The Scrolls of the Ancients

CHAPTER

Forty-three

"T ell me, Wulfgar," Krassus asked. "Are you comfortable?"

The hard, white marble table pressing against his back, Wulfgar looked around the Scriptorium as best he could. He and the wizard were alone. He had been forced here by several of Krassus' demonslavers, and they had tied down his hands and feet, making it impossible for him to move.

He was naked save for a pair of emerald-green silk trousers. His long, sandy hair fell down over one edge of the table and stretched toward the floor. As he lay there, looking up into the smiling face of the wizard with the long white hair and the strange, two-colored robe, his heart beat wildly. Sweat born of fear poured maddeningly off his face and body.

Craning his neck to one side, he saw a partially unrolled scroll hovering in the air nearby. It was magnificent, and it glowed with the same strange blue color that he had seen come and go so often since being imprisoned here in the Citadel.

"What are you going to do to me?" he demanded, straining against his bindings for what seemed the hundredth time.

Krassus wiped the perspiration from his subject's brow. It was almost as if he were a healer, compassionately tending to a patient.

"I am nothing if not a man of my word," he said calmly. "I'm going to do exactly what I promised you that day in your quarters. I shall introduce you to something wonderful-something that will change your life forever. In the end you will thank me. And before we are finished, you will find yourself begging for more."

Summoning all of the saliva he could, Wulfgar arched his back and spat it directly into the wizard's face. Unperturbed, Krassus calmly wiped it away.

"I will fight you; you must know that," Wulfgar swore. "One day I will find Tristan and Shailiha, and join them. Together we will kill you-you and all of these monsters that serve you." Exhausted, he lay back down against the hard, almost welcoming coolness of the stone.

"Of course you will fight me," Krassus said. "Given the nature of your blood, I would be very disappointed if you did not. So will Serena, when her time comes. But by then you won't want to kill the demonslavers, Wulfgar. You will want to command them. I am simply an intermediary, doing my late master's bidding." Krassus turned to view the scroll.

"I believe prudence dictates that we begin with one of the simpler Forestallments," he said casually. "Although the process will not be pleasant, it will have nowhere near the impact of some of the more powerful ones that will eventually follow. But by then your unique blood will have adjusted. When I finally deem you ready, I will gift you with the one Forestallment that will change the world forever-the one my loyal consuls worked so hard to uncover in the scroll."

Narrowing his eyes, Krassus called on the craft, and a section of the beautifully elegant, glowing text lifted itself from the scroll and came to hover before his dark eyes. But just as it did, Krassus began to cough again.

Taking his rag from his robes, he covered his mouth. His hacking went on unabated for some time. It was becoming progressively worse, he realized. Finally the convulsions subsided, and he put the rag away. Now it was Wulfgar's turn to smile.

"Perhaps you will die before you can turn me, wizard," he said. "Did your supreme master consider that before he departed?"

"Of course," Krassus answered hoarsely. "But have no fear: I shall easily live long enough to turn you, perhaps even long enough to see you fulfill my master's plans. What a glorious day that shall be! Now then, shall we begin?"

Pointing an index finger at one of Wulfgar's arms, Krassus caused a small incision to form. It immediately started to bleed. Reaching over to a nearby table, the wizard retrieved a small glass vial, with which he collected some of the blood. Then he closed the vial and caused it to glide back over to the table. Narrowing his eyes, he watched the wound close, the skin knit back together, and the angry red scar disappear completely.

The wizard committed the glowing words and calculations hovering before him to memory. With a smile, he then placed one of his palms on Wulfgar's head.

Wulfgar began to scream.

His body arched with exquisite pain; drool ran from his mouth. His body jangled mercilessly, relentlessly, against the cold, white marble table. Sweat poured from him, and at first Krassus worried that Wulfgar's violent thrashing might break the bones of all his limbs. But the wizard continued with the process of imbuing the first of many Forestallments into Wulfgar's blood.

When Krassus was done, Wulfgar had gone unconscious from the pain, but he was still breathing. Pointing an index finger at Wulfgar's other arm, the wizard caused another incision to form, then ordered a single drop of blood to rise from the wound and come to rest on the table.

He picked up another container. This one was filled with red waters taken from the Caves of the Paragon by Nicholas, and entrusted to Krassus just before the son of the Chosen One had died at the Gates of Dawn. Opening its top, he released a single drop and watched it fall to the table, landing next to the spot of Wulfgar's blood. Almost immediately the two beads of fluid began to move and join.

Krassus pulled a scope closer and centered it directly over the freshly forming blood signature. He held his breath and looked down.

The newly created Forestallment in Wulfgar's blood signature was perfect.

Looking further, he found the other change he was hoping for: Wulfgar's already left-leaning blood signature now tilted farther yet. Krassus' heart leapt in his chest. He had just proven in practice what Nicholas had told him would work in theory: that the Forestallments inscribed so long ago on the scroll could still be correctly deciphered and imbued directly into the blood of the living.

Looking up from the scope, he gazed out one of the broad windows overlooking the Sea of Whispers. As he did, several realizations came to him.

Failee, Wigg's deceased wife and onetime first mistress of the Coven of sorceresses, must have possessed and employed at least one of the Scrolls of the Ancients. There was no other way that Tristan and Shailiha could possibly have obtained the Forestallments in their blood. Even Failee was not brilliant enough to have woven such wondrous aspects of the craft on her own. And the same held true for Celeste's Forestallments, as well.

But the Coven had not been in possession of the scrolls when Wigg banished them to the Sea of Whispers. So Failee must have either discovered them in Parthalon or hidden them somewhere in Eutracia before leaving and then ordered her second mistress, upon invasion of Eutracia, to return not only with the Paragon and Princess Shailiha, but with the scrolls, as well.

But how had the scrolls found their way back to Eutracia from Parthalon? he wondered. How was it that they both eventually came to be in the possession of Nicholas? And perhaps most importantly, how had Failee come upon the scrolls in the first place?

Then another, even more fascinating realization hit him. If Failee had had only the Scroll of the Vagaries in her possession, and if she gleaned from it the Forestallments that she later placed into the blood of Tristan and Shailiha, then all the still-unrealized gifts of the Chosen Ones would be of the darker side of the craft! If she had had both scrolls, would she even have used anything of the Vigors? If so, why? And what about those gifts in Celeste's blood? Would Failee ever want her only daughter's blood infused with anything remotely associated with the side of the craft that she professed to loathe?

His head spinning with questions and contradictions, Krassus looked down at Wulfgar's placid, sleeping face. He smiled to himself. It didn't really matter if he found the answers, he decided. All that mattered was that he complete his master's mission before his disease took him to the Afterlife.

Closing his eyes, he caused the glowing, hovering calculations he had just employed to return to their places in the scroll. Then he selected another section of text and beckoned it to him. After committing it to memory, he placed his open palm back on Wulfgar's forehead. Wulfgar's eyes snapped open.

His screaming went on long into the night.