The Kingless Land

by Ed Greenwood

  His probable reception from the baron, of course, would be even colder. Markoun looked upriver until he found a landmark he knew, shook river water from his fingers, and cast a spelljump.

  An instant after the Silvertree mage vanished, an arrow hissed through the spot where he’d stood. In its wake came a shouted oath of disgust from the archer of Adeln who’d shot it.

  * * *

  The Priest of the Serpent smiled as the kneeling woman gasped. “Sssuch venom slays all who serve not the Ssserpent,” he told her. “Rise, sssister, and join in the most sacred service in all Darsar.”

  Almost hungrily the woman kissed the scaly snout of the serpent. The fangs that had bitten her breast gnawed at her mouth as tenderly as any human lover, and the snake seemed almost to purr as her limbs started to twitch and tremble, and foam gathered at the place where their mouths met. The Priest’s smile broadened.

  “Dusk’s not far off now,” Craer murmured, as the Band of Four crouched together in a fern-filled hollow. They’d been quiet enough that birds hadn’t stopped calling and whirring overhead—and they’d still seen no sign of men or tall stone buildings for men to lurk in.

  “Are we lost?” Sarasper asked doubtfully, looking around at the unbroken trees of Loaurimm Forest.

  “You’re never lost,” Hawkril growled next to his ear. “You’re always ‘right here’—where you don’t want to be. Old soldiers’ joke.”

  The healer gave him an exasperated look. “Well then, Clevertongue—where’s Indraevyn?”

  “Right here around us,” Craer murmured, spreading his hand in a gesture that indicated the sweep of forest all around.

  “Oh, surely,” Sarasper said in disbelief. “Where’re the buildings—inside these trees?”

  Hawkril touched the older man’s arm, and pointed. “See yon? And there?” The armaragor was indicating what looked like a mound of vines tangled around shrubs, with the leafless skeleton of a fallen, long-dead tree draped across all.

  “I see only forest,” the healer told him.

  “And we see overgrown lumps of stone—suspiciously numerous and steep-sided,” Craer replied. “Behold ruined Indraevyn.”

  Sarasper looked stunned. “If it’s all like this,” he said grimly, “we should have brought lit torches in plenty—and a hired hundred of farmers with good shovels. There’ll be no wizards mincing grandly in to pluck up Dwaerindim in this.”

  “All the better,” Embra put in, looking skyward. “Dusk is coming down soon.”

  “We’d best camp back at the hollow with the stream,” Craer suggested, “and venture forward in earnest on the morrow. But there’s a little time left, and we’ve been managing stealth well enough thus far.…”

  “Forward the Four,” Embra murmured. “To do what?”

  “Scout a bit,” the procurer said, “so we don’t end up trying to cross any bare ridges or open places in the bright sun, under the nose of a sentinel.”

  “Lead on,” Sarasper directed, and the procurer did, leading them cautiously up a little valley. There was a ridge at its head, and they clambered cautiously up its vine-cloaked slope together—only to come to a sudden, still halt.

  A grisly warning hung in front of them. Someone had seized a warrior and tied him head downward, spread-eagled in midair by ropes at his wrists and ankles stretched tight to four trees—and some prowling forest predator had come along and eaten away his head.

  Hawkril’s mouth tightened. “That forester I left, back by the lake …” he murmured.

  “We daren’t go back now,” Craer told him. “At least you left him alive, where most would have slain him out of hand.” He lifted his head slowly, just a trifle, and then let out a soundless sigh of satisfaction and lowered himself down again just as achingly slowly.

  “Companions in this crazed quest,” he announced in a murmur, “I must ask you to keep your heads down as you hear this news: over that height, I could see four or five large stone buildings—crumbling, to be sure, but buildings nonetheless. There’s also a very good chance that someone has seen us, so I want all of you to get back to the stream-hollow now, as quickly as you quietly can.”

  “While you? …” Embra asked.

  “Climb this tree and tarry for a bit,” the procurer told her, “to watch our back trail, and make sure no one follows you. Mages wouldn’t even have to risk themselves to send death to our camp … all the snoring night long.”

  Embra shuddered at the thought and sank back down the slope. Hawkril quickly moved to take the lead, lifting a hand to salute Craer, who returned it and swarmed up his chosen tree.

  “No, healer: no fire,” the armaragor growled. “Ever heard of beacons? This forest is alive with wizards and priests and battle-hungry warriors, and even the most stupid of them can move toward a fire.”

  “It’s not dark yet,” Sarasper muttered. “I can get us some hot herb brew and have the fire out before full dark.”

  “Ever heard of smoke?” Hawkril snarled. “At least a few of them can smell, too.” The armaragor looked over at the sorceress, found her gone, and lifted his head sharply. Turning, as if sniffing a scent only he could smell, he spun around to glare across the hollow.

  “Lady Embra,” he snapped, “what are you doing?”

  The sorceress had her back turned to them both. They saw her stiffen at his question, but she did not reply or turn around.

  Sarasper and Hawkril exchanged glances. Hawkril’s face darkened, and he took two quick strides toward the Lady of Jewels, feeling for the hilt of his sword. Her arms, he now saw, were moving slowly, almost lazily—but they were shaping gestures in the air in front of her.

  “Embra!” he barked. “What are you doing?”

  The sorceress said nothing, but there was suddenly movement in the dusk-darkening air above her. Hawkril stared, openmouthed.

  Dark shadows and semisolid wings and a tail swept and coiled above the Lady Silvertree, shimmering darkly … and growing ever more solid.

  Abruptly, a black-scaled, sinuous thing faded into full being above the dark-haired sorceress. She held her hands up to it as if in supplication, as it flapped batlike wings and writhed in the air, tossing two cruel-jawed heads and raking the air with talons longer than a man’s forearm. It hung over her like a canopy, facing the astonished and furious armaragor, and it did not look hesitant or friendly.

  Then the Lady of Jewels turned her head. Her eyes stared straight out into the gathering night above Hawkril’s head, seeing nothing—as blank as if she were a statue. “Nightwyrm,” she commanded tonelessly, “fly!”

  The miniature dragon-thing boiled across the hollow like a storm breeze—but the armaragor was already bounding to meet it, his drawn sword flashing out in a savage chop that sheared off one squalling head.

  A black eellike body thrashed in eerie silence, twisting back and away in the air with dark blood spraying from the great wound Hawkril had dealt it.

  Its barbed tail lashed out, smashing a great splintered gouge in the side of a tree—and giving Hawkril time to dive aside, and the healer time to throw himself facedown behind its groaning, sagging branches.

  Writhing in agony, the conjured nightwyrm flung itself from side to side in the air, as if to shake itself free of the pain. Hawkril snatched out a dagger, in case its next strike should tear his sword free of his hand, and dodged and darted beneath it, seeing the right place to stand and meet it. He noticed Sarasper up and running again but could spare no time to see where he was going—or what the Lady of Jewels was doing now.

  Spellcasting, yes—he could hear new mumblings from her, a sort of chant—but she was somewhere behind him, and before he dared look for her, he had to take care of this hunting wyrm.

  When it came down at last, in a long, curving plunge preceded by snapping teeth, he was ready.

  Hawkril lunged under its scaly bulk, twisted up to slash with his dagger along the edge of its mouth, and left the steel buried hilt deep in the angle of those cruel jaws.

&n
bsp; As the wyrm turned away from the fresh pain, thrashing, the warrior sprang forward and got one arm hooked around the bloody, curling stump of neck from which he’d severed its other head. His grip held, even when its frantically flapping batwings plucked him aloft—and with a snarl, Hawkril sworded its remaining head again and again, ignoring the thrusts of its snout and its wriggling attempts to bite him or slash him with its teeth. He went on hacking until he’d slashed that head to ribbons, and he was rolling in forest leaves drenched with dark blood and half crushed beneath a heavy, wildly whipping body of black scales and quivering agonies. Still eerily silent, it died.

  Hawkril rose, saw no fresh spell menacing him, and let out his rage on what was left of the nightwyrm. He was not gentle in his butchery. By the time he’d dismembered the dragon-thing, he was drenched in its dark blood, and his eyes blazed like twin coals.

  He stalked toward the sorceress, who had somehow ended up on her knees with her wrists held behind her by a grim-faced Sarasper.

  Their eyes met. He’d never seen a woman’s eyes so large and dark before. She shook her head a little but said nothing.

  Embra’s face was pale, and tears had left two bright tracks down her cheeks. Her lips trembled as Hawkril loomed up over her.

  He took her by the throat and hauled her to her feet, and he was not gentle about it. “Well, wench?” he growled. “Why?”

  “I—I—,” Embra said, and choked. Her next word was a sob; wordlessly she shook her head, fresh tears bursting forth.

  “She was under compulsion,” Sarasper said quietly. “Some spell sent by her father’s mages, no doubt. She’s said the wyrm was meant to kill us.”

  Hawkril nodded curtly and took Embra’s chin between two of his fingers. Almost delicately he shook her head swiftly back and forth until she stared at him dazedly, tears abated.

  “So what, Lady Silvertree,” he asked coldly, “are we to do with you? Are we to trust you or …?”

  Embra’s eyes held shame, and pleading, and a vast weariness as they looked up into his. “Kill me,” she whispered, her lips trembling.

  “Slay me now, swiftly, before they come into my head again … or I start pleading. Oh, Hawkril, I am so sorry! I—slay me! Please!”

  The armaragor’s face was cold and as unyielding as a war helm as he nodded, drew in a deep and reluctant breath, lifted her chin with his thumb to lay bare her throat, and drew back his bloody war sword.

  Craer stayed in the tree until the light of the risen moon outshone the last afterglow of the dying day. No one came skulking through the forest in any direction.

  The procurer had just begun the climb down when, glancing back at the ruins one last time, he found himself looking into the calm, dark eyes of a wizard watching him from the heart of the ruins.

  At least, he judged the man to be a mage. Who else wears robes and does sentinel duty by standing on empty air seventy feet or so off the ground?

  Stifling a curse, Craer went down the tree in frantic haste, clawing the bark for handholds in the night gloom. His landing was noisier than he liked, and he dodged a good six paces in a false side foray before slipping toward the hollow. Should they all move on immediately? No, trying to blunder around in the deep forest now, all four of them, would make so much noise that ‘twas wiser to stay still. Had Hawk heard anyone else moving nearby, though? Hawk—

  —had the Lady of Jewels by the throat. Sarasper stood watching, the dark coils of some slain serpentmonster lay all around, and Hawk’s war sword was drawing back for—for—

  “Hawk, have your wits fallen right out of your head?” Craer was too aghast to keep his voice down or his words prudent; his shout cracked across the hollow like a pine bough shattering in a fire.

  “Gods above, man,” he added furiously, striding across the slaughtered nightwyrm as if it wasn’t there, “has some spell got a hold of you? Put down that sword!”

  The armaragor stared at his friend in dumbfounded silence. He’d never seen the spiderlike little procurer this angry—not even the first time some long-dead idiot had called Craer “Longfingers,” a name the procurer still, twenty summers later, wasn’t fond of. Hawk blinked—and his sword halted, right where it was.

  Craer marched right up to him and grabbed Hawkril’s sword arm by the wrist. “I said drop it!”

  Hawkril shook his head, let fall his sword, and reached out a hand toward the procurer’s face, as if in wonder. “She tried to kill us, Craer.…”

  “Spell-thralled by one of the Silvertree mages, no doubt,” the procurer snapped. “So your brilliant response to this is to butcher her, just as they’re trying to do to us, hey? So tell me, Hawk: have we joined Silvertree’s army, after all this? Or has he put a spell on you to make you do his bidding … is that it? Just how long do you think we’ll last against those same three mages without her, hey? Did you think of that, yet? Or were you going to wait until you’d cut her head off, and start doing your thinking then?”

  Craer was almost shrieking his words now, spraying spittle with every sentence, his face white and his eyes glittering. Embra’s eyes were still closed, and Sarasper came around to stand before her, watching her intently. Her throat moved in a tremulous swallow, and her tongue flicked out over dry lips, but she neither moved nor spoke.

  “Craer …?” The armaragor’s rumble held an almost pleading tone.

  The procurer shouldered past him to take Embra by the elbows—he could not reach her shoulders—and sit her down. “Idiot,” he snapped over his shoulder at Hawkril, and then turned his head to look at Sarasper and asked calmly, “Good healer, would you stand watch right now? I need you to go a few paces away from our noise and listen hard, that way in particular. Someone—or something—may have heard us.”

  Without waiting for a reply, the procurer leaned forward to the sorceress until their foreheads were almost touching, and asked gently, “Embra? Lady Embra? What happened?”

  Faerod Silvertree’s daughter raised agonized eyes to him, tried to frame words, and then burst into sobs and threw her arms around him. The procurer held her tight and waited for her weeping to subside, hearing Hawkril move restlessly behind him. One of the sounds was the scrape of the armaragor’s sword being grounded in mossy soil.

  It was some time before Embra recovered herself enough to gasp out so much that the three men understood the dreadful compulsion that had seized her, when through mists in her mind she saw the Spellmaster sitting at a gleaming table in her father’s favorite chamber in Castle Silvertree with a wooden figurine in his hands … under her father’s cold smile, as the magic took hold.…

  “No more tears, now,” Craer snapped, and raised his eyes to Sarasper, who’d drifted back to hear the sorceress.

  “Is there any way to break this magic?” the old man asked carefully. Embra was gulping in deep, shuddering breaths, her face hidden behind tangled hair, but she managed to draw up her shoulders and then drop them, in an exaggerated shrug.

  The three men traded grim glances, and then Sarasper bent again and asked, “If that wood doll he’s using was destroyed, what then?”

  “T-that would work, yes,” Embra gulped. “Until Ambelter made another. He’d need to craft a new figurine, himself, and bind to it something of me—probably hairs from my hairbrush, if they haven’t used them all to work their seeking spells by now.”

  “Can we, say, burn that thing from here—with your magic, if I—if we all help?”

  Embra closed her eyes and seemed to shrink. They saw her shiver before she said very quietly, “There is a way. It will … kill me.”

  “How so?”

  “I have to set myself afire … and as I char, hold the link to the thing of wood back in the Castle, so that it burns, too.”

  “What if we three healed you as you burned? Would we heal the doll, too, or can you hold that back?”

  Embra opened her eyes and looked at him sharply, sudden hope leaping in her face. “That—that would work, yes!”

  “Then we
’ll do that,” the healer said quietly. “Disrobe, everyone—and get all metal far away from us. Hawkril, don’t forget your bracers. All metal must go.”

  “Our clothes?” the armaragor growled, his hands already on a buckle.

  “Unless you want them burned to ash,” Sarasper said almost cheerfully. “I’ll be needing to draw on both of you, if we’re to keep our Lady alive. Don’t strew things; I want bundles we can snatch and run with, if we have to. She’ll probably do her share of screaming, once we begin.”

  “Right,” Craer said, almost briskly, and then looked at Hawkril. Slowly Sarasper and Embra turned their heads to regard the armaragor, too.

  Hawkril Anharu growled something wordless, deep in his throat, before he stepped forward and laid a gentle hand on Embra’s shoulder.

  She put her fingers over it and stroked it, biting her lip to hold back fresh tears, and he gave her an awkward pat before taking his hand away.

  “I hate magic,” Hawkril told all Darsar then, looking up at the night sky as if he expected a reply.

  There was a brief sputtering that surprised all three men, and then Embra Silvertree was crying and laughing at the same time, struggling to frame the words, “I’ve said that, myself, more than once!”

  Three men exchanged slim ghosts of smiles and turned away to disrobe.

  It was not long before the hollow was lit by eerie flames—fire that rose raggedly from the bucking body of a beautiful woman who arched and shrieked in agony, her ankles hooked under a smoldering fallen tree and her wrists held firmly by an old and bony man upon whose face pain danced and twitched. A large man and a small one held to the old man’s arms, and they trembled and cursed softly, but did not draw away.

  More than once the large man growled, “I hate magic!” but the dark and silent trees standing all around made no reply.

  Above a glossy tabletop, deft fingers suddenly convulsed and flew apart. Flames burst into being between them, and the wooden figurine at their heart seemed to smile coldly at Ingryl Ambelter for an instant, before it slumped into ash in the fierce conflagration.