Mother of Daemons Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by David Hair

  Dedication

  Map 1: Yuros and Antiopia

  Map 2: Central Yuros

  Map 3: Mollachia

  Map 4: Pallas

  What has Gone Before

  PART ONE

  Prologue: The Masquerade (Macharo)

  1: At War With Ourselves

  2: His Master’s Voice

  3: The Copperleaf Walls

  4: How Far Will You Go?

  5: A Journey of the Soul

  6: The Governor

  7: The Cats of Dupenium

  8: Hegikaro

  9: East and West

  10: Sancta Esmera

  11: The Test

  12: A Place of Refuge

  13: My Enemy’s Enemy

  14: A Foe Beyond You

  15: The Convent

  16: A Vision of Now

  17: Wings of Pearl-White

  18: Forever Broken

  19: Step Into The Light

  PART TWO

  Interlude: The Masquerade (The Puppeteer)

  20: Against the Omens

  21: Imposter

  22: Angel of War

  23: Three Armies

  24: Broken Lines

  25: Stronger Together

  26: Armoured From Within

  27: Sunlight Through Glass

  28: Triumphal

  29: At Bay

  30: A Sea of Fog and Ruin

  31: A Night to End All Days

  32: You’ll All Fall With Me

  33: The Last Night

  34: The Fall

  35: The Last Hour

  Epilogue I: A Western Sunset

  Epilogue II: Four Years Later: An Eastern Dawn

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by

  Jo Fletcher Books

  an imprint of

  Quercus Editions Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2020 David Hair

  The moral right of David Hair to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  TPB ISBN 978-1-78429-065-8

  EBOOK ISBN 978-1-78429-089-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by David Hair

  THE MOONTIDE QUARTET

  Mage’s Blood

  Scarlet Tides

  Unholy War

  Ascendant’s Rite

  THE SUNSURGE QUARTET

  Empress of the Fall

  Prince of the Spear

  Hearts of Ice

  THE RETURN OF RAVANA

  The Pyre

  The Adversaries

  The Exile

  The King

  This book is dedicated to Eric Greig, my father-in-law, a witty, clever and thoroughly decent man whose life in provincial New Zealand is like a chronicle of our country, from a time of gravel roads linking our countryside to the information highways of the present. He’s now in his ninetieth year. Very best wishes to you, Eric: it’s a privilege to know you and be a part of your family.

  What has Gone Before

  The Events of 930–935, as related in

  Empress of the Fall

  In Junesse 930, a newly formed mage order, the Merozain Bhaicara, save the Leviathan Bridge and use its gnostic energy to destroy the Imperial Windfleet above, killing Emperor Constant and Mater-Imperia Lucia.

  These deaths create a power vacuum at the heart of the Rondian Empire. The first to react is the Church of Kore – Grand Prelate Dominius Wurther, guardian of the emperor’s children, Prince Cordan and Princess Coramore, prepares to form a Regency Council in Cordan’s name to continue the Sacrecour dynasty. But Wurther’s confidante, Ostevan Jandreux, tips off his kinswoman, Duchess Radine Jandreux, in the northern city of Coraine. Radine sends Corani mage-knights led by Solon Takwyth and the Volsai spy-master Dirklan Setallius to capture Cordan and Coramore from under the Church’s nose. More importantly, they free the hitherto unknown Lyra Vereinen, the daughter of the late Princess Natia, a claimant for the throne.

  The Corani take Lyra, Cordan and Coramore to their fortress in Coraine and plan a return to power. With their rivals paralysed by the disasters of the Third Crusade, they persuade Grand Prelate Wurther and Treasurer Calan Dubrayle to abandon the Sacrecours and aid the Corani (an agreement that includes the banishment of Ostevan, in revenge for his betrayal of Wurther). Duchess Radine marches her soldiers into Pallas, where the populace, fearing a civil war (and beguiled by the fairy-tale circumstances of Lyra’s rescue) greet them with great rejoicing.

  However Lyra is no compliant tool of Corani ambitions, but a complex young woman with secrets. Her full parentage is uncertain and despite being born a pure-blood mage, she was never trained in the gnosis. When she does awaken to magic, it’s not the gnosis, but the heretical power of dwymancy. And worse, she’s fallen in love with her rescuer, Corani knight Ril Endarion, an unsuitable relationship for the figurehead of the Corani cause.

  On the eve of Lyra’s coronation, with Radine demanding that she accept the formidable Solon Takwyth as her husband, Lyra blindsides the duchess and persuades Ostevan (facing exile and acting out of spite) to marry her to Ril. After Lyra is crowned the next day, she declares her marriage before the world; Radine, Takwyth and Setallius are forced to accept her actions – and Takwyth is exiled for striking Ril, the new Crown Prince.

  Despite this shaky start, the Corani are able to face down their rivals and the succession crisis appears to have been resolved. In relief, Pallas and the empire settles into dealing with a new world and a new ruler.

  *

  For five years the Rondian Empire struggles on. The Treasury is forced to impose heavy taxes to rebuild Imperial finances, vassal states like Argundy, Estellayne and Noros are clamouring for greater autonomy and warlords and mercenaries are warring in the far south. Duchess Radine dies, embittered by what she considers to be Lyra’s betrayal, but Ril and Lyra continue to reign in Pallas, although Lyra has two miscarriages and has no heir of her blood. Cordan and Coramore, her de facto heirs, remain her prisoners in Pallas.

  In Ahmedhassa, Sultan Salim Kabarakhi I of Kesh is trying to rebuild his realm, with the aid of Rashid Mubarak, the mighty Eastern mage. His efforts are undermined by corruption – and by the Shihadi faction who are demanding revenge against the West, even though the Leviathan Bridge, the only link to Yuros, will be submerged until 940.

  In 935, new crises are developing in the East and West. A secret cabal whose identities are concealed even from each other by the Lantric theatre masks they wear is formed by Ervyn Naxius, a genius unconstrained by anything even remotely resembling morality. He offers the cabal members powers to match the Merozain Bhaicara through a link to an ancient super-daemon named Abraxas: Ascendant strength and use of all sixteen facets of the gnosis, as well as the ability to enslave others using the daemon’s ichor. The ‘Masks’ join him in his quest to rule the new era.

>   In the West, the cabal plans to supplant Empress Lyra with the pliant Prince Cordan, starting with snatching Cordan and his sister from Corani custody. They strike during a jousting tournament staged to bolster Lyra and Ril’s faltering rule. The exiled, bitter Ostevan, now ‘Jest’ of the Masks cabal, having engineered a return to court as Lyra’s confessor, begins to infect courtiers and the general populace with the daemon’s ichor, masking the effects behind the seasonal outbreak of the riverreek illness, in readiness for seizing the royal children.

  The climax of the tourney sees Ril, a fine warrior for all his faults, against an ‘Incognito Knight’ – who on his victory reveals himself to be Solon Takwyth, returned from exile. He begs a boon before the adoring crowd, that he be forgiven and permitted to return to Corani service. Lyra cannot refuse his manipulative request – then she learns that Cordan and Coramore have been abducted and orders Dirklan Setallius, her spymaster, to find them before they can be used against her.

  Meanwhile in the East, the Masks have struck a savage blow: at the height of the Convocation, a religious and political event to shape future policy, Sultan Salim is assassinated by masked assassins. The only survivor of his household is Latif, his chief impersonator, who immediately goes into hiding. Rashid Mubarak seizes control; his sons, the brutal Attam and the cunning Xoredh, advance his stated plan for Shihad, a holy war against the vast and hostile nation of Lakh, their old enemy.

  Prince Waqar, Rashid’s nephew, investigates Salim’s murder and the related poisoning of his own mother Sakita. With the help of Tarita Alhani, a Javon spy, he learns that he and his sister Jehana may be heirs to a mysterious power, but before they can dig deeper, Waqar is sent south on a secret mission for Rashid to Lokistan, leaving Tarita to continue on her own.

  In Dhassa, the mage-brothers Kyrik Sarkany and Valdyr Sarkany, princes of the tiny Yurosi kingdom of Mollachia, who have been captives in the dehumanising breeding-houses of the Eastern magi, are reunited. The meeting is not amicable: after the war, Kyrik was released into the care of Godspeaker Paruq, a priest of Ahm, but Valdyr, remaining true to Kore, has been a slave-labourer for five years. He has never gained the gnosis, having been under a gnosis-suppressing Rune of the Chain since his capture as a child. Paruq, having secured the release of the Sarkany brothers, takes them to Yuros, to a tribe of Sydian nomads he’s been working with as a missionary; there, they discover the Sydians might be distant racial kin to their people. The brothers journey alone to Mollachia, where they are captured by tax-farmers, an unfortunate by-product of Empress Lyra’s efforts to fund her reign. The tax-farmers have draconian laws on their side to extract the fortune owed by the Sarkanys’ dead father. There are two Rondian legions stripping the land and people of their wealth, one led by Robear and Sacrista Delestre, the other by Rondian Governor Ansel Inoxion.

  The brothers are locked up and left to die, but they are freed by the legendary Vitezai Sarkanum, local freedom fighters, and a resistance movement begins. Kyrik returns to the Sydian steppes to recruit aid; the price is marriage to the fiery Sydian witch Hajya. Valdyr distinguishes himself against the Rondian occupiers, but is still unable to gain the gnosis, despite having his Chain-rune removed.

  In Pallas, Naxius and his Masks are readying their coup, using ordinary citizens apparently suffering from a virulent outbreak of the riverreek illness but in reality, possessed minions of the daemon Abraxas. They are used as shock troops in coordinated assaults on the Imperial Bastion and the Church of Kore’s holiest site, the Celestium. Using secret underground tunnels, the attack penetrates all defences; it’s coordinated with a planned unveiling of Prince Cordan as the new emperor and the arrival of a Sacrecour army at the gates.

  Meanwhile in the East, the new sultan’s careful long-term planning reaches fulfilment. Rashid has assembled a vast windfleet: now he reveals that his real target isn’t Lakh, but Yuros. The only thing preventing invasion of the West is the Leviathan Bridge itself: if the Ordo Costruo or the Merozain Bhaicara unleash the powers of the Bridge’s towers, as they did against Emperor Constant’s fleet in 930, Rashid’s fleet will be destroyed.

  At this stage, a new variable enters play: dwyma, or pandaemancy, a heretical form of magic believed extinct. Now Fate or coincidence has placed four people with the power to use it in the midst of these world-changing events – although two of them don’t even suspect they have the power.

  In Pallas, the attacks on the Bastion and Celestium appear to be succeeding and the Masks are on the brink of seizing power. But Empress Lyra uses dwyma to slay one of the apparently indestructible Masks, while in the Celestium, a burst of light from a shrine associated with Saint Eloy, a dwymancer who supposedly abjured his powers, destroys another Mask.

  In Mollachia, on a wild night on the sacred Watcher’s Peak, Valdyr Sarkany wields the dwyma to freeze a legion of Rondian solders just as they’re about to defeat Kyrik and his Sydian riders. Robear Delestre perishes, but his sister Sacrista survives.

  In the East, the dark side of dwyma is revealed. Sakita Mubarak is also a dwymancer, part of an attempt by the Ordo Costruo to resurrect the long-extinct form of magic. Now a servant of the Masks and kept alive by necromancy, she uses her devastating powers to destroy Midpoint Tower, though it costs her ‘life’. Arriving too late, Waqar and Tarita recover artefacts from the tower and find clues concerning the Masks – then the sultan’s windfleet appears on the southern horizon, heading for Yuros, and Waqar realises that Uncle Rashid, his idol, may have been working with the masked assassins – and was probably behind Sakita’s death.

  It is Julsep 935, and for the first time in recorded history, the East is invading the West. The Ordo Costruo and Merozain Bhaicara cannot prevent the invasion; all their energies must go into repairing the Bridge before it’s washed away. And for the first time in five centuries, dwymancers are walking the lands, with unpredictable and devastating powers.

  The Events of Autumn (Julsep–Octen 935)

  as related in Prince of the Spear

  After barely surviving the Masked Cabal’s attempts to unseat Empress Lyra Vereinen and Grand Prelate Dominius Wurther on Reeker Night, the Rondian Empire reels in shock at the tidings of an Eastern invasion.

  The Masked Cabal are still at large: Jest, Tear and Angelstar hatch a new plot to bring Pallas under their power; while the Eastern conspirators, Ironhelm, Heartface and Beak, prepare for the next phase of their own campaign, to take control of the Shihad.

  Crown Prince Ril Endarion is appointed to command the Imperial Army. He is grateful for the job, not just to help safeguard the realm, but also to escape the steady breakdown of his relationship with Lyra. A fateful kiss on Reeker Night with Lyra’s Volsai bodyguard, his best friend Basia de Sirou, has burgeoned into a passionate affair. Leaving his tangled personal life behind, he throws himself into the impossible task of pulling five rival factions into one Imperial Army. As the Rondian soldiers trek south, they are increasingly divided and uncoordinated. In exasperation, Ril escapes the responsibilities of command by taking on aerial reconnaissance, where he comes into violent contact with a new enemy: Keshi magi riding rocs, giant eagle-constructs. The roc-riders are led by Waqar Mubarak, who has been given responsibility for protecting the air above the Eastern advance.

  Left behind in Pallas, Lyra, now heavily pregnant, researches the dwyma, the heretical magic that saved her on Reeker Night. She’s helped by Dirklan Setallius, Solon Takwyth and Basia de Sirou, but her progress is hampered by her blind spot: Ostevan Jandreux, her comfateri, or confessor, and closest confidante. Ostevan, Jest of the Masked Cabal, uses drugs and religion to bend Lyra to his will.

  A new conspiracy forms to unseat Lyra. The beautiful Medelie Aventour seduces Solon Takwyth and lures him into the group, then reveals herself to be Radine Jandreux, the former Duchess of Coraine, supposedly dead but in fact very much alive, with her youth restored and bent upon Lyra’s destruction. The conspirators believe they have the numbers to succeed where the Reekers failed. Popul
ar movements are also growing, including support for ‘suffragium’, an ancient democratic system, propounded by a radical named Ari Frankel, while in the far south the empire has lost control of Rimoni to the mysterious Lord of Rym.

  Ostevan, using Lyra’s insecurities over Ril’s relationship with Basia, almost succeeds in his attempts to seduce her, but just in time his perfidy is exposed and in her fury Lyra unleashes the dwyma. Ostevan barely escapes and Naxius, worried that his plans may be uncovered, accelerates his plans to seize both Bastion and Celestium. Initiating mystical contact with Lyra, he lures her to the Shrine of Saint Eloy, where he intends to capture her himself.

  In Mollachia, the people are not happy about their new Sydian allies, but Valdyr Sarkany is concentrating on learning more of his new power, which means returning to Watcher’s Peak. Along the way he rescues an injured wolf; he names it Gricoama. Unknown to Valdyr, his nemesis, the mage Asiv Fariddan of Gatioch (Beak of the Masked Cabal), has arrived to trace the outpouring of dwyma energy his master Naxius has sensed. Asiv infects Governor Inoxion with daemon ichor, but the governor is slain by Sacrista Delestre when he attacks and infects her. Sacrista in turn is captured and slain by Dragan, head of the Vitezai Sarkanum, in a barbaric Mollach custom called the Witch’s Grave.

  Meanwhile, Valdyr’s brother Kyrik, guiding the rest of Clan Vlpa into Mollachia, is joined by a group of Schlessen and Mantauri, minotaur-like constructs, led by Fridryk ‘Kip’ Kippenegger. Kyrik learns that he is sterile, but knowing the revelation that he and Hajya cannot produce heirs to the Mollach throne will destroy the vital alliance, he doesn’t tell anyone.

  Waqar is so busy leading the Eastern roc-riders, he is forced to relinquish the hunt for his sister Jehana to Tarita Alhani, the Merozain mage from Javon. Alyssa Dulayne – Heartface of the Masked Cabal – is also hunting Jehana. The trail leads to Sunset Tower, part of the damaged Leviathan Bridge. Alyssa lays siege, but Tarita gets inside to protect the Tower and Jehana.

  Meanwhile, the Shihad is advancing across southeastern Yuros, capturing cities in the sparsely populated region of Verelon, while Sydian tribes flock to their banner. Latif, the former sultan’s impersonator, is part of an elephant unit enduring the horrors of the march.