The Floodgate

by Elaine Cunningham

  This meant more to Kiva than she wished to admit. She had chosen Andris before she knew of his heritage and because he was not Matteo. Matteo’s heritage she had known for a long time. The fact that Andris and Matteo were friends disturbed her, as did Matteo’s incomprehensible friendship with Tzigone. Kiva’s nighttime reverie had been haunted more than once by the fear that the three humans were bound by a destiny none of them fully understood.

  The elf woman made her way down to the Crinti camp and sought out Shanair. She described Matteo to the chieftain, instructing the elfblood to take a group of warriors and lure him and any companions into the haunted hills. The men were to be kept alive, she stressed, until Shanair received word otherwise.

  Once the Crinti chieftain gave grudging assent to these constraints, Kiva took her scrying globe and went off in search of a quiet place and a conversation with a certain wizard. She had not contacted him in years, and finding him among the silver threads of magic’s Weave would be no easy task.

  Mastering the spell of attunement took Kiva most of the morning. Even then, the wizard took his time in answering. The elf woman’s lips curled in disdain when at last the man’s face appeared before her. The years had not dealt kindly with the human. He was thin and balding, and the furtive expression on his face made him look disturbingly like a hairless ferret.

  “Damn it, Kiva! After all this time, you had to pick this precise moment?” he hissed.

  “Trouble, my love?” she said mockingly. “I would have thought you incapable of spawning anything quite so interesting.”

  “Where have you been? What’s going on?”

  “No doubt you heard of my capture in Akhlaur’s Swamp.”

  “Yes, and your excommunication from the Fellowship of Azuth. I’m sure that broke your heart.”

  Kiva laughed scornfully. “Yes, but my faith in the humans’ so-called Lord of Magic will sustain me through these trying times. Enough prattle. The battle nears, and we need to unleash all our weapons or fail utterly! You will have to cast the summoning we prepared.”

  The wizard shook his head. “You know I cannot. After the incident with the imp, Keturah bound me by wizard-word never to summon a creature I did not understand or could not control. Death comes to any wizard who breaks a wizard-word oath!”

  The elf lifted one jade-colored brow. “I can live with that.”

  “Obviously, I cannot. Fortunately, I will not have to.”

  Kiva’s golden eyes lit up. “You have the girl?”

  “In the palm of my hand,” Dhamari Exchelsor said smugly. In a few words he described the events of the past few days and his new relationship with Tzigone. “We are heading north even now. Keturah’s bastard has not yet learned the spell we require, but she will master it by the time we arrive in the Nath.”

  “You have done well,” Kiva said. “Surprisingly so! This Tzigone is a canny little wench, with reason to distrust you. How did you win her over?”

  “As a novelty, I tried telling the truth as often as possible. The accusations against Keturah are a matter of public record, so that was easy for her to confirm, but it took some clever magic to convince her and the jordain Matteo of my sterling character and good intentions.”

  “Now I know you’re lying,” Kiva said scathingly. “First, you’re not terribly clever. Second, you have no character of any kind, and third, your intentions are never good. More to the point, neither Matteo nor Tzigone can be convinced of anything by magical means.”

  “Ah, but the spell was not on them, but me! That talisman of Keturah’s? The one that protected the possessor against me and my agents? I had it reproduced. I gave the copy to Matteo to pass along to Tzigone, and I carry Keturah’s original for my own protection.”

  The scorn melted from the elf woman’s face. “It protects you from yourself.”

  “Just so,” Dhamari said smugly. “Since the jordain and the girl are currently the greatest threats to my success, the talisman protects me by ensuring that I do nothing to reveal my true thoughts and purposes.” The wizard’s smile held great satisfaction. “If you wish to retract your insults, I will listen graciously.”

  “Just get the girl to the Nath with all haste. See she learns the spell of summoning on the way!”

  Kiva passed her hand over the globe, erasing the image of the gloating human ferret. She tucked the scrying device into a bag and began to climb down the steep ravine that led to a small, well-hidden valley.

  The ground here was barren except for a covering of silvery lichen, and roughly level except for the single, conical mound that rose some twenty meters toward the slate-blue sky. Jagged rocks lay strewn about in a pattern that suggested a long-ago explosion. There were several places like this in the Nath. This was the least daunting and therefore the best choice for Kiva’s current purpose.

  She walked over to the mound and gingerly pressed one hand against the mossy side. She felt a faint vibration, a not-quite-audible hum of magic and power and ancient, primal evil. Kiva, despite all that she had endured and all that she had become, shivered with dread.

  As tentatively as an urchin whistling in a graveyard, she began to hum an eerie little melody, a song that sometimes echoed through the wild places and passes of Halruaa. It was an act that mingled bravado and desperation, and as she sang the hairs on the back of her neck rose in protest. The evil beneath her hand chilled her like the caress of a malevolent ghost.

  Still Kiva sang, preparing for the task that might yet fall to her. There was always the chance that Keturah’s daughter could not accomplish the task she had been born to do.

  Kiva sang until her throat was dry and tight, but her efforts brought no change to the humming magic of the mound. She fell silent, unsure whether to be disappointed or relieved. As Keturah had once told her, it was rank foolishness to summon a creature one could neither understand nor control.

  No one understood the Unseelie folk, the fey creatures that haunted the mountain passes and wild places of Halruaa. Hidden gates led into the netherworld of the Unseelie Court—a place of evil, a land not quite in this world. Few who entered it returned. Even the Crinti feared the dark fairies and would flee at the sound of their song.

  Precisely why Kiva needed this spell.

  Accepting the Crinti into her plan was rather like inviting rats into a granary to eat unwanted surplus. The nasty gray creatures—whether two-legged or four—were unlikely to leave once their purpose was fulfilled. The appearance of dark fairies would send Shanair and her muscle-bound sisters scuttling back to Dambrath.

  As far as Kiva knew, no one had ever managed to summon the Unseelie folk, much less control them. Decades of study into dark elven magic had given her some insight into the dark fairies, for legend had it that ancestors of the southland’s drow had learned their ways during captivity by the dark fairies, to their great sorrow and utter damnation.

  Be that as it might. Years of work had yielded a promising spell. Research, however, was one thing, talent quite another. Neither Dhamari nor Kiva had the gift of summoning. Keturah had had it, to a degree that few Halruaans had ever achieved. Unfortunately, the stubborn little wizard-wench would do nothing to promote Kiva’s cause. But Kiva, being elven, was able to plot a long path around this obstacle.

  She turned to the east, where wild, snow-topped mountains rose like a spiked wall between Halruaa and the wastelands beyond. She could not see the troops gathering on the plains beyond, but then, neither could Halruaa’s wizards.

  This was an unexpected addition to her assault, but she neatly folded it in. For nearly two centuries Kiva had scripted and adapted and enhanced her plan. A few lingering uncertainties remained, but she had already proven she could push beyond setbacks.

  It was time for Halruaa to die. All that remained was the one wizard who could complete the destruction.

  It was time for Akhlaur to return.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Tzigone warmed her hands over the campfire, rubbing them briskly to dri
ve away the morning chill. She had not expected the Dhamari Exchelsor’s “little journey” to turn into a wilderness expedition.

  She’d been a vagabond all her life, and there were few places in Halruaa unmarked by her footsteps. Unlike most Halruaans, she had even ventured into some of the lands beyond the mountain walls. However, she avoided the Nath, as did every sensible person she knew.

  Oddly enough, Dhamari set a straight path for the northern foothills. Despite his protestations of travel inexperience, he had augmented Tzigone’s preparations with well-chosen supplies and an unusually large armed band.

  Money, she told herself. If you had enough of it, you didn’t need expertise. Dhamari apparently had pots of money. He was a first-generation wizard, the pride of two families of wealthy merchants. His inheritance from his mother was a fortune in electrum mining, and his father’s people owned lands ideal for growing multicolored grapes for Halruaa’s fanciful wines.

  Dhamari had told her stories of his family as they rode north. She would need to know such things if she decided to take the Exchelsor name, he told her gently. Tzigone listened, but she preferred the time they spent studying Keturah’s spells.

  At least, that’s how she felt at first.

  Tzigone’s unease increased with each passing hour. As they rode, Dhamari taught her spell after spell. They summoned wild cats, boars, and even a small band of goblins. The problem was, once the creatures came, they had to be dealt with. Last night a difficult spell had gone awry, and her song had brought an owlbear roaring into camp. Two of their escorts had died fighting the massive bird-thing. Tzigone blamed herself for the men’s deaths. To her surprise, their comrades did not.

  When she was not learning spells, Tzigone moved freely among the warriors. Some of them had dealt with Dhamari before, and those who knew him best seemed to like him least. No one told tales or gave any direct complaint. Even so, after several days on the road, Tzigone was beginning to wonder if both she and Matteo had been mistaken about the wizard.

  She poked at her morning campfire, coaxing the blaze higher. A small iron pot sat among the coals. The scent of herbs and mushrooms and root vegetables rose with the steam. The hired swords gathered around a larger fire a few paces away, using their knives and their teeth to tear strips of meat from the bones of roasted conies, mountain rabbits that were nearly as big as hounds.

  The rich, savory smell made Tzigone’s stomach lurch. For some reason, she had not been able to eat meat of any kind during this trip. Calling creatures required a strange sort of affinity with them. Tzigone suspected that this would pass, but for the time being she stayed with herbs and greens.

  “Can you keep strong on such food?”

  Tzigone glanced up into Dhamari’s gently concerned face. She stirred the pot and lifted a steaming ladle. “Want some? It’s not bad.”

  “Perhaps later. I have another spell for you.” He diffidently handed her a rolled scroll.

  Tzigone flattened it out on her lap and studied it. It was a complicated spell, without doubt the most difficult she had ever seen. The incantation required elven intonations that would task her powers of mimicry. There was also an odd tablature that looked a bit like written music, indicating that the spell was to be sung. The melody, however, ranged down into the lowest depths of Tzigone’s voice and soared into regions she had never attempted to explore. At first study, the markings that choreographed the hand gestures appeared to be less orderly than the footprints left by the last staggering sprint of a beheaded chicken. At least half the runes were totally unfamiliar to her. She suspected that they were taken from a magical tradition very different from that of Halruaa. As she studied, though, the spell’s basic meaning emerged from the tangled mess.

  Tzigone stared at the spell scroll in disbelief. Dhamari had just given her a spell to summon and banish the Unseelie folk!

  She lifted an astonished gaze to his expectant face. “If you wanted me dead, you could have poisoned me before we left the city and saved us all some wear on our boot leather.”

  He blinked and then frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “The hell you don’t! I’m just an apprentice. This spell would challenge a graybeard wizard.”

  “You have exceptional talent—”

  “And astonishing beauty,” she interrupted, mimicking his tone. “But for argument’s sake, let’s say I can cast this. What then? Wasn’t the owlbear enough excitement for you? For them?” she concluded furiously, waving with one hand toward the surviving members of their guard.

  Dhamari lifted a placating hand. “I do not intend for you to summon the dark fairies,” he protested mildly. “That is not the point at all. It would not only be foolish but redundant They are here already. Have you not heard them?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. The strange, compelling song, distant and faint, had haunted the edges of night for three days.

  “These hills are strange and fey,” the wizard went on. “The veils between the worlds are thin in Halruaa—few places in all the world provide more portals into distant places. The Unseelie folk are around us. Knowing that I have brought you into a dangerous area, it would ease my mind tremendously if you could cast the spell of banishment.”

  “Why is that necessary? Can’t you do it?”

  He sent her one of his small, wistful smiles. “I do not have Keturah’s talent and defer to the wizard whose voice held the laraken.”

  Tzigone didn’t like flattery, but neither could she deny the practicality of Dhamari’s words. So she let him tutor her in the preliminary spell, one that would enable her to read the runes. He gave her a ring of translation so she would pronounce the strange elven words properly.

  As she murmured the words over and over, the morning breeze seemed to grow colder. Her arms prickled with gooseflesh, and the warm cloak Dhamari had draped around her shoulders didn’t help. Tzigone let him build up the campfire, but she didn’t expect it to improve matters. She was not chilled by the relatively thin mountain air but by the sound of her own voice.

  The spell frightened her, even at this early stage of its casting. Since it was meant as a banishing, this was, as Matteo would say, logical. Tzigone didn’t suppose that the Unseelie folk could be cowed by some minor magic. The magic felt twisted, though, and somehow wrong.

  Throughout that day and the next she studied the spell, though her vision swam and her head throbbed with the effort of wrapping her mind and her will around the convoluted magic.

  By the second night, the flicker of the campfire made the runes dance on the page. Tzigone kept at it, spurred on by the faint, mocking echoes that tossed from hill to hill—the unholy music of the Unseelie folk.

  Far to the south, Basel Indoulur paced the garden of his Halarahh home. He’d expected Tzigone back days ago, and he cursed himself for granting her permission to leave the city with Dhamari Exchelsor. Tzigone considered the wizard harmless, and Basel trusted her judgment. Her candor, however, was less than total.

  Nor was Basel blameless on this score. He could have spoken to Tzigone of her mother, and he did not. He had not told her of Matteo’s visit, or suggested that the young jordain had urged Tzigone to contact Dhamari as a means to save him, Basel, from the follies of fatherly instinct.

  The irony—layers and layers of it—was almost overwhelming.

  With a sigh, Basel left the garden and made his way up the tower’s winding stairs to the apprentices’ floor. He had given Mason and Farrah Noor a day’s holiday from their studies. There was no one to ask why he felt compelled to stop by Tzigone’s room.

  He missed the troublesome little wench. He enjoyed her quick mind and impish spirit, and he loved her as he would the daughter he should have had—might have had, if the council had not intervened. Instead, he had been turned out like a bull into a pasture containing an idealistic and single-minded heifer. In the eyes of the law, in any way that truly mattered, Basel’s wife was dead—destroyed by her own dedication to the good of Halruaa.


  The wizard’s gaze fell upon the door to Tzigone’s room, and the past disappeared from his mind like a windblown candle. The door was slightly ajar.

  Basel’s eyes narrowed. Tzigone always left the door open. She was accustomed to open spaces and could not sleep unless every door and window was flung wide. The wizard edged closer. The sounds of a furtive search came from within the room, then a gasp of astonishment.

  Despite his size, Basel could be quick and silent. He reached into his spell bag for a small iron nail and eased himself into the room. His hand flashed in a quick circle as he spoke a single, arcane word. The nail vanished, and the intruder froze in the act of whirling toward him.

  Basel paced into the room for a closer look at the would-be thief. The woman was of medium height and extraordinary beauty. Her hair was a glossy blue-black, her features delicate, her curves lavish. She wore a pale blue robe—an attempt at disguise, no doubt. A startled expression was carved onto her immobile face, and a medallion swung from her still hand.

  The wizard’s heart quickened as he studied the trinket That was Keturah’s talisman! There was no magic left to it other than the memories it evoked. No doubt Tzigone had left it there for safekeeping rather than risk losing it in her travels.

  Basel tugged the chain from the woman’s frozen fingers. Her trapped eyes followed his movements and glazed with despair.

  He recognized the woman as Sinestra, a minor wizard married to one of the Belajoon brothers. The family was a well-established wizard line, and they held considerable wealth and respect in the king’s city. What would prompt a pampered young wife to thievery?

  More curious than angry, Basel released the holding spell with a flick of one hand.

  The woman exploded into action, throwing herself at the talisman in Basel’s hand. “Give it to me! It’s mine!”

  He deftly sidestepped, and the intruder tripped and fell facedown on Tzigone’s cot. Her muffled oath was both pungent and familiar. Basel had heard it from Tzigone, and from her mother before her.