Page 37 of Magick and Lead (Dragons and Aces #2)

PRELATE KORTOI

T he heavy, leatherbound encyclopedia sat open in Kortoi’s lap. His long fingernail traced down the line of words, and he whispered them aloud as he read—so the dead, the beasts of the void, and his brothers might hear and learn, too.

“Hmm. Did you know one barrel of crude oil produces around nineteen gallons of petrol fuel?” he asked, glancing to Larl, the Brother he’d appointed as his special attaché for this diplomatic mission, who lounged on the couch nearby.

Larl shook his head. The other two Brothers who’d joined them on the trip, who stood near the door as sentries, looked bored.

Kortoi turned his attention back to the book. “Never miss an opportunity to learn something new, my brothers,” he said. “Especially when you travel. It is written in the Third Book of the Void that knowledge is—” there came a knock at the door.

“Enter.” He placed his bookmark and closed the book, rising to his feet.

In came Langford. The intelligence agent was tall, with skin pale as birch bark, hair like slicked-back corn silk, and a suit so black, its woolen fabric would have pleased the void-beasts well.

He was handsome too, the planes of his face so smooth and sculpted they reminded Kortoi of a fine vase.

But he was one of the blood drinkers, a vampyre.

And though Kortoi had corresponded with him for long years and they served the same masters in the under-realm, the proximity of such a predator made the hairs on the back of the prelate’s neck stand up.

I am a predator too, just of a different sort, Kortoi reminded himself. Still, his unease remained.

“Prelate Kortoi,” the blood drinker said with a nod.

“Mr. Langford. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“There’s been a new development. The one-armed princess is here.”

Kortoi blinked. Given the many hours he spent gazing into the scrying bowl, few things surprised him anymore. But he had not foreseen this.

“Essaphine? Are you sure?”

The undead man nodded, though in all other ways his body remained unnaturally still.

Kortoi scowled, rubbing two fingers thoughtfully across his lips. Surely this development presented an opportunity—for the wise, everything was an opportunity, it was written—but it troubled him, too.

“Well. Let’s just have a look,” he glanced to one of his brothers. “This is important. We’ll need some blood, please.”

The lowest ranking brother—as one who had not yet ascended to full status, he remained nameless—stepped forward and drew a knife.

Kortoi remembered suddenly that there was a vampyre in the room.

“ If you don’t mind, that is?” he asked Langford.

“I’ve eaten,” the agent said coolly.

Kortoi nodded to the brother, who proceeded to slice the back of his hand with the knife and let a few drops fall into the basin that sat on the coffee table, the droplets dissolving into red wisps in the dark water. Kortoi knelt before it.

At first, he saw nothing but darkness: still water against the black stone of the basin, along with the faint swirl of diffusing blood.

Then, slowly, like the shifting of a lens, the view changed.

There appeared a beautiful woman in the bloom of her youth.

She had short hair and she was unclothed, sleeping.

It was only when he saw the stump of her right arm that he realized this was, indeed, the princess—some would say queen—Essaphine.

She’d cut her hair off. And judging from the electric lamp on the bedside table, she was indeed here in Admar.

He could almost smell her for a moment, perfume and the sea-sweet smell of pheromones and pleasure.

There came a time-skip, and she was awake and dressed, rummaging through drawers in what appeared to be a modest apartment. Then she was riding through the night on the back of a motorcycle along an empty, country road.

“There’s the girl,” he murmured. “But where is her dragon?”

Instantly, the view shifted. He saw a tunnel, dark as the heart of the void itself. A pair of iron rails ran along the floor, curving away into the blackness.

Occasionally, this happened when scrying. The object one was trying to view got replaced with some bleak, dark vision, a window into the void. With mental effort, Kortoi tried to shift the scene, but it didn’t seem to be working.

In the tunnel, something was coming. He could feel it.

Heavy footsteps. The deep breathing of some massive beast. Then a pair of orangish, burning orbs emerged from the dim, coming nearer.

Eyes. There were little sounds, too. A pattering of tiny feet.

Squeaks of terror. For a second, Kortoi was confused.

Then he saw them. Rats. Dozens of them, fleeing whatever was coming.

The tunnel shook at the huge beast’s approach.

Kortoi saw the flaming eyes and glinting teeth and a lashing, forked tongue as a massive set of jaws opened up and scooped up several of the squealing, fleeing rodents.

He saw what the predator was, then. It was a dragon, of course.

Essaphine’s dragon. It had borne her here, and it was hiding out somewhere in the tunnels under the city, in the…

He thought, trying to recall his recent reading from the encyclopedia set Langford had lent him. Subway , that’s what it was. The dragon was in the subway, feasting on rats. Kortoi’s mouth twisted into a smile as he let the scrying water go dim once again.

“What did you see?” Langford asked.

Kortoi stood, straightening his robes.

“An opportunity,” he said. “Come.”

Langford and the Brothers followed Kortoi down the steps of an echoing stairwell.

They were lodged on the ninth floor of a high-security state-department apartment complex in the heart of Ironberg, and when they emerged from a back exit, they were in a grimy alleyway.

Kortoi stalked forward on silent feet, his eyes scanning the filthy ground.

“Our friends the Torouman have a philosophy focused on triangulation,” Kortoi explained.

“They aim to have a hand in controlling every player in life’s game, in order to maintain power.

Warriors like our Admite hosts and the Skrathan back in Maethalia, on the other hand, are of a more dualistic mindset.

They’re confrontational. Direct. They seek power through brute force and the might of arms. But we Brothers, we children of the void, how do we conquer? Hmm?”

He looked inquiringly at the two lower-ranked brothers.

Of course, they were bound to silence until they reached mage status—if they ever did.

But the prelate liked to tease them. Occasionally, one of these new acolytes would slip up and blurt something out, and that would help Kortoi weed out the mentally weak ones.

Larl, being less green, knew when to keep his mouth shut and learn.

Langford merely looked on with a knitted brow and arms crossed over his chest.

“Subversion,” Kortoi said, answering his own question.

“That is our weapon of choice. We do not conquer from without, but from within. Tell me, if we were knocking down a castle, would we begin by striking its high turrets? Would we bash ourselves against its stout walls? Pummel our fists against the timber of its gates? No. No, we would undermine the foundation. Tunnel under it. Hollow it out until it crumbles under its own weight. Shifting to another analogy—kill the horse, and a rider tumbles, yes? Well, how much more is that true of a dragon and a rider, whose minds and souls are intertwined?”

He knelt and made a squealing, chittering sound. After a moment, a dark body wormed its way out from a storm grate. A fat sewer rat. It skittered up to him, and he gently picked it up with both hands. Sharp pain shot through his right forefinger, and he cried out.

“Ah!”

The damned thing bit him. With a snarl, he brought the squirming beast up to his mouth and bit its back—hard. The rat squealed and cowered in his hands.

“It bit me,” Kortoi explained to his Brothers, and he spat hair from his lips. “Deal with men in the language of men and beasts in the language of beasts. Write that down.”

One of the Brothers took a notebook from the pocket of his robe and began scribbling. Kortoi reached into the pouch at his belt and took out a small glass vial filled with a dark purple liquid. Popping the cork off with his thumb, he held the vial over the rat’s head.

“Open up,” he commanded, giving the rat a shake.

Then, he repeated the command in the chittering tongue of rodents.

Obediently, the rat tilted its head back and opened its little pink mouth.

Kortoi dumped the liquid in, then dropped the vial and grabbed the rat’s head, holding its mouth shut until it swallowed.

“Now go. Down, down, into the subway tunnels. And when the beast comes for you, let it take you.”

He punctuated his command with one more chitter in the rat language, then dropped the little beast to the ground.

“Go!”

He kicked some gravel at it, and the thing took off like an oily, dark streak, disappearing back to the storm drain from whence it came. Kortoi turned back to his audience with a smile. His brothers watched him attentively, one of them still scribbling in the notebook.

Langford adjusted the dark glasses that hid his eyes. “Poison?” he asked with a frigid smile.

“Oh no,” Kortoi laughed. “It’s much worse than that. You’ll see.”