by P D Ceanneir
To the seaward side of the vineyard lay the two-storey villa and its outhouses, which formed half of the square yard. Most of the yard was open without wall or fence, but it was guarded by many men and they patrolled the ground in shifts.
Telmar had no plan; he felt no fear, only hate and anger. This gave him a form of invulnerable courage as he wandered into the villa’s grounds without a care in the world.
‘Harlequin,’ he said. The Powerball lit up and spun on Basilisk’s cradle pommel.
‘Yes master?’ Harlequin asked.
‘Keep them away from me as I make a dash for the main building.’
‘Certainly, master,’ said Harlequin, and then the Powerball shot away at tremendous speed, trailing an echoing white line of light through the pouring rain as he did so. There was a series of dull thuds and groans as the Powerball raced around and slammed off the heads of any guards close enough to see Telmar run into the centre of the villa’s square.
The Baron slowed to a walk and extracted Basilisk from its sheath on his back. He walked straight up to the main doors and did not falter in his step as they swung open to reveal a tall middle-aged man in a tailored tunic, possibly a servant, and an officer of the guard.
With one swing of his sword, the servant’s throat sprung open as a raw bloody scream and blood pulsed into the rain. As the servant fell to the drenched flagstones, Telmar sprung forward and impaled the officer with Basilisk’s long blade.
He stepped into the warmth of the open sitting room. Lanterns were aglow over the hearth fire and he sensed the movement of unseen women or servants towards the far end of the room through a door that could have led to the kitchen. He ignored them and took the stairs that were off to his right. They led to a low ceilinged corridor that angled to the left. He knew which room they had placed Namwi, because a guard stood by the door. The guard had no time to draw his sword, Telmar rushed around the corner while summoning a hardened fist of air that smacked the guard so hard he flew backwards and hit the far wall. The baron then hacked the man to the ground with two vicious cuts and left him frothing in his own pooling blood.
Telmar used the Arts to disintegrate the lock and violently kicked in the door to the room. It bounced back on its hinges to make a dreadful clatter as it hit the wall.
The girl in the room gave a short sharp scream. Namwi was sitting up in bed still dressed in the same bed robe she wore on the night of her kidnapping, though it was ripped in several places, and she had some purple bruising to her right cheek. She stared in disbelief as Telmar entered, then jumped out of bed to embrace him.
‘Oh, Telmar, Telmar, forgive me. This is my fault,’ she sobbed.
‘All right, Namwi, we will talk later. First we must escape,’ he said urging her to the door but she resisted.
‘I am so sorry, my love I should not have convinced you to marry me in such a low-handed way. Yet, your mother and my father saw it as the only way keep your lands.’
This stopped Telmar on his tracks and then turned to the crying woman. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I lied. I lied about not seeing the Guarding Grants on the Law Reform Bill. I knew it was there and was powerless to stop Duke Cormack and his father from adding it. I sought the help of my father, but it was beyond his control also. However, in a flash of inspiration, he knew that Dowry Laws were the only answer we had to keep the lands.
‘Your mother and I have often talked of us both getting married, but you were always away, and when you stayed in Sonora with that Cinnibar woman, I was broken hearted. Lady Catlyn and father hatched a plan to call you back and marry me with the help of the Dowry Laws, but your mother became too sick to write to you, so I did instead.’
Telmar’s mind was in a whirl at what he had just heard. His family plotted against him. Though that seems harsh, this is how he felt at the time and his anger rose again. He suppressed it as best he could.
‘Somehow Cormack the younger heard of our wedding and the transfer of lands to me,’ she continued. ‘He has been pressing his suit for my hand for a couple of years now, but I have always been in love with you, Telmar.’
‘He found out,’ whispered Telmar. ‘He found out and kidnapped you?’ Even for Cormack such a hastily constructed plan was outrageous. Telmar suspected someone aided him; his father or grandfather undoubtedly. In his mind’s eye he saw the events that led to the kidnap. The Marriage Bans pinned to the corkboard outside the Council Chambers had been available to everybody that passed by and it would not have taken long for the news of their forthcoming marriage to spread around the city. Duke Cormack and his father played significant roles in parliament and the duke himself was co-administrator of the Law College. He would be one of the first to see the Dowry transfer of Tressel Lands when Lord Selwin submitted it.
Telmar could imagine the duke’s rage when he had fathomed out the counterplan to give the lands to Namwi through marriage. He would have seen the rich lands of Tressel slipping away from him after all the hard work he put in to gaining its possession. Nevertheless, how was he going to get away from the law if all of this deception and planning concluded in the illegal kidnap of a noble? Telmar already suspected that the king had already lent his support and that the Brethac Ziggurat was also at the heart of it.
‘So Cormack was conveniently in the citadel with his ship?’ said Telmar still trying hard to understand.
Namwi nodded. ‘Yes, he organised the kidnap, then forced me to marry him while on-board, Telmar.’ Fresh tears flowed down her cheeks. ‘He raped me to consummate the marriage. Oh, Gods, please forgive me.’
Telmar groaned, as anger seethed within him.
Namwi flinched. A shadow blocked the bedroom door and Telmar turned to see a startled Cormack the younger looking back at him.
‘YOU!’ roared Cormack, who drew his sword, ran forward, and then lunged.
Telmar turned to him but had no time to use his sword. Namwi pushed him off balance and Cormack’s sword scored across the ribs on his left side, glancing off them to pierce the girl’s chest with such force that it punched right through her body.
‘NOOOO!’ screamed Telmar, as he lashed out with Basilisk, cutting a deep gash in Cormack’s thigh, severing the femoral artery. Blood pulsed from the wound to drench the floorboards, and before the young Rawn could heal himself Telmar unleashed the volatile energies that had been building inside him for three days.
The blast of heat lifted Cormack off his feet and slammed him against the far wall of the bedroom. He burst into flame, his clothes turning to ash or fusing with his burning skin. Telmar wanted him to suffer so he relinquished his hold on him and pulled the heat back to disperse it into the room. The drapes caught fire; roof beams and furniture became raging infernos, which moved away from the Pyromancer, as if by an invisible hand, as he walked forwards.
Cormack was a hairless bundle of charred flesh. Pyromantic burns are extremely difficult to heal, as he found out whenever he used the Water Element to cool and heal his flesh. Bright sprays of white flame would erupt from his body like hot geysers making him scream in agony.
‘That’s for Namwi,’ said Telmar. He left the dying man to burn to cinders slowly, and went back to Namwi. Her dead eyes looked back at him as he extracted the sword from her chest and picked her up.
Two guards in silver mail barged into the burning room. Both burst into white flames and were instantly incinerated as Telmar calmly walked towards them and out of the door. Such was the fate of anybody that approached him. He allowed his power to spread around the main villa as he walked down the stairs. Flames wrapped around the staircase and climbed the walls as if they had a life of their own, but the fire remained clear of him. It formed into a churning, writhing tunnel to allow him access through the withering heat with his burden, and then it closed up behind him to continue its hungry consumption of the villa.
He took Namwi out into the yard and lowered her gently to the ground. He ran his hand through her hair to keep it away from h
er face and closed her eyes. Something wet and clear landed on her cheek and he realised he was crying.
Around him the monster, which was the raging fire, leapt from one building to the next until all of them were enshrouded in an orange and yellow inferno. Fingers of red and white flame eventually found the prone forms of the guards who had been knocked unconscious by Harlequin; they awoke amidst a blanket of white-hot heat that consumed them like a famished beast, drowning out their screams amidst the crackling and splitting of their charred flesh. As the burning rose into the rain lashed night, lighting up the darkness for miles around, Telmar spread his arms and roared into the sky. He screamed his pain, anger and anguish into an unforgiving world, unleashing two Pyromantic orbs from each hand as he yelled. The orbs shot from him at tremendous speed, simultaneously slamming into the grape press annex and the stable house to obliterate them. The mass of energy incinerated wood and stone into black ash that fell with the rain to cover Telmar and poor Namwi as they remained in the rain-drenched courtyard.
6
Two days previously, Joaquin Ri had been thorough, and at times brutal, in his investigation of the attack at Rathborne Tor. I was to learn of his embarrassment and anger at the knowledge that members of the King’s Guard were involved, and as the King’s Consul, he had a duty to discover the truth.
The truth would change his life forever.
He had interrogated Sir Litton, the Commander of the King’s Guard and together they unravelled a far wider conspiracy. Both men discovered one of the guard’s captains was in the pay of Count Beltane, who he had ordered the attack on Lord Sewin’s home along with an augmented troop of soldiers in the employ of Duke Cormack of Keveni. The Ri actually used a Thought Link on the captain and discovered, to his horror, that his orders were verbally sanctioned, not by the count, but by the king himself.
I was later to learn that Joaquin Ri and King Sallen had been at odds with one another for some time regarding the crippling tax laws. The Ri also did not agree with the way the new king was ruling the city and the disbandment of the old parliament was an affront to its members, and to Lord Joaquin personally; he had many friends and allies within the old political parties and now he had lost those links through the king’s arrogance. Discovering that the conspiracy to kidnap Lady Namwi went all of the way back to the king was the final affront.
Joaquin’s eventual rift with the king would send ripples across the shifting sea that was the Brethac Ziggurat, and create complex schisms amongst the senior members of that Order. However, now, and armed with the knowledge of Telmar’s eventual destination, my father and I, along with the Ri and a personal guard of twenty soldiers, rode towards Keveni.
Telmar was not difficult to find. The tall column of black smoke over the vast acres of vineyards was a huge giveaway. The villa of the Master of Keveni was a blackened, stunted ruin. Even some of the crop in the fields still burnt after the night’s rain. We found Telmar in the central square of the villa’s grounds, still cradling the cold, still form of Lady Namwi to his chest; his tears had marked clean rivulets down his dirty cheeks.
He was unresponsive to Joaquin Ri as he stared into the distance in one of his Fugue States. I wrapped him in a blanket and my father helped me put him on a horse. We hoped he had used up all of his volatile energy in burning the villa, which still smouldered in unrecognisable clumps.
In the baron’s mind, though, reality mixed between the real and the unreal. His sanity remained delicate due to the years in Sonora after his meetings with the Earth Daemon. Now another blow struck him, one that eventually threw him into paranoia and distrust. Family and friends had plotted against him, the Brethac Order worshipped a creature that was so powerful it could destroy the world, and an unspoken threat was coming in the form of the Door.
Now I know why he went mad, and I could not blame him for it.
We rode back to Dulan-Tiss before soldiers from Keveni came to investigate the villa, which they did, but they kept a fair distance from us as we rode away. We delivered the body of Lady Namwi to her grieving father upon our return. Nevertheless, the day after, a small host of the King's Guard arrived to arrest the baron on the orders of the Duke of Keveni for the murder of his son and the Lady Namwi. I was so shocked that I did not even ask how they had come by this information so soon. The other surprising occurrence was of Lord Selwin and Joaquin Ri being placed under house arrest at Rathborne Tor. My father flew into a rage and went to confront Sallen, but the king would not admit him to his throne room and his personal bodyguards threatened him with expulsion from the citadel if he persisted. This was obviously a blasé attempt to threaten my father, yet to do so to the Rogun De Proteous was tantamount to conflict with the Rogun state. Likewise, if he used force to see Sallen, he would bring shame upon the Royal House of Cromme.
In the end help came, or so we thought.
Joaquin Ri had taken the liberty of contacting the Ri Order for their assistance. Four of these men of peace travelled via the Drift to the stone Rings of Dulan from the Tower of Sooth. The Lords Varix, Fowyn, Nestor, and to my relief, Ness Ri.
Lord Ness called in on us in the modest lodgings we took in the Hub district. What he had to say was not heart-warming.
‘The academy is ill pleased with you, your majesty,’ he said to my father. ‘Taking the young prince away from his operational theatre and exceeding the mission parameters was not part of his tuition.’
‘A situation had arisen,’ explained my father. ‘Telmar required my help.’ This was not entirely true but the Ri did not notice the lie. I have known Lord Ness for a long time and I would venture to name him as my true trusted friend, yet I have never seen him look as angry as he did that day.
‘I realise your friendship with Telmar is important, but things are getting out of hand here,’ said Lord Ness.
‘I’ll say they are! That idiot Sallen has…’
My father was silenced by a raised hand from the Ri. Even though Lord Ness began life in a poor family, he had risen to become one of the most famous and oldest of all the Ri and, as a result, commanded respect. My father instantly stopped talking.
‘I have managed to appease the High Echelons of the Academy staff and convinced them you acted honourably. Your father, however, knows a bluffer when he sees one, which I always thought was his most redeeming quality.’
Father went pale. I tried not to smile.
‘He orders you to return immediately. From what I can gather, your presence here is only making matters worse.’
‘But Telmar is rotting in the castle dungeons…’
‘I will look after Telmar!’ retorted the Ri forcefully. He looked at us both and sighed. ‘Sometimes I feel that I have already done this before. Seeing you both like this is so familiar.’
Father and I looked at each other in confusion. Lord Ness turned away from us and walked out of the door, and then turned back again. ‘You will both leave tonight.’ Then he was gone.
Death at the Ancarryn
And Telmar said unto the convicted men, “Reap now thy reward, for it is the gift of death.” Therefore, the axes fell and split their heads and necks asunder.
The execution of King Sallen IV parliament, taken from, The First Civil War: Ringwald the Tolerant
1
Due to fortuitous circumstances a cell, lined with rare Glemmarstone, had been constructed to hold Rawn prisoners of war during the Dragor-rix, though it was seldom used for that purpose. It was in this large, high-ceilinged holding cell, only a few yards square, that Telmar was incarcerated, and it was there he ranted and raved and gave vent to his fury, scorching the Glemmarstone walls as he did so.
By the time Ness Ri was admitted to see his one-time student, my father and I had left Dulan-Tiss under an armed escort provided by Duke Cormack. Father was glum for most of the way home and was not looking forward to seeing the king at all. Fortunately, I convinced him that I should talk to King Valient first and this helped to smooth his temper somewhat. Grandfat
her was one of those men who appeared relaxed one minute and then have bursts of angry energy the next. Luckily I caught him on one of his rare calm days and he listened to our story with interest.
Back in Dulan-Tiss, Telmar lay in the corner of his cell, clutching at the pains in his stomach and mumbling to himself. The large stone doors of his cell slid open into a recess and Ness Ri walked in.
He was shocked to see the mad look in Telmar’s eyes and even more disturbed at the markings on the walls around him. Glemmarstone is indestructible and difficult to manipulate with elemental energy, or so we all thought until Telmar was placed in that cell, a cell designed to hold the most powerful Rawns and Ri. The Brown Glemmarstone now looked patchy white in places, overlapped with intricate designs and engravings of Skrol. Telmar’s skills amazed the Ri as he looked upon fabulously rendered three dimensional figures and faces. On one wall was the picture of the Door, to Lord Ness’s eye it showed nothing important, even the figure beside it did not attract his attention, yet Telmar had sketched Cronos in such perfect detail I could reach out and touch him if I was there. On another wall was the smiling face of Namwi, her face pale white because of the Pyromantic scorching and her eyes seemed to follow Ness Ri as he traversed the room.
As he looked around he caught sight of familiar things, symbols, mathematical theorem, and a list of cities old and forgotten. Each had a date next to it and he was interested to see Dulan-Tiss at the bottom of the list, though the date remained blank.
Telmar chuckled inanely as the Ri approached him, drool dribbled from his lower lip.
‘Do you see?’ he said. ‘See how the Door comes to consume us all.’
‘Telmar, please listen to me. I’m here to help.’
‘Nothing can help me, nothing can help us.’
Ness Ri crouched down next to his one-time student. Telmar’s clothes were now torn in places, and dirty, just like his hands and face, and he had a thick growth of beard, but it was the cold wild eyes that looked out from behind the fringe of unkempt hair that disturbed the Ri the most.
