Death's Mistress--Sister of Darkness Read online

  “I would like to have a life book for myself, since I am starting a new phase of my existence, a new set of adventures.” He rubbed an imaginary stain from the sleeve of his ruffled shirt, and he looked back at her. “Can you work your storyteller magic?”

  Nicci stood apart from them, watching. Once the wizard got an idea in his head, he was very insistent. She had led Nathan through the untracked wilds to find the skull-cluttered lair of the witch woman—all because he wanted to ask Red for a book? Nicci said with dry humor, “You lived in a tower for most of your life, Wizard. You think the sum of your experiences would fill an entire book?”

  Hunter squatted in the dry oak leaves strewn all around. The feline creature snuffled the ground, nudging fallen acorns, equally unimpressed with Nathan’s request.

  The wizard sniffed. “Given enough time, the interesting events of even a tedious life can fill a book.” Nathan turned back to Red. “I’ve always been a storyteller myself, and I wrote many popular tales. You may have heard of The Adventures of Bonnie Day? Or The Ballad of General Utros? Grand epics, and relevant to the human condition.”

  Nicci made an acerbic observation. “You were born a prophet, Nathan Rahl. Some would say that your very profession was to make up stories.”

  Nathan gave a dismissive gesture. “Yes, some would say that—and these days, with the great changes in the universe, I’m afraid telling stories is all a prophet can do.”

  Red pursed her black lips as she considered. “The stories of your life might make a book, Nathan Rahl—and, yes, I do have the magic to extract it. I know a spell that can preserve everything you’ve already done in a single volume, and that will be the end of its own story.”

  “Volume one,” Nathan said with delight. “And I am ready to start a new journey with my sidekick Nicci.”

  Nicci bristled. “I am no one’s sidekick, Wizard. I am your companion, perhaps, but more accurately, your guardian and protector.”

  Red said, “Each person is the main character of his own story. That may be how Nathan views you, Nicci—as part of his tale.”

  “Then he would be wrong.” She refused to soften the edge of her tension. “Is this life book meant to be a biography? Or a work of fiction?”

  Even Nathan chuckled at that.

  The crow left its branch, swooped around the clearing, and settled on another bough, as if to get a better view.

  The witch woman rose from the bench. “Your proposal interests me, Nathan Rahl. There is much you need to do—whether or not you know it yet.” When she cast a glance at Nicci, her ropy red locks swung like braided pendulums. “And I know much of your life as well, Nicci. Your past would constitute an epic. Since I am working the storyteller magic, would you like a life book of your own? It would be my pleasure.” Red had an unsettling hunger behind her sky-blue eyes. “And I also know there is an importance to you as well.”

  Nicci thought of the catastrophes she had survived, the dark deeds she had done, the changes she had undergone, the damage and the triumphs she had left in her wake. She was important? Other than a handful of witnesses and victims along the way, the only one who knew that story was Nicci herself. She gave the witch woman a cold, hard look. “No, thank you.”

  After a brief hesitation, the witch woman brushed her hands together dismissively and turned with a smile to the wizard. “So, a single life book for Nathan Rahl, then.” She left the bench and headed toward her cottage. “First, I will need supplies. There are preparations to make.” Red pushed aside the discolored leather hide that hung across the doorway and ducked inside.

  Lowering her voice, Nicci turned toward Nathan. “What are you about, Wizard?”

  He just gave her a smile and a shrug.

  Red emerged with a small ivory bowl: the rounded top of a human cranium. She set it on the stone bench next to Nathan and reached out to him. “Give me your hand.”

  Happy that she had agreed to his request, he extended his hand, palm up. Red took hold of his fingers, stroking one after another in a strangely erotic gesture. She traced the lines on his palm. “These are your life lines, your spirit lines, and your story lines. They mark the primary events in your life, like the rings of a tree.” She turned his hand over, studying the veins on the back. “These blood vessels trace the map of your life throughout your body.”

  When she stroked his veins, Nathan smiled, as if she were flirting with him.

  “Yes, this is exactly what I need.” Red snatched a knife from a cleverly hidden pocket in her gray dress and drew the razor-sharp blade across the back of his hand.

  Nathan yelped, more in disbelief than in pain, as blood gushed out. “What are you doing, woman?”

  “You asked for a life book.” She clutched his hand, turning it over so that the red blood could run into the skull bowl. “What did you think we would use for ink?”

  As she squeezed his fingers, trying to milk the flow, Nathan was flustered. “I don’t believe I thought that far ahead.”

  “A person’s life book must be written in ink made from the ashes of his blood.”

  “Of course it does,” Nathan said, as if he had known all along.

  Nicci rolled her eyes.

  The blood flowed steadily from the deep gash. Hunter sniffed the air, as if drawn by the scent of it.

  When the skull bowl was a third full of dark red liquid, Nathan said, “Surely that’s enough by now?”

  “We’d better make certain,” Red answered. “As you said, you’ve had a very long life.”

  Finally satisfied, the witch woman released Nathan’s hand and took the bowl over to her smoky cook fire. With a blackened femur, she prodded the coals, nudging them aside to create a sheltered hollow in the ashes. She settled the bone bowl into them, so the blood could cook.

  Nathan poked at his cut hand, then released enough magic to heal the wound, careful not to let the blood stain his fine travel clothes.

  Before long, the blood in the skull bowl began to bubble and smoke. It darkened, then turned black, boiling down to a tarry residue.

  The light slipping through the crowded branches overhead grew more slanted in the late afternoon. High above, birds settled among the branches of the expansive oak for the night. The crow scolded them for their trespass, but the birds remained.

  Red ducked back into her cottage, where she rummaged around before returning with a leather-bound tome that bore no title on the cover or spine. “I happen to have an empty life book among my possessions. You are fortunate, Nathan Rahl.”

  “Indeed, I am.”

  Red squatted next to the cook fire and used two long bones to gingerly remove the skull bowl. The blood ink inside the inverted cranium was even darker than the soot charred on the outer surface.

  Nathan watched with great interest as she set the smoking bowl on the stone bench. She opened the life book to the first page, which was blank, the ivory color of freshly boiled bone. “And now to write your story, Nathan Rahl.”

  She called the crow down from the tree, and the big black bird landed on her shoulder again. It used its sharp black beak to stroke her red braids in a sign of affection. The witch woman absently caressed the bird, then seized its neck. Before the bird could squawk or flail, she snapped its neck and caught its body as it fell. The dying crow’s wings extended, as if to take flight one last time. Its head lolled to one side.

  Red rested the dead bird on the bench next to the skull bowl. With nimble fingers, she combed through its tail and wing feathers, finally selecting a long one, which she plucked loose. She held it up for inspection. “Yes, a fine quill. Shall we begin?”

  After Nathan nodded, the witch woman trimmed the end with her dagger, dipped the pointed shaft into the black ink, and touched it to the blank paper of the waiting first page.

  CHAPTER 3

  The life book wrote itself.

  Red sat on the stone bench, hands on her knees, not noticing that she left a smear of dark soot on her gray dress. As she worked her spell, a
guiding magic suspended the crow-feather quill upright, and then it moved of its own accord, inscribing the story of Nathan Rahl.

  Bending closer, the wizard looked on with boyish delight, resting an elbow on his knee. Nicci stepped up to watch the words spill out across the first page, line after line, and then move on to the next page. Each time the ink ran dry, the feather paused above the book, and Red plucked it out of the air, dipped it into the bowl of burned blood, and placed it back on the page. The flow of words resumed.

  “I recall how many times I wrote and rewrote The Adventures of Bonnie Day until I was satisfied with the prose,” Nathan said, shaking his head as he marveled. “This is far easier.”

  The story flowed, page after page, chronicling Nathan’s long life as a dangerous prophet, how he’d been imprisoned by the Sisters of the Light, first to train, then to control him … how for years they monitored his every utterance of prophecy, terrified of the turmoil that could arise from false interpretations. And prophecies were nearly always misinterpreted, warnings often misconstrued. Merely trying to avoid a dire fate usually precipitated that exact fate.

  “People never seem to learn the lesson,” Nathan muttered as he read. “Richard was right to disregard prophecy for so long.”

  Nicci agreed. “I am not sorry that prophecy is gone from the world.”

  The words flew past faster than anyone could read them, and the life book’s pages turned of their own accord. Nicci scanned back and forth, catching some snippets of Nathan’s life, stories she already knew. On the road, he had spent much time telling her about himself, whether or not she asked.

  He leaned closer as a new section began. “Oh, this is a good part.”

  In his loneliness in the palace, the Sisters had occasionally taken pity on Nathan, hiring women from the finer brothels in Tanimura to comfort him. According to the tale as written in the life book, Nathan enjoyed the conversation of an ordinary woman with ordinary dreams and desires. Nathan had once whispered a terrible prophecy in the ear of a gullible whore—and the horrified young woman had run screaming from the Palace of the Prophets. Once out in the city, she repeated the prophecy to others, and the repercussions spread and spread, eventually triggering a bloody civil war … all due to Nathan’s reckless pillow talk to a woman he would never see again.

  The Sisters had punished Nathan for that, curtailing his limited freedoms, even after he revealed that the supposed “mistake” had accomplished his intent of killing a young boy child destined to become a ruthless tyrant, a tyrant who would have slaughtered countless innocents.

  “A relatively minor civil war was a small enough price to prevent that outcome,” Nathan remarked as he skimmed the black-blood words scrolling out.

  When the quill ran dry again, Red dipped it into the skull bowl, stirred the burned blood, and set the feather tip on the page, where it continued to scratch and scrawl.

  Nathan’s story went on and on—rambling, in Nicci’s opinion—and the feather pen wrote word after word. Of course, most of his adventures had occurred only after he managed to escape from the palace: his brief romance with Clarissa and its tragic end, his work with Richard Rahl to overthrow the Imperial Order and Emperor Jagang, his battles to stop the evil Hannis Arc and the undead Emperor Sulachan.

  Faster than Nicci expected, the entire volume filled up. When the black blood finally reached the last page in the book, the tale ended with the all-too-recent account of Nicci and Nathan trudging through moss-covered skulls to find the witch woman in the Dark Lands. All of the charred-blood ink in the skull bowl was used up, and the lifeless feather dropped and drifted to the ground.

  Nathan was obviously impressed with his own story. “Thank you, Red.” When he closed the cover, he was delighted to see that his name had appeared on the leather front and on the spine. “I shall carry the life book with me and read it off and on. I’m certain others would like to read it as well. Scholarly libraries will want copies.”

  The witch woman shook her head. “That will not be possible, Nathan Rahl.” She took the tome from him. “I agreed to create a life book for you, but I never said you could keep it. The volume stays with me. That is my price.”

  Nathan sputtered. “But that wasn’t what I thought … that isn’t the purpose—”

  “You did not ask the price beforehand, Wizard,” Nicci said. “After living a thousand years, you should be wiser than that.”

  Red ducked back into her cottage, leaving the volume on the bench, as if daring Nathan to take it and escape. He did not. She emerged with a smaller, thinner leather-bound book, which was also blank. “I will take your life story, but I give you something that’s worth far more. A new life book filled with potential, rather than stale old words.” She offered it to Nathan. “I have your past, your old story, but with this book, I give you the rest of your life. Live it the way you would want it to be written.”

  Nathan ran a fingertip over the smooth leather cover, disappointed. “Thank you, I suppose.” He held the book in his hands.

  “I happen to know that you, and the sorceress, are both vital to the future.” The witch woman stepped uncomfortably close to Nicci and dropped her voice. “Are you certain you don’t want a life book of your own? There may be things you need to learn.”

  “I am certain, witch woman. My past is my story to keep, and my future will be written by me, in my own way, not through the control or influence of you or anyone else.”

  “I just wanted to make the offer.” She turned away with a hint of secret amusement in her eyes, followed by a shadow of unexpected concern. “You may still be required to do things, Sorceress, whether or not you want to hear about them.”

  Nathan opened his new life book and was surprised to find it wasn’t entirely blank. “There are words written on the first page. ‘Kol Adair.’” Perplexed, he looked up at Red. “I don’t recognize the term. Is it a name? A place?”

  “It’s what you will need.” Red bent over her cooking fire and used the blackened femur to stir the coals and reawaken the flames. “You must find Kol Adair in the Old World, Nathan Rahl.” She flashed a glance at Nicci. “Both of you.”

  “We have our own mission,” Nicci said. “Here in the Dark Lands.”

  “Oh? And what mission is that? To wander aimlessly because you are too much in love with Richard Rahl to stay at his side? That is a pointless quest. A coward’s quest.”

  Nicci felt the heat in her cheeks. “That’s not it at all.”

  Nathan came to her defense. “After our last great battles, I wanted to come back here, to see if I could help the people.”

  Red sniffed. “Another pointless quest. There are always people who need help, no matter where you go. In the Dark Lands? In the Old World? What is the purpose? Would you rather not save the world and save yourselves?”

  Nicci turned her anger into annoyance. “You babble nonsense, witch woman.”

  “Nonsense, is it? Turn the page, Nathan Rahl. Read your new life book.”

  Curious, the wizard did as she suggested. Nicci leaned close, seeing other words written there on the second page.

  Future and Fate depend on both the journey and the destination.

  Kol Adair lies far to the south in the Old World. From there, the Wizard will behold what he needs to make himself whole again. And the Sorceress must save the world.

  Nicci said, “I have helped save the world enough times already.”

  But Nathan was more perplexed. “This is a game for you, witch woman. You planted this joke for us. Why would I need to be made whole again? Am I missing something?” He touched his arm, which seemed remarkably intact.

  “That is not for me to say,” Red said. “You see what’s written, a path established long ago.”

  “And prophecy is gone,” Nicci said. “Ancient predictions mean nothing.”

  “Truly?” asked the witch woman. “Even pronouncements made when prophecy was as strong as the wind and the sun?” While Nathan flexed his fingers, as i
f searching for missing digits, Red brushed back her tangled locks of hair. “You of all people should know that it is unwise for others to interpret a prophecy.”

  Nicci tightened the laces on her traveling boots and adjusted her black dress. She could not keep the skepticism out of her voice. “As I said, there is no more prophecy, witch woman. How can you know where we need to go?”

  Red’s black lips formed a mysterious smile. “Sometimes I still know things. Or maybe it is a revelation I foresaw long before the stars changed overhead. But I do know that if you care about Lord Rahl and his D’Haran Empire, you will heed this warning and this summons. Kol Adair. You both need to make your way there, whether for the journey or the destination. If you don’t, then all that Richard Rahl has worked for may well be forfeit.” She shrugged, suddenly seeming aloof. “Do as you wish.”

  Nathan slipped the new life book into a leather pouch at his side and closed the flap. “As Lord Rahl’s roving ambassador, my assignment is to travel to places that might not know about the changes in the world.” He looked up at the darkening sky through the canopy of the ancient oak. “But the exact route is at our discretion. We could go to the Old World just as well as to the Dark Lands.”

  Nicci was not so convinced. “And you are going to take her babblings seriously, Wizard?”

  Nathan stroked back his long white hair. “Frankly, I’ve had enough of the Dark Lands and all this gloom. The Old World has more sunshine.”

  Nicci considered, realizing she had followed him, but with no real goal otherwise. She just wanted to serve Richard and strengthen his new, solid empire, to help bring about his longed-for golden age. “I have my own orders from Lord Rahl to explore his new empire and send reports back of the things we find. At Kol Adair, or elsewhere.”

  “And save the world,” Red added.

  She did not believe Red’s prediction—how was she supposed to save the world by traveling to, or seeing, a place she’d never heard of?—but the wizard had a valid point.