War in Tethyr n-2

by Victor Milán

  As she came to the next level, she cast it up and into the chamber. Crossbows twanged. Zaranda popped up, flung a pinch of fine sand from the river bottom, shouted words. Three guards collapsed into slumber.

  Rubber-legged more from magic-making than exertion, Zaranda caught up the pallet again. A blue flash split the night outside, the glare through the arrow loop turning the chamber momentarily day-bright. Thunder cracked like the world breaking open.

  Through ringing in her ears, Zaranda heard screams from outside. Someone was loosing potent magic against her people. As she paused, the lightning lashed out again.

  Frantic, she dashed upstairs. A guard waited at the next floor. She threw the pallet over his head and put her shoulder into him, thrusting him back against the wall. His helmeted head struck stone with a clang.

  Ten feet away, another soldier had just finished hooking the thick string of a crossbow into the claw that held it cocked. He had not had time to drop in a bolt. As Zaranda rushed him he threw the weapon down and snatched up a spear.

  He thrust at her. She put her weight back, skidded, stopped. He jabbed at her again. She parried. Behind her, she heard the first soldier cursing and floundering. Apparently he was coming out second-best in his contest with the pallet.

  Zaranda threw a looping wild cut at the man's eyes.

  He ducked his head back out of harm's way and, whooping with triumph, drove his point for her unprotected body. Crackletongue whirled around and slashed his leading arm. He howled, and lost his grip with that hand. She cut him down before he could shift grip for a one-handed stab.

  The other guard finally escaped the pallet. Zaranda knelt, caught up the fallen crossbow, plucked a quarrel from a wall-mounted rack, and slotted it home. As the guard charged, she shot him through the body. He cried out and fell backward down the stairs.

  Blue lightnings stabbed and crashed outside. Some sort of potent magic artifact was clearly in play here. No one's mind could hold so many spells of such cogency. At least, no one who'd be keeping the company of a hedge-robber like Lutwill.

  Her urgent mission had abruptly changed from an effort to safeguard her youthful warriors from cross-bowmen to stopping whatever magic was being unleashed against them. For the first time, she wished she'd actually brought helpers with her into the tower, rather than charging in alone-and sealing the entrance behind her with a persistent stinking cloud spell.

  More cautiously, she advanced up the final set of stairs, sword in hand. Blue flames danced along both edges of Crackletongue's blade. There was evil afoot here.

  What she most feared was to find another stout door sealed against her; she had used up her magic for that. But the heavy trapdoor that might seal off the penthouse from the rest of the keep was thrown open, inviting.

  Too inviting; she wasn't that ingenuous. She gathered herself, pantherish on strong haunches, then launched herself upward in a mighty leap. It carried her up through the entry hole and beyond. She tucked a shoulder and rolled as a blade clashed on the floor behind her.

  She fetched up against the wall amid a pile of furs that smelled worse than they had when attached to their original owners. Clearly hygiene was not a matter much on Baron Lutwill's mind. A young woman cowered nearby, naked but for a bearskin clutched against her, straw-colored hair hanging limp in a scared, blank face.

  "Keep out of the way," Zaranda told her. "We'll get you free of this."

  The penthouse was a larger version of the filthy barracks on the second floor, though more sumptuously furnished. Instead of straw pallets, furs and stained cushions lay scattered across the floor. On the walls hung once-fine tapestries that, it appeared, had seen much use for the wiping of greasy fingers. The discarded wine bottles were of a better vintage than the ones on the lower floor, but the crusts and mold-green cheese rinds and gnawed joints were much the same.

  The windows were much larger than the arrow loops below, glazed with heavy age-wavy panes set in lead. These were apparently stout; an arrow crashed against the pane and made a mere bird-beak clack before it fell harmlessly away.

  A slight man in a black robe stood by the window. He was a mage, to judge by the large sphere he held up to the window. Its surface was alive with opalescent fire, the light that cast fiendish highlights over his bearded face was blue-the same blue as the lightning-bolt that stabbed down outside as Zaranda watched.

  Somehow the black-robed man was controlling the lightning with his sphere. Zaranda summoned the last bit of magic she had in her, preparing to send him a magic missile where it would do the most good.

  A huge shadow loomed up before her, blocking her aim. "Die, interloper!" it roared, and hacked downward savagely with a great double-bitted battle-axe, She rolled aside. The blade crashed down, cleaving valuable if dirty pelts. She came to the balls of her feet, crouching, Crackletongue held before her. The axeman turned to confront her.

  He was tall, taller even than Shield. He had a mashed-in nose and dark eyes almost hidden beneath bushy brows. Black mustaches swept ferociously back across his cheeks to join with his sideburns, leaving his chin bare. He wore a steel cap, a mail hauberk like his men's, buckskin trews, and boots of some stout, scaled hide, possibly dragonet. His paunch was majestic. The heft of chest and upper shoulders was hard to judge, since he wore a black bearskin vest. Judging from the size of his bare arms, he was doubtless sturdy enough.

  "You must be the one who calls herself Countess Morninggold," he said, swishing the axe in the air one-handed before him-seemingly careless, inviting at-tack. "Zazesspur will reward me mightily when I send them your head preserved in vinegar."

  "Cheapskate," Zaranda said, trying to crane past him to get a clear shot at his wizard. Reading her intent, he kept shifting side to side with an agility that belied his bulk. "Brandy works much better."

  "I doubt you're worth the cost, frankly," he said in his oddly pleasant baritone voice. "But you might provide some diversion if I don't kill you at once."

  Suddenly he held the axe's yard-long helve in both hands and was whipping the head toward her face with the sheer awesome strength of his wrists alone. The blow would have cloven her to the breastbone had it landed. Expecting such, she had read the signs in his body motions and threw up Crackletongue with her left hand bracing the back of the blade. Impact drove her to her knees.

  At contact, the saber flared and crackled with lightning. Evil! Zaranda thought.

  Immediately the big man retracted the axe for a follow-up, finishing stroke. Zaranda fell back, braced her-self with one hand, and stabbed with the other. The baron went tiptoe to avoid the thrust and jumped back, giving her time to scramble to her feet.

  They squared off, feinting left and right, each trying to provoke the other to commit to an attack. Zaranda quickly sensed she was the more skillful, but he was quick as well as horribly strong, and her attention kept getting distracted by the desire to do something to interfere with the wizard at the window.

  The combat continued thus, inconclusive, for what seemed like hours but was probably seconds. Then the baron, noticing the glances his opponent kept darting past him, growled over his shoulder, "Ho, Whimberton! Leave off that play and make some magic so I can put this wench out of the way and deal with her minions myself."

  The wizard jerked as if slapped. Lowering the opalescent sphere with visible reluctance, he turned to Zaranda and began to gesticulate and mutter. Frantically, she tried to get a clear shot to cast her own remaining spell, but Baron Lutwill, grinning savagely, launched a fierce attack, forcing her to concentrate exclusively on keeping her skull unsplit.

  Whimberton threw out his hand. The air seemed to congeal abruptly around Zaranda, freezing her in place. A holding spell! She fought back with all her will, but her exertions, magical and physical, had sapped her. In a moment, she was trapped.

  The baron stepped back, leaned on his axe for a moment, admiring his magician's handiwork. "Hmm. Since I didn't have to damage you at all, maybe I won't be so quick to separa
te your head from that lovely slen-der neck. After all, I can always collect the reward." He turned away. "Well done, Whimberton. Now you can get back to your games. But see you don't use up all the juice, or whatever it is that drives that thing."

  The mage smiled. "It is dweomer, Lord, the stuff of all magic. Yet this object can be recharged merely by attaching it to the weathercock when a thunderstorm rages."

  The baron gestured airily with a hand. "Whatever." He turned back to Zaranda, began to caress her cheek. "You know, this has interesting possibilities-"

  A scream interrupted him. Zaranda could not move as much as her eyeballs, but she could focus vision past her captor, to the window where the mage had raised his sphere once again. He was surrounded by a swarm of tiny, indistinct things that seemed to shimmer with a faint light of their own. He beat at them, frantically, then began to slap at his face and robe, shrieking louder and louder, until he stumbled and fell back against the window.

  Whoever installed the window had not worked up to the exacting standards of Tethyrian artisanship. It gave way at once. Window and mage fell out into the night, the latter trailing a thin dwindling scream.

  The spell broke. Zaranda drove a knee into the baron's crotch. He bent over with a gasp and staggered back, but recovered almost instantly, and swung his axe horizontally.

  Zaranda leaned away, going to one knee. Her free hand found a wolfskin. The axehead whistled by, a finger's width from her face. She flung the pelt over the baron's head and shoulders and stabbed her glowing blade right through it.

  Again. And again.

  At last, when for some time the only cries sounding within the chamber had been her own and the voices coming through the now-vacant window, she stopped and turned. Chenowyn stood in the doorway, face so pale her skin looked like a sheet of parchment and her freckles like drops of paint.

  She flew forward to catch Zaranda in a wild embrace. "You disobeyed," Zaranda said, hugging her tight. Then, to her own astonishment, she burst into tears.

  Despite the horror of seeing friends die and suffering magic attacks they were powerless to prevent, the young warriors were exultant. Even the wounded laughed and joined in the singing as the townsfolk car-ried them to the village on improvised litters.

  That would pass, Zaranda knew. When the hot rush of victory died away, the despair that came after would be as hard for some to bear as the pain of sword cuts and spear thrusts. With the help of Farlorn's gold-glib tongue, Zaranda would help them through that ordeal as best she could.

  When the time came. But meantime, after the wounded were taken off and the castle secured, in that breathless hour before dawn, Farlorn came to her, in an apartment she had chosen to take sorely needed rest.

  And it seemed to Zaranda Star the most natural thing in the world to go into his arms, and surrender herself to the hunger that had been growing in her for long, weary months.

  Ten volunteers died in the fight for the castle, including Osbard's daughter Fiora, blasted by a lightning bolt. Many more were wounded. So brutal was the battle that Goldie, released from the stables, forbore to complain about the indignities Farlorn had heaped upon her in the course of their masquerade.

  But whatever the cost, they had won. And once the news of what had transpired reached Masamont, the villagers streamed forth to take up the casualties, bind their wounds, and bear them gently off to their own beds, where the local clerics could see to healing them.

  What the wondrous rechargeable magic artifact Whimberton had used to such deadly effect was, Zaranda never learned. It had shattered on a paving stone beside its wielder.

  Part III

  The Whisperer in Darkness

  22

  "We are troubled," the halfling in the maroon and purple gown piped.

  Sitting in a simple chair in his eight-sided chamber at the top of the Palace of Governance, Baron Faneuil Hardisty turned away from a design sketch for his coronation robe and regarded his trio of visitors. They stood in a ray of spring sunlight that slanted from the skylight to graze the tabletop on which the baron's model city stood.

  Malhalvadon Stringfellow, the only halfling currently seated on the city council, hopped impatiently from one bare black-furred foot to the other. Baron Zam stood unmoving in his robes of blue and gray. He was tall, astringent, bloodless, with a wisp of iron-gray hair surrounding the dome of his skull. His slit eyes, narrow nose, and pinched mouth were situated on a face that came to a severe point at the chin. Korun, the lone councilwoman, wore a slashed green-velvet doublet over a yellow blouse and orange hose, her hair blonde and short, her eyes green, and her pert-nosed face handsome. She wore her peaked yellow cap at a rakish angle, pheasant feather aslant, and held arms akimbo, as if impatient but amused. The sunlight, ungallant, brought forth the parchment dryness of her skin; she was not so young as she liked to present herself.

  Baron Hardisty sighed and handed the sketchbook to his attendant Tatrina, daughter of Duke Hembreon. He had many All-Friends waiting upon him these days, courtesy of Armenides, who stood behind his right shoulder and beamed like an indulgent tutelary spirit. Tatrina made a curtsy and withdrew. Armenides's hazel eyes followed her until she was out of sight around the columned doorjamb.

  Koran and Zam likewise watched her go, with much different expressions. Each had a son in the All-Friends. Neither felt entirely at ease with that, but they were reluctant to mention it in Armenides's presence.

  "What troubles you, noble Stringfellow?" Hardisty asked with that great apparent sincerity that served him so well.

  The halfling bobbed, tousled his curly dark hair, rubbed his snub nose with a thumb. "It's these Star Protective people," he declared. "They're a threat to our plan to restore order to Tethyr."

  "Meaning," Lady Korun said in a mockingly vibrant contralto, "that they interfere with the bandit chieftains who kick back a share of their plunder to you and call it 'taxes.'"

  "No such thing!" the halfling fluted. "Besides, I'm not the only one."

  "Let us say we all feel the pinch," said Zam, and pinched was a fair description of his voice. "Her impertinence becomes alarming. Her private army grows in leaps and bounds, and just today we received word that she has been welcomed by the city council of Ithmong, having escorted a great caravan thence from Myratma. The first to pass that way since the monarchy fell."

  "She's a sorceress!" Stringfellow cried. "She's got the people bewitched, I tell you. She even has them believing that monstrous orc who travels with her is a paladin!"

  "She's done much to restore commerce to the roads of Tethyr," Korun said, "and it's all bypassing Zazesspur. At this rate, the people of Tethyr, to say nothing of Zazesspur, will soon begin to wonder what they need us for. Clearly this can't go on." "What do wish me to do about it?" Hardisty asked mildly.

  "You're the man who would be king, Faneuil," Lady Korun said. "You tell us." "Very well," Hardisty said crisply. "She shall be dealt with. Enough?"

  "And who will do the dealing?" Stringfellow asked. Hardisty grinned. "Why, I should say-none less than the lord of Zazesspur."

  "You ask much," Baron Zam said.

  "He will deliver much," Armenides said serenely. "He is touched with destiny."

  "He'd best be," said Zam.

  "Our Malhalvadon grows importunate," Armenides said when the councilors had gone. "Perhaps it's time he gave way to one of the Brothers Hedgeblossom. Or both. Surely the council has other bits of deadwood that want pruning."

  "You surprise me, Father. The Hedgeblossoms are our staunch foes. They seek to overturn everything we've worked for."

  Armenides smiled. "Why, isn't that all the more reason to bring them on the council? In every time and every clime, there's nothing scarcer than a rebel who stays avid to cast down power once he shares it›" Hardisty thought about this. Like many things Armenides told him, it sounded bizarre at first, until his mind began to fit itself around the concept. "What of the other council members? Some of them might object to raising up such firebrand
s."

  The priest spread his hands. "Then they are obstructers and unworthy of the positions they hold. Retribution has a way of seeking such out." Here was a different Armenides than the eversmiling figure the public knew, but one in truth no less benevolent. The common ruck might not understand, but Hardisty did.

  He had done things he was uneasy about. Some even gave him nightmares. But he knew the truth of what Armenides taught: when one served Good, to hold back from using any tool available was dereliction to the point of affirmative evil. Just as one must sometimes spank a child less it race heedless into the path of an oncoming carriage and be trampled, so sometimes apparently cruel measures were in truth grandmotherly kindness.

  "You must keep pressure on the council to crown you king as soon as possible, my lord," the cleric said. "The One Below has great patience, but even that wears thin. And we have much need of him yet if we are to bring your visions to fruition."

  Baron Hardisty shuddered, as he always did at mention of the hidden partner in their great enterprise. Politics made strange bedfellows: just look at that stiff-necked old tower of rectitude Hembreon and that rogue Anakul. The way the two voted in council, you'd think they sat next to one another in temple.

  Him Below could be… handled. Armenides assured him of it.

  "First I've got to settle this matter of the Countess Morninggold," Hardisty said. "Despite what I told our friends, I really don't know how."

  He shook his head. "I suppose it's too late to give her her wretched caravan back." Perhaps the greatest of Zaranda Star's many impertinences was that she was running Star Protective Service as a profit-making venture, and it was returning handsome profit indeed, from what his spies reported.

  The cleric shrugged. "Raise an army and crush her."

  "That might not be easy."

  "Good my lord! However they may style themselves, her followers are naught but peasants playing at soldiers. You're a proven war leader, and command real soldiers."