The Kingless Land

by Ed Greenwood

  Hawkril rose out of his crouch, sword in hand, and gaped through the glass at his writhing friend and the crawling, flickering radiance that was killing him. He snarled and swung his sword with all his might at the balcony doors, leaping from his feet to put all his weight behind the blow.

  Glass sang and screamed into shards, guardian spells shattered in sighing silver smoke and sparkling dust, and the armaragor charged through the ruin into the room, to snatch at the convulsing procurer with a snarl.

  The lightning was silver and green this time. It struck the swordmaster like a ram, plucking him from his feet and smashing him back against a wall. In his wake, the procurer was whirled along like a leaf and tumbled against the stones beside him, to be held there as helpless and breathless as Hawkril in the roiling, risen force.

  He stared at its source, a room away but striding toward them as terrible as any angry baron shouldering through archways. Tall and terrible she came in her nightgown, with the witchlights of her risen power sparkling and swirling around her. The Lady of Jewels, it seemed, was a powerful sorceress.

  The gray and slab-sided peaks known as the Windfangs stood like a shield between Coiling Vale and the worst of the winter winds that seared the rolling plains of Dalondblas to the north, piling up glittering snows there in drifts as high as tall castle towers.

  Winter in the Windfangs meant mist-tattered gales howling down the clefts over the glittering corpses of frozen crag sheep, but in summer heavy carts groaned down from quarries through the prosperous barony of Loushoond, whose fat and wine-loving Tersept blinked pale, watery eyes at anyone complaining of brigands and sent armaragors in gilded armor to riding the roads in glittering display. Above the quarries rose tortured knobs and shoulders of rock called the Wildrocks. The frowning mountains rose behind them and betimes sent huge sheets of rock crashing down upon them. They were home to monsters and lawless, desperate men, wherefore law-abiding folk shunned the Wildrocks but spoke much of them, at night in taverns.

  On the night when Flaeros set foot in Sirlptar, a tongue of flame rose in the Wildrocks. Crouching around it, cursing at how long it had taken them to bring down a sheep so their cookfire burned in darkness, visible from afar, were two of those lawless, desperate men.

  “Oh, sargh!” Craer Delnbone snarled, as flame roared up the dry bough with which he was prodding the fire, scorching his fingertips. “Sargh, sargh, sargh!”

  As he shook his hand in pain, the tall, mighty-shouldered man across the fire asked, “Need some help with words, there? Can I offer you a ‘bebolt,’ or perhaps a ‘by the Three!’?”

  Craer sent his companion a glare that seared as hot as the flames snapping between them, and hissed, “Graul you, Hawkril! Graul you!”

  “Repetition is good, yes,” the deep-voiced armaragor agreed, not quite smiling. “Helps us battered helms understand your drift.”

  “If you’re quite finished being clever, Hawk,” Craer hissed, “set meat cooking before a wolf has it—perhaps after it’s made us its first two feasts!”

  “I’ll spread the last of the sauce on you, if you’d like to go first.”

  “We haven’t even coins enough to buy another bottle of that,” Craer said bitterly.

  Hawkril shrugged. “As we don’t dare go down to Loushoond to buy one, what boots it?”

  Craer sighed as he watched the armaragor set two bloody slabs of lamb to cook, nod, and lounge back against the rocks, unconcerned by the grease and gore of the sheep he’d butchered—or the flies now buzzing around in enthusiastic profusion.

  Hawkril Anharu was as good-natured with a price on their heads and no home to return to as he’d been swinging a sword in Ibrelm or peering his way through the brothels of Sirlptar with that same easy grin on his face. A tall, red-skinned mountain of an armaragor, better muscled than most, he wore the scarred bracers of a veteran swordmaster. His only traces of desperation were the words spilling out of him; usually Craer gabbled glibly while Hawkril saved his words, offering a quiet handful only when absolutely necessary.

  Feeling Craer’s gaze, he looked up, flashed that grin, and used the back edge of his sword blade to scratch an itch between his shoulderblades. “How fared you in Dranmaer, swordbrother?”

  “No better than in Sirlptar,” the short, spiderlike man replied. “Everyone remembers an overclever procurer who snatched a haunch or a handful of coins from them a season ago, it seems.”

  “Well, if you didn’t taunt and sing and play jugglers’ pranks when you stole things,” Hawkril said calmly, “folk might not be so swift to remember your face.”

  “When I want you to slap my face with simple facts, Tall Post of an armaragor,” Craer told him wearily, “I’ll be sure to bid you to do so. Until then …”

  “Oho, a threat looms before me,” Hawkril rumbled. “Unfurl it, pray, Master Clevertongue; quaking, I await the bright blade of your wit.”

  “As I suffer under the spiked bludgeon of yours,” Craer snapped, snatching at his belt. A black-bladed knife spun from his fingers to find firewood with a solid thunk—pinning slowly sliding lamb instants before it would have fallen into the flames.

  Memory flared: a man of the Isle choking on that same knife and falling; a fate shared with many. Yet for all the deadly skill of Craer Delnbone, veteran procurer, the Isles of Ieirembor stood unconquered yet, and it was Hawkril and Craer who’d come scrambling home on leaking, overladen ships—to instant outlawry.

  Baron Ezendor Blackgult had been a proud and handsome man with a swordarm of iron, a wit sharp enough to hew foes with, and a ready laugh. Under him, Blackgult had risen to become the largest and mightiest of the River Holds, richer than Ornentar and even Silvertree, with coins to spare for folk to hire bards to craft new songs … coins enough almost to rival the Glittering City itself.

  Perhaps that had been Blackgult’s downfall. The rich merchants of Sirlptar had grown to fear the baron’s rise, war wisdom, and reach. A prosperous barony upriver was one thing—but a barony with the stomach to snatch at the Isles of Ieirembor was quite another.

  The Isles rose out of the sea like a wall sheltering the mouth of the Silverflow, five shoulders of forest-girt rock that were both Sirlptar’s treasure garden and its rear battlements. The most populous, Ibrelm, rivaled only the smallest barony, but all five held rich stands of the timber that made the Glittering City’s close-packed buildings soar, and the copper that gleamed as pots and pans in its every third shop. Perhaps those shopowners had hired wizards and swordmasters enough to break the warriors of the Golden Griffon.

  Craer and Hawkril had never seen such endless, tireless foes before. The Baron’s bold stroke hadfailed, and his few surviving loyal warriors fled home from bloody defeats to find their Lord Baron dead or fled and Blackgult conquered by his old rival Faerod Silvertree. The Golden Griffon badge now meant not only slim hopes of honest coin but also a price on the heads of its wearers—and the long-mythical throne of Aglirta seemed very close to feeling the backside of proud and ruthless Baron Silvertree.

  Hawkril stretched. “It’s good to be back with you, Craer,” he said slowly, squatting by the meat with his belt knife flashing bright in one hairy hand. “Shall we hunt together?”

  The procurer shrugged, not wanting his brotherinarms to see eager tears in his eyes. “I can think of no better road than one we share,” he said awkwardly. “Meat done yet?”

  The armaragor chuckled. “I’d miss that tongue of yours, if I wasn’t around to hear it.”

  2

  The Trembling Flight of the Castle

  Slender fingers and lips that were thin with anger wove a spell that might well hold their deaths. Eyes that blazed raked them up and down. Craer and Hawkril could do nothing but watch.

  Numbing, searing lightnings held them hard against the wall, pressed against the cold curves of gems and wire bodice-snakes and harnesses; their greatest strainings left them gasping, sweating, and shuddering, muscles burning in protest—and won them, amid soft tinklings o
f metal, only a few feeble shiftings of their limbs.

  Helpless in their prisons, the two men did the only thing left to them. They stared.

  Not that the looking was hard. Long, flowing hair cascaded in a dark flood over slender shoulders, framing eyes that glittered with fury in a face whose cheeks and chin shaped more beauty than either of them had ever seen.

  Barefooted, Embra Silvertree stood as tall as Hawkril, or taller, and moved more gracefully than any tavern dancer, a smooth shifting of softnesses that was all the more alluring because it was but herself, and no deliberate lure for men. Her hair might be blue black, her eyes might be dark blue—it was too dim to tell, with the only light in the room raging like fire around them and flickering fitfully on the ends of those long, graceful fingers.

  The Lady of Jewels spun the fingers of one hand in a gesture that shaped an ending and then sat down on a lounge to regard her two prisoners with eyes that were dark and dangerous. The thousands of glistening gems on garments hanging behind her seemed to add their weight to her grim gaze, like so many dark and disapproving eyes.

  No magic occurred that the procurer or the armaragor could see or feel—but when the lightnings slowly flickered and died, much of the tinglings and pain fading with them, the two men found that an unseen force held them against the wall as securely as before.

  “Why are you here?” the Lady Silvertree asked, as calmly as if she’d been discussing what hue of garments would best go with their hair. Her gauzy gown did nothing to hide a figure that was sleek and beautiful. The severe expression she wore stole nothing from the beauty of dark eyes and brows and a face that would have been breathtaking on a corpse.

  On a corpse …

  Craer licked his lips in the hanging, slowly lengthening silence, tried not to look at a swan wing, made of diamonds clustered as thick as his closed fist, that hung not four inches from his nose, and said, “Lady, you will find this hard to believe, I know, but we were hired by your father to test the defenses of the Lady Turret, to—”

  Slender fingers moved slightly, and the procurer gasped as sudden pain arose in him again, raging along his limbs like fire. He could feel his limbs twitching uncontrollably as fell power surged through him, and—thank the Three!—faded.

  “Very hard to believe, sir,” Embra Silvertree replied coldly, “and your claim makes it quite clear to me that you’re unfamiliar with … this household. My patience is limited. Honest and direct answers are desired of you, good sirs.”

  Her other hand lifted from her lap, fingers wriggling in a silent reminder of the power she commanded. Emeralds flashed green fire here and there along the walls, as if in eagerness to acknowledge the power their mistress wielded.

  Craer banished all pain from his face, gave the Silvertree heiress a smile, and said smoothly, “Of course. My apologies, Lady. You’ll appreciate that we were given several tales to tell, in place of the truth. In the time before he served your father, the wizard Gadaster Mulkyn had several apprentices, and one of them—you’ll understand that I’d rather avoid names at the moment—was promised something by Gadaster that he was to inherit at that great mage’s passing. We’ve been sent to find and fetch that something, and—”

  His gasp was almost a sob, this time, and became a low, wet moaning as the procurer writhed against the wall, limbs trembling. Craer watched in wide-eyed horror as his own right hand rose stiffly from his side and awkwardly swept sideways to strike his face so hard that tears swam and his ears boomed. She’d made him slap his own mouth.

  The armaragor snarled and thrust himself away from the wall, teeth set and veins quivering in his throat. He got perhaps half a pace forward before being slammed back so hard that the thud of his head against the wall shook several ropes of pearls off their stand, to hiss smoothly to the tabletop beneath.

  Beautiful lips tightened once more before they coldly spoke the words, “The limits of my patience fast approach, good sirs. Choose your utterances carefully, for you choose your fates with them.”

  Craer nodded and opened his mouth to speak again, but Hawkril rumbled, “Enough lies. Lady, I am Hawkril Anharu, armaragor; this is my friend Craer Delnbone, a procurer by trade; your father uses the title ‘lastalan,’ I believe. We both served the Golden Griffon, and are but lately returned from defeat in the Isles to find the Vale much changed. Our bellies growl emptiness, our purses hang slack, and we’ve long heard of a lady whose gowns drip with gems … are those blunt truths enough to win our swift deaths, or more patience of you?”

  He thought the Lady Silvertree almost smiled before her eyes flickered and she asked, “Have you any other friends, allies, or hirelings here on Isle Silvertree?”

  “No,” Hawkril answered simply.

  The Lady of Jewels turned her eyes to Craer, and said softly, “There—see you how it’s done, Sir Procurer? Simple truth is a rare treasure in Aglirta, I’ve found. I value it.” She looked back at Hawkril, and asked gently, “And your future plans?”

  She raised a slender hand, cupping empty air as if she held a fire of leaping flames that caused her no pain.

  Craer saw a short and dark future ahead, undertaking some deadly task as an expendable pawn of this slender, dark-eyed lady, and blurted, “Oh, no. Nay, Lady … slay us here and now if you must, but—”

  An irritated, imperious hand waved him to silence. They saw the glitter of anger in Lady Silvertree’s eyes again as she leaned forward to stare at them both. Anger, and something else … rising excitement? Then, almost impulsively, she commanded, “Sit. Sit and listen.”

  Her hand waved again, and the force pinning the two men was suddenly gone. They barely had time to stagger and find balanced stances again when the Lady Embra wove another quick spell.

  Two gilt-trimmed stools thumped behind them, as if in greeting, and decanters rose in a stately parabola from a nearby side table to hang in the air beside their hands. The two men eyed these uneasily; even after the ornately curved vessels bobbed beckoningly in midair, neither moved to touch them.

  Exasperation and disgust chased each other across the fine-boned face of the Lady of Jewels, and she crooked two fingers in a come-hither gesture as she snapped, “Sit down, horns to you!”

  One decanter sped to her waiting hand like a bird fleeing a hunter’s bow; she snatched it, pulled the stopper like a thirsty warrior, and took a swig. Then she did the same with the other. They watched her throat move in tense silence, and in like manner they received the glare that followed.

  “See you? Safe, ‘tis—now drink and be seated, gentle sirs! I grow weary of watching you peer at exits and tense to snatch at weapons. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s late. Sleep beckons; I’d probably be able to enjoy slumber even with the riven bodies of two idiots sprawled bloodily at the foot of my bed.”

  She let silence fall and stared at them both, a clear challenge in her eyes. Hawkril answered it by sitting down heavily on his stool and taking hold of the decanter that was drifting smoothly back to him. He raised it, said roughly, “We mean you no harm. Your health, lady,” and drank.

  Craer stared at the armaragor as if he’d just grown a second head—and then sighed, shrugged, and followed suit. He was still wiping his lips with the back of one hand when he saw a little smile almost rise to her lips and her fingers trace a gentle weaving in the air.

  The procurer sprang to his feet, choking as he tried to spit out what he’d taken in and at the same time swallow it so he could find breath to curse, but a strange, roiling tingling rose in his mouth before he could manage to snarl out a single word.

  Craer froze, fingers not quite to the hilt of his nearest dagger, as he saw golden flames snarl out past his nose, flames coming from his own mouth, and mirrored by those spilling from the parted lips of Lady Silvertree. Gold flickerings curled past her chin, and he looked quickly at Hawkril, to see an identical conflagration—and look of astonishment—there.

  “Be at ease, Craer,” the sorceress said gently. “Even the fire down wi
thin you …” A rising warmth was suddenly racing and roiling in the procurer’s belly. He swallowed as his fingers closed on the hilt of his dagger … and tightened.

  “ … harms not. ’Tis but a shielding, to keep magical spying at bay. Now for the love of the Lady sit back down and listen. We haven’t much time.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  Embra Silvertree leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs like any gossiping warrior, and said in a voice that was low and swift with urgency, “I’m a prisoner here as surely as if all these windows and doors were made of armor, and thrice barred. My father and his three mages—who’d lose no contests in cruelty, believe me—have bound me here to become, in the end, part of this castle.”

  “What? Lady, I don’t understand,” Hawkril said, and meant it.

  “In time soon to come, I will lose this body,” the dark-eyed lady told him, “and breath, to become a spirit bound into the stones and timbers and all of Castle Silvertree. A ‘living castle,’ they call it: aware and rooted here forever, given magic enough to repair their hurts and the crumblings that even stout stone suffers with the passing ages and to open or shut gates and doors and the like to defend this place … forever.”

  Craer frowned. “And what of your own magic? You can’t flee or withstand them?”

  Dark eyes looked sadly, almost pleadingly into his. “I’ve been taught only magic enough to serve well, not wage war on my teachers. I was but a child when the first bindings were laid on me—and some of them have lasted from that day until your blunderings this night.”

  “We?” Hawkril rumbled, still suspicious.

  The Lady Silvertree looked at the armaragor. “The two of you broke some of the bindings that hold me, yes, meddling with one of the guardians of the wall. I’ve been watching you since then. Hoping. For the first time in my life, I can hope … to be free.”