Sword and Sorceress 28

by Unknown

  She blew out a breath. Too many times recently, Cluny had seen how the idea of an animal wizard with a human familiar drove seemingly rational beings to odd and sometimes dangerous behavior, and with someone as powerful and capricious as the Ifriti Ranee knowing her secret, she would need the support of her two closest friends now more than ever. “Shtasith?” she called. “Master Gollantz will be here soon if...if there’s anything you need to say that you don’t want him to hear.”

  “What?” Crocker looked from Cluny to the fireplace. “You think he’s not telling us ev’rything?”

  “I don’t know,” Cluny had to admit. She waved a paw, tried to straighten the weirdly fluttering strands of power connecting her to the firedrake, and raised her voice again. “Please, Shtasith. Is there any reason we shouldn’t accept her Majesty’s invitation?”

  “We have no choice,” that sibilant voice echoed from the smoke-darkened bricks. “One of the four elemental rulers of all creation has summoned us. We can no more resist her than we can stop the sun from rising.”

  Cluny blinked, but Crocker gave another of his little snorts. “OK, first? That whole ‘four elemental rulers of creation’ thing is pretty much bogus. I mean, just because she’s in charge of the Fire Realms doesn’t make the Ifriti Ranee any closer to the divine wellspring of the universe or whatever. And second, Shtasith, you don’t keep secrets from us! You can’t! We’re all three in this thing together, and, well—” He stopped, looked over at Cluny. “It might be you don’t know about the standfast spell.” He cocked his head and shrugged.

  A chill rustled Cluny’s fur as she realized what Crocker must be planning. She wasn’t sure she liked it, but after half a heartbeat, she nodded. Crocker nodded back, strode across the room, and squatted in front of the hearthstone. “You listening, Teakettle?” Leaning forward, he reached up the chimney, and Cluny couldn’t keep from wincing at the squawk that followed, Crocker wrenching Shtasith out with a scattering of soot.

  “Unhand me, simian!” But Crocker had apparently learned a few things, too, in the time Shtasith had been with them: a glowing net sprang from his hands to wrap around the firedrake, Shtasith squirming unsuccessfully against it. “This indignity will not go unanswered! I shall fall upon you when you sleep, and I promise you I shall then—!”

  “You’ll listen!” Crocker’s voice, cold and sharp, bit at Cluny’s ears. But she kept them upright and tried her best to look as serious as Crocker sounded. “The standfast spell’s so basic, they teach it here first semester, back before me and Cluny had even figured out she was the wizard and I was the familiar.” He jabbed a finger into Shtasith’s snout, the firedrake’s eyes red and spinning. “It’s simple, but it lets wizards crack open the heads of their familiars and rummage around inside. It feels like white-hot knives slicing into you and your wizard both, but it shows her everything you ever thought and everything you ever did. Everything.”

  Shtasith’s eyes got even wider. “You...you cannot be serious!” He craned his neck, peered through the glowing mesh of the net at Cluny. “Mistress! Chastise the simian for his untruthfulness!”

  This time, she didn’t have to fake her scowl. “What did you call me?”

  “Not mistress! Cluny, I mean!” His magic fizzed and sparked. “But this is madness! How can such a spell exist?? And how—??” His sudden fear burst like chalk dust against her whiskers. “How could you ever...ever—?”

  “She had to.” Crocker shivered, and Cluny almost told him to drop the whole ploy. Except, well, the panic radiating from Shtasith convinced her that he really was hiding something they needed to know.... “The second time we went to the Fire Realms,” Crocker was going on. “We had to undo this spell I’d cast, but since I had no idea what I’d done, Cluny and Master Gollantz couldn’t unravel it. The Ifriti Ranee was gonna kill us if we didn’t, though, so Cluny had to...had to claw through my brain to get at the info.” His voice broke. “Trust me, Teakettle, you do not wanna make her do that to you.”

  None of which was a lie exactly, but the growing terror on Shtasith’s face made Cluny take a breath. “That’s not quite what happened that day.”

  “True,” Shtasith said, his voice trembling. “In fact, my Cluny, even you do not truly know what happened that day. For while I have meant these past months to relate the tale, no opportunity ever presented itself, and I reassured myself that, since we would never likely encounter the Ifriti Ranee, I had no urgent necessity to drag you into—”

  A loud knock stopped him, the door rattling and swinging open to reveal Master Gollantz in the hallway, his black and purple formal robes more severe-looking than Cluny remembered. “Novices? It’s time.”

  ~o0o~

  The transport spell Master Gollantz constructed in their room was the same one he’d built in his office when he’d taken them to the Fire Realms on their second trip. But even though Cluny could see and understand more of its intricate structure this time, she still felt very much the novice watching a master at work.

  She found it so fascinating, it almost distracted her from Shtasith, physically coiled along Crocker’s shoulders above her and aetherically pressing into her brain as jagged as a pawful of shattered glass. Her tail twitching, her claws digging into the cloth of Crocker’s breast pocket, she wanted to stop Master Gollantz, ask him to step outside for a moment till Shtasith could tell them whatever had happened between him and the Ifriti Ranee, but, well, they were on a schedule, and—

  “Novices?” Master Gollantz stood among the invisibly glowing balusters of the transport spell, his hand raised to grasp the section of empty air where the trigger rested. “Might I suggest you bring the invitation? One ought not to take chances when the rulers of realms are involved.”

  Cluny braced herself, Crocker turning, reaching for the parchment, tucking it into one of his side pockets. Master Gollantz nodded, took the trigger, and pulled it downward, the very fabric of reality unzipping as it moved, the wooden paneled walls and off-white curtains of their still sparsely-decorated dorm room peeling away to reveal—

  A cacophony of color, searing reds, yellows, and oranges swirling to fill the space around her, the hot, dry, brimstone-laced air digging into Cluny’s lungs like it wanted to suck every bit of moisture out of her. Shouting, chanting, screaming hit her next, her ears pulling flat against her head, her whiskers sweeping every protection spell she’d ever even considered learning out to surround herself and her familiars to stop whatever was going on here from overwhelming them and—

  “Welcome!” a blast-furnace of a voice roared.

  Forcing herself to settle down, Cluny managed to focus on what was actually happening instead of what her jittering nerves were telling her: banners, she could see now, in every fiery shade billowing from the marble walls of the room where they’d appeared, the black and white stone floor strewn with some sort of flower petals, shimmering like the first golden touch of dawn on a summer morning. Nothing that was going to kill them, in other words, and dialing her panic back one more step allowed her to make out the rows of ifriti, phoenixes, imps and other more globular elemental types standing below the banners and cheering, smiles on the faces of those who had faces.

  And at the far end of the room, rising from her throne like a volcanic eruption given humanoid shape, the Ifriti Ranee spread the magma flow of her arms, the hooting and applause cutting off almost immediately. “Exactly on time, too, Cluny, Crocker, and Shtasith! And how lovely! I see you’ve brought Hieronymus Gollantz as your guest!”

  “Your Majesty.” Master Gollantz bowed, and when Cluny’s still-shaky sense of balance started skewing, she realized with a quick stab of relief that it was just Crocker bowing, too. “It is truly an honor to be in your presence once again.”

  “Of course it is!” Her Majesty glided forward, the lava from her chest down suddenly seizing up to form a pumice-gray gown over her hourglass figure; a snap of her blazing fingers, though, and the gown burst into a vibrant, flamingo pink. “And on this ce
lebratory occasion, all such positive emotions shall be doubled and then trebled!” She planted her big fists on her hips and let out a laugh as robust as a fusillade of cannons. “Perhaps even quadrupled for you, Novice Crocker, considering the absolutely and entirely appropriate headgear with which you have adorned yourself!”

  Swallowing, Cluny stared up at her Majesty—taller than most of the trees back home, she was fairly sure—and wanted with every shiver of her heart to believe all this good humor. But Shtasith’s touch in her head, normally a leaping flame of energy, guttered like a nearly-quenched wick, and Cluny found she could barely summon a smile.

  Fortunately, Crocker didn’t seem to be feeling quite so oppressed. “You’re too kind, your Majesty,” he said, and Cluny almost found herself grinning when he pushed his ridiculous hat a little farther forward over his dark, curly hair. “Some of my colleagues were a little worried that maybe a hat of this caliber wouldn’t sit well in a ‘court of law’ situation. But I’m glad to know that my inherent sense of fashion was once again right on the money.”

  The withering look Master Gollantz gave Crocker forced a chuckle from Cluny’s throat, and her Majesty clapped her hands. “That’s the spirit! Come, and we shall begin this evening’s festivities!” A flick of her wrist blasted magma into the wall behind the throne, that whole side of the room shattering like fire-ravaged wood to reveal a courtyard outside. Open glass carriages hitched to gigantic bombardier beetles stood in serried ranks under a sky about as dark, Cluny figured, as it ever got in the Realms of Fire. “Let us away to the Hall of Justice!” her Majesty continued, striding for the hole she’d just made. “Our three guests of honor shall ride with me, and the rest of you will follow!”

  ~o0o~

  Moving in her Majesty’s wake, Cluny felt very glad she wasn’t walking. At least Crocker had worn his good boots, she noted, and bracing herself in his breast pocket, she cast an extra layer of protection magic over his hands as he scrambled down the tumbled chunks of marble to the courtyard below. The heat rising from the stones due to her Majesty’s passage made Cluny’s whiskers sweat, so she quickly summoned up several cooling spells as well: living with Shtasith had made learning them very necessary.

  Speaking of whom—Turning, she dug her claws into the front of Crocker’s robes and stretched herself up to his left shoulder, the firedrake’s wedge of a head tucked there against Crocker’s neck, his normally solid black eyes flecked with red and darting around like he was tracking multiple targets. “Shtasith,” she whispered, “all that stuff Crocker was saying about the standfast spell! You’ve got to know I would never do anything to hurt—!”

  “Foolishness!” His sharp but quiet hiss struck her almost as hard as a slap. “We must discard such pointless thoughts, my Cluny, and be vigilant instead! All here is not as it seems!”

  She blinked at him, but before she could ask any of the questions that started popping into her head, the jerky ride leveled out, and she craned her neck around to see that Crocker had arrived at the base of the Ifriti Ranee’s landslide, a blue flame of an imp pulling open the door of the nearest glass carriage for her Majesty. Except it wasn’t glass, Cluny realized from the way the light of her Majesty’s lava refracted through the thing: each and every one of the several dozen carriages lined up here had to be carved from solid diamond.

  “Come!” her Majesty said again, settling onto the carriage’s single bench and giving the space to her right a surprisingly delicate pat. “I will tell you the order of this evening’s events.”

  Crocker clambered up and sat beside her, the tension Cluny could feel from him so well masked, she doubted anyone not aetherically connected to him would have any idea how phony his grin was. “It’s the ‘light repast’ part I’m looking forward to,” he said, rubbing his hands together.

  The imp closed the door, whooshed to hover over the bombardier beetle, and extruded a whip-like filament of fire. Stroking this against the beetle’s flank got the creature scuttling forward, and the carriage rolled smoothly from the courtyard, past a line of diamond-coated fire elementals, and out an arched gateway onto a street, more guards holding back a cheering crowd of wyverns, firebirds and other such folk.

  “To begin,” her Majesty said, waving a flickering hand, “we shall process in this fashion to the Hall of Justice. There, we will be met by a group of Lord Hypabyssal’s former partisans. For the sake of, oh, shall we say domestic tranquility, I have agreed to their demands that I formally exonerate you of any blame in my unfortunate cousin’s death only after they’ve presented their evidence to the contrary.”

  Cluny’s ears folded. “Evidence?”

  Her Majesty looked down and smiled in a way that made all of Cluny’s nerves scream predator! “Fear not. They have not one iota of solid proof.” Her smile got wider and even scarier. “Is that not the case, Shtasith?”

  The split-second of silence that followed wasn’t silent at all, not with the crowd cheering and the carriages rumbling and the bombardier beetles snorting. But it was still as soundless a moment as Cluny had ever known. “As your Majesty says,” Shtasith muttered so softly, Cluny didn’t think the ranee could’ve heard it.

  Her Majesty nodded, though, her smile now more triumphant than anything else, turned to wave to the crowd again, and—

  The explosion hit so suddenly and so powerfully, the only warning Cluny got was the word Shield! bursting through her brain in Master Gollantz’s voice. Her claws flicked half a spell, then a massive weight of water engulfed her, surging over and around and swallowing the entire world.

  Stomping down her chittering panic, she completed the motions, felt the shield bubble form above her breastbone, grabbed it with her magic, and pumped. Ozone-sharp air struck her whiskers, and she gasped it in, her panic sinking a bit further when two more gasps from above and behind told her that Crocker and Shtasith were both inside the shield and alive. “What’s happening??” Crocker shouted.

  But Shtasith shouted louder. “Unensorcelled water! It will absorb and dissipate every ounce of her Majesty’s—!”

  A muffled clap of thunder, and the water vanished, shouts and screams tangling in her ears along with Master Gollantz’s voice suddenly right there beside her: “Cluny! Crocker! Shtasith! Are you unharmed??”

  His voice gave her something to grab onto, something to use as an anchor to keep her mind from spinning completely out of control. Because filling the carriage seat next to Crocker, the spot where the Ifriti Ranee had been sitting a moment before, was nothing but a cold and inert lump of basalt.

  ~o0o~

  “Impossible!” Master Gollantz shouted over the uproar. He leaped to his feet at the stone slab that served as the defendant’s table, and Cluny, huddled inside Crocker’s breast pocket, found she couldn’t stop shivering. Not that her fur or his robes were still wet after two hours in a courtroom packed with sapient chunks of lava and other fiery folk. But being charged with regicide, she’d discovered pretty quickly, wasn’t doing her already jangled nerves any good at all.

  From the carved obsidian throne looming ahead of Cluny and to her right, the new Ifriti Ranee banged her stone gavel, her lava a pale and gangly spurt when compared to the former Ifriti Ranee—Lady Felsic had been the previous ranee’s second cousin twice removed or something, but Cluny didn’t really remember much of the quick coronation ceremony earlier. She was only now starting to think again, she realized, after the shock of the attack and the announcement by the city coroner that the several tons of water had so quickly and completely denuded her Majesty of magic that she was now irretrievably dead.

  Those watching in the gallery quieted slowly, and the prosecutor, an ifrit with a diamond pince-nez, raised one molten eyebrow. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Magister Gollantz,” he drawled, “but I fail to see the distinction you seem to be—”

  “Novice Cluny,” Master Gollantz interrupted with a wave of his hand, “is indeed one of the most powerful students of wizardry I’ve ever had the pleasure to mento
r, but she and her familiars are just that: students! Not only hadn’t they a reason to attack the former ranee, they hadn’t the ability! The spell I felt forming out there—!”

  “These so-called students.” Her Majesty didn’t have her predecessor’s sheer volume, but her voice still carried easily though the overheated air. “Were they not the ones who summoned the flood of water that killed my cousin, Lord Hypabyssal?”

  Master Gollantz turned to her, and Cluny could almost smell the effort it took him not to yell. “Yes, your Majesty, they are. But—”

  “Then how,” she cut in, “can you maintain that they could not have summoned the flood of water that has just killed my cousin, our former ranee?”

  Master Gollantz began speaking then about spell levels, about the magnitude of the magic used in this attack, about how Cluny currently lacked the control to deliberately overcome the natural defenses of any fully-grown ifrit, let alone an ifrit who had ruled the entirety of the Fire Realms for close to six hundred years, but Cluny found she couldn’t concentrate, overwhelmingly glad that the magister had come along with them: she never would have guessed that he was fully accredited as an attorney in all the Elemental Planes.

  But then everything had gotten so difficult to believe all of a sudden! How could the Ifriti Ranee have been so utterly destroyed? And who could’ve done it? And what did it mean that they’d chosen the same method that Cluny and Crocker had accidentally used on Lord Hypabyssal eight months ago?

  The more she thought about these questions, the itchier she got. Clearly, she was being set up, but she just didn’t have enough information to draw any further conclusions. Of course, she did have a source of information huddled along the back of Crocker’s neck, but in order to talk with him openly, she would need to—

  Not giving herself time to reconsider, she straightened in Crocker’s pocket, reached her paws up as if she were stretching, touched claws to both Crocker and Shtasith’s chins, and cast the standfast spell.