Sardec’s mouth was dry. Pain came from where his hand once had been. Before it had happened to him, he would never have believed a hook could hurt. There were times when he woke and thought he could still feel his fingers, that the loss of his hand had all been a dream. Of course, it was the phantom hand that was a dream. He had heard that sorcerers used mystical techniques to shape reality around them, imagining things so strongly they became true. He wondered if a sorcerer could imagine himself a severed hand so strongly that it became real. He mentioned it to Lady Asea. She seemed grateful for the distraction.
“On Al’Terra, I knew mages who could manipulate objects with hands they created by pure concentration. I doubt there is enough ambient magical energy to recreate that feat here.”
“What about growing new limbs? I had heard that was possible too.”
“With sufficient power you can stimulate the body in such a way that it repairs itself, like a Serpent Man growing a new tail.” Asea seemed sympathetic. She obviously understood his interest. She looked a little odd this morning as well.
Perhaps she had taken a new lover as camp gossip suggested. The half-breed had spent a long time in her tent last night. Sardec doubted they had been just talking. There was a time when he would have condemned her for it. He still felt the urge, but given his own actions with the girl Rena yesterday evening, he was in no position to throw stones. He felt a faint thrill at the memory of the previous night.
“That’s not an attractive image,” he said, wondering if he were talking about a hand growing like a Serpent Man’s tail or the picture of Asea and the half-breed writhing in passion that passed through his mind.
“There are less attractive ones,” she said. “Some sorcerers used to saw off the hands from the living and attach them to stumps of lost limbs.”
“It worked?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes the limb rotted. Sometimes the recipient died. No one was sure why. The practise never became popular for that reason.”
“My father claimed the Princes of Shadow took limbs from the dead.”
“He was right. Necromancers could reanimate them, and make them work, but there would be no sensation. They were like the limbs of lepers. Some of the Desecrator’s Lieutenants did that, and worse things.”
“You mean Moghrag and his armour of flesh?”
“Just so.” The infamous Moghrag had built a suit of armour from reanimated corpses turned inside out. The bones were fused on the outside to form an exo-skeleton, while clumps of necromantically-animated muscles on the inside amplified his strength. He was said to have been able to rip a man’s head from his shoulders with his bare hands.
Asea said; “Moghrag was always a sick one, even as a child. He was fond of dissecting things. I think he got that idea cutting up lizards and stitching them together.”
It was sometimes hard for Sardec to grasp that to one of the First, people like Moghrag were not simply the names of ogres from the Testaments, but living breathing individuals they had once had the acquaintance of. Asea had known Moghrag before the Exile, so had Azaar, so had Ilmarec for that matter.
“Azaar killed him, did he not?”
“He did. Azaar was First Blade of the Realm then. No one could match him with a sword, not even Moghrag with his strange armour and the stolen strength of a dozen warriors.”
Silence fell between them. When he had read the tales as a child, it was sometimes hard to understand why anyone would have sided with the Princes of Shadow, but there was a dark strain in the Terrarch psyche, and now he could imagine reasons.
He remembered the odd look in Rena's eyes when the cold metal of his hook had touched her naked flesh. He wanted to be whole again. He wanted to be handsome once more. He wanted to be able to think that women did not look at him with horror. There had been times when he had thought that dark sorcery might be the answer; it tempted him, particularly at night when he lay in bed alone with his thoughts. Under the sun, he could see it was madness. He had no desire to bear the stolen limb of another or to have the parts of an animated corpse grafted to his body. That was no solution to his problem.
“Could you work the healing magic?” he asked. The words just suddenly blurted out. They came from the deepest well of his being, and he had not expected to say them at all. Asea looked at him with something like pity on her face, and that was the worst part of it.
“In the right place, at the right time, possibly, yes,” she said. “On Al’Terra, where the flows of power were stable, strong and far more predictable than here it was difficult sorcery. Here on Gaeia, it would be even more complex.”
“Why is such sorcery difficult? You can summon demons from the Pit. Surely healing cannot be all that difficult in comparison.” She smiled as she might have done at a child who expected her to be able to reach up into the sky and pull down the sun.
“They are different types of magic,” she said. “Sometimes it is easier to do the big things than the little ones, just as it is easier to hack off a limb than to sew it on again so that it works. If you stimulate the body to repair itself you must do it exactly right. Otherwise it re-grows too much. Cancers come, or the limb becomes monstrous and malformed and useless, and you must amputate and begin the whole process again. That too is a risky procedure.”
“You do not make it sound easy.”
“No sorcery is ever easy. There is a cost for the sorcerer as well as the person ensorcelled. All magic puts enormous strain on the body and on the mind. Some think that this is why magic has so many ill effects on humans. They do not have the vitality or the mental capacity for it.”
Another thought occurred to Sardec. “Why can the Serpent Men re-grow limbs when we cannot?”
“I do not know. Their bodies are built differently from ours. They grow their entire lives, some of the Eldest are huge, almost the size of dragons. They are thousands of years old.”
“They must be an awesome sight.”
“They are. When I was in Xulander I visited several of the nest cities. Once I was shown into one of the sleeping chambers where the Eldest dream.”
“You never talked to one?”
“No- they are all asleep now. In hibernation I would guess.”
“Why?”
“Why do our own dragons spend most of their time asleep these days? It is a sign of the times, perhaps.”
“I have heard it said that the Serpent Men are cruel to their humans.”
“I have heard it said we are cruel to our humans.” She spoke in the High Tongue so the soldiers would not understand. He responded in kind.
“In the Dark Empire we are.”
“Some would say it’s not just in the Dark Empire.”
He shrugged not wanting to argue with her. He knew that politically they would never see eye to eye. She was too old and too radical. She had, after all, been a founder of the Scarlet faction.
“Do you think it’s true that the Serpent Men came from the stars?” he asked, to change the subject.
“So their Watcher Priests claim, and I see no reason to doubt them. It is said that many of the Elder Races did.”
“To cross the gulf between stars- that is a mighty sorcery.”
“To be sure, but no mightier than to cross between the worlds as our people did, when we came here.”
“Did they use gateways like we did?”
“You are in a curious mood this morning, Lieutenant Sardec.”
“I find it helps relax me when I may be riding into the teeth of Elder World weaponry. I fear I have the urge to learn something of the force that might destroy me.”
She laughed, a clear, ringing sound. “An admirable attitude but I think we are safe. I doubt Ilmarec will feel threatened enough by our force to unleash the horrors of the Ancients upon us.”