Page 56 of Darro

Bodach strode up to one of the clansmen he’d sent to the rooftop to bring back the armorer. “Well? Where is he?”

“I dinnae serve you any longer, bastart.” The guard drew his sword and thrust it at him, making Bodach stumble backward. “Now you shall suffer all that you inflicted on us, and more.”

He didn’t bother to debate that, but turned and ran. Every McKeran he passed reached for their weapons, so it seemed the first one’s claim was true. Shattered soul globes littered the passages. Someone must have found a way to destroy his matriarch spider, which Mirry had warned him would break the spell and release all the zed from his control. He had to get through the spell trap, dose another spider, and then–

A powerful force seized him like a giant, invisible hand and rammed him through the nearest wall into the next passage. Bodach knew the melia’s enchantment had finally detected him, and braced himself to be hurled out of the spell trap, as he always was. This time, however, he did not exit, but was bounced between the walls.

This is not the enchantment.

Like a rag doll, over and over, he hit the stones, his flesh scraping away and his bones cracking. By the time he was flung out through the barrier, he was a bleeding, broken mess.

I cannot die, Bodach thought as shadows crowded in around him, close and suffocating, like a black casket. I am immortal. My red crystal will heal me.

He went into the airless darkness, his mind becoming an endless, featureless black sea in which he drowned. When he finally fought his way out of that dark water and opened his eyes, he saw one of the mortal females he’d left in charge of his prisoners leaning over him.

“You’re awake,” she said, sounding relieved as she pressed a damp cloth against his forehead. “You’ve been out for so long, Master.”

He pushed himself up to see he occupied a pallet in the main room of the dungeons, which stank of dead flesh. Against one wall he saw the charred body of the other female mortal, and suspected the occupants of the cells would be in the same condition.

“Tell me what happened here,” Bodach commanded her.

Somehow Dax Ballar had escaped his cell, and she had gone upstairs to look for him when the entire castle shook as if experiencing an earthquake, and things began flying through the passages and crashing into the walls and floors. She had locked herself inside a storage closet until the tremors and the noise stopped. When she had hurried back down to the dungeons she found the other woman and all the men burned to death, and Bodach unconscious with terrible injuries.

“Then you started to heal, Master,” she said. “I could see your skin regrowing, and hear your bones snapping back together. So I put you here and kept you warm.”

Looking into her eyes he realized she was no longer under his control. The backlash from the use of Mirry’s magic and breakdown of the enchantment must have destroyed her enthrallment as well as killing all the other mortals. She could have fled at any time, and brought back the authorities, but instead she’d stayed with him.

“Why did you do this?” Bodach demanded, grabbing her by the throat. “Do you expect me to be grateful? I am the most powerful dark Fae in this realm, and you are nothing.” He gave her a hard shake, making something in her body snap. “I could make you spend eternity being whipped every day and raped every night by hideous monsters beyond your imagination.” He waited for her to say something, but she kept her head hung low. “Well? Aren’t you going to beg me for your life?”

The stink of her bowels and bladder emptying told him why she couldn’t, and he released her to see her sprawl on the floor, her head at an unnatural angle.

In a rage Bodach tore the viewing scroll down from the wall, casting it into the brazier, where it turned the flames bright gold before dissolving into ash. The spider and the enslaving poison had failed him. Now that the spell trap was collapsing, he had run out of time. After a thousand years of effort with no results, it seemed obvious that he would never possess Torra MacBren’s power to transfer his spirit into other bodies. Revenge against all those in Elphyne who had conspired against him and cast him into exile would never be his. He’d nearly been killed by the backlash from Mirry’s magic which was nothing compared to the melia magic of the spell trap. When that collapsed entirely, the backlash would make this experience seem like a brief tumble with an over-eager lover.

It wasn’t fair. He’d worked for centuries to get his treasure, and he deserved his vengeance. He was supposed to become the most powerful Fae king that had ever ruled, not die like a forgotten worm in this wretched realm.

Slowly he walked upstairs and wandered through the passages of the castle. When he saw Dax Ballar’s badly burned corpse just outside the spell trap, he paused. Although he tried to draw some satisfaction from the idiot’s end, even that didn’t brighten his mood. Instead of ruling over the light and dark courts he instead faced a collapsing spell trap that would blast him with a thousand years of backlash. No Fae had ever been subjected to that, and he had no idea how it would manifest, or what it would do to him. Not knowing made him kick Ballar in the head, caving in his charred skull and separating it from his neck.

“Fool. Did you really think you could prevail over me?” He lifted his foot to stomp on the dead man’s blackened face.

Something came flying out of the spell trap’s barrier, and landed next to the corpse.

Bodach reached down to pick up the small notebook, which had the words READ THIS PLEASE written in bold on the front cover. When he opened it he saw a page clipped to the inside with a brief message in the same handwriting.

To whoever finds this notebook:

I am trapped in another world inside McKeran’s Castle along with hundreds of other people. Everything we’ve tried hasn’t worked to release us from this prison in time. Things are becoming very bad here now, and we believe the destruction of this world is coming. Please use my notes about what I’ve observed to see if there is any way you can rescue us from your side.

-- Esme Martinez, Monterey Today journalist

“So you were the one who wandered inside,” Bodach muttered. Idly he considered flinging the notebook back through the barrier, but knew it would only be thrown back out again. “Stupid bitch. Did you think I’d let anybody read this?”

Drawing back his foot, he kicked Ballar’s burned skull through the entry, hoping to see it smash to pieces. Instead it glittered with red lights as it bounced against the stone wall and came back through the barrier, rolling to a stop at Bodach’s feet.

Ballar’s eyelids lifted, and his desiccated eyes plumped up as they looked at him. His lips began moving, but because he had no larynx no sound came from his mouth.

How may I serve, Master?

Disgusted, Bodach took down a torch and set fire to the animated head, which burned bright scarlet like the viewing scroll before collapsing into a pile of ash. Ballar had been worse than useless to him; he and his idiot coven had been an unwanted distraction. Putting the rest of his remains to the torch, he left him to burn and walked away. He would have to dispose of all the bodies, and soon. He considered burning them all, but to keep the police from finding proof of what he’d done, he would do better to bury them far from the castle. Perhaps in that prison cemetery where he had left the remains of a changeling who had briefly served him before turning traitor and trying to steal his power–

He stopped in his tracks as he looked back at Ballar’s burning corpse. The skull he had kicked through the barrier had come back to life after bouncing back through it. Yet the dark druid’s body had not come back to life. Living flesh could not pass through the barrier and escape the spell trap, so that made no sense. Even as just a head, he should have been thrown back away from the barrier just as everyone else who tried to escape. Instead he had bounced back through it after hitting the wall and landed on the other side. A decapitated head. A dead mortal.

Alive but not alive. Like a zed but dead. A revenant.

Bodach had never been grateful to any mortal, as all they had ever caused him had been trouble. In death Dax Ballar had given him the answer that had so long eluded him. If his skull had remained intact, he would have picked it up and kissed it.

All that truly mattered was that he had at long last solved the problem with the spell trap. Soon Torra MacBren would be his, and there was nothing the McKeran could do to stop him.