The First Champion Read online

  “I am Venerator Dezerath,” she said. “If what these women say is true, you do us great honor by choosing our crypt for your ascension. They have offered their flesh, yes?”

  Mazareem did not respond. Better to let the guards answer for him.

  “We offered ourselves, venerator,” one of the guards said. “He accepted our tribute, but said our duty wasn’t finished. He asked to see you.”

  Dezerath’s eyes narrowed. Mazareem wanted to laugh. The woman was so blatant in her expressions. Her emotions were open for anyone to read.

  “Speak then, risen one, and tell us your purpose,” Dezerath said.

  “With my words, I bind you,” Mazareem said. “I’ve come for one purpose: to invoke the ancient rite of oblation. You will travel with me to the City of Death and join me on the altar of my glorification.”

  Mazareem was pleased to hear a sharp intake of breath from the gathered crowd. So the ancient rites still meant something.

  Dezerath looked stunned. Mazareem watched her process the implications. The rite of oblation would end in her death, but it would bring great honor to her family. And if Mazareem remembered correctly, it would put her at the head of the line for reincarnation. Rather than wait a thousand years to return from the dead and ascend, it might only take her a hundred.

  As the silence stretched, Mazareem realized that the crowd was working in his favor. As venerator, there was no way Dezerath could deny this honor and retain her title. She was suspicious of him, but the testimony of the two guards had convinced everyone else. The longer she waited to respond, the more restless the gathered women grew.

  Finally, Dezerath mastered herself. “Spread the word!” she said. “Tell the people that their venerator has been chosen. I will go to Orcassus and pass into the next life. Tonight, we feast!”

  The crowd of women cheered and stomped their feet. Mazareem allowed himself a satisfied smile.

  There was no doubt in his mind that hunters had been dispatched to find him. Even now, they were probably converging on this very city. But to publicly invoke the ancient rite of oblation would tie her hands until it was finished. Word of this would spread fast. The ambitions of Dezerath’s house would grow to match this new opportunity.

  No, even if Mazareem could be proven to be false, it would not be worth the scandal to refuse them the rite of oblation. Dezerath’s house would deny that Mazareem was an imposter, and it might risk open war to try and take this honor from them. Mazareem had purchased himself some time, now he had to find his quarry before it was too late.

  Chapter 6

  LACRAEL TRUDGED THROUGH THE desert sand. The others had disappeared in the mist behind her. Her calves burned with the effort of walking on the unstable terrain, but she was used to the strain. She was angry with herself. How had she not detected the blight star? For months, she had been vigilant, doing everything in her power to keep their vulnerable party safe. Now, most of them were dead. Lacrael could not shake the feeling of responsibility for those that had died.

  The only explanation was that she was growing weaker, losing her edge. She did not feel the effects of the miasma like the others, but long months of constant struggle took their toll. Together with Niad, she had shouldered the work of keeping everyone else alive. She refused to believe that they had survived so long, only to be wiped out now.

  But survival meant finding a way out of the Ravening. Lacrael tried to force herself not to focus on the impossibility of the task. As far as she was aware, no one had ever walked out of the miasma whole. There were legends about people who appeared years after being lost, people who had been corrupted, twisted into grotesque shadows of their former selves. The saying used to scare young children was: “if the monsters don’t get you, the miasma will.”

  Lacrael paused to stack a small stone on top of another. She did this automatically, without thinking about it. Before continuing on, she glanced behind her to make sure she could still identify her trail. She had maybe an hour before the shifting sands covered her footprints completely. A part of her had always feared that the desert itself worked against them, the sand sharing the same sentience as the miasma that floated above it.

  Time was not on her side. She was moving fast, but if she did not double back soon, she would not return to Kaiser before he decided to venture out on his own. Lacrael desperately wanted to find some sign, some piece of evidence to point them in the right direction. She needed to make up for her failure to save them from the blight star.

  Lacrael was so intent on scanning the desert at the very limits of her visibility that she almost tripped over what she was looking for. She glanced down at the last instant and stumbled to a stop in surprise. Someone had arranged three small stones in a simple triangle. The unnatural arrangement was a sure sign that another desert wanderer had passed this way.

  Hope leapt in Lacrael’s breast. Her breathing quickened. She had moved in a straight line away from the others, and Niad had gone in the opposite direction, so there was no chance that their paths had crossed. This had to be the mark of a stranger. Right now, it did not matter if they were friend or foe. All that mattered was that it might lead to a way out.

  She needed to collect the others and get back to this spot before the desert disguised all evidence of the stranger’s passing. Invigorated by her discovery, Lacrael retraced her steps. She almost ran across the sand. The miasma roiled around her, angered by her swift passage. Lacrael imagined that the Ravening sensed her hope and was enraged by it.

  The return journey seemed much shorter, and sooner than Lacrael expected, she found herself on the edge of their makeshift campsite. Kaiser and Sorrell were crouched next to Tarathine, and Gustavus was lying in the sand with his back to Lacrael. Only Brant noticed her arrival. He got to his feet and moved to stand with her. Lacrael pulled the mask from her face, and Brant did the same.

  “You found something,” Brant said after taking one look at her.

  “Maybe,” Lacrael said. “I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but I found a trail left by someone else. If we follow it, it might take us out of the miasma.”

  “I’ll take anything we can get. We need a break.”

  “Truer words have never been spoken. Has there been any sign of Niad? We need to move quickly if we’re to follow the trail.”

  “You’re the first to return. If we hold to Kaiser’s deadline, she has maybe five minutes before he sets out without her.”

  Lacrael peered into the desert in the direction Niad had gone. To her frustration, she could not see more than ten feet into the miasma. Niad might be almost on top of them, and she would not know it. She shook her head angrily. They could not afford to wait, but she would not abandon Niad either.

  “Are you okay?” Brant said. He reached out a big hand and squeezed Lacrael’s upper arm.

  “I can’t help but feel that what happened is my fault,” Lacrael said, surprised by how readily the admission spilled out of her. She found it easy to talk to Brant.

  “Come on, don’t speak such nonsense,” Brant said. He stepped close to her, and Lacrael allowed him to draw her into a comforting hug. “You’ve done the best you can. Without you, we’d all be dead ten times over. Don’t beat yourself up over what you can’t change. Do you hear me?”

  Lacrael nodded against his chest. They stood in that silent embrace for a long moment. Lacrael felt the tension draining from her body. It was not that she could let go of the guilt, but it felt like Brant was taking half of the burden from her and making it bearable.

  To Lacrael’s relief, Niad walked out of the miasma a moment later. Lacrael extracted herself from Brant’s arms as Niad approached. Now that the two of them had returned, Kaiser got to his feet. Sorrell stood next to him. The five of them converged to decide a plan of action.

  “I only found more of the same,” Niad said in frustration. “Sand, rock, and miasma without even a hint of civilization.”

  “I found a trail left by someone else,” Lacrael s
aid. “It’s the only chance we’ve got to find help. We need to leave now, before all traces of it are erased.”

  Kaiser did not need to be told twice. In three long strides, he returned to Tarathine’s side. He scooped the unconscious girl up into his arms and looked to Lacrael. His unspoken message was clear: lead the way.

  Brant lifted Gustavus off of the sand. Gustavus muttered something under his breath but did not raise his voice in objection. With Lacrael and Niad in the lead, they set off across the desert. Kaiser carried Tarathine and walked behind them with Sorrell, and Brant brought up the rear with Gustavus in his arms.

  They followed Lacrael’s trail back to the point where she discovered the arranged stones. Here, they paused. Lacrael had to choose a direction. Of course, she had no idea who this person was or where they had been traveling to or from. But it was a likely assumption that one direction led towards safety and the other deeper into the Ravening. If she chose wrong, she might seal Tarathine’s fate.

  “We go right,” Lacrael said after a moment of deliberation. “The stones are arranged so that the triangle points in this direction. If I were to leave the same sign, I’d point it towards home.”

  Lacrael swallowed hard as they followed the path she picked. She had tried to sound confident, but despite her reasoning, it had been a guess. Niad walked next to Lacrael, and the two of them worked together to identify the trail signs of their mysterious stranger.

  After some time, they became adept at following the tracks, and Lacrael felt confident enough that she and Niad could talk without being distracted from the task.

  “In the entire time I’ve known you, I’ve not asked about your past,” Lacrael said. “I know better than most that memories of this place are usually filled with heartache and pain. And who you were before throwing in with Gustavus hasn’t mattered before. But it matters now. I need to know who you were. How did you come to leave Vaul? Will you be recognized if we find civilization?”

  Niad walked along in silence as she processed Lacrael’s question. Lacrael waited patiently. She suspected this was not an easy subject for Niad. It certainly was not for her.

  “I was supposed to be a venerator,” Niad finally said.

  Lacrael almost stumbled at this, which Niad did not fail to notice.

  “I thought you’d find that interesting,” Niad said, a grim smile on her face.

  “I’d never have guessed,” Lacrael said. “What happened?”

  “You weren’t a part of the empire, so you don’t remember how petty its politics are. Petty and deadly. I was the firstborn daughter of a house of some repute. But we had the misfortune of living in the remote reaches of the empire. Our holdings were on the edge of the Ravening, so it was a given that we had dealings with the forsaken.

  “At that time, there was an idea taking root that only those who lived closest to Orcassus, the home of the empress, were worthy of prominence and promotion. Our proximity to the forsaken put us at a disadvantage politically. That, and at some point in the distant past, my ancestors intermarried with the desert tribes. My bronze skin and red hair marks me as tainted by forsaken blood. So when my trial came to decide if I would be a venerator, it was rigged. I never had a chance.

  “I would have died, but my father stepped in and stopped the trial. This was the worst thing he could have done. His actions gave our rivals an excuse to exterminate my family. I was in prison when word of their slaughter came to me. I like to believe that some of them escaped to live amongst the forsaken, but that’s probably wishful thinking on my part.”

  Niad walked in silence for a few minutes as she relived the horror of her past. They passed by a pile of stones that marked the trail they were following. When she continued, her voice was quiet and filled with pain.

  “They tortured my father to death in front of me,” Niad said. “They asked me over and over again to admit what he had done was wrong. They said the pain would stop if I did. But I refused. After he died, they took me to the bottomless pit at the center of Orcassus and cast me in. Turns out it's not bottomless—it has an open portal at the bottom. That portal dropped me in the middle of the ocean in Praxis. I would have drowned, but by miracle or chance, the Golden Dawn found me that day. Gustavus fished me out of the water, nursed me back to health, and gave me a spot on his crew. And in twenty years, he never asked where I came from. But I think he knows.”

  “I’m sorry, but I had to know,” Lacrael said.

  “I understand,” Niad said. “To answer your question, I doubt I’ll be recognized. Houses rise and fall so quickly, and politics shift so rapidly, that my family’s fate was just a minor footnote as far as the empire was concerned. That said, I’m not eager to return. I find myself praying that we don’t discover we’re in Palacostian territory.”

  “I don’t think we are. This much desert usually means we're on the edge of the Ravening. The miasma turns fertile soil into dead sand as it moves across the land. It doesn’t linger long when there’s nothing left to kill.”

  “I hope you’re right.” After a pause, Niad said, “What about you? Will you be recognized?”

  Lacrael did not respond immediately. It had been several long minutes since passing the last pile of stones, and she had not seen the next marker yet. They paused and searched the nearby landscape until they spotted the next sign a little way ahead. Kaiser had almost caught up to them by the time they started walking again.

  “To answer your question, I don’t know,” Lacrael said. “I think there’s a greater risk of it for me than there is for you. I’d be surprised if you knew, but they call us forsaken because we’re the original inhabitants of this realm. The empress and her soldiers are invaders. My people are forced to inhabit the desolate land the Ravening leaves behind. Cut off from the Palacostian Empire, we have our own laws and territories. My father was the chieftain of one of the biggest tribes.

  “When I gained my powers, my father saw it as an opportunity. With my help, he could gain an advantage over the other tribes. He thought to unite them against the empire. But he was proud and shortsighted. Even though I begged him not to, he published the news of his fire-wielding daughter far and wide. Of course, the empire sent someone to investigate.

  “I still remember demonstrating my powers for the Palacostian agent. My father stood off to one side with the woman from the empire, and I was alone on a field of hard sand. Warriors from my tribe tried to touch me with their wooden weapons. They shot a hail of arrows at me, flung their spears, and advanced within striking distance of their training swords. I turned every weapon into ash. Nothing could touch me. When the demonstration was over, the sand beneath my feet had turned to glass.

  “My grandfather, Garlang, was furious with the public display, but my father believed that the empire would be forced to respect our new strength. He was a fool. Not a week later, an armed Palacostian procession arrived to ‘escort me on a pilgrimage to Orcassus.’ They were seplica, the elite tomb keepers of the empress herself. My father could not refuse without starting an outright war, and so he consented to let me go.

  “The night before I was to depart, Garlang came to me. He offered me freedom, and he said that he would teach me about my powers, but we had to leave right away. I went with him, and we fled into the desert. The seplica hunted us for weeks. They were no match for my grandfather’s knowledge of desert lore, and eventually, they gave up. We lived out there for years. In the end, we were undone by a random patrol catching us off guard. My grandfather’s last act was to give his life so that I could escape through a portal.”

  “How long ago was this?” Niad asked.

  “Only a few years,” Lacrael said. “There’s no doubt in my mind that I could be recognized. Depending on where we find ourselves, we may have to rely on you to be the spokesperson for the rest of us.”

  “The others, they don’t understand what we’re walking into. They think that any civilization has to be better than what we’ve suffered the last few months, but th
ey’re wrong.”

  “I know. I’ve tried to warn Brant, but it’s impossible to communicate how brutal the people of Vaul are to those who haven’t experienced it firsthand.”

  “Until I left this place, I had no idea that life didn’t have to be so cruel. Life on the Golden Dawn was hard, for someone who only knew the realm of Praxis. To me, it felt like a permanent vacation. I remember the first time I woke up without the burden of oppressive fear weighing down on me. I broke down and cried in my hammock, right there with the rest of the crew watching.”

  “After escaping through the portal, I lived alone in Nogard forest for a time,” Lacrael said. “I had never seen trees or a stream. I found a little bubbling brook and slept by it for days. I couldn’t bring myself to abandon this thing of wonder and beauty I had found.”

  Niad smiled at the thought. “Do you… do you really think that Abimelech would spread this rot to the other realms?”

  “My grandfather told me that Abimelech wants to subjugate the entire human race,” Lacrael said. “The easiest way to do that is to repeat what he’s done in Vaul in the other realms.”

  “But why? What’s the point?”

  “As inhospitable as this place is to us, it’s a fertile breeding ground for dragons. According to legend, they thrive in the miasma. Abimelech is trapped in the realm of Atlan, where his dragon spawn hold Northmark in their terrible grip, and only the high king’s power keeps him there. If Abimelech were to return here or corrupt Atlan in a similar fashion, he could usher in a second age of dragons. This is what Garlang said I was given my powers to prevent.”

  “By releasing the high king from whatever mystical prison he’s trapped in.”

  “He’s the only one with the power to defeat Abimelech forever.”

  “We’re a long way from making that happen,” Niad said, shaking her head.

  “Every step of the way, the next challenge has always appeared insurmountable,” Lacrael said. “We always seem to face an impossible task. But every time, we’ve managed to overcome. I don’t think the high king has brought us this far to abandon us now.”