His Final Secret Read online

  She couldn't count how many times she had lamented losing her pack at the reactor. The personal loss of the ring Talon had given to his wife, her father's notes, and Jeremiah's journal was painful enough. The wand and the blue stone would have made her current course of action much easier.

  She reached the edge of the camp proper, where the dilapidated tents of the followers were replaced with larger barracks tents, and soldiers were moving out around the field. Half the tents had already been pulled down and packed, while most of the others were on their way. Eryn could see the flag at the top of the center tent now, still some distance away. It had taken a long time to get this far. Too long. The girls would be inside the tent, subjected to whatever distasteful activities the army's leader had planned.

  The rage began to fill her, and she felt her Curse begin to seep into her body. She fought to calm herself, to push it down and keep it contained. It wasn't time, yet.

  A large man in a leather hauberk bumped into her from the left, sending her stumbling.

  "Watch where you're - oh." The man's voice turned from anger to fear in an instant. "I'm sorry, my Lord."

  Eryn turned her head enough to see the man from the corner of her eye, her face hidden by the cloak. He dropped to his knee and bowed his head.

  "It was my fault. I wasn't looking where I was going."

  She glared at him for a moment, remembering the way she had been treated when she and Talon had first arrived in Varrow. Until Fehri had intervened. Fehri. The follower of Amman, who believed in the goodness of people, even soldiers. Who had died at the tip of General Spyne's blade.

  She looked away, continuing forward towards the center of the camp, picking up her pace a little more. Fehri, Trock. Loshe, Robar, Sena. The names of those she had known and lost rolled through her thoughts as she strode angrily past the busy soldiers. They cleared the path for her, allowing her through without confrontation. The fighters didn't know what the Mediators were truly capable of. They only knew that they were supposed to respect and fear them.

  Eryn could hear the laughter and the sad whining as she approached the front of the tent. There were a hundred soldiers gathered around it, talking to one another, making jokes. The entrance to the tent swung open and a soldier came out, still buckling his belt. He shared a knowing look with the others before turning and heading off.

  Her breath was heavy, her face tight in anger, her fists clenched at her sides. She glanced at the back of the retreating soldier, and then returned her attention to the tent. The magic was coming now, pouring into her, fierce and out of control.

  She would show them why they should fear.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Spyne

  General Spyne hated traveling through subroutes.

  He had only remembered that once the juggernaut had pulled him into one, dragging him past the milky white portal and into the realm beyond. Like the world of the Shifters, the subroute carried those who entered into a time outside of time, where the path from one point to another was shortened through a wrinkle, though not eliminated altogether.

  It was a realm of sparkling darkness and confusion, where the paths twisted and tumbled across one another, and the past and the future converged simultaneously. It was a place where he could see the milky white portal at the other end, only a few hundred feet distant, yet it would take what felt in his mind like weeks to reach.

  Weeks during which he had nothing to do but remember.

  Tella. Loene. The time before the war. The time after. Who he began his life as, and what his life had become. Who he had once been, and who he had turned into, when anger and guilt and fury and rage were all there was to fuel him.

  That, and the promise.

  He had weeks to think. Weeks to consider. Weeks to question. Weeks to try to remember the promise, and the reason he had made it in the first place.

  Whenever he thought he would, whenever it felt like the answers were close, he would see her there, his boot on her throat, choking the life from her. He would see Loene with her throat cut, laying on ground outside the mirrored tower of Genesia, just one more child dead as a casualty of the war.

  Then he would cry.

  Tears of pain that fell at a glacial pace. His memories were returning, the truth revealing itself to him when he should have died and didn't. When he should have returned to Genesia to be repaired, and couldn't. When a juggernaut rescued him and then named itself Jeremiah.

  His hatred for Talon Rast began to fade, diluted in the truth of his tears, replaced with an understanding of the man who had once been known as Thomas. A tinkerer and inventor, a gentle, sensitive man with two beautiful children and an even more beautiful, more gentle wife.

  Thomas had learned the truth. He had seen what the promise had done to them, and now he was fighting back.

  Spyne decided that when he reached the other side of the portal, when he left the suffocating confines of the subroute, he would fight back too. He would take the rage and the anger, and he would turn it back on the one who had used what Jeremiah had created to win a war and twisted it to control not only him but all of the Empire. He would let General Spyne, the rapist and murderer, remain in place of Sol, the gardener, and join his friend in meting out both justice and revenge.

  They were nearly at the other end of the subroute when Spyne heard the growling behind them. It felt like it took hours for him to turn his head, and when he did he saw that some of the Shifters had followed them from the Killorn reactor into the fold. They moved just as slowly as he did here, unable to use their temporal shifting in this in-between place. Even so, it was a problem. They couldn't afford to have the Shifters escaping from the reactor this way. It meant that wherever Jeremiah was leading him, they would need to destroy the portal at the other side. There was no way to shut off the tail, only the head.

  He would have pointed it out to the juggernaut at his side, but communication was impossible. Every sound took so long to make that the beginning of it was forgotten by the time the end arrived. Attempting to decipher drawn out moans was a futile effort.

  The time continued to pass, slowly and deliberately. Even from the time that he could have reached out to touch the tip of the receiving end it seemed as though days had passed before first his hand, and then his arm, and then his body began to be absorbed through it. Jeremiah waited silently behind him, the battered juggernaut keeping its remaining eye back towards the dozen or so Shifters who had entered the pathway so far. There would be more, he knew, if they didn't act fast. While it may have seemed like weeks had gone by inside the subroute, only minutes had passed outside.

  Then Spyne was through. He stumbled down the steps on the opposing platform, confused when he suddenly found himself wrapped in thick, ircidium-laced netting. It fell onto him from above, constricting as he attempted to remove it, and holding him tight until he fell onto the floor.

  "What the-" he heard someone say.

  He was interrupted when Jeremiah exited the subroute. Spyne flipped himself over onto his back in time to see a second net fall onto the juggernaut, and the juggernaut extend its remaining arm to easily break it apart. He saw three men and three women in ircidium chainmail standing on either side of the portal, their faces wide with shock at what had arrived.

  "It is coming," Jeremiah said, ignoring the others. He turned around on the platform, reaching out for the golden, jewel-encrusted ring.

  "What are you doing?" one of the women asked. At the same moment, the first of the Shifter orcs came through the portal.

  "It breaks it," he said, his metal hand wrapping around one of the gems and tearing it from the ring. A second Shifter managed to get through before the white surface of the subroute was sucked away through the center of the ring.

  "No," came a cry from the back of the room.

  The two Shifters howled, bending their legs to leap. One of the soldiers stabbed it with an ircidium-tipped spear, holding it steady while another stabbed it with a sword. Jeremiah took c
are of the other one, grabbing its head in his hand and crushing it.

  "Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing-"

  There was motion from the rear of the room, and then an old man with a long, white beard appeared in the corner of Spyne's eye. He was dressed in a simple black shirt and pants, with a white surcoat draped over it. The red eye of the Empire was stitched into it.

  He paused over Spyne, looking down in surprise. "General Spyne?" He gasped when he saw how Spyne's neck had been stapled back together. "What in Heden's name?"

  "Release me," Spyne growled. "Now."

  The man looked to the soldiers near the subroute. "Sissus, Brom, free the General."

  The two soldiers rushed in silence to where he was laying prone on the floor.

  "My apologies, General," the man said. "We don't get many people through the portal." He paused to suppress a laugh. "Actually, we don't get any people through the portal, and certainly not whatever that is." He looked back at Jeremiah. "The creatures, yes."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Spyne

  Sissus and Brom sliced the netting around Spyne, and he pushed them angrily aside and got to his feet. "Who are you? What is the meaning of that?" he asked, pointing back at the subroute. It shouldn't have been active, and yet here was this man who had clearly been expecting Shifters to come out of it.

  "Again, my apologies General." The man looked very uncomfortable. "I'm not sure I should tell you."

  Spyne reached out and grabbed him by the neck. "I am General Spyne Valkosian, Leader of the Historians and Protector of the Empire. I have full reign to do or know whatever I want whenever I want."

  The old man smiled weakly and tapped Spyne's hand with spindly fingers.

  Spyne let him go.

  "Of course, my Lord," he choked.

  "It is near," Jeremiah said behind them.

  Spyne glared back at the Juggernaut. "You'll have time to explain yourself later. Now, I ask you again. Who in Heden are you, and what is this place?"

  He scanned the room while he asked. It was large enough to hold the subroute, along with platforms next to it where the soldiers could perch to drop nets on whatever came out. Now that the portal itself was gone, he could see a small box behind it with tubes running out to the bottom of the subroute. The box had a domed glass top, and he could see a small chip of ebocite resting in the center of it.

  "It catches it," Jeremiah said. "It studies it. It is near. It is this way."

  "Hold," Spyne ordered the juggernaut. He didn't know if Jeremiah would listen to him. The juggernaut paused.

  "My name is Jean Romulus. I am Chief Inspector for the Empire, assigned the position by our Lord, himself."

  "I've never heard of you," Spyne said.

  "Our work here is done in secret to all but the Overlord of Edgewater," Jean said.

  "Overlord of Edgewater? Is that where we are?"

  Jean nodded. "Below it. Yes."

  Spyne looked back at Jeremiah, standing still and silent behind him.

  "You study the Shifters?"

  "The what?"

  "The creatures like those." He pointed to the dead orcs.

  "Yes. My charge is to understand them. How they function. More specifically, how to kill them."

  "We know how to kill them."

  "Follow me, General."

  Jean led him through a door in front of them, into a second, much larger room. Cages with ircidium bars lined the left side of the room, occupied by Shifter orcs and goblins who howled and screeched when they entered. A table in the center had another orc tied down to it by wrists and ankles, its stomach cut open and held apart by ircidium clamps. Its scalp had also been removed, though he could tell that it was still alive.

  On the right side was a shelf full of vials of blood, and glass jars with organs inside. There was also a full skeleton handing from a rack. Not of an orc.

  A Shifter General.

  It's large, wedge-shaped head and long spine curled down into a narrow, boney frame that was so similar to a human's, and yet so different. Spyne was surprised to see it there, and he walked over to it without thinking, memories of the war flashing through his mind. Of Ares'Nor, where Thomas killed the Shifter Master General and sent their armies fleeing.

  "General?" Jean said, watching him.

  "We know how to kill them," Spyne repeated. "Besides, there are so few of them remaining, and they mostly stay in hiding."

  Except when we start reactors and draw them out.

  "With swords and spears, yes," Jean said. "But as you said, they are in hiding. The machine behind the ring draws them in from time to time. That's how we get our test subjects. They rarely come through the portal, but it isn't unheard of."

  The box was like a tiny reactor, the ebocite and the resonance too small to draw in all but the weakest of the Shifters.

  "My command is to find a way to kill them, all of them, wherever they may be. I've been studying their blood, based on ancient texts that were provided." He went over to the shelf and lifted a vial of bluish liquid to show Spyne. He put it back and lifted a clear vial. "Thirty years, I've been the Chief Inspector. I replaced the prior Chief Inspector, who was set to the same task for forty years. I think we're getting close though. This vial is mainly water, but I added a finely ground tincture of fourteen natural substances to it." He smiled and brought it over to the Shifter on the table. "Watch."

  He poured the contents out onto the creature's face. The water slid down into its mouth, and it began to convulse. It calmed after a few seconds.

  "The tincture causes it pain, but it isn't enough to kill it. There is still something missing."

  "How long have you been studying this?" Spyne asked. He wasn't impressed by the display.

  "Thirty years for myself. The Inspectors as a whole have been working on the problem for, oh, seven hundred years or so."

  "Seven hundred?" Spyne asked. The research had started some time after the war. Or maybe it had started sooner, and Jean didn't know it. He waved his hand at the Shifter. "And that is all you have to show for it?"

  "My Lord," Jean replied, looking frightened. "I work day and night on the problem. It is not as simple as you may think."

  "What I think is that it would be easier to hunt them down with sword and spear, and not invite them to this world with the ebocite."

  "Ebocite?" Jean asked. Of course, he didn't know what the box or the stone inside it really was.

  "Seven hundred years," Spyne repeated. "He gave you the orders?"

  Jean shook his head. "No, my Lord. The Overlord promoted me into the position when the prior Inspector went to Amman. For as long as the problem has not been solved, there must be an Inspector. That is what he said to me, before making me swear to remain down here in near solitude."

  "Then how do you know the orders came from him?"

  "Where else would they have come from?"

  "What about your soldiers there?"

  "They are mutes, and only barely bright enough to follow my commands. The Overlord removed their tongues to keep them from ever speaking of this place, so I get no conversation but my own. They do have their uses, I suppose, the females especially." He looked back at them with a dirty smile. "They keep a man from getting too lonely."

  "You look too old to care for such things."

  "I'm not. Might I ask, General, how did you come to be in the portal? And what is that infernal machine that looks like it is trying to be a man?"

  "It's none of your concern," Spyne snapped, looking back at Jeremiah. "You knew about this place?"

  "It starts it."

  "You created it? I should have known. Before the war, or after?"

  "It is during."

  "Before the Nine, or after?"

  "It is before."

  Spyne laughed at that. The Academy was one of the only places that survived the war, though few knew its origins were that ancient. Jeremiah had traveled from Genesia when the war began, and again during its
first year. Now he knew why. He had sought a means to kill the Shifters without spilling their blood.

  He had failed.

  "It is near," Jeremiah said. "It is this way."

  "You never saw me here, Inspector," Spyne said, standing over the man and baring his teeth. "And nothing out of the ordinary came through the portal. Understood?"

  Jean backed away under his menacing posture. "Yes, my Lord. How do I explain the missing stone, should anyone ask?"

  "I don't care how you do it. Unless you would prefer I kill you here and now."

  Jean continued to back away. "No, my Lord. I will think of something."

  "Well?" Spyne said, looking to Jeremiah. "Show me the way."

  "It is pleased."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Talon

  Talon stared at the Overlord, his sharp eyes unblinking. Olmas was a short, fat, ugly man, with a crooked back and an even more crooked smile. Even when they had been on the same side, Talon had never cared for him.

  He liked him even less now.

  "You're wondering how I caught them, yes?" he asked. "Oh, the message I received from the party I sent out to hunt you down helped a small bit." He pinched his fingers together. "Mainly, it was this one." He motioned to Delia. "She's far too pretty to be forgotten anywhere. I remember her father came to me some years ago, begging me to lobby for General Spyne's head." He laughed. "She was only a child, but already so pretty. I knew her immediately."

  "I don't see the riders that escaped Fulton," Talon said, staying calm.

  Olmas smiled. "They're being treated for trauma. They described a massacre at Fulton. One that found you at its head."

  "There were monsters in the gorge. I tried to save them."

  Olmas shrugged. "It doesn't matter, Talon. My orders are to kill you." He pointed at Wilem. "This one made the mistake of wearing Mediator Jevyn's shirt, which the Headmaster recognized immediately. Then when I saw how he reacted to my arrival with Delia, here, it was simple enough to get him to talk."