The Night Sorceresses Read online

  The trip took several days, but he finally arrived in Ethermoor City. The streets were filthy and lined with beggars. Knowledge Sorcerers experienced intense physical sensations when in the vicinity of someone telling a lie, and Damian could sense the corruption of the Ethermoorian government by just walking through the city itself. He sensed the dishonesty coming from the government buildings miles away so strongly that he felt as if burning ash from a fire was stinging his skin.

  The castle loomed large over the city surrounding it. Damian made his way through the streets to the door of the castle. “My name is Damian Anderson. His Highness requested to see me” Damian said as he handed the letter he had received from King Banderon to the guard standing beside the door. The guard looked over the letter and said, “Come with me.”

  He opened the door and led Damian inside. They walked down a long hallway and stopped at a set of double doors. The guard said, “I will inform His Highness that you are here.” He opened one of the doors, walked inside, and shut the door behind himself. Moments later, the door opened again. The guard popped his head out and said, “King Banderon would like to see you now.”

  Damian walked through the door and into the throne room. “Your Highness, this is Damian Anderson,” the guard said.

  So there you are, in the flesh, Damian thought, seething with fury. A long red carpet stretched across the room, from the doors to a large ornate chair made entirely of gold and silver. A man wearing a suit made entirely of golden material sat on the throne. A crown made of solid gold and studded with every kind of jewel that Damian was familiar with sat on the man’s head.

  I’ll bet that suit is worth enough money to house and feed all the beggars in Ethermoor City for the rest of their lives! Damian thought. Damian bowed to the king and felt very nauseous doing so. King Banderon leaped off his throne and walked down the red carpet. He smiled broadly and shook Damian’s hand vigorously. “Just the person I want to see!” Banderon said.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Your Highness,” Damian said. A searing pain shot through his body as he lied.

  Banderon leaned in and asked, “So what have you found out about the strange creatures?”

  “Not much, only that they killed another woman in Seaside last week.”

  Banderon glanced at a servant woman busy dusting a candelabra attached to one of the walls. He whispered, “Let’s go somewhere we can talk in private.”

  Private? Damian thought, absolutely terrified by the notion of being alone with the sorcerer killer. Then, he noticed a wild terror in Banderon’s eyes, and Damian took comfort in knowing that the man might genuinely be frightened of something.

  “Yes, sir,” Damian replied.

  They walked out of the throne room, down an adjacent hallway, and stopped in front of a door. Banderon looked both left and right as if he were looking to see if there were any potential eavesdroppers around. They were the only people in the hallway. Banderon stopped in front of one of the doors, and the two walked inside. He closed the door and locked it.

  The light of the sun streaming through one small window dimly lit the room. “My new royal alchemist believes that the spectral creatures are Faeblood Wraiths,” Banderon whispered. In the dim light, Damian could see that Banderon’s eyes were wide with terror. He stuck his forefinger in Damian’s face. “And they are predominantly going after sorcerers! You are following my orders to keep people from talking about the creatures, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, I am,” Damian replied as he choked back a lump in his throat.

  A grin stretched across Banderon’s face. “Good.”

  “Sir, why do you think the victims are sorcerers?”

  “My royal alchemist had his suspicions as to what the creatures were, and he created a formula that detects magic. He tested the medications that the victims sold in their shops, and sure enough, there was magic in them. Can you believe that sorcerers and sorceresses were hiding in plain sight, and we didn’t catch them until now?” Banderon said.

  There goes any shred of sorrow I might have felt for Banderon in his dealings with the Faeblood Wraiths. Damian felt like ripping his sword out of its holster and chopping Banderon’s head off, but he maintained his composure.

  “May I meet this man?” Damian asked.

  “Certainly! He comes in at ten at night. He prefers to work at night because he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  Damian narrowed his eyes. “How did you come to hire him?”

  “My old alchemist died three months ago. During the last phase of the interview process for a new one, Halvor showed us his sorcerer-catching formula and demonstrated an ability to catch these criminals. All have used magic in self-defense upon being discovered by the authorities,” Banderon said.

  I must relay this information to the other Knowledge Sorcerers, Damian thought.

  Banderon invited him to eat supper at the palace as he waited for Halvor’s arrival, and Damian accepted. Banderon also took him on a tour of the castle, which Damian thought was rather odd because he was a total stranger to the king.

  At ten, they waited in the servant’s entrance for Halvor’s arrival. At precisely 10 p.m., a cloaked figure walked through the door. Damian could not see the man’s face because the hood of his cloak was covering it.

  Banderon said, “Halvor, I would like you to meet one of the men investigating the murders.” He gestured to Damian. “This is Damian Anderson.”

  The figure pulled the hood off his head, revealing a middle-aged man underneath. He was emaciated, with chin-length brown hair and cold brown eyes.

  Ugh, this is him. Damian thought. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Halvor said with a grin so wide that it showed all his teeth. “What is that lovely bracelet you have there?” Halvor pointed to Damian’s bracelet.

  Damian’s bracelet consisted of a leather strap threaded through an eyelet that he had attached to the top of a bottle. He thought it was odd that someone would even notice it at all. “Oh, it’s just something I made. His Highness tells me that you have invented a formula that can detect magic. I would like to see how it works.”

  “Why don’t you show Damian to your lab?” Banderon suggested, smiling.

  “It would be an honor,” Halvor replied, bowing slightly to Damian. Damian felt as if his skin had caught on fire. It was clear to Damian that Halvor did not want to show him his lab.

  He followed Halvor through the castle. They walked up five different flights of stairs to the fifth floor. Then, they walked down another hallway. Halvor stopped in front of a door. He opened it and led them up a dark spiral staircase. When they arrived at the top of the stairs, Halvor opened another door, and they walked into a room. “This is it,” he said, gazing around the room.

  Damian saw a chemistry apparatus, several shelves full of books, and a telescope pointing out a window. There were no cabinets, and all of Halvor’s materials either sat out on tables or on shelves. Damian walked around the room. He did not see any herbs or liquids typically used in potions, something that might indicate if Halvor was a sorcerer who had turned on his people.

  Instead, he saw bottles and jars of alchemy chemicals sitting on the shelves and tables. “What exactly do you do here?” Damian asked.

  “I turn objects into gold and silver for His Majesty,” Halvor replied.

  Damian’s mind again turned to the homeless in the streets. “Do you create any money to give to the poor?” he asked.

  Halvor burst out laughing. “The poor? I wasn’t hired to help the poor! I was hired to make gold for the king and advise him in matters of science and chemistry!”

  Damian decided not to press the matter any further since alchemy was not what he was interested in discussing with Halvor. He wanted to talk about the concoction he’d made that could detect magic. “How do you make the formula that detects magic? What are the ingredients?”

  “I never disclose my formulas to anyone. Besides, I make that one at home,” Halvor replied.

&nb
sp; “I am an Ethermoorian officer, and I wish to know what’s in the formula!” Damian protested.

  “And I am a chemist with a doctorate in chemistry! You and your fellow officers buy bottles of medications from apothecaries, bring them to me, and I will use my formula to discern if there is magic in them!” Halvor spat. “Here, watch this. The police purchased this liquid in a shop owned by one of those sorcery criminals. The owner was beheaded this morning.” Halvor pulled a bottle out of his pocket. The label on it read, Wart B-Gone. “Wart remover looks innocent enough, right?”

  Damian felt as if he were going to pass out from nerves. The thought of an innocent person being murdered for magic made him sick, and seeing something that provided that person’s livelihood being used to demonstrate how the government hunts down and kills others like them made Damian’s blood boil.

  Damian nodded his head in agreement. After all, the person had been innocent of a real crime and was only trying to make a living helping others.

  “Look at this!” Halvor said as he unscrewed the cap and placed the bottle on a table. He pulled out another bottle full of clear liquid. This bottle did not have a label on it. He opened the bottle and poured a drop of the liquid in the Wart B-Gone. The medicine lit up as brightly as the sun! “See?”

  Damian’s mouth hung open in shock. Then, he reminded himself that he was supposed to be playing along with the government officials as much as he could, and closed his mouth.

  Then, he had an idea. “Could you make some for the officers to use on their investigations? It would be so much faster than bringing the medicines back here to test them.”

  Halvor pulled a large wooden case out of one of the shelves. “Most certainly!” he said as he unlocked the case. He opened the lid, revealing twenty bottles of clear liquid. “How many bottles would you like to take?”

  “I would like to take the whole case, if you don’t mind.”

  “Certainly. Anything to help King Banderon,” Halvor said as he closed the case and handed it to Damian.

  “Thank you so much, Halvor. You are such a help to His Highness.” Pain ripped through Damian’s body.

  He walked out of the tower and said goodbye to King Banderon before leaving the castle.

  Damian decided to take the formula back to the Pyraxia Library in hopes that the other sorcerers could determine what the ingredients were. If they could discover the formula’s contents, perhaps they could recreate enough bottles of it to test as many apothecaries’ medications as possible. If they found magic in the remedies, they could warn the shop owner about the raids on apothecary shops before the police discovered them.

  Damian walked through the door of an inn. An elderly woman with long bushy white hair sat behind a counter. “Excuse me,” Damian said. The woman looked up from the book she was reading. “Do you have a room available for the night?”

  “Room 217 is available,” she said.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “That will be twenty Galdorians.”

  Damian dug twenty pieces of silver out of his pocket and handed them to the woman. She gave him the keys to Room 217. As she did, one of her long white hairs came off in Damian’s hand, and another idea struck him. He had to make sure that the liquid really could detect magic. If it did, then his hair would make the liquid glow, and her’s wouldn’t.

  “Thank you,” Damian said as he turned away from the counter. He walked up the staircase. As soon as he walked into his room, he put the case down on the bed and opened it. He took out a vial and unscrewed the cap. Like most sorcerers and sorceresses, Damian wore gloves to protect his skin from touching iron. Iron severely weakened fairies and their descendants. The gloves also were a barrier between his skin and the potion. He didn’t want to ruin the experiment when he was testing different hairs for magic.

  He decided to test the woman’s hair first. He dipped the long hair in the vial, and nothing happened. He removed her hair, pulled a hair out of his head, and dipped it in the vial. Suddenly, the liquid glowed!

  I have to find out where Halvor lives, Damian thought. He went to bed and spent a restless night wondering what to do about Halvor.

  The next morning, as he was eating breakfast in a restaurant, he saw Halvor’s cloaked figure walk by the window.

  Damian leaped up from the table, crept out the door of the restaurant, and quietly followed him down the street, hoping to see where he was going. He heard Halvor mumble something, and he made an odd signal with his right hand. Suddenly, a brick wall blocked Damian’s path, and a new alleyway appeared where the back of a building had been just seconds before.

  So, he does know magic. He ran down the new alleyway and became disoriented. He ran back to the side street he had entered the alley from and tried to look for Halvor. Damian searched all around that city block but did not find him.

  Damian finished eating his breakfast in the restaurant, saddled his horse, and rode to the Celexia Mountain Range where the Pyraxia Library was.

  It was a two weeks’ journey to the Celexia Mountain Range from Ethermoor City. Along the way, Damian stopped and purchased something from every apothecary shop he found and tested the remedies for magic. If he found magic, he warned the shop owner that they were in danger. He also gave some of Halvor’s bottles to his Knowledge Sorcerer friends working with law enforcement.

  Two weeks later, Damian arrived at Mount Pyraxia. He looked for the rock formations that marked the entrance to the library. A blanket of snow that could only be removed by a magic spell covered the door. The spell was the name of a place in another world that was too hot to snow. A fairy who guarded a vault in another part of the mountain had lived in that place after the banishment and knew no one would guess the word since it was not a word in the Ethermoorian language.

  Damian shoved his hand in the snow as far as he could. “Florida!” he said. The snow suddenly melted away, revealing a gold-plated door.

  There was one more magic word that Damian had to recite to open the door. “Please?” he asked. The door swung open. Damian walked inside, and the warm air of the interior of the library hit him. He and his horse stepped inside and shut the door behind them. The scent of musty old books wafted through his nostrils. A warm glow illuminated the room, and the walls were lined from floor to ceiling with massive bookcases.

  Damian looked down and saw the head librarian, Melvil, standing at the foot of the staircase. He was an elderly man with long white hair and a long white beard. Melvil was the wisest of all the Knowledge Sorcerers. He looked at the top of the stairs and saw Damian standing there. A sorceress took the reins of his horse and led it off to the stables. Melvil’s eyes twinkled with delight when he saw Damian. Damian walked down the spiral staircase and embraced his mentor.

  “Ah, Damian, it’s been so long since I’ve seen you!” Melvil said, smiling. “How have you been?”

  “Oh, I wish things were better.” Damian sighed.

  “Don’t we all? It seems like people are just being murdered left and right these days.”

  “We have our suspicions as to what is happening. Tyrus believes that they are Faeblood Wraiths.”

  Melvil shook his head. “I know, and I pray all the time that they aren’t.”

  “I know the government is hunting sorcerers and sorceresses as well, so we need to be several steps ahead of the government to try to protect them.”

  “Isn’t the government always hunting us?” Melvil chuckled.

  A deadly serious expression came over Damian’s face. “Not like this. I was summoned to the palace to discuss the progress of the murder investigations with the king. Banderon has this alchemist working for him who has created a formula that detects the presence of magic in apothecary medicine. When I was at the palace, the alchemist gave me these bottles of his formula, thinking that I am a non-magical human working for King Banderon.”

  Damian placed the box of vials on a table and opened it. Melvil immediately stopped laughing.

  “I am going to se
nd the bottles to other investigators so they can warn the sorcerers and sorceresses who own the apothecary shops that the government is hunting them. I am hoping we can discern what is in the liquid so that we can make some of our own to give to our investigators. The alchemist would not tell me what was in it, and he makes the concoction at his house, not at the castle. I tried to follow him home one day, but he cast a spell that blocked my path, and I never found him after that.”

  “Let’s go see if we can find out what is in this concoction,” Melvil said. Damian closed the case. The two walked about two miles through the library and into a room. A massive chemistry apparatus sat on a table in the center of it. “How exactly does this potion work?”

  Damian placed the case on the table and took out one of the vials. “It works like this. When you are testing a medication for magic, you put a drop of the potion in the medication. If the medication glows, that means it has detected magic. If no magic is detected, nothing will happen.”

  He put his bag up on the table and opened a little compartment in the side of it. He pulled out a clump of hair. Melvil grimaced and said, “That’s disgusting.”

  Damian chuckled at his reaction. “Watch. This is hair from non-magical humans that I picked up off the floor of a hair salon yesterday. Nothing will happen if the formula doesn’t detect magic.” He unscrewed the vial cap and dipped one of the hairs into the liquid. Nothing happened. He pulled the hair out of the bottle. “May I have one of your hairs?”

  Melvil pulled one of his long white hairs out of his head and handed it to Damian, who dipped it into the bottle. The bottle glowed brightly, and Melvil’s mouth hung open in shock and terror. “Have you seen anything like that before?” Damian asked.

  “Never!” Melvil gasped.

  Melvil walked over to a set of drawers and opened one. He took out a crystal and said, “This is a type of crystal the government grew during the time of Tareth. Pour the liquid in a beaker and drop the crystal in. It will turn black if it detects dark magic.” He grabbed a beaker off a shelf and handed it to Damian. The crystal was too big to fit in the little vial of liquid.