The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Brad Magnarella (ink book reader txt) 📖

representatives of the Second Order, those with direct access to the Elders. From there, the Elders existed in name and legend only, a legend Lich could manipulate to his, and Dhuul’s, ends.”

“So you’re saying that all of the creatures I’ve captured and sent back were illusions?” I fingered the place where a nether creature had torn off a chunk of my right earlobe.

“No, Everson. The work of everyone who served under what we believed to be the Order was very real. Beings do exist in the nether realms, the lesser ones seeking sustenance in our world, the greater ones hungering for dominion. Much of the critical work of the Order actually continued.”

“And that helps Lich how?” I asked skeptically.

“In two ways.” Connell stood and began pacing the room, hands clasped behind his back. Something in the way he carried himself bothered me. “First, it acts as a distraction, keeping magic-users like us busy. We don’t question what we’re being told to do, nor by whom. That has given Lich freedom to devote himself to building the portal between our world and Dhuul’s. Second, the practice and experience we obtain grow our power. And—”

“That doesn’t make any goddamned sense,” I interrupted. “Why would Lich want magic-users to become powerful enough to challenge him?”

“Oh, they never get to that point. He only lets them grow powerful enough to sacrifice them. The lion’s share of their power goes to the portal while a quotient is entrapped in a glass pendant that sustains Lich himself.”

I blew a raspberry with my lips. “Like other magic-users aren’t going to know their colleagues are suddenly missing.”

“Even under the policy of compartmentalization?” he asked, one eyebrow raised. “And let’s not forget the zero-tolerance policy. Magic-users are hit with enough warnings and threats in their early years that were any of them to learn about the execution of a fellow magic-user—or told they were up for execution themselves—they would hardly be surprised. Terrified, yes, but not surprised.”

I couldn’t keep myself from revisiting the numerous warnings I’d received over the years. But that didn’t explain Grandpa, an old and powerful mage. His death had been an accident, stepping into a street at the same moment a bee happened to sting an approaching driver. He hadn’t been sacrificed or had his soul harvested.

I was going to say as much, then remembered something the vampire Arnaud had told me shortly before I blew him apart. I kept close tabs on your grandfather since his arrival in Manhattan, he’d said. He was behaving quite curiously, performing work far beneath his station. A stage magician and insurance man?

Almost as though Grandpa was trying to hide his abilities from someone. I broke off the thought when I realized Connell was watching me intently.

“Yeah, nice story so far,” I said. “There’s only one problem. If Lich the Great and Terrible created this perfect artifice, fooling everyone, how in the hell do you know about it?”

“Your grandfather,” he said.

I stiffened. “What about him?”

“Asmus Croft was a scholar in Europe, a brilliant man.”

“A scholar?” I’d never heard anything about that.

“Yes, of mythology. Interesting how you followed in his footsteps without ever knowing. In any case, in his early days as a wizard, Asmus took a great interest in the history of the Order. He learned everything he could about it, going back to the earliest records. That had been Lich’s role in the First Order: penning its history and protocols, its first spell books. After overthrowing the Order, Lich took many guises, but he kept up the history. He gave an account of the rebellion, and his own role in it, but reported that it ended in his death and the closing of the seam to Dhuul. The falsehood was not only to evade suspicion, but to enact harsher punishment for magic-users who committed any number of infractions. Lich set up wards to spy on them. Thus began the regime of warnings and executions.”

That was actually consistent with what Chicory had told me about the Elders taking steps to ensure nothing like the rebellion would happen again. Careful, Everson, I warned myself. Probably exactly how Whisperer magic works, grafting lies onto what one already accepts as truth.

“But Asmus was exceptional in languages too,” Connell continued. “He developed an expertise in what would later become the field of linguistics. Though Lich had altered his penmanship in composing the post-rebellion history, your grandfather saw similarities in the diction between that history and what had come before. He began to ask questions. Not aloud, no—he knew better. The questions he posed were to himself: What if the rebellion had succeeded? What if Lich had destroyed his siblings and not vice versa? What if this Dhuul was directing what everyone believed to be the Order? With those questions in mind, your grandfather simply observed. What was said, what was done, what was promulgated down the ranks. He did this for many years, continuing his work as a scholar and wizard, never letting on what he suspected but becoming more and more convinced of it. When the regional enforcers of the Inquisition grew bolder in their threats against European magic-users, he requested guidance from the Order, and this was where Lich slipped up.”

I caught myself leaning forward slightly and sat back.

“The Order advised your grandfather to ally with the vampires to confront the threat,” he said.

“What was wrong with that?”

“It went against the Order’s entire reason for being,” Connell replied. “Saint Michael sired children to combat the offspring of the Demon Lords, which included vampires. For hundreds of years, the Order had never wavered from that position.”

“Yeah, but this was for survival.”

“Saint Michael forbade his children from warring against humans. Again, it went against their reason for being. But now, just like that, two of the central tenets on which the Order was founded had been altered.”

“How would that have been advantageous to Lich?”

“Your grandfather believed Lich saw war as the best chance for the long-term survival of magic-users. The longer they lived,