Shroud of Eternity

CHAPTER 71

With the roars of wild beasts and the clash of swords behind him, Mirrormask fled. He would let Nicci do the rest here. The sorceress had the incentive, and she certainly had the powers. He could think of more spectacular things to do.

With all the combat animals turned loose, ready to kill anyone they encountered, the ruling council would have to respond, including even icy Thora. It would surely disrupt their plans for the bloodworking at the pyramid. He did not want the shroud permanently reinforced to trap all of Ildakar under a suffocating dome forever. Its people would be no more than fish in a bowl, swimming around in endless circles, going nowhere. He was sick of Ildakar’s stagnation.

Although Nicci and the rebels would cause quite a stir with the deadly animals and the warrior slaves, Mirrormask had plans of his own. The sorceress wasn’t thinking big enough. He could cause so much more mayhem!

He clutched his broken mask, using just enough of his gift to fuse the pieces clumsily together so that the mirror was intact again, though distorted. Blood still flowed from the gashes on his face. He healed it just enough to create scabs, not wasting the time or energy to do more right now.

He ducked through a side tunnel, looking for a way back out to the streets. The stench of blood and rotting meat filled his nostrils. This was the passageway through which slaves delivered the animal feeding carts, but the slaves had all fled now. Many were probably among his own followers. Mirrormask didn’t know them by name, saw them mainly as a resource to drive his own plans.

Bells began to ring from the city towers, not to mark the sacrifice, but to summon the city guard. Armored soldiers ran through the streets, marching out from garrisons, strapping on swords, quivers, and crossbows. Angry lower-class people were shouting, rushing out of alleys and side streets to attack the guards with makeshift clubs or confiscated swords.

Most of the soldiers were not gifted, but they had training and superior weapons, which the slaves did not. However, Mirrormask—and yes, Nicci, too—had given the rebels and the downtrodden another weapon. Their anger and indignation, their thirst for revenge, made them selfless fighters and therefore more deadly than any trained guard. They fell upon the soldiers.

Knowing this was happening throughout the city, Mirrormask smiled behind his clumsily repaired mask. He didn’t let anyone see him. He kept to the shadows, flitting down alleys, working his way around the looming combat arena with its observation towers and raised seats above the killing sands. This revolution was far more entertaining than any arena spectacle.

Mirrormask climbed the streets, knowing the back ways, slipping through orchards and climbing walls until he reached the sprawling mansion of the fleshmancer Andre. He could enter one of the wings from the back.

With his gift, he easily diverted Andre’s guardian spells, but he had more trouble with the vicious thorns in the squirming hedge of eyeflowers that surrounded the courtyard. His gray robe was torn in several places and he was disgusted with the inconvenience. But he got inside.

He knew that Nathan, the traveler and supposed wizard, remained an experimental subject inside the fleshmancer’s studio. Nathan had survived the horrific exchange of hearts, although it remained to be seen whether he could demonstrate any restored capacity for the gift. Perhaps all that pain and effort had been for naught. Mirrormask did not know if Nathan Rahl would be an enemy or an ally, but unless the useless wizard could release his magic, he was irrelevant.

Mirrormask had an entirely different purpose in visiting Andre’s mansion.

Many lights were lit inside the sprawling building, and the fleshmancer was no doubt preparing for the blood magic at the pyramid in the next few hours. He would never be prepared for what Mirrormask was about to do, however.

A separate wing was dark, the windows covered with tightly woven hangings. If Andre called his experimental laboratories his “studio,” then this separate wing was his “gallery,” where he displayed his most magnificent work.

Mirrormask had been looking forward to this for a long time.

He was alone inside the dark and silent wing, but in the presence of tremendous power. He could feel the anger, the impatience, the bottled fury trembling in the air. He ignited a hand light and set it floating against the wall so that he could behold the three towering armored figures, fighting behemoths encased in their prison of armor.

The Ixax warriors.

He could sense them, and knew they were aware of his presence. He saw their glittering yellow eyes behind the slit openings in their helmets. The titans loomed there, straining inside their confinement. They had been locked immobile for more than fifteen centuries.

“Patience, patience,” he whispered. “It’s almost time.”

He looked through the slits in his own mask, which reminded him of their encapsulating helmets. Maybe the behemoths could see their reflections in the cracked covering on his face.

He stepped up to the first Ixax warrior. “I apologize to the other two. One of you will certainly be sufficient for my needs.”

The thick studded armor was marked with the insignia of Ildakar, a sun with lightning bolts—back then, Andre had been quite patriotic. He had created this trio of titans, hoping to unleash them so they could mow down swaths of General Utros’s army, like a scythe harvesting wheat. The wizards of Ildakar had stopped the fleshmancer from creating more than three, fearing how powerful those human weapons might be, suspecting they could be uncontrollable.

The petrification spell and then the shroud of eternity had rendered the Ixax warriors moot.

Mirrormask reached forward, found a deeply etched rune in the steel-hard leather armor on the first titan’s waist. Releasing his gift, he activated the spell that encased the mammoth soldier like a cocoon. He broke apart the magical manacles that held the Ixax motionless.

As the room began to glow, Mirrormask backed away. “Wake,” he said, “and do what you were meant to do.”

He laughed, knowing that this would be far more disruptive than anything else his rebels could achieve. Mirrormask flitted out into the darkness as the Ixax warrior began to bend his massive arms and legs.

Awakened at last.

* * *

The smashing uproar in the side wing of his mansion jarred Andre from his musing.

Elsa had stayed all day to help guide Nathan through his recovery. She suggested exercises, tiny gestures of magic that would help him build his confidence. Sometimes Nathan succeeded, but at other times the magic reacted in bizarre ways. Occasionally, nothing happened at all.

Andre was losing patience with his subject. “If you continue to fail, then we’ll just have to find you another heart, hmmm?”

Nathan’s face turned ashen at the suggestion. “No, I’ll keep trying. I will unlock my gift.” He turned to Elsa with a look of desperation. “We’ll find a way.”

“We must stop soon, because we have to go up to the pyramid. The bloodworking happens at midnight,” Andre told Elsa, then raised his eyebrows. “You can come and observe, Nathan, if you like. It might give you some inspiration, though, alas, you won’t be allowed to participate. Not yet.”

Nathan did not appear pleased by the invitation.

Just then, crashing sounds rang throughout the mansion, a deep hollow roar that sounded like a bear groaning in an echoing cave.

“Now what is it?” Andre said, exasperated.

He had heard the alarm bells and shouts down by the combat arena and was sure that some other mayhem was taking place down there. More animals released, perhaps. The city was becoming quite unruly. But he was busy in his own mansion, and the bloodworking would soon require all their attention.

This time, however, the havoc emanated from his own home. Elsa and Nathan looked as if they wanted to follow him, but he snapped, “Stay here.”

He stalked off, feeling a shiver go down his spine as he ran toward the side wing, where the noise had become deafening.

“Here now! By the Keeper—” he shouted, striding into the high-ceilinged gallery where he displayed the towering Ixax warriors. Two of the armored titans remained motionless, as they always had been. But the third mammoth soldier lurched forward on treelike armor-encased legs, stomping boots so hard they cracked the flagstones of the floor.

Andre could only blink and stare.

The Ixax reacted to his arrival, swiveling its gigantic helmet so it saw the fleshmancer, its creator, its tormentor. The eyes blazed like tiny balls of wizard’s fire.

Andre stumbled back, holding up his hands and summoning his gift. The Ixax strode forward with thunderous footfalls, clenching huge gauntleted hands.

Andre released magic in a wall of force that slammed into the armored titan, but it had little effect. The Ixax simply plowed through the magic, intent on the wizard who had taken three unwilling Ildakaran soldiers, conscripts who had agreed to help their city without knowing what they were offering to do. The fleshmancer had used those young men as the raw material to create these things—weapons powerful enough to save Ildakar, weapons that had never been used.

Instead, the monstrosities had been locked awake, motionless, going insane for fifteen hundred years.

Now the Ixax was unleashed, and his limbs swung free, releasing pent-up fury. He hammered the stone wall with his fist like a boulder launched from a catapult, and the blow crushed through the blocks, pulverizing them.

The Ixax let out another bellow, amplified through his helmet. Andre hurled wizard’s fire at the monstrosity. The fierce magical flames scorched the armor, but quickly rolled off. The titan closed the distance to Andre in two strides and loomed over the fleshmancer.

Trapped, Andre flung up his hand, releasing blasts of magic—sizzling bolts of lightning, howling wind, and fire—but the Ixax warrior did not even draw his huge sword. Instead, he raised a gauntleted fist, clenched it tight, and pounded down with all the force of a giant falling tree.

With a single blow, the Ixax crushed Andre, breaking him, splattering him into a mass of jagged bones, a shattered skull, scattered teeth, and spraying blood. He raised the gauntlet again and brought it down, pounding the ruined corpse another time, hammering the remains into a pulp.

Seven identical blows later, nothing remained of the fleshmancer but a widely dispersed film of gore. Blood, smeared tissue, and bone powder spattered the gallery’s floors, walls, and ceiling.

The Ixax lifted his huge feet and straightened. Even though he had destroyed his creator and tormentor, he was not satisfied after waiting for fifteen centuries. He had been created for destruction, so he marched ahead to destroy everything in sight.

Everything.