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Lio wanted to hurl every drop of magic inside him at Miranda. But it was beyond his control. Spots danced on his vision as the poison advanced through his body, stirring his power and shredding his focus.
Miranda circled the table, checking the security of the straps. “You, Cassia, are what we call a leech. Empty of magic for so long that you’ve started sucking it out of others. How the mighty have fallen. You could have been a Gift Collector like me, but now you are reduced to this. It is the most demeaning fate. Worse than being a mount. You are the bottom feeder of the Master’s hierarchy.” Miranda smiled. “And it is I who have become his favorite. I, whom you betrayed and discarded. Who is in control of our destinies now?”
Cassia studied the ceiling, her expression neutral, all her outrage hidden behind it. Lio knew another person might have snapped at Miranda’s baiting, but not his Lady Circumspect. Her self control was all that stood between him and Miranda’s punishment, and he hated Miranda for putting Cassia in that position, as much as he loved Cassia for protecting him.
“There is just one problem,” Miranda went on. “You couldn’t feed off any mage like a proper leech, could you? That would have been so much easier, if I could simply let you run through a few idiots like Master Gorgos to keep you alive until I’m done with you. But you had to fasten onto a Hesperine of all things.”
Not much of a Hesperine errant now. Lio had never felt so helpless and unable to defend his Grace.
“Last question,” Miranda said. “What am I waiting for while I play with you?”
Lio drew in a breath, shuddering. “You’re waiting…for the poison…to work.”
“Well done. You two answered all my questions correctly without breaking any rules. That is a first.”
Miranda let a moment of silence fall. Her reverence was so great that Lio felt it through her dream wards. The whole room filled with her sense that this was a moment both sacred and profane.
“You survived a match with an Overseer,” she said. “You may progress to the Masters’ Game. And once you proceed, there is no going back.”
She drew her stone dagger again and slid the flat of her blade up the inside of his arm, coaxing his poisoned blood into a bowl. “Epochs ago, the Diviner Queen brought her magical knowledge to this realm. The Six Old Masters became greater than their teacher, and she was fearful of them surpassing her power. She sought to destroy them, but they banished her from their domain.”
Miranda strode to the wall at his right, which he and Cassia could both see. With Lio’s blood as her ink and the dagger as her brush, she drew a hexagram on the wall. “The Old Masters reign supreme over life and death, magic and fate. Their power is beyond imagining. When they go to war against each other, civilizations rise and fall. We all live upon the graves of their past games.”
She painted an Eye of Hypnos on the wall, then another, and another, until there were six.
Miranda’s voice seemed to crawl over Lio’s skin. “Akanthia is their game board. To prevent each other from destroying the world, they have established rules to which all six adhere. In each epoch, there are different rules and a new winner.”
Lio wanted to dismiss all of this as Miranda’s mad ravings. But he had read the hints about the Old Masters in the scrolls. Cassia had beheld the ruins at Btana Ayal.
Lio could imagine it, this twisted contest that had reduced the shadowlands to ruins again and again and left Tenebra a stunted child compared to the thriving Empire.
Lio believed Miranda.
She smeared the remaining blood onto her hand. With a loving caress, she left her handprint on the Eye at the top of the hex. “In every epoch, the Masters choose new followers, and only the strong survive until the next game. I will fight for the Collector in every game, from now until the end of time.”
She faced them. “In this time, the rules of the game are that the Masters must not reveal themselves to their playing pieces. It is one of the greatest challenges they have ever devised for themselves. This contest of subtlety and manipulation, of strategy and patience is the Collector’s element. This is his epoch to win.”
She stood still, lifting her face toward her master’s glyph. “You have stayed on the board long enough to earn this privilege: you may know his name.”
She scrawled Divine script on the wall in Lio’s blood.
“Cassia is such a slow reader,” Miranda said. “Lio, read it aloud for her and tell her what it means.”
“Kallikrates.” The name sent a pall over him, as if he were invoking a dangerous god. “It means ‘beautiful power’ in the Divine Tongue.”
Cassia shot Lio a look. From the mocking tilt of her brow, he could imagine what she wanted to say. Impressed with himself, isn’t he?
Lio recalled her words after their battle with the Collector at the Summit. I don’t care who he is. He’ll get no respect from me. He’s just another man with too much magic trying to take what he wants. That is as old as the world, and they’re all the same.
In the middle of Miranda’s deadly sermon, Lio almost laughed.
Then his magic cresting under his skin. It finally broke free. The poison had done its work.
His power crashed along the current between him and Cassia. She gasped, her body levitating against the straps. Miranda stood between them, watching with an expression of concentration. Her necromancy coiled around them. Was she studying them?
“Hypnos’s nails,” she cursed. “This is the most unnatural magical interaction I’ve ever seen. What did you do to her, Lio? I won’t be able to displace her magic until I unfasten her from you.”
Hespera’s Grace. In this hour, as always, that was his and Cassia’s hope. Miranda could not understand how their Grace bond interacted with Cassia’s magic.
