The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) Read Free

memories he clung to. Memories that were an essential part of him. These were the memories that made him.
    He remembered his sons, Romulus and Remus. Those memories never left him. But no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember his wife’s face.
    “Mars.”
    He could recall certain battles in exquisite detail. He knew the name of every king and peasant he had fought, every hero he had slain and every coward who had run from him. He remembered the voyages of discovery, when he and Prometheus had traveled across the unknown world and even out into the newly created Shadowrealms.
    “Lord Mars.”
    He had witnessed wonders and horrors. He had fought Elders and Archons, Ancients, even the scattered remnants of the legendary Earthlords themselves. In those days he had been worshipped as a hero, the savior of the humani.
    “Mars. Wake up.”
    He did not like to wake, because that brought the pain, but worse than the pain was the realization that he was a prisoner, and would remain one until the end of time. And when he was awake, his punishment, his pain, reminded him of the times when the humani had come to fear and loathe him.
    “Wake up.”
    “Mars … Mars … Mars …”
    The voice—or was it voices?—was insistent, irritating and vaguely familiar.
    “Wake up!”
    In his prison of bone, deep in the catacombs far below Paris, the Elder opened his eyes. They were bright blue for a single instant before they burned red. “What now?” he snarled, voice echoing inside the helmet that never left his head.
    Directly in front of him were what looked like a humanicouple. They were tall and slender, their deeply tanned skin stark against pristine white T-shirts, white jeans and white sneakers. The woman wore her dark hair short against her skull, whereas the man’s head was smooth shaven. The couple’s eyes were hidden behind matching wraparound sunglasses.
    Simultaneously, they took off their glasses. Their eyes were bright, brilliant blue, the pupils tiny black dots. Even through the pain of his perpetually burning and hardening aura, Mars Ultor remembered them. These were no humani: they were Elders. “Isis?” he rasped in the ancient language of Danu Talis.
    “It is good to see you, old friend,” the woman said.
    “Osiris?”
    “We have been searching for you for a very long time,” the man added. “And now we’ve found you.”
    “But look at what she has done to you,” Isis breathed, obviously distressed.
    The Witch of Endor had trapped Mars in this prison cell, which she had created from the skull of a creature that had never roamed the earth. But imprisoning him had not been enough for her: she had created an extra torment for her prisoner. The Witch had caused Mars’s aura to continually burn, then harden on the surface of his skin, like lava bubbling from the earth’s core, leaving him trapped in the skull cell and in constant agony beneath a leaden crust.
    Mars Ultor laughed and the sound came out like an echoing growl. “For millennia I see no one, and now it seems I am popular again.”
    Isis and Osiris separated and moved to either side of what looked like an enormous gray statue forever frozen in the act of trying to rise. The lower half of Mars’s body, from the waist down, was sunk deeply into the ground, which Dee had turned to liquid bone and then frozen solid again, trapping him. The Elder’s outstretched left arm dripped stalactites of ivory, and clinging to his back were the petrified shapes of the hideous satyrs Phobos and Deimos, their jaws gaping. Behind the Elder was a long rectangular stone plinth, where he’d lain undisturbed for thousands of years. Now the thick slab was cracked in two.
    “We know Dee was here,” Isis said.
    “Yes. He found me. I am surprised he told you where I was,” Mars rasped. “We fought. He is the one who trapped me here in the ground.”
    “Dee told us nothing,” Osiris said. He was standing behind Mars, examining in almost minute detail the