A Society in Decay

  A SOCIETY IN DECAY

  THE DARK SORCERER BOOK 4

  D.K. HOLMBERG

  Copyright © 2022 by D.K. Holmberg

  Cover by Damonza.com

  All rights reserved.

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Author’s Note

  Series by D.K. Holmberg

  1

  The village had a strange smell to it.

  Jayna didn’t think that she was necessarily sensitive to smells, but this one had a stench, and it seemed to overwhelm everything else around her. Normally, there would be fragrant flowers within the forest, the smell of damp earth, even some of the pungent aroma of tular root and despar - herbs that were prevalent in this part of the world and that she needed to use for spells a few times. None of that was all that noticeable now. Just the stench.

  “What do you think that is?” Topher asked.

  Jayna tapped on her dragon stone ring, twisting the smooth surface around her finger for a moment, tracing the bloodstone that had been worked into it. She could feel some of that bloodstone, along with the ability to augment the power from the dragon stone, but she didn’t dare reach into that power. Not yet and not unless she absently had to. She preferred to steer clear of her Toral power.

  “I don’t know. Maybe some creature got caught out here and is rotting,” she said, looking around the forest. She wasn’t accustomed to coming out here with Topher. But chasing the rumors that she was after, she hadn’t wanted to come completely alone. If something happened, she needed somebody with her to call to her friend Char.

  “I grew up on a farm,” Topher said. “This isn’t just some creature rotting.”

  She glanced over to him. Just when she thought she knew all that she could about him, he surprised her. He didn’t really strike her as a farm boy, but then again, he didn’t strike her as somebody who had much ability in the way of enchantments, and he had proven himself increasingly adept.

  “Let’s just keep moving,” she said, waving her hand toward the village that was just visible in the distance. She couldn’t see anything through the trees, but she had a sense that it was out there, that all she had to do was to find the village, and…

  She shook her head. It was little more than a dream for her. She had spent so much time and effort over the last year or so trying to uncover anything that she could about her brother, to see if there was any way to help him, but she had found nothing. Rumors, and little else. Even when she had come across his friend Matthew, he hadn’t known anything about what had happened to Jonathan. It came to the point where she started to think that maybe she would never find her brother.

  She’d been looking for him for so long that she no longer knew if she would find anything about him. When she did, she wondered if he would even recognize her. Jayna had changed so much over the last few years.

  “I wish Eva were here,” Topher said.

  “Me too,” she said softly.

  “She didn’t have to leave.”

  “I think she did,” Jayna said.

  Not because Jayna had sent her away or because there was any disagreement between the two of them, but because Eva needed to understand herself. Having learned that she was Ashara, she needed to come to terms with what that meant for her. It meant Eva really couldn’t stay. Regardless of how much any of them wanted her to, and Jayna suspected that Eva wanted to stay, she needed to understand herself and her purpose.

  If only Jayna had perfected some way of communicating with her. Char had tried, and Topher had his own technique with his enchantments, but everything they had attempted to use to ensure ongoing communication had been difficult.

  “Tell me again what you think we’re going to find out here?”

  Jayna looked over to Topher. He was often thickheaded, but there were times when he was even slower than usual. That stemmed partly from having been attacked by dark sorcerers, but partly it was just him, she suspected. Not that she would ever say that to him, and she certainly didn’t want to make him feel as if he still couldn’t help her, but it would be easier if he wasn’t so slow.

  “We are here because I’m looking for information about my brother, and it’s possible we may be able to find something here. And if I can, I want to learn what happened to him.”

  “What did happen to him?” Topher looked over, and they had paused at one point in the forest, not going any further.

  Jayna was trying to decide which spell she might need to use. She had different attacking spells, all of them fairly straightforward to create but probably more destructive than what she wanted here. There were other defensive spells that she had started to learn, but even those had an element of danger to them. Typically, the difficulty she had now was in the additional power that she had access to and how she could use the Toral ring and the bloodstone to augment almost anything that she did.

  “He’s a thief,” Jayna said softly.

  “You’ve told me that he’s a thief, but what happened to him?”

  Jayna looked over. “Have you ever had somebody that you care about who does something that’s destructive even though they know that it’s destructive?”

  “Well…”

  She frowned at him. “Well, what?”

  “I was thinking of Eva.”

  Jayna shook her head. “I’m not referring to Eva.” Then again, the comparison was fairly apt. Eva had been destructive. They had both cared about her, wanting to offer her whatever they could to help protect her and bring her back, but she had not been interested. She had been far more interested in drinking and filling the holes in her mind with wine until she had no choice but to find those answers.

  “My brother did something like that,” she said. “Not because he was trying to forget something, at least, I don’t think so,” she went on and started to question how much of what Jonathan had done was because of what had happened to their parents.

  It was an angle that she hadn’t really considered before, but perhaps she should have. If Jonathan had acted like that because of their parents, it might explain things differently. She shook her head again.

  “Anyway, he was a thief. Is.” She had to correct herself. Jonathan wasn’t gone. That was the entire reason that she was out here in this gods’ cursed place, looking for information about her brother, thinking that she might figure out where he had gone, and she might find whether there was anything that she might be able to do to help get him out. “He disappeared on me. I don’t know exactly what happened, only that he disappeared. I think he got caught, and no one who knows him is sure of what happened to him. But I’ve been looking. I don’t have any choice but to keep looking.”

  “And you haven’t wanted to ask that friend of his?” Topher shrugged, nodding to her. “I know he’s been around, well, he used to be around, and now he’s gone.” He frowned, his broad face wrinkling, making him look ridiculous. Was he having another of his moments? She preferred it when Topher had the competent, almost confident, side of him and didn’t really care for this side of him. “Where did he go, anyway?”

  “He’s a thief. He had to go back to whatever he was doing.”

  “Looking for your brother?”

  “I don’t think Matthew ever looked for my brother,” she said.

  The smell was starting to build, and Jayna was nauseated by it. She tried to ignore it, focusing on everything else around her, but that smell was too much. And as she focused on that stench, she couldn’t help but feel as if there was something almost familiar about it.

  She tipped her head to the side, breathing in carefully, slowly, not wanting to inhale too deeply. She didn’t want to call that stench into her, but at the same time, she didn’t think that she could go anywhere further until she knew.

  “I think I’ve smelled something like this before,” she whispered. “I don’t know why, and I don’t know what it is, only that there is some aspect to it that strikes me as familiar.”

  “Have we faced anything that smells like this?”

  Had she?

  There were dark creatures she and Eva had fought, especially recently, and many of them were foul, which often led to them smelling foul, but she didn’t remember anything quite like this. Maybe there was something here, though.

  She motioned for Topher to come with her. There was no point in lingering here any longer and taking their time. They need to keep moving, get
up to the village, see if the blacksmith here had any word of Jonathan the way that she had been led to believe, and then go on.

  It was a weak tip to go on, but she’d gotten word of this village, the blacksmith, and marks that he had made that implied his connection to a specific sorcerer. It was enough for Jayna to append everything that she had been doing, to abandon her search for other dark sorcerers, including the sole Toral, and to come out here. Ceran would have to understand. Then again, Ceran would have to respond to her first, something that he often avoided doing.

  She twisted the dragon stone ring again. She took a deep breath and had the starburst spell ready.

  “Let’s go,” she muttered.

  “Do you think it would be easier to go at night?”

  She looked over to him. “At night? If we come in here in the middle of the night, we’re going to attract a very different kind of attention. And rather than trying to talk to us, which is what I would prefer, we would end up having somebody just attack us.” She shook her head. Sometimes he really was dense. “We can get the information we want without fighting.”

  “I just thought…,”

  “What?” she snapped, turning to him. “You just thought that I wanted to fight?”

  “You never shied away from it before,” Topher said.

  “I’m not trying to shy away from anything,” she said. “But there is a time and a place to use violence.”

  “I…” He shook his head again. “I’m sorry, Jayna. I wasn’t trying to upset you. I was just trying to tell you that… Well, I don’t even know what I was trying to tell you. I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you, and I’m willing to help you, and…,”

  She breathed out a sigh, suppressing the frustration that surged within her. This would be so much easier to do if she had Eva rather than Topher. Topher had his uses, but she was accustomed to going with Eva. Especially over the last year. She had become so much more than a friend.

  “Just stay behind me. If you need to, I gave you those enchantments, so use them, but not unless you need to.”

  “What exactly is the enchantment going to do?”

  “You’ve seen it. It’s an acoustical attack.” When he frowned at her, she shook her head again. “Sound. It will create a loud explosion of sound. And that will push back anyone.”

  At least it would push back anybody who wasn’t prepared for the possibility of a sonic attack. Jayna had seen that attack in action. It was effective and incredibly potent. She was increasingly thankful for the young dular who had given her those enchantments and for the opportunity those enchantments offered her; she could use them without killing someone.

  With the kind of fighting that she had done recently, she couldn’t help but feel as if fighting without killing was the better strategy. At least, it offered her an opportunity for answers that any alternative did not. There had been too many times when she had gone against a sorcerer who might have answers for her, including about Jonathan, and she had been forced to kill them before she had been able to get those answers. She tried to avoid it, but there were times when there wasn’t anything else she could do. It was then the only option that she had to take definitive action, the kind of action that meant that sorcerers died, or she did. It was an easy choice. Especially since most of those sorcerers were dark.

  She tapped on her pouch. She had several of these enchantments and could use them if it came down to it but preferred not to use up her enchantments if it wasn’t necessary. She started forward when the smells around her began to shift.

  She froze.

  That smell seemed to come from all around her. At first, she thought that it was permeating the forest, but there was a directionality to it, something that she hadn’t noticed before now. Now she could tell that it was seemingly coming from a specific direction, and not from within the village, but away from it.

  She started toward the village, taking another step, and then she paused again. She raised a hand behind her, motioning to Topher. She needed him to approach slowly. She also needed him to be quiet. She brought a finger to her lips, silencing him. He frowned at her, his brow wrinkling up, giving him that same ridiculous expression, but she ignored it.

  Everything within her told her that this was dangerous. She had been told about a blacksmith who would make a sorcerer’s marking, so of course, there would be some level of danger, but she hadn’t expected it out here in the forest in the middle of some village off to the east of Nelar. She hadn’t expected to run into any real danger.

  Of course, ever since coming to Nelar, Jayna had encountered danger in places and ways that she had never expected to before. It was more than just the type of sorcery that she encountered. There were other elements to it, other dangers, and as much as she had tried to keep herself focused on what Ceran asked of her, using her free time to dig into what happened to her brother, she had not had that chance.

  Jayna took a few more steps, and the smell shifted again. This wasn’t just rot. It had some purpose.

  She turned to Topher, holding her hand out, and then hurriedly formed a pattern, using the magic ball barrier that would protect them. She created a pattern around them and exploded outward. She didn’t use anything through her dragon stone ring, not wanting to call upon that power just yet. She couldn’t wait too long, though. Lingering here with this power around her would put them into danger. Both of them, but mostly Topher.

  The magic ball spell created an invisible barrier around them that muted sound so that everything seemed to be hushed. There had been some sound in the forest of insects buzzing, and an occasional squirrel chattering, and the steady gusting of wind, a slow buzzing, but that wasn’t what drew her attention, either.

  Rather, it was the silence. The emptiness. It was the absence.

  She turned in place. “The smell was moving.”

  “That was just the wind shifting,” Topher said.

  Jayna shook her head. “If that was just the wind shifting, it would’ve dispersed the smell. There’s a reason for it. Something purposeful about it.”

  And increasingly, she started to worry that there was some sort of dark power here. She hadn’t seen any dark creatures on the journey here, but there had been far too many around Nelar, so she wouldn’t be terribly surprised to find them chasing her and attacking.

  She crept toward the village.

  She held onto the magic ball spell, keeping it wrapped around her. Topher stayed close to her, following behind her. With each step, she dragged the magic ball spell with her. She didn’t know if she would lose that spell and was pleased to find that she could move it with her fairly easily. The spell itself was straightforward, and she had used it enough that she knew how to call upon it fairly easily. It was only difficult in maintaining concentration.

  At the edge of the village, Jayna realized what had been troubling her, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it. The village seemed empty. Rumors of Jonathan had come from here, though.

  Unless they hadn’t. What if this was some sort of a trap?

  She should have been focused on that, but instead, she been focused on the smells, the possibility that she would find her brother, and on any number of different things that had nothing to do with why she had come. The blacksmith. Finding her brother and learning some secret to what might’ve happened to Jonathan.

  A rustling sound came near her, and she turned, sweeping her hands out, and pushing the magic ball spell away from her. It served to press back any attack, but she still couldn’t see what struck the spell.

  “Something is out here,” Jayna said, her voice low and in a whisper.

  Topher turned, holding out his enchantments, which she knew weren’t going to do that much. Not out here, and not against something powerful. The rot stayed with her. Rot could be many things, and when she had first smelled it, she thought that it was natural, but now she believed that it was of some dark origin.