Corruption (The Necromancer's Key Book 2) by Mitchell Hogan

Author:Mitchell Hogan [Hogan, Mitchell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crucible Press
Published: 2021-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

The next he knew, Anskar was swaying on his feet. Stark light hurt his eyes. His stomach clenched, and he bent double, a stream of vomit issuing from his mouth.

And there was a sword at his throat, the blade a silver moonbeam.

Just for an instant, and then Niklaus removed it. He waited for Anskar to stop being sick before asking, “How did you get here?”

Anskar straightened up, wiping his mouth and chin with his shirtsleeve.

Ryala stood behind Niklaus, her sword also drawn. The Grand Master was on her left, a look of puzzlement on his face, golden motes swirling around him from where his ward sphere had been about to spring to life. Blaice stood from a stoop to frown at Anskar, then returned to whatever it was she’d been examining. Someone was missing … Anskar turned and almost groaned. Gadius stood behind him, eyes narrowed.

They were in a large, low-ceilinged room with smooth walls, no sign of any mortar joins. The walls, ceiling and floor gave off a soft, lavender glow. The center of the chamber was stacked with square boxes of what looked like clear crystal, and it was into these boxes that Blaice was peering.

“How did I …?” Anskar started, then turned a full circle, looking for the dark opening he must have come through. It wasn’t there, but there was an archway to his left, illuminated by silvery light, and on the right the outline of a second arch, its solid center indistinguishable from the rest of the wall. “How did I get here?”

Niklaus watched him patiently.

“I don’t know,” Anskar said. “I started to fall, and then I was here, throwing up.”

“You appeared out of the air,” Ryala said.

“By your own means?” Gadius asked.

“How would that make you feel if I had?” said Anskar.

The Grand Master raised an eyebrow.

“What’s she doing?” Anskar asked.

Blaice was pressing her fingertips against the side of a crystal box. Indentations appeared in its surface at her touch, and as she pressed harder, her fingers passed through the crystal as if it were water.

“She thinks this is where the portal stone is kept,” the Grand Master said.

“There is no—” Anskar started, then edged forward to see what Blaice was reaching for.

In the other boxes stacked above and to the sides, he glimpsed the inert bodies of strange and exotic creatures—crab-like things with long, coiled tails; scorpions the size of a small dog; a man’s head—Traguh-raj—perfectly preserved, the neck cleanly severed and trailing filaments of brass. There was a hand too, the skin black like that of the Orgols. He saw something that resembled a gigantic woodlouse, only its carapace was formed from segments of silver, and it had two tiny rubies for eyes.

As he came to stand behind her, Blaice curled her fingers around a severed hand with crystalized droplets of blue blood beaded around the stump of the wrist. She pulled it out through the wall of the crystal box, eliciting a faint plop. There was an ebony ring on the hand’s index finger, a glinting emerald set into its broad band.

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