Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 63

Being surrounded by so many books and so much knowledge usually exhilarated Nathan. The secrets and stories contained in those soft, well-worn volumes had made his centuries of captivity a little more tolerable in the Palace of the Prophets. The Sisters’ huge library held countless tomes describing magic that Nathan could never use, thanks to the wards, webs, and shields woven throughout the palace architecture, not to mention the iron collar of his Rada’Han. Still, reading the legends, histories, even folktales had brought joy to his tedious existence.

When Lord Rahl’s star shift had made all books on prophecy useless and irrelevant, he had offered to let Nathan keep one small library for his own entertainment, perhaps even out of nostalgia, but the wizard soon decided that what he really wanted was not to bury himself in old archives but to go out and live his life, to write his own story. And that was exactly what he did.

He patted the mysterious leather-bound life book the witch woman had given him. Now he had other reading to do. Vital reading.

He let out a weary sigh as dutiful Mia brought him a new stack of volumes. “I have no idea what these contain, Wizard Rahl, but they look interesting.” Mia got directly to work, showing him a tome at random. Many of these new books looked waterlogged, scuffed, or tattered. “Somewhere in our archive we’ll find a way to stop Victoria. Cliffwall has every answer, if only we can find it.”

Nathan chuckled. “Are you suggesting the ancient wizards in the time of Baraccus and Merritt knew all there is to know?”

The studious woman’s brow furrowed as if he had questioned her reason for existence. “Why, of course! This is Cliffwall. All knowledge was placed here for safekeeping. All knowledge.”

He drew two fingers down his chin and gave her an indulgent look. “I’m glad you have such faith in the ancients.”

Mia nodded. “They were much more powerful than anyone alive now.”

“But if they had all that knowledge, then why did they fail?”

She responded with a stern look. “Just because knowledge exists, doesn’t mean people know how to use it.”

“Well, I wish I had your confidence, young woman.” Nathan peeled open the cover of the book he had chosen, frowning to see that the pages were swollen and rippled, as if they had been soaked in water and improperly dried. Some of the pages were torn, the ink smudged and unreadable. He brushed clumpy dust off the cover of the next book in the stack. “Where did these volumes come from? Did you dig them out of a hole?”

Mia looked embarrassed. “After the sorceress opened the sealed vault beneath the damaged tower, our laborers used picks and chisels to break into other previously inaccessible chambers. Some of the books had been partly fused into walls, others buried under rubble. No one has looked at them yet, but I wanted you to see them right away, in case they were important.”

He picked up a third book, trying to decipher the embossed symbols on the cover. “I thought the damaged tower contained only books on prophecy. I doubt they will help.”

“No, the prophecy sections were in the upper levels. In the final days of building Cliffwall, the ancient wizards were in a panic to finish, being hunted down by the forces of Emperor Sulachan. The lower vaults were piled with last-minute additions. No one has seen them except you, Wizard Rahl.”

“Then I am absolutely delighted by the opportunity, my dear.” He patted the empty chair beside him. “Would you help me study them? I only have two eyes, and together we could read twice as fast.”

Mia beamed. “I’d like that.” She sat beside him, chose a book at random, and began working her way through the smudged and faded letters.

* * *

Deep within the resurgent forest—which was her heart, her very soul—Victoria felt the magic of reawakened life pulsing through her … and, by extension, through everything she had made, the burgeoning life that came from the stillborn ground. The tortured Scar had been as painful to her as the stillborn baby that she and Bertram had so wanted to have.

But unlike her bloody and painful miscarriages, Victoria now had the power she had always longed to have: a woman’s power to create and nurture life. As proof, she needed only to look out at the flourishing new jungle she had created. The growth charged forth like a wild stampede, but Victoria didn’t want to control it, not at all. She wanted it to fill the valley, roll over the mountains, and sweep across the continent, pristine, primeval, and unstoppable.

Life would triumph over death. Her unquenchable victory would overtake all efforts to stop it. “Victory” … the very word was in her name. She was Victoria. She was Life’s Mistress. Within her, she had a power to rival the Creator Himself.

As she pondered her new role, thickets rose and swirled around her body. Thorny vines and flowers exuded a heady, hypnotic perfume. The trees grew so swiftly they swelled, shattered, and toppled over. And then even the splintered trunks hosted swarming worms and beetle grubs, as well as fungi and molds that churned the fallen tree into mulch, which became fertilizer for more life.

And yet more life.

Her acolytes, who wielded the same energy of vibrant fertility, had gone separately across the primeval jungle. They were stewards of the reawakened life now, nurturing the trees, the insects, the birds, and more. Victoria would see to that. The world would once again be pristine.

As Life’s Mistress, she would never be satisfied to merely return this valley to its former baseline, an exploited landscape with enslaved herds and rigidly defined croplands. Victoria understood now what her true role in the world was. All the generations of memmers and their preserved ancient lore had led to this. Victoria could not be content with memorization for its own sake; she had to find those powerful spell-forms, the maps of magic that would let her accomplish what was necessary.

As her unnatural body thrived and the tendrils of her forest conquered the barren territory, her mind unlocked more of what it remembered, revealing esoteric and deadly magic that she could use.

The wizard Nathan and the sorceress Nicci had searched for a way to destroy the Lifedrinker, and she had no doubt they were applying themselves with as much determination to eliminate her—and Victoria would not stand for it. She felt the power of life, the power of the Creator, and knew she was stronger than any magic those two adversaries could hurl against her.

Even so, she did not underestimate their abilities.

Although Nicci claimed credit for killing the evil Lifedrinker, Victoria knew that the Eldertree acorn was truly responsible for that triumph. The sorceress was undeniably powerful, nevertheless, and Victoria did not want to be hindered in her sacred work. She already knew that Nicci was a nuisance, interfering where she was not wanted.

Although Nathan Rahl’s ability to use magic was minimal, perhaps even imaginary, he was a man with great knowledge and experience, and thus a threat to her as well. There was something about the man, and Victoria did not wish to be sanguine about him, either.

They both must be stopped.

In the thriving thickets, trees, vines, and mushrooms swelled around her like a bubbling life spring. The buzz of swarming flies, bees, and beetles hummed an intense lullaby. As her wisdom and power expanded, Victoria recalled forgotten methods and incantations that the ancient wizards had sealed behind the camouflage shroud, preserved for millennia among the memmers.

With that knowledge, Victoria understood how to create a weapon to eradicate both Nicci and Nathan, perhaps a weapon strong enough to tear down Cliffwall, stone by stone. To activate the magic, Victoria didn’t even need to move, because she was the forest, all the stirrings within, all the leaves and branches, the wings of insects, the flutter of birds. Everything belonged to her, was part of her.

She released the magic to create her emissary, an assassin, a manifestation of the jungle’s primeval power: a shaksis. A shaksis was a creature molded entirely of debris, the detritus of the forest.

With her mind and her magic, Victoria gathered up fallen branches and gnarled twigs to serve as the bones and framework for the shaksis. She wove them together, building a wooden skeleton around which, with whiplike speed, she wound grass blades and dry leaves, forest mulch, and thorny twigs. Fungi inflated to fill out the muscles.

Victoria summoned an army of worms, beetles, maggots, and other crawling creatures to expand the creature’s body. By the time the magical construct extended its arms and took tentative steps, its entire form boiled with a thousand points of life.

Two iridescent beetles, each as large as a fist, scuttled along the forest floor and crawled up the thing’s body framework. Its rounded head was woven of bent twigs and supple willow, skinned with bark, thatched with dry grasses. Two hollows formed in what should have been its face, and the beetles crawled up the construct’s head and nestled into the sockets to serve as surrogate eyes. A splintered branch across its lower face made a gash of a mouth. It clacked and chewed, broken spikes grinding together.

Pale green vines looped around its legs, winding and weaving into its flesh, like blood vessels filled with sap. The shaksis creaked as it stepped forward. It folded and unfolded its sharp branchlet fingers, while the two beetles inside its eye sockets stared out with a faceted, malevolent gaze.

Made of the jungle itself, the shaksis was Victoria’s puppet, her surrogate, her killer, a soulless thing that was merely an extension of the primeval forest.

Victoria flashed it a warm and welcoming smile, a maternal smile. She stroked the uneven chest, feeling the life she had deposited there, a new child she had created. Into its hollow mind, she placed the details of its mission—images of the blond sorceress and the pompous old wizard with straight white hair.

“Find them and kill them,” Victoria said. “Go with my blessing.”

The animated construct turned and, with a rustle of brittle limbs, stalked out of the forest toward Cliffwall.