as you can’t really say that they’re dragons anymore, can you? The name has rather caught on. Though so far I’ve found it impossible to completely control the mind of a godsbeast, our treatments keep them docile, and beyond that, the children’s castings bind them like a harness does a horse. And of course, I control the children. Watch this.”
He snapped his fingers—for the show of it, Rielle knew. His abilities needed no outward trigger.
Surrounding the pit, the elemental children snapped to attention. Echoes of their hoarse cries rang in the silence. Corien reached for a mechanism attached to the grating, pressed a catch. A door in the grating flew open.
“Show her,” Corien commanded, his voice brimming with excitement. As soon as the word left his mouth, one of the children—a young boy, fair of skin and hair, gray-eyed and round-cheeked—raised his banded wrists.
A crawler leapt up from the pit to latch on with cracked claws. Hanging there, it opened its wide mouth and howled.
Every torch suspended from the grid overhead exploded to life. Roaring pendants of flame spewed from their brackets, filling the cavern with blazing light and heat. Metal plates molded around the beast’s chest, belly, and shoulders shone liquid with fire, matching the brilliance of the boy’s castings.
Rielle stepped back from the inferno, her heart pounding as the truth became clear to her.
The crawler’s armor was part of the child’s casting, binding them together. A pair of killers, pliable and pitiless. And whatever power lived in a godsbeast was no doubt enhancing the elemental magic the child already possessed.
And Corien…
Corien could control them—the children, and their beasts.
He could control all of them.
14
Jessamyn
“Translated from the formal Qaharis, ‘Vaera Bashta’ means ‘den of sorrows.’ This massive, cavernous facility, spanning two square miles beneath the city of Elysium, houses prisoners from every country in Avitas, and was designed by the Emperor, in His infinite wisdom, to torment its human inhabitants beyond repair.”
—The Glory of Elysium: An Introduction to the Emperor’s City, compiled by the Invictus Council of Five for students of the Lyceum
It happened twice a month, announced by five sharp blasts of the huge brass prison horns—some kept underground, others bolted to nearby rooftops in the city above.
Jessamyn crouched on her perch in the prison of Vaera Bashta and watched the chaos unfold. In the common tongue, it was called the culling. In Lissar, it was cinvayat, and in Qaharis, it was praeori kyta. A time when all the locks in the prison’s fifteen wards were undone, all the doors thrown open.
For three hours, thousands of prisoners were free to do as they pleased, to kill who they wished, to cower in the shadows and hope no one found them—until the angelic wardens forced them back into their cells.
Jessamyn waited until the horn blasts had faded, then jumped silently down from the stone ledge overlooking section E3. The grated walkway below was empty, untouched by the chaos of the culling. It led to the solitaries, and the prisoners kept there were not allowed the same fun as the others. The solitaries were special. Many had personally affronted the Emperor. Conspirators. Dissidents.
Brothers of stubborn princesses who refused to use their power as they ought to.
The wardens had retreated to their offices, food and drink in hand—none of which would quench their thirst or satisfy their hunger, but the act of consuming it, Varos had long ago explained to Jessamyn, was satisfaction enough. At least for a time. At least until it wasn’t.
As Jessamyn stalked down the empty walkway, the sounds of violence rang in her ears. Savage shouts as hunters pounced on their prey. Choked, wet cries as death claimed the weak. She caught only glimpses of the prisoners swarming through the dimly lit caverns below. A skinny boy, his shoulder blades protruding from his bare back like a pair of submerged knives, crawled through the shadows and whispered frantic prayers that no one would find him. Someone did; Jessamyn heard his stifled cry, the sound of bone smacking stone. To her right, marching toward the lower wards, a gang of men chanted in Borsvallic, brandishing torches they’d wrenched from the walls. To her left, a gang of half-naked children in filthy rags pounced upon an old man and dragged him to the ground.
They were hungry. For some, this was a time to kill not for pleasure, but simply for a full belly.
When Jessamyn at last reached the solitaries, the culling had faded to an echo. The corridor was carved