Mantle: The Return of the Sha by Gary Bregar Read Free Book Online Page A

Balki had another gift he had inherited from his ancestors. This gift was another ability that he had received from his father’s side—he had the ability to cloak.
    The ability to cloak was something he kept hidden from others. It was a skill that could prove extremely useful, but it was also considered to be highly suspect and even dangerous.
    Balki had not inherited an ability to cloak himself physically, as Barth had, but he could cloak himself to alter the way others felt about him while in his presence. He could disguise his words in a way that the person listening would trust him wholeheartedly and without doubt. He could appear as though the words he spoke were in a person’s best interest, even though it might be clear they were not. Even without speaking, a person might feel safe and trusting while in his company.
    It was a dangerous ability that hadn’t been seen in Forris for generations, and the prospect that someone could so easily manipulate others would be terrifying to the Fories.
    So Balki did not speak of it—but he certainly did use it. In fact, he used it often. Balki was born with a hunger for power and, fortunate for him, he had not only been born into a family where power and trust were received openly, but also with an ability to cloak himself in order to gain even more power.
    No, he was not the son that his father believed him to be and he deceived everyone. Now the king was scheduled to arrive, and Balki had plans. They were not elaborate plans, though; Balki had also been born with patience.
    He intended to do only one thing on the day of the king’s arrival, and that was to simply plant a seed. He would introduce himself to King Zander and make his mark with him. By the time Balki had gotten his several minutes with the king, he would have instilled such an unwavering trust in him that, although Zander would be blind to the reason, he would see Balki as an up-and-coming adviser who should be trusted and consulted.
    That would certainly make sense to those around the king. There would be nothing suspicious or out of the ordinary. He was a Touro, after all, and the Touro family was known for their loyalty. Now the king would have Balki in his head and would not be able to let go of him.
    Balki’s ability to cloak was not the only weapon in his arsenal. There was something else even more dangerous to the people of Forris and the whole of Mantle.
    Balki himself was unaware of a dark power that he carried with him—hung around his neck. He was unwittingly the carrier of an inflock, an extension of the spirit of Menagraff, the Skite king. An inflock hadn’t been known in Forris (or anywhere else in Mantle) since the defeat of the Skites during the Great Mantle War, and so no one in Forris would ever think to look for one, or be suspicious that they hadn’t gone extinct along with the Skites at the conclusion of the war.
    This isn’t to say that they could be easily spotted. An inflock could possess any object of its choosing, and it was the Skites who had perfected the making of objects that the inflock would desire. This particular inflock was hidden in a hollowed gold medallion. During the medallion’s creation, it had been filled with the powdered bones taken from the enemies of the now long-defeated Kingdom of Skite. This included the bones and tears of Fories and their allies.
    Balki’s ancestor, Barth, had taken it from a Skite soldier during his escape. He would not have even considered removing it from the dead man’s chest, but it had called to him and he could not refuse— it had been created especially for him . This was yet another piece of the Skites’ elaborate and long-reaching plan to seek revenge on the three allied kingdoms of Mantle.
     
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    For hundreds of years the inflock, along with the medallion, had been handed down through generations. It was passed along to each firstborn son by his father. In Balki’s case, his father, Tate Touro, had passed it to him