of history? That someone erased the story of what Uger and Kemji did and wiped it out of all the history books and scrolls?”

  “He who controls the memory of the past controls the present.”

  “Well, who the fuck would do that? Why would they erase the memory of what Uger and Kemji did? And how did they manage to erase it from my own family line, and—”

  I paused mid-sentence as a memory suddenly hit me. A memory of my father, speaking to me before I left on my pilgrimage to the Luminescent Spires—the trip that forever changed my life and destiny. It had also been the last time I’d seen my father alive.

  “Look at you, my boy,” he’d said. “All grown up and almost ready to take over from your old man, eh?”

  “Not just yet, father,” I’d said with a laugh. “I still have to become a Consecrated Knight first!”

  “I don’t know why you’re insisting on doing this, my boy, because there really is no need to go off and join that cul—Well, you know my thoughts on the Church of Light, and you and I don’t need to argue about it anymore, not now, when you’re leaving for your long journey. But when you come back, regardless of whether you succeed or fail in this quest of yours, you’ll be a man. And then, you’ll be ready for a little secret. It’s something every Lord Chauzec learns about when he sits on the throne of Brakith for the first time.”