The Scourge of Gods

CHAPTER THREE

Dust expanded, settling on Inarhi's hair and clothes as she opened another ancient book. She leafed through several pages to discover the tome held only early medicinal practices and records of the Kavani witches. It was no good. Inarhi brushed her face and gritted her teeth.

Uncovering the perpetrators who unleashed the demon wasn't very simple.

To make matters worse, it wasn't only a single demon roaming the empire now. It was three-thousand. They were pouring out of the North, razing crops, destroying towns and villages, even afflicting air trade. Not only that, but they were radiating out from the Sky City of Nagia, the home of the Imigi witches.

It didn't make her job any better when Inarhi had prior commitments as the Minister of Ambassadorship. Before she'd holed herself up inside her chamber, she dispatched hundreds of envoys with gifts and promises, in an attempt to keep foreign relations peaceful. The nobility was in an uproar. Every important family throughout the world had experienced casualties after the massacre. They demanded wiccan blood.

In the mind of an untrained, ignorant human, the witches would have been the first and obvious guess, but Inarhi knew better. The Imigi were pacifists at heart. There was no way they would do something like this, but they were going to be blamed. She needed to find evidence to absolve them before things got out of hand.

And it hadn't been easy so far.

A lot of the older books Inarhi had acquired throughout the years had no visible title or author, mostly because the covers had eroded to nothing more besides faded ink. She had been looking for any sort of clue for hours, hidden away in her private library that contained forbidden works of wiccan knowledge.

The truth had to be in the summoning process. Inarhi thumbed through the Instructions of Eleri, one of her few books that had a title. It detailed the art of summoning. She spent another hour or so reading through the tome, then stopped dead. Her eyes widened.

She'd found it. Her heart rate soared.

The author claimed ordinary witches could only contract one spirit at a time, due to the excessive amounts of energy it required to sustain the link. Of course, it was possible to bond with two or three, but that was rare. The Imigi clan only had one-thousand members. It would be impossible for them to have summoned these demons!

Inarhi smiled. That was one mystery solved, but she still had to decipher the mark branded on the demon that attacked the parade. She put a hand to her forehead, the corners of her vision fraying. She pinched her arm and blinked her eyes. Sleep couldn't take her now. No one in the empire could solve such a puzzle. Not even the foremost human scholars knew as much as Inarhi about witches after the Church outlawed such studying. If she found out what the brand meant, then it would possibly lead to the identity of the person who unleashed the spirits. Better yet, provide a way to kill the demons.

She looked around her little alcove; her collection was impressive enough. Her lamp revealed two rows of bookcases, filled to the brim with topics on magic instruction and battle theory, to lore on interdimensional gods. But there was nothing on demons. Where else could she go?

The muffled tinkle of a bell sounded outside.

Inarhi sprang from her chair and carefully moved the sliding door open, slipping into her sunlit chamber. She shut the door behind her. It slid perfectly into place, with the alcove now concealed behind a bookcase filled with unremarkable, more respectable texts. She swept the dust from her gown and looked in the mirror beside her. Her face didn't look any better. A moment later, someone knocked on the chamber door itself.

She grabbed a cloth from her nightstand and rubbed the dust from her pale cheeks, then tied her disheveled brown hair into an acceptable bun. There were noticeable bags under her eyes, but that couldn't be helped.