The Golden Tower Page 9

Power surged up inside Call, brutal and terrifying. He was propelled to his feet, even as the woods around him seemed to shift and waver — other memories overlapped these woods, of ancient forests deep with trees, dark paths winding through them, lined with ferocious elemental monsters.

  And through all of that, Call could see something he had never seen before. Chaos, living chaos, like black lines running through the world. The sky and earth were dark with it. This was why chaos had such power, he thought — because it was a part of everything, of every rock and tree and cloud; it was in and around all things. It was the spinning heart of the world.

  He reached out with his hands as if he were reaching to pick up something simple like a cup or a stone. He caught the twisting coils of chaos that wound all around him and pulled them together, weaving a massive spinning black flame between his hands.

  He could hear the others screaming his name. It didn’t matter. He knew exactly what he was doing. Somewhere in his mind, Aaron was shouting. Call flung his arms out, and the black flame exploded from his fingers, striking the elemental wolves, tearing them to shadowy pieces.

  Jasper had flung himself in front of Gwenda and Tamara. They all watched, stunned, as the wolves blasted away to ash, and black fire raced up and down Call’s arms, crackling like lightning.

  “Call!” Tamara screamed. “Call!”

  But Call couldn’t hear her. He could only see and hear black fire, only remember burning. In fact, memories were pouring into his head, in an uncontrollable tide. As he tumbled down into darkness, he could hear himself screaming.

  HE WAS IN an ice cave. The cold of it made his breath crystallize in the air. He could feel it even through his heavy coat, even through his magic. There was a terrible pain in his chest and all around him were the dead and dying.

  If he didn’t act quickly, he was going to be one of them.

  He had come here to strike at the old and infirm, the weak, because he knew from long experience that fear was more palpable than might. It gave him no pleasure to attack the elderly, children, sick people. Yet the person who cares the least is always the winner and he wanted to win. He was willing to do whatever it took, no matter how terrible, and he was willing to do it himself, not trust it to some underling.

  He’d never expected such a weak and infirm collection of people to mount such a response. The Chaos-ridden he’d brought with him were destroyed, fallen in their second death, and he’d been hurt. Badly hurt.

  His body was failing, its heart slowing, its lungs drowning in their own blood. He cast about for a new vessel. Sarah Hunt, who’d sent the magical knives into his chest? He’d managed to turn a few of the blades back to strike her and now she leaned against the wall, mortally wounded, watching him with wary, dulling eyes. No, she wouldn’t be alive much longer. He glanced at a few of the grandparents, their bodies protecting children. Dead, all of them dead.

  A thin, thready cry went up, and he saw that there was a baby, still alive, held in the arms of a man — Declan Novak, Sarah’s brother. Declan had slumped down against the wall near his sister. The mage made swift calculations. He had no idea whether his Makar power would go with him into this child. He’d always taken care to possess the body of a Makar before — if the power didn’t go with him, then he might well find his end at last.

  He took a long and painful step closer to the baby, ignoring Sarah’s cries for him to keep away. The child was wailing, which was a good sign. It was still strong, a survivor, with a shock of black hair and angry waving fists.

  A baby. As an infant, he wouldn’t be able to do magic or leave the cave. He would be defenseless. He would have to take the chance that someone came. Worse, he was afraid that the unformed mind would be overwhelmed by the full scope of his memories. And yet, Constantine’s body was fading fast. It would never last long enough for him to find another candidate.

  His memories would have to be walled up inside this vulnerable new mind, he decided swiftly. It was a tidy solution in its way — only when he was a mage strong and wise enough to find those memories locked up inside his head would he be able to free them. He would receive all the wisdom he’d once possessed only when he was ready for it. After all, without his memories, how would he ever return to glory?

  And he, Maugris, the Scythe of Souls, the Devourer of Men, the Enemy of Death, was intended for glory. Glory forever and ever, for all time.

  Taking a deep breath, his last in this broken body, his soul pushed its way out of what was left of Constantine Madden and into the screaming infant that had been Callum Hunt.

  This is not the end of me, he vowed.

  Call woke with a scream and then went on screaming. Someone had tied him down to a bed and there were scorch marks on the wall, scorch marks Call didn’t recall making. He didn’t recall the walls either, or the room.

  “Call?” It was Jasper’s voice, and for a moment, Call quieted. He knew where he was, after all. Or at least he thought that he did before the room tilted and everything slid away.

  Then it seemed to him that he was in a thousand places at once, that there were a host of people passing before him, trying to talk to him. A thousand voices shouting. Mages in Assembly robes, men and women with burned and blackened skin, shaking their fists.

  “I defeated you in Prague!” Call shouted back at one of them. “It was I, and I shall defeat you again!”

  “This is really not good,” said Jasper’s voice. Call found himself back in his body. His wrists were tied to the posts of a large bed whose hangings bore marks of punctures, water damage, and smoke. His shoulders ached.

  “It’s me,” Call said. His voice sounded hoarse, and his throat ached. “Where’s Aaron?”

  I’m here, said Aaron’s voice in his head. Call, you’ve got to get hold of yourself. Push the memories back, wall them up again. You were right —

  Jasper looked worried. Why he was next to Call’s bed, Call didn’t know. “Aaron’s dead,” he said. “Call? Do you know where you are?” He ran to the door. “Tamara! He’s talking!”

  A girl raced into the room, her hair flying. Brown skin, dark hair, beautiful. Call knew her but the knowledge was rushing away from him. He gripped the ropes connected to his wrists, trying to hang on. “What’s happening now?” he said. “What happened then?”

  The girl — Tamara, Tamara — came close to his bed, her eyes full of tears. “Call, what’s the last thing you remember?”

  “The ice cave,” Call said, and saw both of them stare at him in horror just before he tumbled off the edge of everything.

  He was in a massive stone room. Constantine Madden was pacing back and forth in front of a huge dais made of granite, his customary mask pulled down over his scarred face. On top of the dais was a tomb, and on the tomb lay a body — one that Maugris recognized easily. He knew both Madden siblings well enough. It was Constantine’s brother, Jericho.

  Jericho was motionless in death but Constantine was full of movement. He raced from one end of the room to the other, the silver mask that hid half his face gleaming. Over and over he spoke to his brother, telling him that he’d bring him back, that he should never have died, that the Magisterium would pay. Death itself would be destroyed.

  Maugris watched with interest. He understood hating death. He had spent generations and centuries avoiding it himself. Looking down at the elegant but wrinkled fingers of his own hand — a woman’s hand this time — he knew he could easily have a decade or three more in this body. And yet Constantine, in his present state, might not last so long. He would burn up — all ambition and impulse and no strategy.

  Master Joseph had done good work, separating him from the Magisterium, from the people who cared about him. Maugris allowed himself a moment of pleasure and pride in his cultivation of that mage. A man broken enough to be manipulated, broken enough to break that child, had been an excellent choice for an apprentice. And yet he had never suspected his Master of anything but inflaming his own ambitions. He had certainly never suspec
ted her of being a Makar. The mouth of the woman’s body he wore curled up into a smile.

  The last time he rose in power, the last time he had made a bid for taking a bite out of the mage world, was long enough back that they would never connect him with those who had come before. That was the value of lying low for several generations: It gave the world time to forget. But this new Makar had tried some interesting experiments. He had failed to bring back the dead, but he’d given Maugris an idea for an army. An unstoppable army.

  It was time to become Constantine Madden.

  This has all been and will be again.

  Call opened his eyes again, back in the stone room with the bed. The scorch marks were no longer on the wall, but he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined them or if they’d just been washed away. He heard howling — Havoc? Chaos wolves?

  “Call?” came a soft voice. He turned his head. “Do you remember who you are now?”

  Celia was there, her wispy blond hair pushed back with a headband, her face so pale that what stood out was the redness of her eyes. Call frowned at her, trying to place her in his memories. She didn’t like him.

  Had he burned down her tower and scorched all her lands? Murdered her family? Spit in her soup? There were so many crimes rushing through his head.

  “Call?” she said again. He realized he hadn’t answered.

  “You …” he croaked, raising a finger to point accusingly at her. She’d done something, too, he remembered that.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you must be wondering why I’m here when I’ve been so awful — and I was awful. I was afraid. I had family here at the Magisterium when your father — and you, I mean not really you, but him.” She stopped speaking, clearly having gotten herself tangled up in her words. “When Constantine was at the school, no one thought he would become the Enemy of Death. They knew he was all puffed up about being the Makar and believed he could do things no one else could, but it didn’t seem that bad. Until it did. A lot of my family died in the Mage War, and when I was growing up, they warned me over and over again about how brave I would have to be to stand up to Constantine, but that if someone had, none of this would have happened.”

  Murdered her family, Call thought. That was what I did to her.

  Call, came a voice in his head, a voice that startled him. Call, you have to focus. Push back the memories.

  “I know that’s an excuse,” Celia said. “But it’s also an explanation, and I wanted you to have one. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

  “Why now?” he wanted to know. Why had she decided to forgive him when she’d been right all along? He wasn’t trustworthy. He wasn’t even sure he was Call.

  “You nearly died saving Jasper,” she said. “Constantine wouldn’t have. Maybe he’d have done some of the other stuff to look good, but I couldn’t think of any reason to do what you did other than being Jasper and Tamara and Gwenda’s friend. And then I started to think about the walks we used to take with Havoc and how horrible it would be for everyone to think something bad about me for something I couldn’t control. And then I thought that it wasn’t fair you had to almost die for me to think better of you. And then I heard you weren’t okay and I wondered if things would have been different if we hadn’t — if I hadn’t — ”

  “It wasn’t that,” he started, but then the room tilted again and he got a lungful of smoke. He was standing on the deck of a ship and in the distance he saw an entire armada on fire. He watched mages leaping into the sea, but when they got to the water, tentacles reached up for them out of the depths. He needed to warn her. The girl. The girl who was sorry.

  “There are elementals,” he told her urgently. “Under the waves. Waiting. They will drown you if you let them.”

  “Oh, Call,” he heard her say, voice soft and broken up by sobs.

  He was lying on a narrow wooden bed. He knew he was dying. His breaths were coming in ragged gasps and his body felt as if it were full of fire.

  This was not what he had planned for his life. He had been a brilliant student of the best Magisterium in the empire. His teacher, Master Janusz, had been the wisest and most powerful Master, who had chosen him first at the Iron Trial. He was a Makar who could shape chaos. He had been assured of a long life of power and riches.

  And then the coughing had begun. He had dismissed it at first as the product of exhaustion and long nights working in the laboratory he shared with his Master. Then, one night, the coughing had bent him double and he had seen the first red spray of blood across the floor.

  Master Janusz had brought the best earth mages to heal him, but they could do nothing. His power had waned with his health, and he had become a prisoner in his garret, eating only when his landlady or Master Janusz brought him food, waiting in a fury for the inevitable.

  At least until the day he realized.

  He had always known it. The opposite of chaos is the soul. But he had never really, truly thought about what it meant. Since the day he had thought of it, he had lain in his bed, considering the possibilities, dwelling on method, on opportunity …

  The door to his garret opened. It was Master Janusz. Still a man in his prime, he bustled over to the dying mage’s bedside. The man in the bed hated his former master. How dare he have health and a future when he had already had so many years?

  He seethed as Master Janusz fussed with his pillows and used fire magic to light the candle by his bed. The room was already growing dark. He listened as the older mage wittered on about how he would be well soon enough, as soon as the weather was warmer.

  “Nonsense,” he said, when he could stand it no longer. “I am going to die. You know it as well as I do.”

  Master Janusz paused, looking stricken. “Poor Maugris,” he said. “It is a shame. You could have been a great Makar. One of the greatest the world has known. It is a shame and a pity for you to die so young.”

  Rage came upon Maugris. He did not want pity. “I would have been the greatest Makar history has ever known!” he roared. “The world would have trembled before me!”

  It was then that Master Janusz made his mistake. He came toward the man in the bed, hands outstretched. “You must calm yourself, my boy — ”

  The dying mage reached out with all his strength, not of his body but of his mind. The idea that had burned inside him flared into life. He was a manipulator of chaos. Why couldn’t he also manipulate the soul?

  He reached within Master Janusz with hands made of smoke and nothingness, and saw the other man’s eyes bulge. With all his strength, he tore his own soul free from its moorings and pushed — pushed it into Master Janusz, hearing the mage’s tinny scream as his soul was forced out into nothingness….

  A few moments later the door burst open. The landlady, hearing the commotion, had raced upstairs. She saw before her a scene she had expected: her dying young tenant had expired, white-faced and still in his bed. Master Janusz stood in the center of the room, a dazed expression on his face.

  “The boy,” she said. “He died?”

  The Master did a very strange thing. He grinned from ear to ear. “Yes,” he said. “He is dead. But I will live forever.”

  “Aaron.” It was Tamara’s voice. “Aaron, I know you’re in there.”

  Call opened his eyes. They felt like heavy weights. Celia had gone, if she had really been there in the first place. Tamara was sitting next to his bed. She was holding one of his hands.

  But it was kind of strange that she was calling him Aaron. He was pretty sure that he wasn’t Aaron. Except he wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t. Memories swirled inside his head — a Chaos-ridden wolf puppy, a burning tower, a monster made of metal, a room full of mages, and he was one of them. One by one he killed them all, so they could never go against him. He watched them fall and laughed….

  “I was the Scythe of Souls,” he croaked. “I was the Hooded Kestrel, Ludmilla of Prague, the Scourge of Luxembourg, the Commander of the Void. I was the one who burned down the towers of the world,
who parted the sea, and death will die before I do!”

  Tamara made a choked noise. “Aaron,” she said. “I know you’re in there. I know Constantine is doing this somehow. He’s driving Call out of his mind.”

  It’s not Constantine. The words swirled up inside Call’s mind. He didn’t quite know what they meant, but they carried an enormous urgency with them. He found words spilling from his mouth suddenly:

  “It’s not Constantine,” he gasped. “There’s another mage. One even more evil and way more ancient. His memories were blocked up, but we unblocked them and they’re basically blowing up Call’s brain.”

  Tamara’s eyes widened. “Aaron,” she breathed. Her body jerked forward. “Aaron, you have to save Call. You have to close those memories off! Wall them up! And Call — you have to help him. You have to let him do it.”

  For a moment, it seemed as though he’d fallen back into the morass of memories, that time slipped and went sideways again, but then there came another feeling, like a cool cloth against his brow. It was the feeling when someone came into your mess of a room and put everything away when you were gone, but in the right places, in the places you’d meant to put things.

  “Aaron?” Call said. He was able to separate himself from the torrent again.

  I’m here, came Aaron’s voice. Do you know who you are?

  “Yes,” Call said. From the end of the bed, Tamara was watching him warily, clearly reserving judgment as to whether Call talking to himself out loud was a good sign or a bad one.

  And who exactly is that? Aaron asked, sounding as though he was coaxing a cat.

  “Callum Hunt.” He turned toward Tamara. “I’m okay now. I know I’m Callum Hunt. I remember — well, I remember a lot.”

  She let out her breath all at once and sagged against the footboard of his bed.

  “How long was I … like that?” His stomach growled. It had seemed both instantaneous and endless, the cascade of memories. He could feel them still, at the edges of his mind, whispering.