The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [211]
“Masks,” Grace murmured. She met the questioning gazes of the others. “The masks are the focus for their magic. We saw that firsthand.”
Beltan cleared his throat. It was the first sound the blond knight had made since they had gathered around the fire. “All right, let me see if I’m following this. These sorcerers—the Scirathi—they’re the ones behind the murders of the gods?”
Sareth hesitated, then nodded.
Melia clenched small hands into fists. “They will pay for this!”
“But how?” Falken said. “Even a sorcerer should not have the ability to slay a god.”
The Mournish man looked down, silent for a long moment. Travis realized he was gazing at his wooden leg. At last he looked up.
“It is a demon,” he said.
Vani clamped a hand to her mouth in an expression of open horror. Clearly she knew what Sareth’s words meant, and by their grim expressions Melia and Falken did as well. But Travis had no idea.
“A demon?” he said.
“Yes,” Sareth answered. “A relic of the War of the Sorcerers long ago. When the sorcerers rose up against the god-kings of Amún, they created the demons as their greatest weapons. A demon could lay waste to an entire city, destroying every last grain of its walls, leaving only bare sand.”
Aryn shuddered. “Just like Madam Vil’s hostel.”
“But the demons, what were they?” Travis said.
“They were morndari made incarnate. The morndari were ever bodiless and hungry spirits—that is how blood could be used to draw and control them. But a few of the sorcerers found a way to bind the morndari, encasing them in bodies of stone. These were the demons. Incarnate, they could walk across the land, but their hunger was not lessened in their physical form. They consumed everything in their path, and they were never sated.”
These words sickened Travis. He could almost see them—vague, shadowy creatures opening vast maws to eat entire cities as people tried in vain to flee.
“If they were never sated,” Grace said, “then how were they stopped? Why didn’t they consume everything in Amún?”
“They very nearly did. It is because of the demons that the lands of Amún are now the Morgolthi—a wasteland of bones, dust, and death. However, in the end, the sorcerers who created them realized their folly and managed to undo their magic, destroying all the demons.”
“But not all of them,” Falken said. “Not if you’re right.”
Sareth turned toward the bard. “We can only guess that one of the demons crossed the Summer Sea, to the shores of Falengarth.”
“But why didn’t it destroy things here?” Lirith said.
“It was bound somehow, imprisoned in a chamber beneath the very hill upon which Tarras was later built. Although who bound it there we do not know. It must have been a sorcerer of vast power.”
Travis forced himself to stop biting his lip. “But if it took such a powerful sorcerer to bind the demon the first time, how can it be locked up again?”
“The demon is not free,” Sareth said. “Not completely, for were that so there would be only a void where Tarras stands. Its prison has grown weaker, yes, due to the actions of the Scirathi. But I believe the sorcerers have found a way to use the demon for their own ends without releasing it.”
“Their own ends,” Melia said, her voice rising with fury. “You mean to murder the gods!”
Sareth regarded Melia with solemn eyes. “No, great lady, that is not so. To murder the gods is not the reason the Scirathi are using the demon. Instead, the deaths of the gods are merely meant to appease the thing—an attempt to sate it—so that they might safely pass by it.”
“You mean,” Falken exclaimed, “the Scirathi are sacrificing gods to the demon just so they can get past it?”
Melia was shaking with rage. “That’s … that’s utterly perverse!”
Travis’s heart rattled in his chest. Something was wrong—and not just the existence of an ancient monster or the pointless deaths of three gods. Then, with a chill, he understood.
“Sareth,” he said, “you told us that the Scirathi are sacrificing gods to the demon in order to sate