Chapter 9

Lacilius sat at a small table by the window of his room. His staff was leaning against the wall while the necromancer’s languid gaze wandered over the broad stone street of Aradeyn.

He could feel… feel the air shuddering from the excess of power coursing through him like the currents of the Annarath River.

“So this is… what happens when a world lies too close to the Intersection of the Abyss,” the necromancer said aloud, clenching and unclenching his fist—the veins on his arm stood out. “No wonder everything turned out the way it did in Magnol. I only meant to scare him a little, and instead I got… an entire army. Well, the things one does for ‘one’s own… state.’”

Lacilius was from Mraskanzas. It was a special place where all the dark mages of Existence found refuge. Well, “dark,” of course, in quotation marks. A guild-state that offered its services to anyone and everyone. As long as they paid.

In that sense, the necromancer was something of a colleague of a certain rogue named Yan Di Wonderwalk. Just on a slightly different scale.

Suddenly, a black raven landed beside the window the sorcerer was looking through. The necromancer flicked a finger, the shutters opened, and the bird flew inside, immediately transforming into a man.

Tall, muscular, dressed in rags of black feathers, coal-black clothes, and a hood that completely concealed his face. In his hands—a staff, at the end of which an iron chicken’s foot clutched a large ruby.

“Did you manage to find out anything, Velet?” Lacilius asked as though nothing unusual had happened, looking at his companion.

As we already mentioned in previous chapters, the sorcerers of Mraskanzas did not work alone. Even though they were quite powerful and cunning.

“Not a damn thing,” the dark mage named Velet waved him off, kicking the nearest sideboard with all his strength.

It exploded into splinters.

“We’ll have to pay the owner for the damages later,” Lacilius said, shaking his head.

“He won’t dare say a word to us,” the dark mage waved it off, abruptly turning around and taking several steps toward the necromancer. “Otherwise I’ll burn out his heart, and this whole damn inn along with it.” Velet clenched his fist. “There’s so much power in this world that it’s tearing me apart, Lacilius. I don’t believe the local mages can be our equals.”

“The local mages have lived near the Intersection of the Abyss for hundreds of years, Velet. They know how to deal with the powers we possess. Pure, concentrated light from the towers of the local Academy, for example.” The necromancer sighed. “Besides, don’t forget, we came here for an entirely different reason.”

“Which is getting us nowhere,” Velet remarked angrily. “Damn Zolotoros has vanished as if the ground swallowed him. I searched all over the city. Not a damn thing.”

“I listened to the shadows of the local guests and drunks…” Lacilius remarked. “No one has seen an old man in a purple robe with a cane. And in Aradeyn, someone like that should have been easy enough to spot. Mages dress according to their element—red for fire, blue for water, and brown for earth.”

“Amateurs,” Velet hissed through his teeth. “Even the lousiest mage from Encantaria would turn them to dust.”

“And yet Tsagat is still independent,” Lacilius remarked. “Interesting. Is it only because the world lies too close to the Intersection? Or are there other reasons?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” Velet replied, dropping into the chair across from the necromancer. He waved a hand and pulled a bottle of wine from a small pocket dimension. He uncorked it and poured it down his throat, hiccuping and coughing. “Fuck.”

Lacilius said nothing. The necromancer had no time for his partner’s angry howling. He was thinking about how to get to Zolotoros. And quickly.

Because soon enough, it was entirely possible that everyone and anyone would start hunting the fugitive mage. And many among that “everyone” were people the necromancer had absolutely no desire to cross paths with.

The Inquisition of the Blacks, for example.

At the thought alone, a slight shiver involuntarily ran through the necromancer.

“To think he actually managed to pull something like that off,” Lacilius remarked, interrupting his companion’s endless drinking. “Just think about it, Velet. This Zolotoros is a madman of a kind you don’t come across often.” The necromancer shook his head. “To manage to peer into the Beyond… be horrified by his own discovery and run! And run from whom? From Queen Illida herself, whose cruelty is infamous across many worlds of Existence… and who has one of the thirteen knightly orders of the distant past in her service.” The necromancer shook his head.

Then Lacilius abruptly fell silent, as if he had just realized something, and raised his eyes to his companion.

Velet asked with disgust:

“What?”

“Hah. I think I know how to find our fugitive mage,” the necromancer said with a smile on his face.

“What? And how?”

“Let a certain rogue I know do it for us,” the mage replied. “And as soon as he does, we’ll already be nearby.”