Page 5 of Fate Promised

A bright flash lit up the sewer.

Green smoke billowed out, circling the man. He screamed and jerked, but his hand remained stuck inside the scrying bowl.

Hoyt circled the man, who stopped screaming but remained jerking, trying to twist away. “Yes, the first few times aren’t pleasant, but you get used to it.”

“What is this?” the hooded man asked, his voice strained.

Hoyt reached out and touched the other man, exactly over the scarlet palm print on his chest. The smoke darkened in color and swirled around Hoyt, who raised his head and breathed it in. The other man stumbled, swinging his free arm to push Hoyt away, but it flailed uselessly as if drained of all strength, barely skimming Hoyt.

When Hoyt absorbed the last of the smoke, he spoke a few words in the arcane tongue, the language of magicwielders, and the hooded man snatched his hand from the scrying bowl. He slumped back against the wall of the sewer, clutching his raw and reddened hand to his chest. “What did you do?”

“You’ll be all right. I didn’t take too much. You’re lucky I need something from you, or I could have drained you completely, leaving you helpless on the floor for the rats.” Hoyt smiled his thin-lipped smile. “It’s temporary—you’ll feel all right in a few hours. I figured this would be much more effective for my little presentation.”

Juri frowned. What had Hoyt done? How was that possible?

The other man massaged his chest, and his gasps for breath filled the tunnel. “How? How did you do this?”

“Morana needed me to release her from Peklo because Peklo has no suns. Which means she had no access to the normal source of her magic.”

Juri avoided magicwielders, but he knew their magic came from the light of the smaller, second sun, which didn’t appear in Peklo—the underworld.

“She found another source, and she fed me that power so I could conduct my spells for her,” Hoyt continued.

The other man remained crumpled against the wall, and Hoyt appeared the larger of the two now. “Shuwt?”

Hoyt nodded. “That’s right.”

Juri frowned. What was shuwt?

“You dared drain me?” the hooded man asked. “I’ll have no magic for the rest of the night.”

Hoyt shrugged. “I needed to prove my capabilities. Guess you better stay on the human side of town tonight.”

A brief silence filled the sewer until the hooded man said, “We’ve tried to figure out how to tap into its power for centuries, and everything has failed. Tell me how you did this.” The man’s voice had changed from arrogant and hissing to almost worshipful.

Juri turned to Kyril. “Hoyt just zapped this asshole, and he doesn’t care. All he wants is to learn how to do it himself.”

Hoyt shifted his weight and stood taller. “Morana fed me bits of power, and I knew it was a different source. More powerful and more difficult to wield. But everything she fed me was temporary, and it had to come through her. I couldn’t access it on my own.”

He pointed at the bowl. “But I could access this bowl whenever I wanted, and it showed me … many things.” His voice dropped to almost a whisper. One dripping with a tinge of lust. Or reverence.

“It showed you how to access shuwt?”

Hoyt shook his head. “Not exactly. It showed me where to find something much better.” He reached into his robes and revealed a leather-bound book, the ends of the paper rough from being cut unevenly.

“A moldy old book?”

“This is Herskala’s grimoire.”

The other man inhaled sharply. “Impossible. Let me see it. I don’t believe you.”

Juri frowned. Herskala? The magicwielder died centuries ago, and while there were legends about the strength of his magic and his role in the Deciding War, there was never anything said about a grimoire. Most of the tales were centered on him founding the magicwielder academy that now bore his name.

Hoyt smiled. “Oh, it’s real. And it’s less a book of spells and more a book charting his magical inquiries. Of course, he wrote in code mostly, so it’s taking me some time to get through it. But his most intense field of study was shuwt. And he knew the one place in Ulterra where he could gain all the power he wanted.”

“I want to see what it says,” the other man said.

Even from where Juri stood, he could tell things had suddenly shifted between the two men. The hooded man’s voice had lost its decisive edge, and Hoyt seemed larger in the sewer tunnel. Hoyt smiled. “After you help me with the first step.”

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