Shadow’s Lure by Jon Sprunk Page B

frowned. Before his disappearance, Levictus had contacted her to ask for additional strength, which she had provided at great cost to herself. Levictus had been her most important tool in the southern lands. Not the most reliable—the sorcerer was as unstable as any Brightlander—but his role was crucial to her plans. For him to be killed at the apex of his power was no small matter.
    “Who was it?”
    “The night was so dark. No moon. So beautiful … We fight.”
    She dug her fingernails into her palms, marshalling her self-control.
    “Who? Who did you fight, Levictus?”
    The shade paused for a few heartbeats. Then his rasping voice warbled across the void.
    “The scion.”
    Her bosom heaved as the words echoed across the ethers between life and death. Upon granting his boon, she had required one task of her servant. That he kill one man. A very dangerous man.
    “Did you slay him as well?” she asked.
    Mumbled words whispered from the portal.
    “Levictus! Did you slay the scion?”
    “He was defeated.”
    Sybelle released the breath she had been holding. Thanks be to the Mother Dark —
    “But something … interfered. I die. Shinae …”
    Sybelle hissed between parted lips. Shinae was a dark metal native to the Shadowlands. She had gifted the sorcerer with a pair of shinae knives during his visit to Eregoth, years ago, but what was he talking about? She needed more answers. Yet he was fading before her eyes. She reached out to take hold of the spirit directly and wring the truth from its spectral voice, but it slipped through her psychic grasp. She lunged after him, but the withered shade of Het Xenai reappeared, gazing at her with vacant holes.
    “Bring him back!” she demanded. “I was not finished.”
    The ancient warrior’s sigh was a gust of wind over a cold desert plain. “The shade has passed beyond my sight.”
    Invectives flew from her lips. The warrior’s spirit wavered and departed, back to its eternal sleep. She brushed the charnel dust from her hands and arose.
    This was unforeseen. For almost two decades she had been assembling her power. Levictus was supposed to blaze the trail. Now her plans were unraveled, and her Master was unforgiving. She threw the sheet back over the sarcophagus, its paleness reminding her of the snowfields on the day she emerged from the gateway to step onto these cursed lands. Her father—her liege—had stood before her under the alien blue sky that burned her eyes, and lifted up his hand.
    “From this land,” he said, “we shall forge a new empire.”
    Despair had welled up inside Sybelle as she gazed out upon the blankness of the bare ice and stone and the foul light rising in the east. They were exiles, outcasts in a world that was but a hollow reflection of the one they had left behind.
    She reached out to catch her father’s arm. “We should go back. We could make peace—”
    He struck her, and she fell upon the icy ground. She lay there, feeling the sting of his hand, which she knew and hated.
    “No,” he said. “We must make our destiny in this world now, or be crushed by it.”
    His fist closed, and there was a terrible crash. Sybelle looked back to see the path behind them swallowed into an icy crevasse. The gateway was gone. They were marooned here.
    Sybelle pulled her gaze away from the covered sarcophagus. That had been a long time ago, but the pain was still fresh. She had left behind a life of luxury and privilege, and in return been given only hardship and an endless litany of demands. Nothing in this world had been able to assuage the betrayal, not even the birth of her son, Soloroth, who had never seen the onyx skies of Shadow, nor walked upon the pallid shores of its midnight seas.
    Steadying herself against a stone pillar, Sybelle went to an alcove in the wall. She took down an elaborate orichalcum box and opened the lid. A bed of fine golden powder lay inside. She took a pinch between her fingers and held it up to her nose. Inhaling