The Choice of Magic - Michael G. Manning Page 0,204

felt in Selene afflicted him for several minutes, until his body finished absorbing and converting it.

With his ordeal over, Will realized his eyes were closed, and he opened them. A sense of vertigo washed over him and he promptly vomited onto the lane. Off to one side, he saw Selene lying prone, her eyes open as she watched him. “Are you all right?” she asked, exhaustion plain in her voice.

Spitting to clear his mouth, he nodded. Selene sat up and began gingerly getting to her feet.

That surprised him. Normally after being drained of their turyn, people were helpless for hours. “How are you recovering so quickly?” he asked.

“The elementals,” she said simply. “I can draw from them.”

“It doesn’t make you sick?”

She shook her head. “The heart-stone enchantment converts it for me.” She gave him a worried look. “How about you? That was pure demonic turyn. It should have killed you.”

Will got to his feet, doing his best not to stagger. “I guess my whole body is like the heart-stone enchantment. It converts anything I take in, just not as quickly.” He walked over to the man they had killed. The black-robed stranger looked ordinary enough, but as he searched the body, he noticed a strange symbol tattooed on the man’s chest. “What’s this?”

“The symbol of Madrok,” said Selene. “We need to move.”

He had briefly considered moving the man’s body into the guardhouse with the others, but there were shouts coming from several directions. It was too late. Selene grabbed his arm and slid it over her shoulder as a mist rose seemingly from nothing to surround them. Both of them had been through an ordeal, but she seemed to have recovered from it first.

She led him down a different lane, the one that headed to the right. Gradually, Will’s balance returned, and he used his turyn to adjust his eyesight so he could see through the dense fog. He started to remove his arm, but Selene seized his torso, pressing her face into his chest. “I thought I was dying,” she said into his shirt.

“We both would have died if you hadn’t destroyed that thing,” he replied, unsure what to do. Slowly, he relaxed, putting his arms around her. As the stress in his body began to drain away, he felt his arms begin to shake with a faint tremor. That thing scared the shit out of me, he realized. Things had happened so quickly before then that he hadn’t had a chance to register how much it had shaken him.

Selene pushed him away, and her posture straightened as they began moving again. There were shouts in every direction now, and Will saw people running past them through the mist, heading toward the scene of their battle with the demon. He was forced to steer them toward the center of the lane as most of the responders ran along the sides.

“What did you do to that sorcerer?” he asked.

“Not a sorcerer,” she corrected. “He was a priest of Madrok, a warlock.”

“Oh.”

“It was a water drill, a spinning vortex of water,” she told him.

“And that thing with him was a demon?”

Selene nodded.

“Why didn’t it vanish or go dormant after he died, the way elementals do?”

“A sorcerer controls an elemental through their heart-stone enchantment. When they die, the elemental becomes incapable of doing anything until someone new takes control. Demons are different—they’re intelligent. The priests of Madrok sell their souls to him and he grants them a demon to assist them. The tattoo is a mark of that, but they aren’t controlled like an elemental is. Once the warlock dies, they can do whatever they want,” she explained. “What bothers me more is that there shouldn’t be any priests of Madrok here. They come from the kingdom of Shimera. They’re supposedly enemies of Darrow.”

Will didn’t like the sound of that, then he saw something that caught his attention. “What is that?”

“How should I know?” demanded Selene. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

On their right was a large, wooden building and Will could see several women standing along a railing that stretched the entire length of its front porch. They were staring out into the mist curiously, though he was sure they were just as blind as Selene. “There’s several women standing in front of a building to our right.”

“Just keep walking,” urged Selene. “That’s not our objective.”

The women were only twenty feet from them as they passed the building, and Will stared intently at them. His mist-vision rendered everything in shades of