Redmane’s wayward son stood with Aric and Aerin Morholt, holding a hushed conversation.

  It took a moment to process what he was seeing.

  And there was something else. Something about the aura of the two Morholts. It reminded Redmane of Pietr, Dobrogost, any of the others he’d granted everlasting life by way of Devourer.

  Vos had done something similar to those two. Some higher sense told Redmane they were connected to his son in the same way his spawn were connected to him.

  But… How.

  How had they escaped. It had to have been Vos. Some failsafe he devised in ancient times, or perhaps there was something about the nature of divinity he knew that Redmane didn’t.

  He had forgotten much, after all.

  “He is here,” said Vos, looking past the Morholts.

  The earth quaking from the footfalls of the giant sentinels must have given it away.

  Aric followed Vos’s gaze, but he wasn’t looking at anything in particular. The young Morholt had a stricken look on his face.

  “So… What’s the plan, then,” he said, in as steady a voice as he could manage.

  “The sentinels will show us where he’s hiding. When he surfaces, we strike. And once he is subdued I will take him apart, as I have done more than once throughout the ages of this world.”

  Aric nodded slowly. Evidently the reassurance of a God was enough to calm him.

  Aerin Morholt cleared his throat.

  “Ah… Forgive me for asking, but how does one take apart a god?”

  Vos’s eyes slid to meet the elder Morholt’s, and the latter looked away, unable to bear the weight of the First Sovereign’s attention. “One must forge and wield a soul sundering weapon. A craft taught to me long ago, by travelers from another world.”

  “Numantians?” asked Aric.

  Vos shook his head no.

  “You’ll ally with the Numantians against Redmane, won’t you?” asked Aerin.

  Vos raised an eyebrow. “Why would I do such a thing.”

  Aerin didn’t know how to follow up on his own question, so he shrugged with a sheepish look and let it drop.

  Redmane made a mental note to thank him later. As he’d just given him an idea.

  In truth, he knew not the character of his own child, aside from what he had learned. He knew only that Vos was capable of patricide, matricide, and the mutilation of divine bodies and souls. But would he ally himself with Numantia?

  Not if he understood what it would cost. What the Numantians did to divinities who refused them.

  Perhaps the enemy of his enemy could be his friend.

  Redmane would have preferred to reconcile with him, to learn why he’d done what he’d done, to achieve a semblance of understanding.

  But such things were not always possible.

  In the meantime, he had to work out how to foil their ambush.

  The sentinels could see him, but they couldn’t touch him. He could use that, perhaps. Lead them somewhere and then spawn decoys, distractions. Something which would draw their attention. But if he weren’t truly there, the value of such a distraction would be fleeting. Quickly wasted if he didn’t make a move worth spending it on. There was also the risk that Vos would correctly deduce that he was moving around in an incorporeal state, and muster countermeasures against it.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  So… A singular distraction, invoked at the correct moment.

  To what end, though.

  He was here for the Seal of the Dragon. Vos surely knew this. Why else would he be here, but to stop him from reclaiming the last of his power.

  Aric and Aerin Morholt were likely to be invested with a portion of Vos’s divine power, just as Redmane could do the same with the mortals who had become his spawn. And Vos himself now looked to be recovered from his long torpor. His aura felt much stronger.

  And then there was an army of giant Gnosis-powered guardians, each one Level 400.

  Contending with them, and with Vos and his minions, and then contending with the Seal of the Dragon, was sure to be a losing proposition.

  There was also the issue of finding the Seal in the first place, which he hadn’t yet succeeded in despite searching through this maze of a city for most of the day.

  If he were to find the Seal, slay its guardian and claim its power, in all likelihood he would emerge with the strength to best Vos and his acolytes and his sentinels and the Numantians and the Praetor Jarel Craith and, with will and good fortune, the ominous presences moving him from the shadows.

  He just had to make it there first.

  Vos and his two new followers may have unwittingly led him close to it. They could be near wherever the Seal lay concealed, knowing Redmane would have to come this way to reach it. Either that or this was simply the place where they emerged from the Abyss and stopped to talk. He doubted they would clarify if he came around the corner to ask them.

  Redmane folded his arms, his mouth twisting into a thoughtful frown.

  Many problems faced him. Luckily, he’d stumbled on this one before it had gotten the drop on him.

  But finding the Seal would still be the first one to attend to. And searching for it with a single pair of eyes wasn’t getting him anywhere.

  It was time for a trick he hadn’t employed in some time.

  Spawn. Lots of spawn.

  First, he floated away from Vos and his cronies and found a secluded place with plenty of room around his feet to create lots of them.

  Small ones. Fast movers. The rough specifications of a lizard or ground squirrel, with claws sharp enough to find easy purchase on walls and ceilings. Naturally stealthy due to their size and quickness, so that he didn’t have to invest each and every one with Gnosis to power Skills.

  If the sentinels found one, they would have to catch it to squash it. A good way to see how fast those stone giants truly were.

  Redmane sacrificed a generous portion of Corpus, to create a good large batch of them.

  Corpus: 35,344

  By his count, he’d spawned a hundred.

  They skittered off in different directions, in small groups, so as not to attract the attention of the god and two godlings nearby.

  Redmane closed his eyes, and reached out into their senses. And he found that his third eye assisted him greatly in the task. Before the Sphinx, he could feel the forms of his spawn if he placed his focus on it, but not in a way that translated into an immediate sensory experience. It was more like closing his eyes and touching his left hand with his right hand.

  Now, the third eye beheld everything at once.

  It was a disorienting experience at first. Overwhelming. Too much information for a mind accustomed to only one set of sense impressions.

  He skittered across black stone streets. Crawled on walls and ceilings. Looked up at the titanic boot of a stone sentinel as it passed by on patrol. He had a composite picture of so many places at once that it began to construct a three dimensional image, in the same way one might see the after image of a burning candle if they stared straight at it for a long time and then closed their eyes.

  His third eye was helping him draw a map of this place with the eyes of a hundred spawn and the power of his mind.

  It would be a time-consuming process. Fast as they were, it was still a sizable area to cover.

  But he wouldn’t miss anything this way. He would have the picture in its entirety. No hidden corner or shadowed alcove would go unexplored.

  The mind-map unfolded in layers, revealing the concentric circles of the city’s design, the orderly blocks and uniform streets which radiated from the city center like the spokes of a wheel. He could feel the little claws of all his spawn darting across smooth black stone dusted with sand, intelligently evading the notice of the lumbering sentinels.

  He realized it wasn’t their intelligence, but his. He was unconsciously moving them, like pieces on a game board.

  As the map grew, it also grew richer in detail. And the more clearly Redmane saw the totality of this city, what appeared at first to be naught but redundancy in the design and placement of the structures became clearer. There were indeed differences. Whether this was all designed to confound intruders or it was simply the way these folk built things, he couldn’t have said.

  But he noticed that on the north, east, west and south sides of the circle, there was a small round building which did not match its rectangular neighbors. Redmane saw one earlier when he was searching with only one pair of eyes. At that moment he had made little of it. But now that he studied four of them, he noted they were too small to be storehouses or even dwellings.

  They could be privies, perhaps.

  He’d have to go inside to find out.

  So he sent four spawn into each one, to have a look around. And he found the same thing in each location.

  Stairwells. The steps built of the familiar black stone, the walls beginning smooth but then becoming rough and irregular, natural caverns. Evidently the presence of his spawn was sufficient to trigger the torches mounted on the stone walls, which lit with Golden Flame as they passed by.

  From the north, south, east and west, Redmane descended with four pairs of eyes and a fifth to guide them all.

  The presence of a familiar power pulsed beneath him. As if beckoning.

  PATREON