The ward surged behind us as we entered, flaring with sudden power, and the door slammed shut with a muffled thump. I swore and spun, grabbing and pushing vainly at the door. For a moment, my fingers scrabbled against magically empowered wood, but soon they brushed against what felt like a latch or handle. I sighed as I realized that the door almost had to be openable from this side. After all, no one would want to trap themselves inside this place…

“Ionat,” Renica murmured softly. “Do you feel that?”

“What?” I asked, looking futilely around the room. We were in total darkness; not a speck of light filtered in through the closed door. My stomach churned from the sense of imbalance in the room–something in here was definitely not right–but I couldn’t feel anything unusual besides that.

“There’s something–it’s like the room is angry,” she replied, her voice free of irritation for the first time since we’d gone into the Cathedral. “Or something in the room is. I–I’m having trouble feeling anything. Can you see anything?”

I frowned and looked around, focusing on my magical vision instead of my normal senses. I saw the ward behind me, glowing dull red and slowly brightening as it strengthened. The red light didn’t actually illuminate the room, though; apparently, it wasn’t a real source of illumination. Fortunately, that was easy enough to fix; I had a perfectly good light spell, after all. My reserves were a bit lower thanks to the key I’d had to make for Renica, but Twilight Moon only took a point each of solar and lunar raju. I summoned the energy and cast the spell, willing the orb to rise into the air and sweep away the darkness…

My heart lurched as the raju rushed out of me–and vanished, dissipating into the air and leaving us in darkness. I tried again, pulling up tiny amounts of lunar and solar raju, blending them so the lunar magic countered the heat of the solar magic and left only clear, glowing light. The power rose from around me and poured into the spell-form in my mind, but the moment it left my body, it disappeared as if swept away by a hurricane breeze that I couldn’t see or feel.

“Ionat, whatever you’re doing, I don’t think it’s a good…”

I grunted as something heavy slammed into my chest, driving me back and hurling me to the floor. Pain flared in my left arm as something stabbed deeply into the top and bottom of my forearm, holding it tightly, and cold filled my arm, spreading out from the wound. A snarling growl filled the air, and I felt clawed feet scrabbling against my flesh, ripping through my clothing and tearing shallow but painful lines down my shoulders and thighs.

I reacted instinctively as I fell, twisting my arm and coiling my legs beneath whatever attacked me. My arm tore painfully free of whatever held me, and I felt the warmth of blood running down the cold skin. My feet jammed up against something smooth but yielding, and I straightened them, pushing my attacker away. Whatever hit me was heavy, but not as massive as even Renica, and I flung it away from me with a snap of my legs. I felt its weight vanish from me, and I turned the fall into a roll, coming to my feet as I yanked the hatchet from its sheath and pulled one of the knives at my hip free.

I heard the thing snarl again, and I rolled sideways. I felt it pass by me and kicked out, catching it as it slid past. It fell and scrambled around, its claws audible against the stone floor. That gave me enough warning to dodge sideways and lash out with the dagger in my hand. The blade scraped against something soft and yielding but didn’t penetrate deeply, and pain flared in my hand as the creature bit down hard on my wrist and palm. I hissed in pain but lifted my hatchet, ready to strike. Before I could, the thing released my hand and spun, its claws sliding on the floor, and Renica cried out as I heard it lunge once more.

I stepped forward, leading with my knife and wounded hand. If the thing turned around and bit me again, I didn’t want to lose the use of both hands, after all. The blade touched the creature, and I struck with my hatchet. The knife seemed to encounter some sort of armor or resistance, and I expected the hatchet to do little more than scratch the beast. To my surprise, the blade sank into its hide, and the monster howled, its cry painfully loud as it spun toward me, yanking the hatchet free.

The beast lunged, knocking me down once again, and I cried out as its fangs sank into my left shoulder perilously close to my throat. Cold spread from the wound again, and I worried that I might die from poison before I would have a chance to bleed out. Instead of fighting to escape, though, I wrapped my left arm around it and pulled it close, locking it in place. Its claws slid across my ribs, and it shook its head, tearing the wound in my shoulder open wider, but I just clenched my jaw and brought my hatchet down on it, sinking the blade deeply into what I guessed was its side.

The monster fought back, trying to escape, but I was heavier and stronger than it, and I wrapped my legs around it, holding it in place as I yanked my weapon free and slammed the blade into it again and again. The thing’s struggles weakened with every blow until at last, it fell limp against my body. Its jaws loosened in my shoulder, and I pushed it to the side with a sigh of relief.

My shoulder burned, and I felt the blood running from the wound turning my shirt sticky and wet. The coldness in my shoulder did nothing to numb the pain of the throbbing puncture wounds, and I realized that I needed to heal it quickly. I pulled up more raju, guiding it into the wound, willing it to close–but as the power neared my numb, tingling limb, it vanished, seemingly sucked into the limb and disappearing. My shoulder warmed slightly, but that was all.

“Sara, what’s going on?” I thought with alarm. “Why isn’t my shoulder healing?”

“I don’t know, John,” she admitted worriedly. “The raju is being absorbed by whatever the monster put into your bloodstream. It’s almost as if that monster injected golost into you with each bite.”

“Ionat?” Renica’s voice was loud in the darkness, and I could hear the concern filling it. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” I grunted as I laboriously pushed myself to a sitting position, my left arm cradled against my body. “That thing got me good, and I can’t seem to heal it.”

“Can you make a light? I should take a look at your wounds.”

I tried to summon tenuous strands of lunar and solar raju, guiding them down my right arm away from my wounded shoulder, but once again, the energy sputtered and fizzled out. “No, I can’t,” I said worriedly. “I don’t think I can use any magic right now.”

“Hold on.” I heard her fumbling around and the sound of cloth ripping. As she did whatever she was doing, I turned my thoughts inward.

“Sara, what if this thing did pump me full of golost?” I asked worriedly. “Does that mean that I won’t use magic again?”

“I–I’m not sure, John.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do me a favor. Try to cast another spell–any spell.”

I pulled up the mental image of Twilight Moon once more, the cheapest spell I had in terms of raju. The tendrils of solar and lunar raju swirled around me, gathering about my skin, but as they rushed along my body, they sank into it and vanished.

“Okay, I’ve got good news and bad news,” Sara said with a sigh. “The good news is that every time you use raju, it seems to be countering a little of the toxin in your blood. That means that if you use enough of it, it should purge you of whatever that thing did to you.”

“That does sound good,” I agreed. “And the bad news?”

“The bad news is that extrapolating from what I just saw, it’ll take more raju than you have to clear your body,” she said worriedly. “And the toxin is spreading quickly. If it spreads too far, it might stop you from even drawing raju into yourself at all, and if that happens, you’ll permanently lose all ability to cast spells–at least in this world.”

The sound of metal rubbing on metal came from Renica, followed by a few sparks that lit up the darkness. One of the sparks seemed to catch on something, turning into a tendril of flame that slowly grew. A moment later, a small fire blazed on the floor, illuminating Renica kneeling above a pile of cloth that I realized was her shredded acolyte’s robe. The woman’s face, chest, and right arm were splattered with dark blood, and a long hunting knife on the floor beside her was similarly coated in the thick liquid.

“That’s the best I can do, sorry,” she said, rising to her feet and walking toward me. “Let me take a look at those injuries.”

She knelt down beside me and gently pulled back the bloodstained robe, wincing visibly at what she saw there. “This is bad, Ionat,” she said, her face taking on a worried expression. “The beast missed anything vital, fortunately, but you’re still bleeding badly. I’m going to have to sew it closed.”

“You have needle and thread?” I asked her curiously. “Why? You don’t strike me as the sewing type.”

“I’m not, exactly,” she laughed weakly. “Although I can patch my clothes if they get ripped–which happens a lot on a hunt. The main reason I carry a sewing kit is that if Vikarik or I get wounded out in the forest, I can’t count on making it back to the village for healing. Sewing the wounds shut stops the immediate bleeding, and we can make it back to the Sorvaraji to get a full healing done.” Her face fell as she spoke, and I saw the sorrow in her eyes as she recalled happier times and painful memories. “Or, I guess, we could.”

“Go ahead, then,” I told her, pulling her back to the present. “Just try to be gentle, okay?”

“Ha! Isn’t that what the woman is supposed to say?” She laughed again, more heartily this time, and her eyes refocused as she dug into her pouch and pulled out a leather packet. “Do you want to bite down on something, Ionat? This is probably going to hurt.”

“No, I’ll be fine. It’s not the first time I’ve been stitched up without anything to numb the pain.” I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, trying not to anticipate the feel of the needle stabbing into my wounds.

“While she’s doing that, Ionat,” Sara suggested, “you might try clearing the venom from your body before it spreads too far.”

“How do I do that? Do I just keep casting spells over and over?”

“You could, but I’d try casting one spell, then keep adding raju to it.”

“Won’t the spell just vanish when I cast it?”

“Yes, but you can keep funneling raju into the spell-form, and it should take it. Even with all your raju, I don’t think you’ll be able to clear the toxin, but you should be able to at least counter enough of it to keep it from spreading throughout your body.”

“Any suggestions for which spell?”

“I certainly wouldn’t cast something like Twilight Lance or Flare,” she laughed. “You don’t want to set the room on fire or hurt Renica, after all. Twilight Moon might be too slow. Maybe try unbinding the ward? That should be easy enough to channel raju into.”

I cast my thoughts out at the ward sealing us in. It was a complicated bit of spell crafting, and I guessed it would be hard to actually undo, but fortunately, I had no intention of unbinding it. It just made a convenient target for my spell. I pictured a twining of lunar and solar raju in the shape of a blade that would cleave the ward in half and began to channel energy into it. The power surged through me, racing for the spell-form, but as it touched the tainted part of my flesh, it vanished–and left that flesh slightly warmer than before.

I almost lost the spell image as Renica’s needle slid into one of the puncture wounds, and I grunted with the sudden flare of pain. I ignored the discomfort, though, and focused my thoughts on channeling raju into my spell-form. In a way, trying to hold the spell through the discomfort of Renica’s impromptu surgery actually helped; the focus it required took my mind off the pain and my growing fear that I’d fail and lose my spellcasting ability. I still didn’t know what was happening in this world, but I was certain that I’d need my twilight magic to resolve it.

As the energy swirled through me, the spreading cold in my body gradually faded, retreating back toward my left arm and shoulder. I continued to channel power, effectively burning away the toxin, restoring warmth to my body. As the seconds passed, though, the energy within me began to wane, sputtering and fading as I drained my reserves of raju. My shoulder still pulsed with an icy chill, and I knew that all I’d really done was stave off the inevitable for a while, but that was better than nothing.

With a sigh, I released the unbinding spell and examined my status to see how badly I’d drained my raju reserves.

John Gilliam, Tamer of the Divine

Mental Stats

Reason: 23 Intuition: 19 Perception: 24 Charm: 7

Physical Stats

Prowess: 13 Vigor: 13 Celerity: 12 Skill: 15

Solar Raju: 0 (8.5/minute recovery, currently 0.0)

Lunar Raju: 0 (0 Blood, 0 Death, 12.4/minute recovery, currently 0.0)

57 Unassigned XP

Unassigned XP can be divided among the following professions:

Inquisitor, Investigator

You have 24 hours to assign this XP or it will be randomly assigned

74 Unassigned XP

Unassigned XP can be divided among the following professions:

Inquisitor, Undead Hunter, Warrior

You have 24 hours to assign this XP or it will be randomly assigned

I assigned my waiting XP to Inquisitor, bringing it to 8,598 XP–only 7,000 or so to go until level 4–and noted that my raju recovery was currently at zero. I hoped that was due to the dead feeling of the room, not the poison in my veins. I’d find out once we left, I supposed. I started to close my status when something caught my attention.

“Hey, Sara. Did my physical stats go up?”

“Yes, John, they did.”

“When did that happen? I didn’t level a profession without knowing it, did I?”

“No, I would have told you about that,” she laughed lightly, then seemed to hesitate. “It seems that it was a side effect of the toxin in your body. It didn’t just drain your raju; it bound it into your body. That improved the functioning of your muscles and nerves. You aren’t really any stronger or faster, but you can get a little bit more from the muscles you have, now.”

I stared at the status screen, my mind racing at it processed this information. “And if I let the toxin fill my body?”

“You’d probably gain several points in each of your physical stats,” she confirmed. “However, you’d lose the ability to use magic–and I have no idea what it would do to your mind, John.”

“What do you mean? Wouldn’t improving my nerves boost my mind, too?”

“Maybe, but your mind’s neural network is a lot more complicated than your body’s. Suddenly adding new connections in there could cause all sorts of problems. You could find yourself at the mercy of your lower brain, driven by emotions and in a constant state of fight-or-flight, a rage-driven monster that kills anything or anyone that might be a threat. And who knows what it would do to the parts of your brain that utilize magic? It could empower them while taking away their ability to function, which could drive you insane, or it could destroy them entirely, leaving you with permanent brain damage.”

“Okay, so definitely not a good realm for experimentation.” I paused, hissing in sudden pain as Renica’s needle pierced my flesh again. “So, this toxin makes someone stronger and faster but unable to use magic. Does that remind you of anyone, Sara?”

“The Vanatori,” she agreed with my unspoken guess. “If they were exposed to something like this toxin, it would explain their physical capabilities. It would also explain why the Vanator told you that using magic excluded you from the order; once you’ve started to do that, you develop the parts of your brain that focus on magic. They’d need people who could use magic and drew raju but who never utilized that potential deliberately. Of course, they’d need to keep dosing themselves with it to keep their abilities.”

“Why?”

“The changes the poison’s made to you can’t be permanent, John. Every time you move, you’ll use up some of the raju that the poison bound into your body. You’d need a constant influx of new raju to keep up your enhanced abilities, but that new raju would counteract the venom. Eventually, your natural intake of raju would destroy the venom in your body, and you’d slowly revert back to normal.”

“That Vanator was a dick, but he wasn’t insane or a mindless killer, though,” I pointed out. “Wouldn’t that happen if he got dosed with this venom on a daily basis?”

“Possibly. They might use something derived from or similar to the venom, though, instead of the toxin itself. Something that gives them similar capabilities but doesn’t affect their minds–or they have a way to counteract it before it has a chance to affect their minds too deeply. Even so, though, my guess it that the longer they’ve been a Vanator, the more likely that sort of damage is to show up.”

“Finished,” Renica said with a sigh and interrupting my silent conversation. I opened my eyes and saw her wiping a curved needle with a cloth to remove my blood from it, shaking her head as she did. “Eight puncture wounds, Ionat. It’s like you offered your shoulder for that thing to bite you.”

“In a way, I guess I did,” I laughed, glancing down at my shoulder. Four neat, clean X-shaped stitches crossed my bare skin in a crescent shape, still throbbing but no longer bleeding. “That’s good needlework,” I said admiringly.

“I’ve had plenty of practice,” she shrugged. “And you stay calmer than Vikarik does when I stitch her up. That helps.” She glanced at the dwindling pile of rags burning behind her. “We’ve got a few minutes of light left. Can you get us out of here?”

“I–actually, I don’t know,” I frowned as the coldness in my shoulder reminded me of my earlier incapacity and my total lack of raju. “I think the door will still open if we don’t stay here long–the wards are still rebuilding.”

“Let me try,” she said, going to the door and pulling on the handle. It resisted for a moment before sliding open, but she hissed and shook her hand as the ward lashed out at her weakly for disturbing it. “Ouch! That burned!”

“If we’d waited much longer, it would have been a lot worse,” I told her.

As she slid the door open, light from the Archives spilled into the room, illuminating it fully for the first time. I rose to my feet, wincing at the pain in my shoulder and hand. I’d try to heal them again once I’d regenerated some raju–assuming I still could–but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be able to heal much until I’d purged myself of the monster’s toxin.

Thinking of the beast made me glance over to look at it. The fallen creature was black and roughly dog-shaped, with a long, lean body and four legs that ended in ebony toenails. It looked to be about four feet long and was totally hairless, its smooth skin gleaming glossily in the firelight. Its head was small, shaped more like a Doberman’s than a hound’s, but it lacked both eyes and ears on its head. It must have used some other sense to see us in the darkness.

“Any idea what that thing is?” I asked Renica quietly, not wanting to make noise that would draw attention from the Archive outside.

“No,” she shook her head, her face troubled. “It doesn’t look like any animal I’ve ever seen.”

“My knife couldn’t cut it,” I told her. “Only my hatchet worked against it.”

“Really?” Her face looked surprised. “I didn’t have any problem stabbing it. She picked up her long knife and began to clean it. She glanced at the blade still clenched in my left fist and frowned. “Wait, you used that?”

I looked down at my hand and saw the Imperial dagger clutched in my fist. I hadn’t wanted to leave the knife in our room with Ferka and Melania, just in case, so I’d brought it with me.

“Yeah, I must have pulled it by accident when it attacked me,” I frowned, holding up the dagger. “Huh. It’s empty.”

“Empty?”

“Yeah. The dagger absorbs raju the same way Viora’s diamond does. When I grabbed it earlier, it was mostly full. Now, it’s totally empty.”

“I–I think that monster could eat magic,” Renica said hesitantly. “I couldn’t feel it during the fight, the way I usually can with beasts. And when I tried to calm it down, it felt like trying to touch a hole.”

“Yeah, that’s also why I couldn’t cast a light spell before, and why I couldn’t use my spells against it. I tried, and they didn’t work.”

“Can you cast one now?” she asked curiously.

“No. It drained all my raju from me,” I lied slightly. Technically, it was its poison that did that. “And this room is blocking me from getting more.”

She nodded. “The air in here does feel–dead, I guess. Like something vital is missing from it.” She shook her head. “That’s a nasty guardian to put in this room. I wonder how they restrain it when they visit.”

“It only attacked after I tried to use magic,” I pointed out. “It might stay docile when magic’s not being used. The people who visit here could bring lamps or lanterns to see, instead.” I glanced around the room in the dim light coming in through the open door. “Speaking of seeing, can you slide that wider?” I asked Renica. “I want to take a look around really quickly.”

“Are you sure? Someone could come any second.”

“Possible, but unlikely. The hallway’s rarely used, and the door isn’t visible to someone walking past and looking down the hall.” I shrugged. “Besides, this was the entire reason we came here. I don’t want to go through all that and then just walk away empty-handed, do you?”

“No, I suppose not,” she said, grabbing the door and pulling it completely open.

The room we stood in wasn’t large, only ten feet by ten feet and fifteen feet high. Half-filled bookcases lined three of the walls. The fourth looked almost like a wall of lockboxes, covered with metal doors that proved to be locked when I tried one. I ignored most of those doors and went to the largest one, what looked almost like the door to a safe, including a rather primitive combination lock consisting of four dials in a row. It was the most secure of the doors–the others I guessed I could break into by main strength if I wanted–which meant, I hoped, that it had the most important things inside it.

“I’ve never seen a door like that,” Renica said quietly, her voice awed. “Is that steel?”

“Yep,” I nodded, testing the door to make sure it was locked. I knew that it probably was, but you’d be amazed how often people put something into a secure safe and then never locked it. They either believed that the sight of the safe alone would deter potential thieves–it wouldn’t–or they’d gotten the safe as a type of theater, making them feel secure when they really weren’t worried about someone breaking in and stealing their stuff. It was similar to people who used their birthdays as a password; they never imagined that someone might bother to hack into their account, so they didn’t really try to secure it.

“Can you get it open?” she asked.

“I think so. I’ll need it quiet, though.” She nodded, and I pressed my ear to the safe door, turning the first dial slowly.

Like most things, movies and TV shows get safecracking wrong more often than not. However, one thing they get right: it’s possible to open a safe using nothing but your ears. However, it’s a complicated thing involving finding the contact zone, determining the number of wheels, and writing down the results of slowly turning the dial from different starting points to see where the contact zones line up and thus what the numbers are. Even then, you just get the numbers, not the order, and you have to try all the possible combinations. For a five-digit code, that’s 120 possible combinations, and for an eight-wheel lock–about the most you’ll ever find–you’re talking about 40,000 combinations you have to try. That’s why most people break into a safe through brute force; it’s louder, but it’s a lot faster.

Fortunately, for this safe, each dial only had one wheel behind it, meaning each dial was one number. All I had to do was turn them slowly until I heard the fence–a bar that rested atop the wheels–slip into the notch in each wheel. It required patience, but it only took a few minutes to pop the lock and open the door. I wondered if the omeni hadn’t developed multi-wheel combination locks yet, or if the people in charge of this place just didn’t feel one was necessary here. It sort of made sense; very few people would be able to get into the hidden vault, after all, and the ones who were supposed to be there would be people you already trusted. The locked doors could just be an added layer of restricted access, not an actual security feature.

I pulled open the heavy steel door and glanced inside. A glittering gray crystal on a white pillow caught my gaze, and I quickly pocketed that to examine later. I picked up a handful of books and glanced at their titles, smiling as I saw that they included the Casting Primer volumes I was missing, numbers one and four. A slim, gold-embossed volume had no title on the outside, but when I opened it up, the yellowing first page read, “Personal Journal, Empress Miksa the First”. A final one was titled, “A Legacy of Shame: the True History of Novilad”. I also grabbed a rolled-up scroll and carefully opened it to see an old, yellowed parchment entitled, “The Proclamation of the Sun”.

“Miksa the First was the Empress when the Empire started hunting the followers of Florin,” Sara said excitedly. “And that Proclamation of the Sun was the statement that started the purges! Those could fill in the missing gaps in Vutana’s history, John. You might be able to figure out what’s wrong in this world!”

“Is it anything good?” Renica asked nervously.

“I think so,” I nodded, closing the safe gently and spinning the dials to reengage the locks. I slipped the books into a satchel I’d brought for that exact purpose. “Now, we just need to get out of here.” I looked at her critically. “That’s going to be hard with you not looking like an acolyte anymore.”

“So sorry that I created some light so you didn’t bleed to death,” she said sarcastically, rolling her eyes.

“I wasn’t complaining,” I assured her. “Just thinking out loud, is all.”

“Well, while you’re thinking, you might want to look at yourself,” she said, folding her arms over her chest. “You look like you’ve been sleeping on the floor of a slaughterhouse.”

I glanced down and saw that my robe was soaked with blood, which had also stained the shirt beneath. I sighed and stripped the robe off, tossing it into the dwindling fire. The blaze roared back up as the robe caught.

“Well, looks like we’re sneaking out,” I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to sneak out of a place I’ve walked into.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it sometime,” she grinned at me. “After we’re safely out of the Cathedral, though.”

“Agreed.”

Slipping out of the Archives was harder than getting in, but it wasn’t terrifically difficult. We had to wait for a while until the main hallway was empty, and I held Renica’s hand as we passed through the wards to keep her close–and in the hope that the wards would think we were one person instead of two. It seemed to work; at least, no one tried to stop us as we left.

Despite that, Renica’s mood steadily soured as we traveled through the Cathedral. In the vault, she’d been her old self once more, but outside it, she seemed irritable, even angry, and she snapped at me more than she spoke. Fortunately, she did so quietly, but my good mood had evaporated completely by the time we left the Cathedral and stepped into the night.

Which was why when the dark figure scrambled up the stairs and leaped at us, I was almost relieved.