AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Queen Soteira shook her head. “Not tonight. In time.”
Cassia sat up further in bed. “You might learn something. I must try.”
“Not tonight,” Queen Soteira repeated.
“As you say, Annassa.” Cassia leaned on Lio.
Apollon studied his brother. “Can we be certain of this?”
“No,” Uncle Argyros answered, “we are not certain of anything. That is why I believe our theory is correct.”
“You have a theory?” Lio asked.
Komnena reached out and touched Lio’s hair, as if on impulse.
When Aunt Lyta put her face in her hands, the dread took hold of Cassia.
“I can’t believe this is happening in our lifetime.” The Guardian of Orthros quit her chair and began to pace.
“What’s happening?” Cassia breathed.
“It is the only explanation,” Queen Alea said. “No one else could test our power in this way.”
“Who could possibly test your power, Annassa?” Cassia shook her head.
“Very few,” Queen Alea answered. “Only six, to be exact.”
The color drained from Lio’s face.
Cassia touched his cheek. “Who are they?”
“The Old Masters,” Uncle Argyros answered.
Silence fell.
Lio broke it. “That’s impossible! They’re a hypothesis. If one is generous. They are more legend than anything else. We don’t even know if they exist, much less if they really have the kind of power the sources, such as they are, claim.”
“They are real,” Kassandra said.
Everyone attended to her.
Orthros’s oracle spoke. “They are in and out of the past, present, and future. They move as fast as lightning, and if I blink, I miss them. They move at the pace of the mountains rising, and I cannot detect their progress. I will tell everything I can to assist against the Collector, but act upon what I see with great caution.”
“What do you see now?” Queen Soteira asked.
“Cassia and Lio are the first to surprise him since before Orthros was founded. He will not make the same mistake twice.”
“An Old Master was in Orthros. I—” Lio’s hand was shaking in Cassia’s. “Goddess. He tried to take you, Cassia.”
“You speak as if we faced Hypnos himself,” Cassia protested. “I admit, when he showed himself, I fancied we might be battling a god, he seemed so powerful. But we defeated him. He was just a man.”
“The Old Masters are neither divine nor mortal,” Uncle Argyros said, “as far as we know from legends and scraps of ancient writings. Lio is correct that the evidence is scant. Name any of the catastrophic events of the past few millennia, and a source about the Old Masters was destroyed in it. Our cult’s best research on them went up in flames with Hagia Notia. Other scrolls simply disappear.”
Cassia tried not to see a game board in her mind. She willed herself not to try to make connections, not to analyze the moves.
“According to what information survives,” Uncle Argyros went on, “the Old Masters are the oldest known hex of necromancers mentioned in the writings of what are now Tenebra and Cordium. They are said to have extended their lives and amassed great power through necromantic arts. These figures appear and reappear in different accounts and esoteric writings. Sometimes there is a mere mention, a fearful allusion, other times worshipful incantations or mad ravings. Extracting a coherent account of each Master from this is impossible. Even determining which figures are the same, which are two different figures, and how many there are is a challenge. Six is the prevailing hypothesis due to some slight consistency between the sources referring to them as a hex.”
Cassia must keep trying to shrink the Collector down to size. She must not let him loom so large in her thoughts and fears. “So they’re just necromancers. Old, powerful ones, but—just mages of Hypnos.”
