The Stone Warriors: Nicodemus Page 3

  “Antonia!” The door slammed against the wall while he screamed her name. But he knew. He knew. He was too late. She was gone, just as his brothers were gone. Everyone he’d ever loved . . . gone in the blink of an eye.

  History would record that he won the war. But he knew the truth. He’d lost . . . everything.

  Chapter Two

  ANTONIA WOKE from a nightmare that became all too real when she sat up and stared around a room where, she knew instinctively, she’d never been before. It wasn’t only the room, though. Everything about it was unfamiliar, from the scents coming in through the open window, to the texture of the ceiling, and even the strange décor which appeared to be decorative paper glued to the walls. She reached automatically for her magic and found it waiting for her, but her relief at its presence was tempered not only by its relative weakness, but by its wrongness.

  Panic threatened when she realized this wasn’t her world. How had she gotten here? She didn’t have the power to travel among worlds. Hell, she didn’t even have the right kind of magic to travel to different places in her own world. Not the way Nico had, she thought, remembering when he’d taken her to the waterfall. Which meant if this was another world, another place or time, that . . .

  She jumped to her feet in shock, as the nightmare flashed through her mind once more. Sotiris. Goddess, had he killed Nico? Her head spun in realization, and she fell back down to the bed. The nightmare hadn’t been a dream, it was a memory. Sotiris had come for her at Nico’s. She’d been sitting in the kitchen garden with the healer . . . what was her name? Magda! Yes, she and Magda had been sitting in the sunshine discussing the healing qualities of various herbs, while Antonia had been subtly encouraging those same herbs to grow better and stronger, to enhance their healing effects. Everyone had known the battle had already begun, and though there’d been no reports from the field yet, she’d understood that casualties would soon begin to arrive. Men and women grievously injured, some wracked with pain as they slid closer to death. These same herbs that she nudged to better effect now would help when those injured fighters came through the gates. And though Nico had ordered her to remain in his tower, she’d been set on helping in the only way she could . . . with her magic.

  That was why she and Magda had been sitting in the sun magicking while Nico and too many others were putting their lives on the line, risking injury and death to stop . . .

  Antonia frowned. Something had happened then. At the very moment she’d thought about the war and whom they fought against . . .

  She covered her mouth against the cry that rose from her throat. Sotiris had come. One moment she’d been bathing the herbs in warm waves of her magic, and the next . . . oh Goddess. Magda had fallen with a cry, and when Antonia had turned, Sotiris had been standing there. He’d been bloodied and muddy in a way she’d never seen before, his eyes filled with madness. And he’d stared at her with such fury that she’d immediately known he’d come to kill her.

  Antonia remembered rising to face him. Determined that if she was about to die, she would do it with pride that she’d finally taken a stand against his cruelty, his endless greed for more. More gold, more land, more farmers who starved while he filled his coffers with the fruits of their labor. And above all, more power. Sotiris’s only desire was to be the greatest sorcerer in their world, the greatest sorcerer who’d ever lived. But Nicodemus had stood in his way, and though Sotiris had tried many times, through war and treachery both, to rid himself of his fellow sorcerer, he’d never succeeded.

  Until Antonia had created the hexagon.

  She hadn’t meant to, but the fates had been playing their usual games with human lives and Antonia had stupidly followed where the magic took her, taking step after step until she’d looked down one day and truly seen what she’d created.

  She’d known instantly that she could never turn the weapon over to Sotiris. She’d also known that she couldn’t hide it from him. She’d worked in his tower, and he was far too powerful and too paranoid not to sense the development of such a formidable device on his own estate. He’d started coming by more often to check on her work. And though she’d exaggerated the problems she was having, he’d seen the potential in the hexagon and had kept track of her progress.

  Her only fail-safe was that the device required priming before it would be effective. The chosen victim’s blood was the crucial element in the final spell that brought the weapon to readiness. Unfortunately, Sotiris had figured that out, and once he had the device, he would no longer need her cooperation. Blood wasn’t hard to come by in battle. Sotiris would need only to bribe one of Nicodemus’s people, to obtain a sample of his blood, and then he’d kill both the traitor and Nico.

  And turn the entire world into a nightmare of his making.

  So she’d lied, telling Sotiris she was still refining the weapon, when in truth she’d been plotting a way to meet Nicodemus in person. She’d wanted to evaluate the man, beyond what she’d heard from Sotiris’s constant rages. If he’d proven to be as corrupt as Sotiris, she’d have destroyed the hexagon altogether, and accepted her fate. What was one woman’s life against the future of an entire world?

  But Nico hadn’t been corrupt. He’d been brilliant and clever, kind and generous, so beautiful, and so gods-damned powerful. Her future had been set within minutes of meeting him. She’d known then that the hexagon would be primed against Sotiris, and would ensure Nico’s victory instead.

  Just as she knew when she’d stared up at Sotiris in Nico’s sunlit garden that something terrible had gone wrong. And she was about to die for it.

  Antonia covered her eyes and cried, convinced that her Nico was dead, along with his warriors and too many others to count. And that her world, the one she’d been born to, the one that sang to her magic as if she were rooted as deeply in the soil as the oldest tree, was condemned to a pitiless future.

  The door to the room she was in now opened without warning and she looked up, not bothering to hide her tears, not caring who was barging in so unceremoniously.

  “Awake at last?” Sotiris’s voice grated with disdain, his gaze hard when he glared at her, waiting for a response.

  She didn’t give him one, other than to glare back at him, and to wish her tears had dried so he wouldn’t have the satisfaction of seeing her fear. “Where are we?” she asked. “What have you done?”

  “What have I done?” he demanded, coming close enough that she could see the murder in his eyes. “I’m not the traitor in this room, you thankless bitch. I gave you magic. I taught you everything you know. And you tried to destroy me!” he thundered so loudly that the walls seemed to shudder with the force of it.

  Antonia had said everything she needed to. She had no defense that this man would understand, much less accept. And she’d already asked the only question she needed answered. Where was she? And how could she escape the wild-eyed creature that Sotiris had become?

  “Your lover is dead,” he sneered. “And his damn warriors will soon wish they’d joined him.” His laugh was harsh, and so viciously mean that her soul ached at the sound of it.

  She didn’t know whether to believe anything he said. But even if Nico wasn’t dead, he might as well be. This wasn’t their world. Her magic had been warning her of that from the moment she’d woken.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” she said, putting as much steel in her voice as possible. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in France,” he said tauntingly. “Not far from Paris.”

  Antonia mentally scrolled through her geography lessons, but knew she wouldn’t find either of those places. “Why?” she asked.

  He surprised her with a serious answer. “I grew weary of living in a world where that jester of a sorcerer is worshipped as some kind of god.” He shrugged. “So I discovered how to leave. And now, here we are.”

  “But why am
I here? You don’t need me. And you sure as hell don’t care about me.”

  “You think I would leave you to live happily ever after with your lover, instead?”

  So, she thought, Nico wasn’t dead, after all. She didn’t voice her thought, hoping he’d reveal more. “There’s very little magic in this world,” she said instead. “You must realize that.”

  “Yes. Little magic, but fewer magic-users, and those who exist are weak. Here, I’m a fucking god.”

  She swallowed hard, holding back her reaction to his insane proclamation. And yet, if he could harness what magic existed here, and hoard it for himself, he would be like a god. And she wanted no part of it. If he thought she would be his willing assistant again, his delusions of godhood had rattled his brain.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, chuckling, as if reading her thoughts. “I no longer require your services, and I wouldn’t trust you if I did. No, you’re here to serve out your punishment for betraying me. Everything you know, everything you are, will be gone. Your life will continue, though everyone you meet, befriend, or even love, will fade and die, leaving you alone, century after century, as your magic keeps you living long past the usual age in this world. But that won’t matter, because you won’t even know your own name. You’ll be nothing and no one . . .” His mouth curved in a cruel smile. “Except what I choose. Your name, where you live, how you spend your days, even your memories, will be only what I decide to give you.”

  Antonia closed her eyes again, not granting him the sight of her fear . . . and her hatred. She couldn’t fight him. Couldn’t stop whatever he planned to do with her. Not yet. But her magic was rooted in the earth, and though this wasn’t her world, she could feel the life of it. It was weak yet, but it would grow. And when it did, she would grow, too. Stronger, smarter, more determined. Until he became tired of watching her simply exist. And as he tired, her magic would slowly, quietly eat away at his control over her. Until she was no longer his puppet. And then it would be her time for revenge.

  Chapter Three

  Five weeks later

  IT TOOK NICODEMUS weeks of painstaking work, weeding out the dregs of Sotiris’s spell that lingered over the ground where they’d stood before the battle, capturing the last vestiges caught in his own clothes, and on his skin. Endless hours were spent sampling the taste of the spell’s essence, until he finally knew what had been done to his brothers. Somehow, their enemy had trapped them in the ephemeral sands of time and space, and cast them into the void.

  What he still didn’t know was whether Antonia had met the same cruel fate. Her scream had come after his defeat of Sotiris, which would seem to indicate her punishment had been different somehow. Sotiris was a heartless monster, but she’d been the bastard’s closest companion for over a decade, far closer to him than anyone else. Was Sotiris so cruel that he could condemn the one person in the world who might actually have loved him to a hellish existence? Had the bastard ever loved her back? Or had she been nothing but a convenient path to influence, one who just happened to possess enough magic to be of use to him? Nico didn’t know the answer.

  He did know that discovering what had been done to his brothers and Antonia wasn’t enough. He needed to learn how it had been done. If he could replicate the spell, he could find them, one by one, and do whatever it took to free them. But all these weeks later, he was no closer to finding what he needed.

  Too tired to scream his frustration, or even to notice the disarray all around him, he shoved books and scrolls off the library table. He’d all but abandoned his own castle, spending day and night searching every nook and cubby of Sotiris’s expansive estate, uncovering spell-sealed stillrooms and work spaces, searching libraries full of notes and diagrams, and shelves of scrolls so ancient that even Nico had been unaware of their existence. He stood now in a vast library containing what must be one of the greatest collections of sorcerous material in the world. But where there’d once been long rows of ceiling-high cases filled with neatly catalogued tomes, there now stood empty shelves surrounded by piles of half-open books and torn pages, with all semblance of order gone. It was as if storm winds had blown through the open windows and wreaked havoc with the utter disregard of nature.

  Outside the room, servants and others whispered as they tiptoed past, not knowing if their Lord Sotiris was indeed dead, and if this crazed sorcerer was their new master. Or if the rumors were true, and Sotiris had fled for his life, never to return, abandoning his tower and estate, along with all the people who had lived and served him there.

  Nico paid no attention to any of them, barely aware they existed, and that only because someone was providing him with regular deliveries of food and drink. The small corner of his brain that was still thinking rationally about something other than magic, was aware that those deliveries were the only reason he was able to keep going. He hadn’t slept more than an hour or two at a time in longer than he could remember. His days and most of his nights were filled with the search for clues to the spell Sotiris had used to exact revenge on him. His pain, the loss of everyone he loved, was nothing compared to what those same people must be suffering.

  His brothers had been trapped in stone. But what the hell did that mean? Were they dead, with only their souls remaining trapped in some random statue for all eternity? Or were they alive and aware of every minute that passed while they remained imprisoned? He didn’t know which was worse. And were they cursed to remain prisoners forever? Or would they be free once the stone wore away with the ages? And how did one measure that? Gods forbid, it could be millennia before they were freed. Could they remain sane after all that time?

  And what of Antonia? Everything he’d discovered thus far seemed to indicate she’d been cursed separately, differently. But unlike with his brothers, he had few details about her disappearance. There had been hints of a similar spell used against her, but the smallest variation of the spell’s intent could mean so much. The great thinkers of his world insisted there were many worlds, some like theirs, some not. Which meant that while his brothers had all been sent to the same world, since they’d been cursed by the same spell and within minutes of each other, Antonia could have ended up in a completely different world. Someplace Nico might never identify, much less figure out a way to get to.

  Other than his own empirical findings, he’d uncovered few clues as to either spell, but Sotiris must have left notes somewhere. He’d clearly expected to be the victor in their final battle, which meant he hadn’t counted on the need for such a hasty exit. Besides, not even Sotiris was good enough, intelligent enough, to keep every nuance and component of every spell in his head. Virtually immortal, sorcerers lived a very long time. They required accurate records of their research, of the spells they cast, details of successes and failures alike.

  Even if Nico was unable to locate the specific spell his enemy had used, he could compile a close facsimile if he knew which constructs had been used, which specific ingredients were included, or if Sotiris had made use of any sorcerous precedents.

  “My lord.”

  It took Nico a moment to register that someone had spoken to him, and even longer to recognize the voice, and to remember that he’d actually summoned this person. The one thing he knew for certain about this disaster—at least insofar as his warriors were concerned—was that he’d been betrayed. His brothers had been relegated to a living hell because someone they’d all trusted had violated their sworn oaths of loyalty. Nico didn’t yet know the specifics, or what service the traitor had performed for Sotiris, but he’d caught a brief scent before the spell had completed its task, and that scent had been one he recognized. It was painful to accept that a man Nico had known most of his life, a man he’d counted as a friend, could have forsworn himself so readily.

  Schooling his expression, he turned to greet the traitor. “Antioch.” He permitted a trace of relief to enter his voice when he said the ma
nservant’s name, wanting him to believe that his rightful lord was pleased to see him alive and well. Nico was pleased, though Antioch soon wouldn’t be.

  “Lord Nicodemus.” Antioch’s voice trailed off as he looked around the wreck of what once had been an orderly library. “You sent for me, my lord?”

  A spark of renewed energy had Nico straightening to his full height, mind clear and focused on this one thing, this one man. Had Antioch only known about the rage fueling his master’s renewed alertness, he’d have been running for his life. But it was too late for that now. Far too late.

  Nico smiled. “I’ve made a bit of a mess here, I’m afraid,” he said, raising his hands in a helpless gesture. “I got caught up in my search and well . . . . It’s a fine collection, but I’m going to need help putting it back to order. Else it will be useless in the future.”

  He gave the traitor an inquiring glance, but since there’d been no question, the man responded with only a weak smile.

  “Given the specialized knowledge required,” Nico continued, “the compensation will be significant. And as it is likely to consume some number of weeks, it will be a job well worth taking on. I was hoping to find someone on Sotiris’s staff with knowledge of the collection’s previous order, and thought perhaps you could query the servants, and locate at least one person with some familiarity—”

  “I would be pleased to undertake the task for you, my lord,” Antioch offered eagerly.

  Nico eyed him quizzically. “I wasn’t aware you had ever worked for Sotiris or his family.”

  The manservant’s face flushed with heat, and for the first time, he appeared uneasy. Blinking repeatedly, he cast his gaze around the room, as if searching for the right words to say. “I never . . . that is, I was not a servant for Lord Sotiris or his family. I was thinking more of my familiarity with your own library and thought perhaps—”

  “So you’ve never been in this room before?”