Aerenden: The Zeiihbu Master (Ærenden) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ÆRENDEN: THE ZEIIHBU MASTER

  Copyright © Kristen Taber 2014

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9851200-7-8 (electronic book text)

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, locations, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination, or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locations or events is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Sean Tigh Press. No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of the Author.

  www.kristentaber.com

  Cover and Sean Tigh Press logo by Lance Ganey

  For Lauren:

  Bravery is not always about wielding a sword,

  but standing strong against adversity despite our fears.

  Thank you for being my inspiration.

  From mountain top to water deep, with ghosts at last in tow

  The promise made will come to pass; the seeds of friendship sowed

  In death, in strife, in battle bound; in beastly shadow's doom

  The whispers born from rhyme and rift will bring a Master's boon.

  —The Aurean Prophecy, Verse Three

  CHAPTER ONE

  “IT ISN'T necessary for you to agree with me. You'll do as I want. It's just a matter of how much pain you're willing to endure in the meantime.”

  Stilgan turned to his young prey and smiled, the cool gesture one of calculated practice. It served to add menace to his grotesque features. His webbed mouth and twisted, scar-like nose instilled terror. His ashen skin, stretched tight across bone, made many strong men shudder. His unnatural height and the protection of an impervious brown cloak inspired the aura of invincibility. He was Mardróch, one of the strongest magical creatures on this world, Garon's elite. His superiority brought him pride and, more importantly, authority over thousands. Their lives belonged to his whim, their will to his crushing grasp. And his smile broadcast that fact. He enjoyed being a monster, and he wanted his victim to know it.

  The Zeiihbuan's face hardened with hatred. During the first few days the young captive had been a guest in the rustic Zeiihbuan village, Stilgan had resorted to using his power to force him to cast spells. The strength of his Spellmaster abilities had whet Stilgan's appetite for more. He itched to see how far those powers could go, how much destruction he could unleash, but Garon had forbidden any further use of the tactic.

  Garon wanted the Zeiihbuan converted to his side, not mindlessly forced there. As leader by default, the boy's willing acceptance of Garon's rule would ensure the tribes did the same. Though the Zeiihbuans held no magical threat, Garon recognized their strength. Many of them lived under Stilgan's power of mind control, but if the others chose to fight back or to join the Ærenden people's cause, their skill in battle could tip the balance in the war. The young man's alliance with Garon would help keep the Ærenden people under Garon's rule.

  Convincing a fourteen-year-old northerner should have been a simple task. Yet he refused to sway. In the weeks since Stilgan had held him captive, he had only cried once, when Stilgan had told him his family had died in the fire in Ærenden. Since then, he had not shown weakness, despite the torture he had endured.

  It had to be his power. He was one of the few Zeiihbuans who had one. A power might have made him stronger, but Stilgan did not believe the boy could have evolved that much from his kind.

  The boy pressed his lips together, his anger making them hard white against skin a shade lighter than the normal Zeiihbu olive tinge. Stilgan knew the boy's mother had Ærenden heritage. Perhaps he had received some superior genes from her. The boy raised a hand, running it through his strawberry-blonde hair, but did not respond.

  “Cad,” Stilgan hissed, and smiled again when the young man's nostrils flared.

  “Caide.”

  Stilgan inclined his head. “Caide,” he corrected, though the mistake had been intentional. Each word the boy spoke brought him closer to Stilgan's control. “You're smart enough to understand the position you're in. You fight against the good Garon could do for your country. You cost your brethren their lives. Surely you recognize that you're the ruler now. You must do what's best.”

  “My grandfather,” Caide said, and then pinched his lips together, resuming his vow of silence.

  Stilgan maintained a cool demeanor with another smile and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. Caide averted his eyes from Stilgan's. Stilgan allowed it, as he had for the past week. Trust was built by giving the boy false control over his surroundings.

  “Your grandfather has abandoned his people,” Stilgan confided. “His mind grew feeble, lost to senility, and he wandered to his death in the forest. You hunt. You know what creatures seek human feasts, crave the taste of flesh. You know he could not stand a chance alone against them.”

  Caide's eyes widened. Stilgan leaned forward, dropping his voice to a whisper. “You know I'm not lying. His guards are here. Would they leave him alone to the wilderness if he could be saved?”

  Satisfaction twitched the corners of Stilgan's mouth as Caide's eyes flicked to the men who flanked them. Four of the former ruler's personal guard stood at attention, though their eyes appeared blank, their faces expressionless. The boy shook his head, but maintained his silence. Stilgan's hand tightened on Caide's shoulder and then left it.

  “You doubt me?” the Mardróch asked. “Or do you consider your people's lives worthless? It's your choice if they live or die. Your silence brings them death.” He formed electricity at his fingertips. It warmed, heated his touch in a way that never failed to thrill him. He shot the blue bolts from one hand to the other. “Who do you wish to die today? One of your grandfather's guards?” He nodded toward the shortest man to their left. The guard remained impassive, as did Caide. Stilgan's eyes narrowed. “You don't care about him,” he decided. “Then how about the village children?”

  Caide's focus snapped back to Stilgan's face. Stilgan locked his red eyes on the young man's green ones and grinned. The grin held more threat than his usual smile. “So you care about them, do you?” he asked, though he knew Caide no longer had the ability to respond. He had frozen in fear, a side effect of the power emanating from Stilgan's eyes. “I can leave them alone for now, but you'll pay for the favor with pain.”

&nb
sp; This time, the gesture was not faked or an act born to intimidate. It stemmed from true pleasure. Torture had always been one of his favorite ways to pass time, and though the tactic had done little in converting the Zeiihbuan so far, Stilgan did not feel the need to stop trying it. He took a step closer, pressed his hand to Caide's skin, and felt a surge of joy when the young man screamed.

  §

  CAIDE HAD never experienced so much pain before. During the beginning of his captivity, Stilgan had forced him to use his power to recite spell after spell, hurting villagers, killing livestock, even blowing up a member of Stilgan's army who had disobeyed him. Caide had loathed watching his body perform tasks and his lips say spells he could not control, but then Stilgan switched to physical torture and he soon longed to have the Mardróch numb his mind once again.

  The first day Stilgan had brandished a whip, and Caide only lasted minutes before he passed out from pain. The second, he struggled to survive through hours of agony before blackness greeted him.

  On the third day, when he awoke in his childhood bed, he thought it had all been a horrible dream. Then the guards came to drag him back outside.

  They deposited his bruised and aching body in the center of the village and Caide held his breath when he saw what Stilgan had planned for him. Beyond the knives and fire, the whips and chains piled in the courtyard, Stilgan had gathered the villagers to watch. They stood in a circle around him, corralled by the same guards who used to be their friends.

  Stilgan lifted a brand from the fire. The shape of a hut glowed red at its end, and Caide recognized the symbol of the Domae tribe. They had used the iron for cattle.

  Caide stepped back, but two guards grabbed his arms, forcing him to stand in place. At first, Caide vowed not to scream. He wanted his people to see only his strength, but when the hot metal pressed into his shoulder, cooking flesh and muscle with an angry hiss, Caide could not hold back his screams.

  When Stilgan finally stepped back and the guards let him go, Caide collapsed to his knees. Stilgan selected a chain next. He circled Caide, dragging the heavy metal links behind him. They slithered shallow lines through the dirt, and then the Mardróch snapped them forward. Two quick lashes crushed Caide's ribs and arm. Another found the back of his skull. Lights flashed in front of his eyes and he collapsed onto his hands. Another shot slammed into his back, forcing his stomach to the ground.

  Caide turned his head. His eyesight blurred as he scanned the crowd. Adults looked away from him as tears streaked down their faces. Children cried and sobbed for their mothers. An old woman fainted.

  Stilgan's chain lashed across Caide's shoulders. He screamed, and then closed his eyes to keep from vomiting. He listened for the sound of the chain cracking through the air, tensed for the attack. He expected he would not last long today. But he did not anticipate what he heard next.

  “Stop!”

  Caide forced his eyes open. A young girl lunged from the crowd. One of the guards reached out to block her, but only managed to trip her in the process. She landed in front of Caide. Stilgan turned his eyes toward her, but she dropped her gaze to the ground.

  “You dare interrupt me?” the Mardróch hissed. When she did not respond, he reached down to pull her up to her feet by her hair. She cried out, but still said nothing. Though he held her firm, she managed to avert her eyes once more. His lips tilted into a chilling smile that Caide knew too well. It frightened him to see it pointed at someone else.

  “Take the boy back to his hut,” Stilgan commanded one of the guards. “This one will be more fun to play with.”

  The girl's eyes widened. Two of the guards yanked Caide up by his arms. He wanted to fight, to save the girl's life, but he could barely stand. She whimpered. The guards dragged him behind them, toward his hut.

  “He'll die,” she blurted out. Her voice sounded tight, but she managed to speak loud enough to be heard. “You need him alive, don't you?”

  Stilgan gestured for his guards to stop moving. Caide remained propped between them. He felt dizzy and he realized he would have collapsed if they had not been holding him.

  “What do you know?” Stilgan demanded of the girl. He yanked on her hair again, tilting her head up. “As you'll soon discover, I have a special skill with torture. I know how to keep my prey alive. After all, they're no fun if they're dead.”

  “His skull,” she braved. Her lips trembled, and so did her voice, but she continued, “He'll die by morning.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I can sense it,” she answered. “And I can fix him, but not if you kill me.”

  Stilgan let go of her hair. “You're a Healer,” he hissed. The villagers murmured their own astonishment at the news. Stilgan took a step closer to the girl. “Your name,” he commanded.

  “Emalía.”

  “Look at me.”

  She did as he told her, meeting his eyes. He brought a hand to her throat and squeezed. “If he dies at your hand, your death will be long, do you understand?”

  Frozen, she could not nod her ascent, but it did not matter. Stilgan did not wait for a response. He brought his hand up, drew it back, and slapped her face.

  “No!” Caide cried out. He tried to push forward, but his knees buckled. Hers did too. She landed on all fours in the dirt in front of Stilgan, his freezing power broken by the force of his strike.

  “Pay attention to the pain you feel now.” His voice drew low in warning. “You'll learn worse if you dare interrupt me again.”

  He turned from her and walked away. One of the guards lifted Emalía by the arm, and deposited both her and Caide inside the hut. While Caide lay on the bed, Emalía placed her hands on the back of his head.

  “Were you telling the truth?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He felt a new fear he had never known before and swallowed hard to chase it away. “Can you heal me?”

  “I think so,” she whispered. “But I've never healed a person before, only animals.”

  He nodded in understanding. By the crowd's reaction, he guessed no one knew she had a power until today. She had kept it hidden, as most in her position did. And if this had not happened, she probably would have hidden it for the rest of her life.

  Her power shot through him, more painful than Stilgan's torture, and Caide soon passed out from it.

  Each night she healed him, until she became as much a fixture in his life as his torture. By the third day, he recognized her as a former classmate, but it took until the fifth day before she spoke to him again.

  Her fingers skirted over his burnt right arm, sending a surge of power into the exposed muscle where skin had been, and he whimpered. He tried to hold the sound back, tried to bite his cheek to prevent it from escaping, but it found its way past his lips anyway. And it embarrassed him. He could not show weakness here. He knew it, yet when the heat searing his skin joined with the heat from her touch, he could not hide his pain.

  “I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I don't have much control.”

  Over her power, she meant, though he wondered if anyone had control in Zeiihbu anymore. When Caide and his family had left their lands, they had left an organized, happy people. A few Mardróch had come to hunt for him, but his father and grandfather had assumed that once the monsters could not find Caide, they would leave. Instead, more monsters came and they took over Zeiihbu. They turned a forest thriving with yearlong green trees and plants into a dying wasteland, crawling with choking vines. Meticulously maintained buildings fell into disrepair, resembling the crumbling will of the people. Stilgan forced families to live together in the smallest of the huts, and burned the rest down. The once proud Zeiihbuans had become slaves, either held captive by Stilgan's army or worse—turned mindless by the Mardróch leader's power.

  Some had escaped into the wilderness, though Caide's grandfather had not been one of them. He had remained captive for over a year as Garon's army destroyed Zeiihbu, and Caide's father had known about it the entire time.
Scree, the family gildonae, had carried messages back and forth to Ærenden.

  It bothered Caide that his parents had not trusted him enough to tell him the news, but whatever secrets they had kept from him had died with them. Everything he knew now he heard in whispers through the open window of his prison hut. He recognized some of the voices who spoke to him, just as he recognized the hut he slept in every night. On the wall by the front door, a series of lines represented his brother's annual growth. Although faded, Caide could still read his brother's name beside them in his mother's neat script. The word taunted him every morning when he woke: Aldin. The boy who would grow no more.

  A similar set of lines bore Caide's name on the wall by the bed. This had been his family's sleeping hut. This was his village.

  The people who dared sneak secrets to him at night risked their lives to tell him what had happened, and to let him know he was not alone. The first voice had been his former teacher. The second had been his mother's best friend. And the third had been his father's chosen advisor, though the man would never ascend to the position now that Faillen would not become ruler.

  The three visitors alternated nights, passing along what information they could before the guards made their rounds. Some nights when the moon provided too much light, they chose not to come at all. If the guards caught them, death would be the best of their fears.

  Emalía had taken the same risk for him when she stepped out of the crowd, drawing Stilgan's wrath. He did not know if he could have been so brave.

  Her power surged and waned. The pain of it made him catch his breath, but he forced his eyes open to watch her. A look of intense concentration blanketed her face as she studied the wound she healed. The tip of her tongue darted out to the corner of her mouth and she bit down on it. Her dark brown eyes narrowed into half-slits. And sweat beaded along her forehead. Her skin had the deep olive color of a pureblood Zeiihbuan, indicating that Ærenden blood had never tainted her family line. Yet she had a power. It amazed him to see, or rather to feel it working, and he wondered if Cal's teachings about the powers coming from the land itself might be true. Her eyes drifted closed as her breath came faster. He felt her power surging again and gritted his teeth against it. His skin tingled, and he focused harder on her.