Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

Chapter Fifty-Four

Mortanius was exhausted, but no matter how tired he was, he could not afford to get even a few hours of sleep. The spell that kept Kain’s soul trapped in his body was only maintained by constant concentration, so going to sleep would result in the end of all of Mortanius’s carefully-laid plans. He was tired to the bone, but he stayed on his feet and finished his preparations. By the time he was done, it was midday, but his basement laboratory had no windows, and without candles to light the room it would have been black as night.

His old servant Harlis was long dead, and Mortanius had never hired one to replace him. He rarely stayed at his private residence anymore, and in his absence, the property had fallen into disrepair. However, his laboratory was still intact, and it would serve for this one final experiment.

Kain’s body was propped upright and fastened in place with chains. Yannig’s sword remained where Yannig had put it, the blade sticking out of Kain’s chest, smeared with blood and dirt. It was a grisly sight, but necessary. Kain’s body was in effective stasis, temporarily unaffected by decay of any kind. Even within a few hours of death, there would be biological changes that Mortanius could not allow, and so he maintained Kain’s body from the moment of his death. For the moment, Kain’s soul was trapped inside a gemstone, but it would not remain there for long.

When everything was in place, Mortanius set the stage. With a wave of his arm, the laboratory burst into flames. The fire looked real and gave off waves of convincing heat, but it was all an illusion, a spell created specifically for this purpose. The young nobleman before him would expect to see such a vision in the underworld, and Mortanius needed him to believe.

Mortanius had managed to do a little bit of research in the few short days before Kain reached Ziegsturhl, and had come to the conclusion that Kain was a brash and arrogant man, driven by his ego and obsessed with his own sense of right and wrong. It was no secret that Kain’s family had lost much of its wealth and social standing in recent years, and his journey to Meridian was in many ways an act of desperation. In another time, Kain would have become the Lord of Coorhagen. His current disappointing situation – forced to travel to another city to beg the generosity of distant relatives – must have felt supremely unfair to him. Everything that Mortanius had learned about Kain led to one overall theory of the man’s personality: Kain believed that he deserved better, that he was destined for greater things. Mortanius would use that desire for greatness to spur Kain on his quest.

The final bit of theater was a spell to alter his own appearance. Mortanius moved his hand across his face and his features changed. The tone of his skin became ghostly white and his cheeks and eyes became sunken and gaunt. The effect was quite grim, making his face look more like a skull than that of a living man. Combined with his dark red cloak, he looked like the spectre of death, which he supposed was appropriate.

The spells holding his subject in place ended with the snap of his fingers. “Kain,” he said in a booming voice, “Awake.”

Kain jerked forward, his eyes popping open in a look of abject terror. He opened his mouth to scream, but there was no air in his lungs. Yanking in panic at his restraints, he sucked in a breath and cried out in despair. Surrounded by flames, the sword that killed him still impaled through his chest, he screamed and pulled so hard at his chains that it seemed he wanted to yank his limbs from their sockets.

“What’s going on?” Kain wailed. “What’s happening to me?”

Mortanius took no joy in the man’s torment, but he kept his expression blank and folded his hands in front of him. “You are dead, Kain. Murdered by cruel men.”

“No!” Kain pulled against his restraints again but his efforts lacked the intensity of a few moments ago. He sagged down and stared dejectedly at the ground, his body trembling. “No, this cannot be,” he groaned, shaking his head, “… I was on my way to Meridian ...”

“I know where you were heading,” Mortanius said. “And so did the men who waylaid you. They were waiting to ambush you, my Lord.”

“What are you talking about?” Kain demanded, his head snapping up. “Who are you? If I’m dead, then how am I talking to you? I demand to know what’s going on here!”

Mortanius let himself smile. For a moment, he was worried that Kain would slip into despair and self-pity. But even in death, Kain carried himself with a sense of noble entitlement.

“You are most certainly dead, my Lord. But I have interrupted your journey to the spirit world.”

“How have you done this? And why? Are you a wizard?”

“I’m a necromancer. As to why I’ve done it, the truth is that your fate is entwined with the fate of Nosgoth itself. It is within my power to return you to the world of the living, if that is what you desire.”

“Of course that is what I desire, you fool!” Kain shouted. Then, he seemed to realize that he was at Mortanius’s mercy, and forced himself to speak in a calmer tone of voice. “I would be … indebted to you. But I must ask again, why have you done this? What is my life to you, wizard?”

“Nosgoth needs your help, my Lord,” Mortanius said. “You are an educated man, so surely you know how our world has fallen into decline. The land is poisoned, immorality and crime are rampant, and the people of Nosgoth suffer for it.”

“Yes,” Kain said. “I know of this. Everyone knows.”

Mortanius stepped closer. “I can give you the opportunity to make a difference in the world, my Lord. To hunt down those who seek to harm the innocent. I can give you the chance to avenge your own death, and kill the men responsible.”

Kain stared intensely at him. Mortanius could see the thrill of revenge swirling in his mind. People were murdered every day, but none of them ever had the chance to exact vengeance upon their own murderers. Such an opportunity was something that no one could turn down. Kain was a nobleman born into wealth and privilege, and the thought that he had been brought down by a group of dirty peasants surely burned within him. Mortanius was counting on it.

“Yes. I would like that very much, necromancer,” Kain said.

Mortanius nodded and walked around Kain. He placed his hand on the hilt of Yannig’s sword and pulled. Kain screamed in disgust as Mortanius slid the blade free, the metal scraping on the bent edges of Kain’s punctured armor. He felt no pain, but the sight of the sword slicing through his own body would have been discomforting, to say the least. When the sword was free, Mortanius walked back in front of Kain.

With a subtle gesture of his hand, the chains that held Kain in place suddenly broke apart, setting him free. He stumbled a bit at his newfound freedom, placing a hand on the hole in his breastplate. His face twisted in a scowl of fury and anguish, and he stared at Mortanius as if unsure whether to embrace him or throttle him.

Mortanius held out the sword for his inspection. “The men you seek are in the town of Ziegsturhl. You should have no trouble finding them. One of them still rides your steed and carries your sword. This one belonged to him.”

“Then I will slay him with his own sword,” Kain spat, grabbing the handle and holding the blade up. “I’ll kill them all. They’ve taken my blood, and so I’ll take theirs in return.”

“My Lord, I promise that you will have all the blood you desire.”

“So I will be … resurrected?”

“When you awake, you will be alive once more. And after your revenge is complete, there is something you must do. You must travel to the Pillars.”

“Why the Pillars?” Kain asked, glancing up at Mortanius with a hint of suspicion in his eyes.

“Your assassination was only one piece of a vast conspiracy, my Lord. The Pillars are the key to it all. It is there that you will learn the truth.”

“What truth? Stop speaking in riddles, wizard.”

“Nosgoth is on the verge of destruction, my Lord. And only you have the power to stop it. Go to the Pillars and you will understand. If you do not do this, then Nosgoth is doomed.”

Before Kain had time to respond, Mortanius cast a spell to interrupt the magic that kept Kain’s body animated. He flopped over like a puppet with its strings cut, the sword clattering from his grip. Mortanius quickly cast the levitation spell again to keep Kain’s body from striking the floor. With another wave of his hand, the illusory flames around him disappeared, revealing his laboratory once more. He moved Kain’s body onto one of his examination tables, and then found a chair to fall into. Although the flames were not real, the heat they generated was real enough, and Mortanius was sweating like a pig under his cloak.

Casting so many spells in a short time drained his endurance to the limit. Once again, he yearned for sleep, but he was not done yet. In fact, he had not even started work on the most difficult part of his plan. What came next would be vastly more challenging, requiring levels of magic that Mortanius had never fully experimented with.

If he had to be completely honest with himself, he didn’t even know if it would work.

Kain was dead. Mortanius could permanently resurrect him, like he had done to Malek so many years before, but that was not a real solution. Nosgoth did not need another undead warrior haunting the land. If that is all Mortanius wanted, he could easily have found a willing subject among the legions of disaffected and leaderless soldiers all over Nosgoth. He would not have bothered to track down the new Guardian of Balance for something like that.

Besides, that is not what he promised. He promised Kain that he would live again, and that is what he intended Kain to do. For the first time, Mortanius would literally bring the dead to life. But it might not be the life that Kain expected.

Mortanius wearily got up and walked over to his shelves of magical components. He had a table set up with several of his magical grimoires. Sitting on top of the texts was a small polished wooden box. Mortanius picked it up with one hand and then carefully raised the lid.

Inside was an object that he had possessed for more than four hundred years. Originally, he had intended to study it, but the Slaughter of the Circle distracted him from that project and he eventually forgot that the item even existed. It was not until about a century ago that he found it again, buried in the back of one of his overcrowded cabinets.

In the box was the heart of Janos.

After four centuries, it should have been a shriveled black husk no bigger than a walnut. But the heart looked as if it had not decayed or decomposed at all. By some strange vampiric magic that Mortanius could not even begin to comprehend, the heart looked exactly like it had the day Raziel of the Sarafan cut it out of Janos’s chest.

The heart of a vampire. Mortanius held it up and looked over at the corpse on the nearby examination table. Soon, the heart would beat once more, and Kain would return to the world of the living, but not as a human being. With the heart of a vampire beating in his chest, Kain would become a vampire as well.

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