Bloodmender (Tales of the Five Provinces Book 3)
Praise for Glyphbinder
“...an entertaining debut that avoids many missteps ... the characters are largely engaging, each with his or her own story to tell.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“...a wildly compelling YA paranormal story set in a mysterious world where magic is the ultimate tool of power and blood the currency of the trade ... a mesmerizing setting and compelling characters...”
—Faridah Nassozi, Reader’s Favorite
“...what I really enjoyed was Eric’s ability to keep things tight and controlled while still giving each character some time in the spotlight.”
—Clayton Blanchard, reviewer at The Page Turners
“...a fantastic story of magic, trust, and perseverance ... by the time the story is done, and you close the final page, you feel like you’re saying goodbye to a set of dear friends.”
—Lilyn George, reviewer at SciFi and Scary
Praise for Demonkin
“...heart-wrenchingly deep and compelling characters, a rich and well-developed world, and an air of adventure...”
—Ron Garner, Editor, Silence in the Library Press
“Filled with vivid images, great action, and one of the most imaginative magic systems I've read in a long time...
—Stuart Jaffe, author of The Malja Chronicles
“Everything is tense, as it should be, given the circumstances. I found myself unable to put the book down, which is always a good sign.”
—Clayton Blanchard, reviewer at The Page Turners
“Demonkin was a solid read, and I think most traditional fantasy fans would be fine with this sequel to Glyphbinder.”
—Lilyn George, reviewer at SciFi and Scary
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.
BLOODMENDER
Copyright @ 2017 by T. Eric Bakutis
www.tebakutis.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cover artwork by Greg Taylor
www.GregTaylorArt.com
Interior Design by Eric Bakutis
Published Books of T. Eric Bakutis
(Tales of the Five Provinces)
Glyphbinder
Demonkin
Bloodmender
(Short Story Anthologies)
The Ways of Magic from Deepwood Publishing
Fairly Wicked Tales from Ragnarok Publications
Superhero Monster Hunter from Emby Press
Brave New Girls Vol. 2 from Paige Daniels and Mary Fan, Editors
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Editor
Chapter 1
Four Years Ago...
SERA VALENCE CREPT through a patch of twisted brambles, ignoring the tugs on her clothes and hair. A doe mehed pitifully eight paces away. It saw her.
“Ssh,” she whispered. “Don't scare it.”
“You don't scare it,” Byn whispered from behind her. “I'm the one keeping it calm, remember?”
Sera crawled from the brambles on hands and knees. The doe's panicked eyes grew wider, wetter. If it tried to run, she might never be able to help it.
The crippled animal panted and blinked, but it did not scramble up on its ruined leg. Thanks to the complicated beast glyph Byn had scribed on Sera's face — Staga — this doe saw her as another deer. It saw her as a friend.
Sera knelt beside the doe and took the dream world, a network of black lines and yellow sky filled with flashes of orange life. The doe glowed among that life. As Sera traced severed tendon and gnawed bone, she grimaced. This poor animal had chewed its own foot off, probably after days stuck in a trap, and that made her chest ache.
As a Bloodmender, a wielder of the power of the Five Who Had Made the World, Sera could harness her pure blood to heal fractured bones, even mend split flesh, but regrowing a leg was beyond her. As Senior Healer Landra said, no lesson was more difficult than accepting one's limitations. Sera could not save this poor doe.
Yet she could ease the animal's suffering. It would cost her, in blood and energy, but she would practice soothing glyphs today. She settled in front of the mehing doe, pictured the glyphs she had learned at Solyr, and waited until she had them firmly in mind.
Soon she split her index finger with one sharpened thumbnail. She took the doe's ruined leg in one hand, gently, and Byn's glyphs held. She scribed with her other finger, in her own blood, along its mangled fur.
Once certain her glyphs were correct, Sera ignited them. Blood left her body in a rush that made her light-headed. The doe's orange form grew less turgid in the dream world, a sign the animal was relaxing.
Sera massaged its knee, searching for flashes suggesting pain. No flashes came. The doe breathed easy now, but she couldn't let it relax.
If it relaxed, it might try to get up again, and nothing she could do would ease the pain of stepping on a ruined stump. She scribed another glyph on the doe's head, just above its nose. She would make it sleep now.
“Sera,” Byn whispered.
She ignored him. Sleep was a tricky glyph, with a hooked curve on the tail end she always got wrong. Last time she got it wrong, the animal leapt up and almost bit her hand off.
“Sera!” Byn hissed. “Move!”
The urgency in his voice yanked her from the dream world. “Why?”
A mass of teeth and claws bolted from the woods. The doe hopped up, knocking Sera onto her back, and then a flurry of claws and teeth tore into it: a grayback, one of the Lorilan's fierce wolves.
Sera gasped for breath as blood flew and the doe shrieked. It was dying and she couldn't breathe. How could she help it if she couldn't breathe?
Byn hauled her into his arms. Then he was charging through the forest, crashing through branches like a startled bear. Sera watched over his shoulder as the doe thrashed, as bone snapped, as that wolf ripped it open.
This was not the peaceful end she had hoped to give the poor creature, but it was an end. Worse happened every day in the Lorilan woods. Byn was still running, grunting, but the wolf was not coming after them.
Sera sucked in breath. “Byn.” It came out as a hoarse whisper. She pushed at him, trying to get his attention, but not so hard he might drop her. She did not want him to drop her while he sprinted through the woods.
“We're safe!” she rasped, takin
g her voice back. “You can put me down now!”
He kept running, each breath ragged in his throat. How far had he carried her? He was going to hurt himself.
“Byn!” Sera thumped his chest. “Stop!”
He stumbled into a clearing and slowed, still clutching her in his arms. Leaves of red and brown carpeted the ground. He thumped to his knees, and that allowed Sera to finally wriggle free.
Byn gulped down air, chest heaving, as blood coursed down one cheek. Tiny scratches bled across his wide face, sweat glistened in his tousled brown hair, and his arms trembled. He had run himself ragged for her.
“You stupid jerk,” Sera whispered. Then her voice grew a great deal louder. “Why did you do that?”
His big brown eyes focused on her. “Drown me, that was terrifying.” He leaned close. “Are you hurt?”
“Am I...?” Was he serious?
“Did it scratch you?”
“I'm fine,” Sera said, pushing up and brushing leaves off her dress. “Byn, you have a serious cut on your face.” She took his head in healer's hands and eased it left, then right. “Several cuts.”
She wanted to take the dream world and tend him, but her memory of that doe's eyes challenged and haunted her. That poor animal had died alone, in agony, after chewing off its own foot.
Few deaths came without pain — that was why Sera became a Bloodmender, to make death less painful — but her failure to help the doe pass peacefully hurt. No one deserved to gnaw their own leg off in the woods. If this was the world the Five had made, maybe the Five were wrong.
“Hey.” Byn took her hand in his, gentle, like she'd been with the doe. “Come to the Harbor Day dance with me.”
Sera's eyes snapped to his. “Excuse me?”
“We'll dress up like snooty nobles.” Byn's big hand swallowed hers, warm and calloused. “It'll be fun.”
“And you decided now was the time to ask me?”
“Why not?”
“You're covered in blood and a wolf tried to eat us!”
Byn grinned in the way that made Kara punch him in the arm. “So?”
“So isn't this the wrong time to ask a girl to a dance with you?” Sera's heart pounded like that grayback was chasing them.
Byn released her hand. “Honestly, all I thought, back there, was how empty I'd feel if something happened to you.”
The ache in Sera's chest grew.
“I saw that grayback creeping up on you, and I thought 'What if I lose Sera? What if it tears her throat out, and I never asked her to go to a dance with me?'“
He was serious. Sera knew he would ask this now because he was Byn, after all. Her Byn.
How many times had he come out here with her to practice glyphs? Why did she always go to the Lorilan with him and not Kara, her best friend? Kara made her feel welcome and warm, but Byn made her feel safe.
“I don't think I could get past it,” Byn said, “if I lost the chance to tell you I like you. I like everything about you. The way you lean close to people when you're worried about then, the way you frown when you're concentrating, even your little snorts.”
Sera's face burned like she had lingered too long in the sun. She liked Byn too, for many reasons, including his mad dash through the woods.
Byn wiped more blood from his cheek. “So? How about it? Go to the dance with me?”
Sera breathed, focused, decided. “All right.”
“All right!”
“But I'm going to fix your face first.”
Byn's wide grin made her forget about the doe.
Chapter 2
Now...
EXCRUTIATING PAIN LANCED through Sera from neck to spine to toes, like someone had driven hooks into her bones. Like those hooks were pulling her apart. She couldn't see, couldn't scream, couldn't breathe.
Her soul was lost to the Underside.
She would never see Byn again, never see her world again. Yet if damnation was the cost of saving those she loved from this eternity, Sera would do it again in a heartbeat. Byn was alive, Kara was too, and that made this agony bearable for a moment.
Sera remembered sitting with her father on their wide back porch, staring at the stars. She remembered Byn brushing her hair from her forehead. She remembered laughing with Kara as they wrestled in Solyr, yet no moment, no memory, stopped the pain splitting her bones.
These metal hooks murdered good memories. They ripped her open to her soul. A bone-deep agony was wrecking her, killing her, except she could not die.
Sera forced open eyelids that were not hers. This was not her body. Extruded bone sprouted from this body's shoulders and ringed the metal pole above her, suspending the flesh that kept her trapped.
Whatever she was now hung on a metal rod by her extruded shoulder bones. Dozens more bodies hung on either side of her, faceless, formless sacks of flesh. None breathed and none moved.
Countless hanging bodies hung from other metal poles, hundreds mounted inside a towering pyramid of black walls. Sera closed her eyes and tried to take the dream world, but her efforts yielded inky black. She had no power here.
The pole descended with a lurch that sent agony racing through her bones. Sera opened her eyes and trembled inside her own mind. A demon waited below, standing on a floor of alternating white and black tiles.
This Mavoureen had four spiked, angular legs, and a large body that closely resembled a giant tick. A torso that was almost human rose from that tick body, with disturbingly long arms covered in coal-black scales. The demon's bull-shaped head had horns to match.
Its mouth could easily encircle her head, and its bared teeth were longer than her fingers. Its four yellow eyes glowed in the dusky light. One sharpened leg tip ticked rhythmically on tile, like a traveler impatient for a late carriage.
This demon would be her first torturer. Yet no matter how much these demons hurt her, Sera would not relinquish her grip on hope or sanity. At least ... not all at once.
The pole lurched to a stop. Her extruded shoulder bones shattered. Sera's arms flailed and her legs did too.
She broke her fall with shaking hands and trembling knees. She pushed up through muscles that ached as if she'd been rowing for days. Then agony dropped her once more, and this time, writhing, she felt her body change.
Bone snapped and muscle twisted. Skin stretched and folded. Teeth burst bloody from her gums.
The changes stopped. Sera breathed, treasuring a few moments without pain. Such respite, she suspected, would be all too brief in the eternity she now faced.
No one pulled her to her feet, so Sera gathered the strength to stand. She gathered the strength to speak. She glared at the demon before her.
“I.” Her tongue felt heavy as stone. “Won't.” She pictured Byn's smiling face. “Forget them.” She had come here to save those she loved, and that would keep her sane.
Sera stepped toward the four-legged demon. It did not move to strike her, so she took the opportunity to look down at the body ... her body, now. She finally understood how this fleshy cage must work.
This doppelganger body had changed itself to approximate her mortal form. This must be how the Mavoureen tortured people. They shoved souls into bodies and tore those bodies apart, over, and over, and over.
“Well?” Sera looked up. “What happens next?”
The four-legged Mavoureen inclined its horned head like a tutor greeting a student. “I am Jorumand.” Its voice was pleasant, honestly. “I am not here to hurt you.”
“Really?” Sera trembled and told herself it was because of cold, not fear. “Why are you here, then?”
“To welcome you, honored guest, to Hecata's kingdom.”
Sera remembered bone shifting and snapping inside her. “This isn't a welcome I'd recommend to anyone.” She might have felt embarrassed by her nakedness, in other circumstances, but this wasn't really her body.
“You have adapted to your husk quicker than most. My mistress was correct to transition you so rapidly. You will come with me n
ow.”
“Why in the Six Seas would I do that?”
“You would prefer to remain in the body temple? You will become lonely.”
“No matter what you do to me,” Sera said, each breath burning in her strange lungs, “I'll never serve you like Cantrall did. I swear on the Five. I swear on my soul.”
“Both lost to you. No, Miss Valence, you would break if we gave you endless pain. Your limited mortal mind would shatter with your body. If you truly think yourself unique, my mistress made a poor choice in saving you.”
“Saving me?” The longer Sera kept this demon talking, the longer she had to regain her strength. “You tricked me, stole my soul, and shoved me into a corpse!”
“All true.”
“So tell me, demon. How did your mistress save me?”
A crack of light beyond Jorumand suggested an exit from this pyramid and possibly, freedom. Even if freedom was nothing more than leaping into a purple void and falling for eternity, Sera would take that over being tortured to death, repeatedly.
Jorumand chittered softly. “Mistress Hecata will explain everything.”
Sera recognized that name. Hecata was a demon goddess, queen of the Underside, and more ruthless than even her husband: Paymon the Patriarch. Sera wondered if Paymon was going to torture her, too.
“Who do you think brought you to us, Miss Valence?” Jorumand asked. “Who do you think claimed your soul?”
Sera remembered a seductive female voice speaking inside her head, soothing her, teaching her, tricking her. She had known it was a Mavoureen and known it meant her ill. Yet she had never imagined the demon was Hecata.
“Your mistress claimed my soul?” Sera asked. “Why?”
“That is what my mistress wishes to explain. It is why you will come with me, now, to speak with her.”