The Lost Prince Read online

  “Many wizards use staves to focus their spells,” she explained. “Staves, wands, amulets, rings, and so forth are walking aids or decorative accessories for the best of wizards, and a crutch for the rest. You are hopelessly lame and, I believe, in desperate need of one.”

  “Did we stop at Wizards R Us?”

  “These branches are from Rosencrantz. Wizard trees are very rare, and staves made of their wood even rarer. Magic from the lay lines has seeped into the wood over the years. It will not be difficult to draw magic into the finished staff from far-off sources.”

  The branch was hardly straight, still had bark on it, and was pretty thick and heavy in his hands. “Really?”

  “You must whittle your staff from that branch,” said Lelani. “And take care to save the shavings—they can be used for potions and other enchantments.”

  “I don’t know diddly squat about whittling.”

  “I’ll teach you my technique,” Lelani said. “But your bond to the staff is determined by your mind-set as you craft it. Put some thought into what you want to accomplish. I’ll help you with the runes when it’s ready.”

  “Runes? I have to learn a foreign language, too?”

  “Magic is language, Seth—verbal and nonverbal, thought, knowledge, and will merged into a single action. When we cast a spell, we’re communicating with magical energy to produce an effect—rearrange molecules, speed or slow kinetic movement to change temperature, and in more advanced stages, altering the smallest particles of creation—even brain neurons that influence the mind. The more powerful the wizard, the smaller the particle he can manipulate. But you have to have a fundamental understanding of a thing, both in what it is and what you intend to create. And, most importantly, we are asking the energy to undertake this change.”

  “What if the hocus pocus says no?”

  “The things a caster asks are in harmony with the energy’s nature,” Lelani instructed. “Just as a bee wants to make honey, the energy wants to affect things. It is oblivious to the ramifications of those changes at our level of understanding. If a wizard turned you into a mouse, the magical energy he used to rearrange you is not aware that you think being a mouse is inferior to being a man. It does not realize that it is changing you from the version of yourself that you hold superior. The magic was asked, in the proper cipher and form, to rearrange you in a particular way, and its nature is to do that.”

  “Does the energy think?” he asked.

  Lelani smiled. Was this what geeked her out?

  “The sentience of magical energy is a matter of great debate,” Lelani said. “Scholars, sorcerers, and clerics have had passionate arguments—even coming to blows. Some clerics believe it is the lifeblood of the gods coursing through all creation. They become incensed when wizards use the power outside of what is prescribed in their dogma. The true source of the energy is a mystery.”

  “So Dorn is using the same magic we are … the intent is what makes magic dark, not the spell itself?”

  “Dark?” she queried. Her eyes thinned and settled on his contemplatively.

  “You know … black magic. Casting spells for devils, turning people into mice to feed their pythons.”

  “Seth, that is not dark magic. I told you, the energies pass no judgments on the spell caster’s intent. Such spells, constructed to convey a sense of evil or foreboding, serve really to fuel the caster’s self-image. The magic doesn’t care if the caster prefers to wear black robes instead of white, spiderwebs over roses, or pentagrams to circles. All that is required is access and communication.”

  “But your reaction just now…?”

  “Dark magic is a perversion—banned in Aandor. It forces the energy to act against its own well-being. After you render a spell, the energy you used continues through the multiverse in some form or another. Dark magic, however, wrests control of the energy, captures it, or destroys it.” She turned serious, solemn. “You do not want to provoke or harm the magic … it could curse you.”

  Cat and Cal emerged from the clerk’s office in better spirits than they went in. “I’ll have you know there are plenty of brilliant police officers,” he overheard Callum say to his wife.

  “Mostly on television,” Cat responded.

  “Where to now?” asked Seth.

  “To talk to a man at a diner,” said the cop.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE TIPPING POINT

  1

  The examining room conveyed to Dorn a cold, antiseptic feeling of death. Its bright red hazardous materials box blared radiantly against the room’s mint hue. Posters under the fluorescent lights illustrated unique maladies—a travel advertisement warned of inoculations to stave off the dangers in Africa. This lord of Farrenheil, nephew to the archduke, could not remember a more humbling experience—even in the earliest days of his youth, when his nascent susceptibility to magic subjected him to his family’s contempt. Dorn was cognizant of their distrust of his abilities. Magic was simply not the attribute of a prince. Sitting naked in a paper gown, it was clear there was nothing to be done about his ailing health on this earth. His only chance to live was to return to Aandor, and the only way to return to Aandor was victorious. Victorious or not at all, were his aunt’s exact words. He had to complete his mission. He had to murder his cousin, the prince.

  The debilitating migraines and voices plagued him more each day. So desperate was he to stay this coming tide, he had turned to the quacks and charlatans of this universe for a local remedy. His servants pretended not to notice, but his periods of incapacitation and irrationality were growing more frequent. How long can a man plagued with madness retain their loyalty?

  Medical implements lay before him on the counter. If he thrust the scalpel into his temple, would it stay the pain, cut out the voices?

  No inoculation would have prepared Dorn for this trip. That his group was ill prepared was an understatement. Who knew the court mage of Aandor, Magnus Proust, had discovered a bridge between universes? Dorn often remarked that Proust’s reputation was bloated—the endless accolades simply enthused hyperbole. And yet Proust, with his power and great knowledge, was impotent against Farrenheil’s invasion. Invasion? It was an onslaught. They took the capital and most of the kingdom in a single day. This last trick of sending the prince across universes was the final desperate gasp of an extinct house.

  Dorn offered a small fortune to have his examination and blood work rushed. But here he waited yet again. The doctor had skittered off to tend other patients and left him alone to rot. In Farrenheil, Dr. Korensteen’s family would cower for their lives until he successfully healed a member of the archduke’s family. Dorn toyed with the idea of converting the doctor into a minion instead of paying the promised exorbitant fee.

  Not to waste a period of clarity, the bored lord of Farrenheil retrieved his iPad and opened a file with the scanned parchments of forbidden magicks that he’d stolen during the invasion. These sorceries had been sealed and guarded for centuries in a vault on the border of Aandor and Nurvenheim. All requests to study the scrolls had been turned down—but war favored the opportunist. Chaos made an excellent cover, circumventing powers that might have been brought to bear protecting the scrolls. Many sorcerers had died defending their citadel. Dorn did not see wizardry as a brotherhood—the fewer, the better. True magic users were rare; one in ten thousand had any sensitivity to magical energies. Of them, maybe one in a thousand could willfully wield the energy.

  One scroll contained a spell that could suck an entire city into a singularity no larger than a grape seed. A black snake on a scarlet, hexagon-shaped field was stamped in the corner of that parchment; all the scrolls had this mark—the symbol for forbidden knowledge. Like most of these spells, it required a radioactive element. Destructive weapons existed in this reality through scientific means, but in Aandor, where men still fought wars by hacking at each other with swords and spears, such a spell would be interpreted as an act of the gods.

  You are a god, said t
he voice. He ignored it. Talking only encouraged madness.

  Dorn read over the singularity spell and wondered what the point of war was if there were no spoils. Sword fighting was messier and less efficient, but one could not rape or enslave cinders or plunder a singularity. One could not farm a field burned to ashes.

  You would be the farmer of death … your crop a bountiful row of corpses.

  The other spells were just as impressive. A few could be utilized to hunt down the prince. They would not be necessary, though. His indentured detective, Colby Dretch, was hot on the lad’s trail. Using forbidden spells at this point was like swatting a fly with a trebuchet. These spells would have to wait until they returned to Aandor. Perhaps he would wipe out that postage-stamp kingdom of Jura—always cowering behind Aandor’s skirt. A miscreant breed of ass kissers if he’d ever met any.

  He opened the locket with the image of Lara. She was only a few years older than him, and could have chosen any lover in the Twelve Kingdoms. Their affair was the worst kept secret, made scandalous only by the fact that she was his mother’s half-sister. But her reputation as a vengeful witch kept their detractors’ tongues in check. Dorn suspected she had enchanted him, heightening his passions for her. It was ironic that those best able to utilize sorcery were also most susceptible to it. Resistance to magic was the sole commonality among the rulers of the Twelve Kingdoms. It was why Dorn could never rule.

  He wondered about the love spell that Lara may or may not have cast on him. These spells were complex, dangerous enchantments and difficult to remove. The enchanted has no desire to remove the spell even when he or she is aware they’d been afflicted. It was like a drug. Intense longing came over the subject when parted from the object of the spell. Dorn had not been prepared to be away from Lara for so long when he crossed over into this universe. He wondered if this was the root of the migraines, the dementia that had grown increasingly worse since arriving on this dimensional plane. “I’ll be home soon,” he told his aunt’s portrait.

  The doctor walked in without announcing himself. It irritated Dorn to no end. This world excelled at rebukes, and all seemingly set against Dorn’s superiority. “Have you diagnosed the cause of my headaches?” he asked bluntly.

  “The causes of many migraines are a mystery,” the doctor said, sidestepping the question. “May I call you Rudolf?”

  Another slap; he was required to fill in his full name on the office indemnity form. “No,” said Dorn flatly. The doctor continued regardless.

  “You’re exhibiting symptoms similar to decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends. Do you scuba?”

  “No,” Dorn said.

  “It can also occur during travel when an aircraft isn’t properly pressurized. Have you traveled recently?”

  “Yes,” Dorn said. Perhaps it’s not the love spell after all. “But, my companions do not share my symptoms.”

  “You could simply be more susceptible than other people.”

  The doctor was a never-ending line of insults, and he had graduated from rude manners to direct affront; implying that Dorn’s ragtag band of half-breeds and peasant bastards were better suited to survivability than a member of the house of Farrenheil. Dorn couldn’t see himself suffering this man’s presence too much longer … his usefulness was becoming marginal at best. “And what, pray tell, is to be done?” Dorn asked.

  “Like I said, you show similar traits to people suffering from this. Your blood work came back negative for dissolved gasses. There are bubbles forming in your blood though. I don’t know what’s causing it. It does not seem to be pressure related, you have no joint pain or breathing problems despite the staggers, so I don’t think a hyperbaric chamber would do much good. Frankly, I am stumped.”

  “Is there anything you can do for the migraines while I search for a more competent physician?” Dorn said, pondering the doctor’s imminent demise.

  The doctor was shocked at Dorn’s directness. He pulled a prescription bottle from his lab coat pocket. “Treximet will help,” he said, handing Dorn the pills. Dorn swallowed his dosage while the doctor watched, clueless that the medicine only bought him a reprieve contingent on its effectiveness.

  “It should allow you to focus,” Dr. Korensteen continued. “I’m also setting up an appointment with a neurological specialist at New York Presbyterian. Can I inform the neurologist that you’ll be offering a similar cash deal for payment?”

  Dorn agreed, but with the detective close to finding his little lost prince, he hoped to be back in Farrenheil before the appointment. The doctor left to let Dorn dress.

  As Dorn put on his Armani suit, there was a knock at his door. He thought it was Korensteen again, until he realized the doctor would not seek permission to enter. “Come,” said Dorn.

  Oulfsan, entered—tall and thin with a fair complexion and impeccably dressed in a tuxedo of gray pinstriped trousers, white shirt with bow tie, and black long-tailed jacket. Oulfsan’s outdated attire reminded Dorn how far they’d come since arriving in this reality.

  They’d crossed the transference point following the prince’s party expecting to find themselves somewhere outside Aandor City. It was a similar spell that allowed Farrenheil’s armies to sidestep Aandor’s border forts and deliver crushing blows to the capital city’s support garrisons. But the transfer point Proust created actually led to another universe … this universe. Dorn’s company had been unprepared for the differences in this reality: language, customs, currency, and so forth. They also believed they were only a few hours behind the prince, only to find it was years.

  When they arrived at the transference point in upstate New York, they took refuge from the storm in a bookstore. With shelves of images and language from which to draw, Dorn thought it a stroke of good luck. He and Symian were able to concoct crude language spells from the texts and give everyone a passing knowledge of modern English. They utilized photos from the books to create new garments, but unfortunately, did not realize at the time the wide range of eras covered in all the books, and that fashions on this world evolved rapidly. Oulfsan and his fraternal twin, Krebe, searched for servants’ attire and had become enamored with a book on Victorian England. The desert sorcerer K’ttan Dhourobi fancied fashions from a tome on cinema from the 1970s. Dhourobi had been killed in a duel with the centaur mage Lelani Stormbringer, and, Dorn had to admit, he was grateful not to have to suffer K’ttan’s swagger or powder-blue leisure suit any longer. Any fool that lets an acolyte, and one from an inferior race at that, defeat him in open battle was too incompetent to remain in his service. The rest of his crew eventually came in line with their choices of contemporary styling. He didn’t care so much about Oulfsan because he was not expected to be out in the field like the others. And yet, what was so important that the man ventured the six blocks from their suite in The Plaza hotel?

  “How fare you, my lord?” Oulfsan asked.

  “We shall know shortly,” Dorn said, shaking the bottle of pills. “What news?”

  Oulfsan fidgeted uncomfortably.

  “Well?” Dorn said curtly.

  “Our devoted taxi driver, Salim, has gone missing.”

  “Missing?” asked Dorn, incredulously. “He has no family, no green card. I hold the man’s heart in a velvet sack. Where could he have gone?”

  “Lhars saw him in the elevator this morning, looking more miserable than usual,” Oulfsan said.

  “And what of our other heartless? Are they of a mind to defect?”

  “The specialist is set to his task and awaits the proper opportunity. The other, Tom, remains at the hotel. He is far less ambitious than the others and seems to be content, so long as we allow him to watch the Devils play hockey. I’ve never seen someone less concerned that he is missing his heart. He doesn’t realize he should be more worried. He may have been mentally deficient prior to our converting him.”

  Dorn’s sour stomach competed with his migraine for the greatest discomfort. Half of their contingent had been lost
in a battle upstate two nights past. What remained were idiots, freaks, and half-breeds with only Lhars, Gunther, and Hommar his last three human soldiers from Farrenheil. They were loyal and trustworthy, if not particularly bright. A new migraine struggled against the medicine he just took. He rubbed his temples and hoped Korensteen’s treatment would kick in. “Our heartless minions are dropping like flies,” he pointed out.

  “Perhaps, my lord, if we restored one minion to health, Tom perhaps, it might inspire the more able servants,” Oulfsan said.

  Dorn laughed. Oulfsan wasn’t seeing the humor.

  “Creating a minion is an act of sorcery,” Dorn said. “Restoring one to full life is an act of divinity. We can return their hearts, but only a cleric can return their breath. Do you see any clerics in our party?”

  “Then we…”

  “Lied,” Dorn said. “Hope is the chain that binds our thralls to their purpose. Speaking of which, what news of our fair detective?”

  “Krebe has followed him to Baltimore. The boy resides in a suburb, but … there was some type of incident at the home. The police have sealed the scene and he could not get closer to investigate.”

  Another stab of pain cut across Dorn’s stomach. If the migraines didn’t kill him, the ulcer surely would. “What type of action?” he asked.

  “It looks as though the prince was involved in a murder, and … has fled.”

  With no warning, Dorn backhanded Oulfsan across the cheek. The man broke his fall clutching the edge of the examining table. He was shocked, frightened. Dorn’s agitation accumulated in his temple, feeding his migraine.

  “You waited to tell me this?” Dorn said. Another wave of pain restrained his rage. He backed off cradling his forehead.

  “I-I w-was concerned a-a-about your health, my lord,” Oulfsan stammered.

  “My health? My health will improve when I am attended by true healers and not these pill mongers! Where is the detective?”

  “He searches for the boy still. His car is parked at the motel where he took a room. He has not called in over a day.”