The Well-Favored Man

by Elizabeth Willey

  “What is it?” Dewar asked, low, looking around.

  “Something’s ahead,” Prospero said. “It waits.”

  “What sort of thing?” Dewar said to Freia.

  “Dark,” she said. “Do you see?”

  I stared into the lightless walls and hall and saw nothing but dark, though I could now sense, if I tried, the sinuous trailing line drawing us on with our own curiosity.

  “Onward.” Prospero tugged at me and the others gently to move us forward again, and his lantern went out. He lobbed it with a curse into the cavern which had opened out from the corridor—the Maze was gone.

  We stood for a few breaths in darkness so complete that the darkness behind my closed eyelids seemed brighter.

  “The Spring!” I cried. It was there, coursing around us, and Virgil hooted thrice as he landed on my left shoulder.

  “No …” Prospero said uncertainly. It wasn’t the Spring really. There was that same alien tincture in it.

  “Aha,” Dewar said. Suddenly he swung his staff speaking quickly, and a haze of light followed its end, streaming like a banner, and then clotted, hissing, at the top, a huge ball of fire illuminating the perfect chill blackness around us far better than any common lamp: no ignis fatuus, but a Salamander, bound there to light us and to be used as a weapon if Dewar chose to release it.

  The darkness curled and coiled and rose like smoke, high up, and rumbled, “Usurper.”

  “You are the usurper here,” Prospero said.

  It glistened; it made a sandpaper sound, flowing and settling into a shape as tall as the pillars. The Salamander-light showed it: black, scaled it seemed, with two oblong patches of even blacker blackness on either side of a head that was not human-shaped, nor like anything else I recognized.

  “This … is … mine,” said the dark thing, a voice that filled the darkness with worse.

  “It is mine; my blood has made it, my blood has shaped it,” Prospero cried, “and you are an interloper and shall be cast out.” The Black Sword was in his hand. “By the Spring I command you speak your name,” Prospero shouted, and gestured. I felt the Spring, our Spring, wash over and around us, and Dewar said, “Aaaah,” and stepped to his right a few light steps as I circled to the left, behind Prospero.

  Freia stood stock-still.

  The Spring flowed out to us, gathered, and receded toward the intruder; I drew on it also, and I saw it forming into a deceptively lacy network, growing around him and constricting, compelling—

  “I am Tython, who was here before all,” roared the intruder, throwing off Prospero’s command, and a blackness cut toward Prospero from Tython’s right hand as he swung it. He had a black weapon, difficult to see in the darkness and against the darkness that was him. Freia ducked under the blow, which swept through where she had been, and rolled and came up by a pillar.

  Prospero raised the Black Sword and met the blow. White-gold light flashed out from the meeting, like lightning struck between clouds; Prospero staggered, but so did Tython.

  Dewar, at the same time, hit him with the Salamander, a comet of hissing fire.

  “You are a leech, a loathsome lifesucking maker of nothing,” Prospero shouted, “and there shall be no mercy for you, vile parasite.”

  I drew on the Spring and drew Tython’s attention by doing so. It seemed that sorcery, under the circumstances, might not be the right weapon for this battle. “Sprat,” he hissed, and I used the Spring to shield myself from his other hand, buffeting me. It didn’t work—he was slowed by it, but not stopped, and he laughed until I slammed Talon through the palm of that hand and pulled it out, blackish blood flowing smokily with it, as I twisted and dodged away around a pillar.

  Tython screamed; by the light of the Salamander which was winding itself around his right sword-holding hand like a bracelet, I saw that his tongue was forked.

  “Gwydion, back! Ward thy mother, boy,” yelled Prospero at me, furious, and I fell back toward her. He was right—she had neither Art nor arms.

  From behind us, I heard laughter, incongruous bright soprano merriment.

  “Dazhur,” Freia said, whirling, her face settling into an expression I had never seen before—hard and cold, angrier than I would have thought possible. “You have done this.”

  “I, I,” Dazhur laughed, “and you shall not be the Lady of Argylle long.” She approached my mother, who folded her arms. By the Salamander-light I saw that Dazhur’s blonde hair was short, as Dewar had described it, and that she wore floating white robes. My mother was grubby from her journey through the Maze; her hair was straggling out of its knot, and she presented not nearly so majestic an appearance as Dazhur, who shone in the vaulted dark.

  “Fool,” said Freia, her voice sharp. I hovered a few paces behind her.

  “Gwydion, drop!” shouted someone, and I threw myself down against the base of one of the great pillars; a hot blast passed over my head. Dazhur laughed again and made a gesture with her hands, and the heat caught and collected there, darkness in her pale fingers. She held it over her head. It glowed, inside her hands, inside itself, dull and unlively.

  “Get back, Gwydion!” Dewar cried.

  I got away from the flashes and crashes of the fight against Tython, closer to my mother.

  “Catch,” Dazhur cried, and hurled that ball of Otherness at Freia.

  Freia lifted the hand that had destroyed the door, her left hand, with the mark of the knife still on it, and the ball exploded into light, dissolving.

  “There is more to the blood of Argylle than a draught of the Spring,” Freia said, white with anger. “Dismiss this thing you have conjured and you may keep your life!”

  Perhaps, I thought, Mother didn’t need help—yet she was vulnerable to conventional attack.

  I glanced around to see how Prospero was doing; he and Dewar were harrying Tython, trying, it seemed, to cut at his knees. The monster had left the Spring, and was smaller and solider than he’d been; he had tusks, as well as a forked tongue, and the sinewy way he moved made me think he had no real bones, only joints in his limbs. Dewar’s Salamander was flying at Tython’s face; Tython knocked it down at Dewar, who had to throw himself aside to avoid being incinerated by the Elemental he’d Summoned. This is the problem with them in a fight: they don’t take sides. The match seemed even enough, and I returned my attention to the others.

  “Oh, how generous of your Ladyship!” Dazhur retorted, sneering. “You, who have jealously kept everything of the Spring to yourselves for eternity, you would so kindly grant me my life. I tremble before your mighty justice—”

  Prospero was fencing with Tython’s claws, his back to the pillar behind which I stood. Dewar was not with him. Yet I was engrossed by the clash between my mother and Dazhur, and I tarried before helping him—he was holding his own, and he had ordered me to guard Freia—and he might resent aid when he didn’t really need it.

  “You have never understood the true nature of Argylle,” Freia was saying. “The Spring is not kept; it is keeper, sustainer, donor. This thing of your greed will kill all if you don’t banish it. Indeed—I believe you are not strong enough to dismiss it, and in that case you will keep neither your own life nor anyone else’s.” She seemed to glow. I could feel the Spring’s power flowing around and into her like a whirlpool. Mother didn’t use sorcery or the Spring, not as Dewar and I could. I think though that sorcery and the Spring could use her.

  “The Black Chair shall be mine and you—” began Dazhur, and Freia made a sharp, chopping gesture with one hand: enough.

  They stared at one another, the one malicious and hate-filled, the other coldly determined to do what was necessary, as she always had.

  I wondered what the best way to jump in with Prospero was; clearly Freia didn’t need help just now, and I could hear Prospero’s quick steps and panting gasps as he fought. Virgil decided that for me; soaring in from the darkness, he hovered before Tython’s face as the Salamander had, distracting him for Prospero. I held back again
and watched the two women.

  “You see nothing,” Freia said, “but what you desire, Power. You are blind to the rest of the world. This thing you have raised is greater than you, but not greater than the Spring, which is not to be possessed.”

  Someone shouted, a quick short startled cry. Dazhur laughed again, and I knew that even if Mother did need my help, my uncle or Prospero needed me more.

  I shifted Talon to my left hand and went around the stone column. Prospero, to my right, was doing well; some distance away, Dewar lay on the floor—he must have taken a blow. The Salamander was gone. Virgil was flying close around Tython’s head, making him hiss and snap and snatch, but always escaping. I drew on the purling Spring, strengthening arm and blade, and struck at the back of Tython’s scaly-clawed hand while bracing myself on the column. It was the diversion Prospero needed.

  “Hai!” said he, and in the same moment brought down the Black Sword two-handed and hacked the wrist half-through. Tython screamed and the blood sprayed in a fine mist from his maimed arm; Prospero and I both darted out of its way. The hand flopped on a piece of skin and sinew. Tython tore at it with long teeth.

  Freia had run to Dewar to help him up; I could not spare them more than a peripheral glance, being busy dodging a long line of hot-feeling force from Tython’s other hand, which he wielded like a whip. It swished through the air. Tython howled again; Dewar had thrown his sword into the monster’s side, where it stuck, and enraged Tython turned and swatted at him.

  The blow missed him; he dodged it.

  Freia leapt back and away, but not quickly enough.

  Tython struck her.

  I heard her gasp where I stood, my heart stopping in my chest.

  Tython’s handless arm knocked her into the air. Dewar screamed and jumped toward her; he could see what I could not at once, that her trajectory was taking her too close to the Spring.

  Prospero snarled like an animal and hurled the Black Sword at Tython’s head, where it smote his eye and stayed there.

  I heard an inhuman shriek coming from my own throat as I recklessly ran forward, swinging Talon wildly, and felt the blade bite into Tython’s groin.

  Freia seemed to hang in the air a moment, just beyond Dewar’s leaping reach. She fell into the dark, liquid Spring of Argylle. I saw her body jerk and twist as it surrounded her, and the Spring was dark and liquid no longer; in an instant there was an ardent eruption from it, a jolt of pure, unchannelled, undirected power and light and sound which caused Tython to howl as he vanished, erased from the world, and which blasted past me, overloading my senses and confounding interpretation.

  Dazhur screamed madly, shrill and high.

  The momentum of my swing threw me off balance and I fell to my knees.

  The Black Sword rang and rang again as it struck the floor. Something else made a clattering sound nearby.

  Dewar and Prospero sprawled on the floor at the edge of the Spring. Prospero half-lay over him; he had tackled Dewar to keep him from falling in also as he failed to catch his sister. One of them was shouting incoherently.

  The Spring had a halo of polychromatic light over it like a bubble, which faded as it returned to serenity.

  Dazhur was laughing hysterically, her arms upraised in triumph.

  Freia was gone.

  Ottaviano let me sit and recover from the telling for a long time. The clock ticked more loudly than I breathed. He moved after many minutes, slightly, enough to end the moment.

  “What happened to Dazhur?” he asked softly. “She Summoned that thing …”

  “I beheaded her while Prospero sat on Dewar,” I said. “We were mad. Stark mad.”

  I opened my desk, rummaged around for a can, and prised off the lid. I stuffed the herbs in it into my pipe and lit them with hands that were icy-cold and slippery with perspiration. Recollecting my manners, I pushed the can over to Otto, and he sniffed, smiled quickly, and knocked the dottle from his pipe to fill and light it too.

  “Gwydion,” he said, “I’m … Hell. It shouldn’t have happened.”

  It should not have. Dazhur had been laying her web of evil in Argylle, seducing Josquin and Hicha, stealing information from the Archives, retreating (only in seeming) to Errethon and insinuating herself into the confidence of the old Headman there, promising him Argylle and herself. I clenched my teeth. “We were asses. Complacent. Unaccustomed to the idea of an enemy. There was Dazhur, all that time, collecting scraps and bits, enough to raise an evil thing with a grudge greater than her own. Phoebe recognized what she was doing as unnatural, but couldn’t counter it herself—and none of us who could have acted, did.”

  “She’s perceptive,” he said, and drew on his pipe.

  The mild sedative effect of the stuff, a local herb usually infused for headaches and as a muscle relaxant, began to hit me. I felt my pulse going down to a normal rate. Mother always frowned on this kind of drug usage, maintaining that a person should be able to govern himself, but even she sometimes failed to follow her own preaching. Crutch or not, I couldn’t have gotten myself under control without it, couldn’t have survived those first couple of months or those first couple of hours.

  “Hit your dad hard, didn’t it,” Otto half-asked.

  “Still does,” I said.

  “He’s been away a long time.”

  “Wish I could be,” I said, and it was true when I said it, although in all my travels I’ve never found a place I like better than home.

  Ottaviano stayed another half-hour, and we just smoked together without talking until I got up and opened the Way to Ollol for him, back to the guesthouse and his mercantile diplomacy. I wondered why he had asked about Freia. In Landuc, they claimed he was in love with my mother, but in Landuc, they’ll say just about anything about just about anyone. Except, really, Mother. People don’t like to talk about her, not even gossipy Aunt Viola or foaming Fulgens. They press their lips together and look away, or say, “Such a shame,” in a hurried mumble, or they shrug.

  I had Anselm reschedule my afternoon appointments and went to my mother’s study, where I spent the afternoon browsing through her books. I had another evil to face, alone this time.

  6

  I BEGAN BRIEFING MYSELF PAINSTAKINGLY THAT evening, first reviewing the spells that had had the most effect on the dragon the first time and then adding others of similar power and impact. If only there were some way to take a book of spells into battles of this sort, or notes at least—but there isn’t, so a sorcerer facing a contest first conquers his own shortcomings, and if he fails to do so he will fail in his fight. Most sorcerers who lose such duels do so because their memory flags and leaves them speechless. Though it is best to be primed with freshly-swotted Destructions and Summonings, it is also well to be ready to cast some spell—any spell—no matter how incongruous. Dewar claimed a duel had been won by someone who, in the desperation of the moment, changed the challenger’s horse into a pig. In the time so gained, he did the same to the sorcerer.

  My review took the rest of the night and most of the following day. I paused for another nap and a big meal—no point in letting myself slip below peak in any way—and checked outside my door for any notes Prospero might have left for me. One, dated that morning:

  Marfisa’s mending; Alexander still coughs, but no blood. He’ll live. The Councillors send respects and grovelling beg for news; I’ve answered them. Tell me ere you set forth. Belphoebe reports that Gemnamnon keeps to his billet, nursing his own grudges. Prospero.

  It was late afternoon. I was as ready as I could ever be. After building the fire up, I stretched and took out some pieces of sorcerous apparatus. With a bit of the soil I had picked up and certain other things, I composed a spell of passage to the mountaintop. Then I closed my eyes and reached along the gossamer lines of pulse and counterpulse connecting me to my three hawks.

  My birds were still in place, meaning that the dragon had not relocated. Yet he might have gone out and returned.

  Since I had my Mi
rror of Vision in front of me, I performed a Lesser Summoning of Phoebe and got a confirmation of Prospero’s report: Gemnamnon was still there, in a foul mood; he had gone hunting again and returned to the tower ruins, presumably having killed and eaten. She hadn’t heard yet whom or where.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I am attacking him again tonight. Stay off the peak. Go down to the south or southwest side, without being seen.”

  “Alone,” she said, “you go alone?”

  “Yes.”

  We regarded one another.

  “You should not,” she said finally.

  “It’s my risk to take,” I said firmly. It was. Moreover, it was my duty to face things that threatened Argylle in person, just as my mother had always done.

  Belphoebe sighed, still looking at me.

  “This is sorcerous work,” I said.

  “You could—” she cut herself off.

  “Could what?” I was sure I knew what she’d say, anyway.

  She shook her head, once. “You know what you do. I cannot … I’m sure you’ve thought it through with all care.”

  “I have.”

  “Good luck, Gwydion.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Send a bird to me if you … if you need help.”

  What could she do? Get toasted herself. “Thank you, Phoebe.” I broke the spell. No point telling the twins or Walter. They were out of this, and I didn’t want more dissuasion or nervous advice. I wasn’t letting myself think too hard about the whole proceedings at this point.

  I dressed and armed myself. From Marfisa’s and Alexander’s injuries, I concluded that I wanted padding and a gas mask. The gas mask would have hampered me too much, and anyway the dragon’s exhalations could be dispersed with simple transmutation spells, so I skipped that and layered on body protection. The dragon had shown a tendency to use his claws and tail, so I wanted more than just leather this time.

  Sword, buckler, a knife in each tall black boot, heavy quilted gold-embroidered gambeson and over it my gold-tinted scale mail on leather (a present from Dewar, the work of dwarves he did business with at times, ensorcelled to repel most conventional damage, including fire), a helm, a couple of stilettos concealed here and there, and a long slender dagger with a leaf-shaped blade on my belt, with my sword. Certainly I’d use only the sword, but I felt better with lots of hardware. Confidence is what you make it of, Gaston used to say. The padding interfered with my freedom of movement, so I walked around and stretched and swung my arms until I was comfortable.