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The voice was silent as Logan went on mumbling for a bit, ranting really, talking about how he was going to fuck one Jonathan Hale nine different ways from Sunday if he ever made it out of this godforsaken place . . .
I can help you with that, you know.
"Help me with what?"
Getting out of this forsaken place. Isn't that what you just said you wanted? To get out of this place so you can make that bastard pay . . .
Another laugh. "In case you haven't noticed, my leg's pretty messed up. I'm probably bleeding to death right now and I don't even know it. Probably making you and everything else in this place up in my mind, just figments of my imagination as my brain gets starved for oxygen and my veins pour out on the ground."
I assure you, I am quite real.
For whatever reason, Logan believed him. And he played the only hand he saw before him.
"Okay, then; pop my bones back into place, knit my flesh back together, and we'll get out of here. The two of us, together. You help me, I'll help you. Deal?"
There was the sound of a gasp in the darkness, as if the other couldn't quite believe what he'd just heard, and then a quick succession of rapid pops.
Almost like iron clasps being broken under immense force . . .
Logan had a second to wonder just what he'd done, and then the figure from the throne was bending over him, its bony teeth shining in the darkness, the eyes on the necklace around its throat all turning as one to stare at him in horror.
This won't hurt a bit, the other said, and then a hand clamped itself over one side of his face as a searing heat burned itself deep into his flesh and his head was filled with the triumphant laughter of a being who should have remained locked in its prison deep beneath the earth until time itself passed all meaning, but was now free to wreak havoc wherever and whenever it wanted . . .
The Adversary was a prisoner no more.
Six Months Later
The door to the mansion in the swamps outside New Orleans crashed inward from a savage blow, and then Simon Logan strode into the room, staring with satisfaction at the surprised occupants and disrupting the ritual that they'd just begun.
One of them stepped forward.
"What's the meaning of this?" he cried. "How dare you intrude on--"
The speaker, one of the senior mages of the Council of Nine that Simon Logan had once longed to emulate so badly, never got any further. Logan waved a hand, and the man began choking to death, his throat collapsing inward upon itself as if it had been struck by a great weight.
As the man struggled to escape the fate he'd called down upon himself, the other men in the room fell silent, stunned into inaction by the power of the man they thought long dead, the man who had once been nothing more than an eager acolyte but had now returned to them as a powerful sorcerer in his own right.
Just the reaction Logan was hoping for.
He searched their faces one by one, looking for his target. Not seeing him, he addressed the closest man. "Where's Hale?"
This man was perhaps a bit smarter than his colleague, for rather than protesting he simply turned and pointed into the ranks of those behind him.
Sensing where this was going, the men standing in that part of the room quickly separated, leaving Logan staring at the man he had come here to kill.
Hale's mistake was in not attacking the moment Logan entered the room. The extra time gave his opponent the opportunity to prepare his defenses, so when the attack came, it crashed against a wave of arcane force far more powerful than Hale had anticipated.
Logan gazed calmly at Hale as the other stood there, bewildered by his onetime apprentice's newly found power.
"My turn," Logan said with a smile.
When he was finished, there wasn't much left of the former necromancer but a few bloody bits of flesh clinging to the walls.
Logan addressed those still standing in the room.
"I hereby claim leadership of the Council of Nine, its power and authority granted to me by the rite of trial by combat. Any objections?"
There were none.
