The Devil's Influence Read online

  Prologue

  Belhurst was old. His joints told him this, elbows and knees the most severe with their protests. He did not know his actual age; just that he was older than any human had a right to be and every sunrise added another burden to his already weary bones. Spells upon charms upon potions kept him moving, allowed him to forget the number of full moons he saw, the number of seasons he had endured. But he could not rest yet, too tethered to duty. He needed to do this, to be here now.

  Baroon was a large city, the third largest in the country of Tsinel. It was built upon a town built upon a village; new unseen alcoves built on existing nooks, secrets stacked upon secrets. Belhurst skulked down alleys that extended from other passageways, corners formed by buildings long forgotten in various stages of decay. Rumors and tales told by miscreants with tongues that waggled for coin or drink had led Belhurst here. An item was to exchange hands soon. An item of ancient magic, holding an extreme amount of power.

  The clack of his walking staff echoing off the walls, Belhurst turned one more corner and he thought he had come upon a dead end, an alleyway of stagnant puddles and rotting trash. Cursing his luck, the old wizard thought about leaving to track down his informant who gave him this misinformation and placing a spell upon him but decided to travel further instead. His decision to brave the filth paid off, finding an alcove hidden by the shadows caused by the odd angles of neighboring buildings.

  Despite the building’s various stages of decomposition, the old door was rather sturdy, a rusted padlock securing the equally rusted chain around the handle. Belhurst chuckled to himself, thinking if he had any kind of muscled brute with him, they would have an easier time kicking through one of the walls than shouldering down the door. Alas, he had neither the physical strength to bull through anything nor the predilection. He was a wizard after all. A pinch of dust from one of the dozen pouches strapped to his body, a practiced gesture with his hands, a few whispered words; the padlock fell to the ground.

  Hinges so old that they no longer creaked, merely offered a soft grinding noise as Belhurst opened the door. The windowless room was dark, but he had prepared for this. Belhurst procured a small vial of liquid from a pocket and drank the contents. Another whisper of ancient words and he could see everything around him in monochrome shades of blue.

  Crates long forgotten lay as a pile of decaying wood to the left. A pool of water soaked the base of the wall in front of him. There was a lone doorway to the right and he heard voices from the other side.

  Again prepared, Belhurst cast a cloaking spell upon himself. He moved cautiously into the other room. The spell did not make him invisible, merely giving him a camouflage to the casual observer. He also had no way to hide the noises he made, so he padded slowly, careful about how he used his staff.

  The room was much larger than the one he had come from but had no windows or other doors. Four individuals occupied the center of the room, one lit lantern among them. The flame of the lantern, too, appeared as rippling shades of blue to Belhurst.

  The wizard wondered how they made their way into this secret warehouse—smashed crates and barrels lined the perimeter of all four walls, as did rotted sheets of canvas—since a rusted lock had secured the lone door into the building. However, the hobgoblin of the group answered his question as he sniffed a fistful of his own shirt and said, “I swear the stench of the underground tunnels has permeated my tunic, Cezomir.”

  Belhurst assumed that Cezomir was the leader by the way the others regarded him. He was human—no, only human in appearance, human for now. The wizard sensed his lycanthropy. By the way the man stalked about the room, Belhurst guessed werewolf. His voice was deep, every word a feral growl. “Quit whining, Bigol.”

  “I’m not whining. I’m just suggesting we charge extra for having our clothes ruined.”

  “It’s the room. It stinks of decay.”

  The lanky creature with pointed ears and hooked nose sniffed his shirt again. “Room, tunnels, it doesn’t matter what’s causing the smell. The smell is in my clothes. Your clothes, too. Our clothes will never smell like anything other than rotting warehouse or dead tunnels again. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I don’t hear Riz complaining about it.”

  Riz was a minotaur with a thick pelt of fur running from his bull head down past his human-shaped shoulders, thinning along the way and fading to flesh around the bottom of his chest, visible underneath his unbuttoned vest. He ran all ten of his fingers up his face and along his horns. He finished his display with a headshake and a snort.

  “See?” Cezomir continued, “No complaining.”

  Indignation weighing in his voice, Bigol snapped, “No complaining? That’s because he never says anything! I know he can talk. I’ve heard him, but he never says anything.”

  “Isn’t it interesting,” the human of the foursome said, his voice as slippery as a greased eel, “that Riz says no words, yet speaks volumes. You do nothing but talk and say nothing.”

  “You know what, Mallen, I’m sick of your—” the hobgoblin started as he advanced on the human, but stopped and turned toward Belhurst.

  The wizard stilled himself and cursed his enfeebled body for possibly betraying him with any number of unconscious movements. How badly had he been shaking? Had he been swaying? Unknowingly shifted his stance? The point was moot now as Belhurst took a mental inventory of ingredients on his person, readying himself to cast any spell that could save his life.

  “What’s wrong?” Cezomir asked, looking in Belhurst’s direction as well.

  “Nothing. Just thought I saw something move,” Bigol replied.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t that?” Mallen asked, pointing to a spot between them and Belhurst. Roiling smoke bubbled up from the ground, black and thick. A cloaked figure emerged.

  The flowing slowed, more akin to oozing pus, and the figure remained still, motionless in the center of the smoke. Sleeves loose and draping, the figure extended an arm, the fingers of his gauntlet tapering to pernicious tips, and pointed to Cezomir. Voice as dark and billowy as the smoke, he asked, “Do you have it?”

  Cezomir crossed his arms over his massive chest and said, “We do. Do you have our payment?”

  With the sleight of hand of a street magician, a gourd sized bag appeared in the cloaked man’s palm.

  Frowning, Cezomir said, “Looks a bit small.”

  “It may be smaller than you thought, but more than you expected. It is filled with Albathian diamonds,” the cloaked man replied.

  A sickening twist formed in the pit of Belhurst’s stomach. If what the man said was true, a bag that size of Albathian diamonds could fund a small village for a generation. He took a cautious step closer for a better view.

  Cezomir nodded at Mallen. The human stepped to within two paces of the cloaked man and produced a pouch of his own. He peeled back the edges of the pouch to expose a fist-sized crystal, the lamplight glinting off its hundreds of facets.

  Belhurst fought hard with himself not to gasp. Despite the world around him being painted in blue, he saw the crystal in its natural color, a glowing crimson. Just as he suspected—The Heart of Inferus, the mythical deity who gave fire to the world. Belhurst held no belief in the silly tales of gods shaping the world, but he did believe that the crystal gave the user the ability to control fire with the ease of a simple thought. He could not let the crystal leave this place in anyone else’s hands other than his own. What to do? His spell choices were limited, mostly for defense and stealth, nothing for taking on five potential combatants. But he would need to think of something q
uickly; Bigol grabbed him by the throat.

  So enthralled by the transaction, Belhurst had lost sight of all the participants. He cursed himself as his cloaking spell faded. All eyes locked on him.

  “Well, look what I found! It looks like we have a rat scurrying about. He’s sneaky like a rat. He looks like a rat. Yes. Yes, I think we have—”

  Belhurst was old, but not without his resources. He stopped the hobgoblin’s prattling by slamming the crest of his staff against the underside of his jaw. Bigol squealed like a stuck pig as his bloodied tongue fell to the floor. Calling upon all the strength of his feeble muscles, Belhurst summoned just enough to crack his staff against Bigol’s head, knocking the hobgoblin unconscious.

  Needing to halt the transaction, Belhurst waved his staff and wiggled the fingers of his free hand while uttering a phrase over the shouts of the other men in the room. Mallen’s body went rigid as his feet left the ground. A simple levitation spell to keep him, and the crystal, out of reach. Belhurst had not counted on the ferocity of the buyer, though.

  Just as Mallen left the floor, the cloaked man leaped from the center of the still frothing smoke. He grabbed Mallen’s arm, the one holding the crystal. With a quick motion, an unseen weapon severed Mallen’s arm just below the shoulder. Writhing and kicking midair, Mallen screamed as blood sprayed. The cloaked figure hurried back into the smoke and disappeared, the floor absorbing him.

  “You!” Cezomir yelled at Belhurst. “Because of you, we didn’t get paid!”

  Belhurst was right about Cezomir; he was a werewolf.

  Remaining bipedal, Cezomir advanced. With every step, fur replaced flesh, fingers turned into claws, teeth changed to fangs. In his lupine state, he was just as tall and wide as Riz, but so much more feral. “Now, old man,” he snarled, “you die.”

  Cezomir charged at Belhurst, but the wizard used his staff to fend off the enraged beast man by stabbing the tip at the creature’s slavering mouth. With short lunges, Cezomir stretched and strained his head forward, his teeth a symphony of rage, clashing and snapping against one another. Spittle sprayed in every direction as the big beast tried to evade the staff that fended him off time and time again keeping his mouth from the old man’s flesh.

  Belhurst was soaked, though he could not tell how much of the moisture was Cezomir’s saliva and how much was his own sweat. “This is too much like work,” the old wizard muttered, carefully studying the werewolf’s movements. As the lycanthrope coiled backward readying himself to spring, Belhurst held his staff with his left hand while he used the fingers of his right hand to dip into one of his pouches hanging from his belt. He slipped his fingers into another pouch, then a third, and rubbed them together. As he uttered a few quick syllables in an unintelligible tongue, his fingers glowed white and became intensely cold. The werewolf sprang out of his coil at him. Belhurst jammed his staff in the gaping maw yet again, but this time he touched the beast with his ensorcelled hand.

  Cezomir howled and drew himself backward; ice consumed his muzzle and then raced across his head. He rolled away in retreat, swatting at the frost that consumed him.

  Satisfied that he had bought himself a few seconds respite from the frothing jaws of destruction, Belhurst pivoted to flee but turned into the path of the charging minotaur. He was too late. Riz barreled into the wizard, bending him in half at the waist, and drove him into the wall. Belhurst hit with such force that he cried out, cursing at the intensity of the pain, knowing that something had given way, either his hips were shattered or the wall had failed at the point of impact. But even this thought was short lived. Riz took a step back and then crashed into Belhurst again, forcing the wizard’s body to straighten to full height, his head slamming back into a very solid part of the wall. A lancing pain ran through his right arm as Riz gored him with his horn. The staff dropped from Belhurst’s grip, clattering to the floor. If he was to survive this encounter, Belhurst knew that he would have to endure more pain than he had ever imagined, his earlier complaints about the aching of old bones a lost memory.

  Through teeth clenched against agony, Belhurst ground out a few magical syllables, his left hand tingling as energy grew upon his fingertips. It was a weak spell that would produce a simple jolt of handheld lightning. Hardly enough to stop this mauling, unless perfectly placed.

  The arcs of electricity danced around Belhurst’s fingers as the wizard pressed his palm against the minotaur’s chest, just below the sternum, and released the energy. The burst provided just enough punch to knock the wind from the beast’s lungs. Desperate in his attempts to breathe, Riz released Belhurst and dropped to his knees.

  On the floor as well, Belhurst fumbled around for his staff. In reclaiming it, he noticed that the rot at the base of the wall he had been slammed into had given way to a hole. A small hole, but one large enough to serve as egress from this room of certain death.

  Rough flagstones bit into his knees and hips as he dragged himself through the hole. He could feel scarcely anything below his waist. He was thankful for his old hide at that moment, for surely it was the only thing holding his broken form together. Later the miracle of magic might help him walk again as if the battle had never taken place. But he was to be wrong yet again.

  Belhurst still had feeling below the waist; the plunged knife in his thigh made him aware of that. Through the various holes in the dilapidated wall, he saw the hobgoblin’s smile, a cascade of blood flowing from the bottom half of his face. With one last effort, he landed a kick to the side of Bigol’s head, forcing the hobgoblin away.

  Breaths coming in ragged gulps of air, Belhurst lay on his stomach, a burning sensation at the entry point of the knife. Not just the ordinary burn of a foreign object inserted into flesh . . . the unnatural fire of a toxin. He noted the way the poison spread with alacrity, singeing as it seethed through his body. It was not unlike a snake slithering its way through his sinews, a miasma roiling through him, pervading every bit of him, tearing at the fibers of his essence, and warring with the very quintessence of his magical being. He knew it now, the poison called “magus bane,” a toxin for those possessing the gift of magic, for which there was no known cure, natural nor mystical.

  Time grew short and he had to hurry. If the poison did not win its battle within his body first, then those he hurt in the other room would finish the job. Especially Cezomir, his words growing angrier and more panicked as he screamed, “I can’t change. I can’t change back to human. That wizard did something to me! I can’t change back!”

  Slipping through the hole bought Belhurst enough time to concentrate, to cast the complicated spell of opening a portal back to his laboratory at the Wizard’s Guild. Back to his apprentice, Silver.

  “It’s about time you came back, old man,” Silver groused, as Belhurst crawled through the portal. “I hate it when you don’t tell me where you are going. I could have helped, and you know this. Now, this is when you say, ‘why, yes, Silver’—”

  “Why, yes, Silver,” Belhurst said, pausing to cough out a gob of blood as the portal closed behind him. “You could have, but it’s too late now.”

  “What the—?” Silver’s speech failed him as he looked down at his mentor. He raced the few steps remaining between them and slid to a halt on his knees at Belhurst’s side. The old wizard knew his apprentice well and could all but hear the dozen different plans and contingencies bandying about in his mind. Waving his hand to shoo them away before any left Silver’s mouth, Belhurst said, “I’ve been infected with magus bane.”

  “But—”

  “No! There is no time. It is very important that you finish what I started. Now listen carefully . . .”

  one

  The Ox Ankle Tavern was once a place where adventurers and mercenaries could find respite. Not quite “home” since those with a rambling spirit and a yearning to be the hero in their own self-told tale had no home, but certainly a p
lace where they could put their feet up, eat a shank of meat, and share a story with a fellow journeyman. All without the constant need to look over their shoulder. It had been that way for well over a century, up until a decade ago. That was when one patron and his talking rabbit arrived, repeatedly telling the tale of how they saved the world. Anywhere from three to five times a week, they would show up and expound to all in the tavern about . . .

  “Me! Bale Pinkeye!” yelled Bale Pinkeye, an ogre of enormous proportion and hideous physiognomy. Flesh tone of a rotten pear, the ogre boasted a face full of lumps, a mouthful of angled, yellowed teeth, and a pointed head topped with a ragged patch of brown hair.

  “Yeah, him! Bale Pinkeye!” Lapin, the talking rabbit, repeated, punctuating his sentence with a hiccup that could only be conjured by profuse intoxication.

  Only five other patrons were in the tavern; two sets of two human men sat at separate tables as far away from the bar as the room would allow, and one hobgoblin at the bar next to Bale and Lapin. Unbeknownst to anyone else in the bar, the hobgoblin had slipped into a coma an hour ago, right when Bale began his tale.

  Under the glare from the bartender, a gnome who had been tricked into buying the tavern a year ago, Bale swallowed half of his tankard of ale in two gulps, in his mind adding to the suspense of the story, even though he had already finished telling it. The twinkle in his eye surpassed in brightness only by the sheen on his glistening lips, Bale concluded, “Yep, I used my presperdigenous brain to save the world. What do you think of that?” To sprinkle a bit of zest upon his question, and add a bit of camaraderie, Bale punched the hobgoblin in the shoulder. The green skinned creature fell to the floor, his lanky arms and legs akimbo, looking like a child’s scribble.

  Bale sighed. The hobgoblin on the floor reminded him of his late friend Pik Pox, a hobgoblin as well, one who helped Bale save the world. One whom Bale loved like a brother. More than a brother, actually, because Bale used to have three brothers. All three had been murdered by demons during his adventure to save the world. The loss of Pik had hurt Bale far more than that of his brothers. Pik’s absence still cut him.