War Maid's choice wg-4

by David Weber

  It was too late. Surprised, already off-center from the lunge which had missed its target, Leeana’s lifting foot unbalanced him completely. He hit the ground with bone-crushing force, crying out as something shattered in his right shoulder. Slivers of anguish rocketed through him, and he shook his head groggily, dragging himself up as high as his knees. He had to get back on his feet, he had to Something flashed over his head. A kneecap rammed into his shoulder blades like a maul, and his left hand clawed uselessly at his suddenly blood-slick throat as the war maid garrotte bit deep. He gurgled, twisting frantically, and Leeana Hanathafressa crossed her wrists behind his head, set her shoulders, and twisted with all her strength.

  The last sound Cassan Axehammer ever heard was the crunching snap of his own neck.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Varnaythus stared into his gramerhain, jaw tight while echoes of disbelief reverberated deep in his eyes.

  Impossible. Everything had gone perfectly- perfectly! — and that bastard Tellian had turned it around on him anyway. After all his years of effort, his plans, the risks he’d run-after he’d gotten every piece into position despite all the obstacles and every one of his Lady’s demands-all of it had been torn apart by the last minute interference of one miserable mage, a mangy pack of war maids, one minor lord warden…and a single meddling wind rider who seemed to be almost as hard to kill as her never to be sufficiently accursed husband! It couldn’t have happened, yet it had.

  Disbelief turned into crackling fury as a tall, slim, redhaired young woman and a huge chestnut courser cantered up to the smoking ruins of a hunting lodge. The young woman slid from the saddle, crossed to where her father stood beside the King of the Sothoii and dropped something round at Markhos’ feet. The King rolled the round object to one side with the toe of his boot, and Cassan Axehammer’s dead, astounded eyes stared up at the monarch he’d tried to murder.

  “ Bitch! ” the wizard hissed, all the years of wasted effort that severed head represented crashing through him in a torrent of rage, and his hand twitched towards the carved-bone wand lying on the desk before him.

  “Would that be wise?” a quiet voice asked, and Varnaythus’ head swiveled. Sahrdohr met his gaze and shrugged ever so slightly. “It’s your decision, but as soon as we activate the kairsalhain, everyone in Norfressa will know exactly who was behind all this. Or every mage-and Wencit-will, at any rate, and even with Her orders, the Council won’t like that.”

  Varnaythus glared, but even as he did, he knew his anger wasn’t truly-or shouldn’t be, at any rate-directed at the magister. Sahrdohr simply happened to be close enough to serve as a focus, and Varnaythus forced himself to leash his temper. It wasn’t easy, under the circumstances, but no one could attain the rank of master wizard without learning how to govern his own passions.

  “Point,” he said after a moment, his voice sharp, and his nostrils flared as he inhaled deeply. Then he turned back to his own gramerhain.

  Arm Shahana’s image glowed with the silver-shot blue of Lillinara, and a fresh lava flow of anger rippled through him as he watched her lay hands upon Markhos Silveraxe. The glowing blue corona ran down her arms to her hands, lapping about the King, and Varnaythus could actually see his wound closing. Somehow the healing of that wound-the wound which was the visible proof of how close they’d come to hurling the Kingdom of the Sothoii into civil war and destruction-actually helped him throttle the fuming embers of his rage.

  He inhaled again, more naturally, and gave himself a shake. It was because watching her heal Markhos put everything back into focus, he decided. It punctuated the failure of Athnar’s assassins-and Cassan-and forced him to consider everything afresh, with all the hard-earned dispassion he’d learned in his long, ambitious life.

  They’d moved everyone out of the ruins of the hunting lodge as the last of the flames gnawed away at the remaining fuel, but they hadn’t gone very far. Nor would they, with so many wounded men. Shahana would heal the worst hurt, but a single arm of Lillinara wasn’t going to be able to heal very many of them, and moving injured men over Sothoii roads would be an agonizing ordeal for the wounded. Messengers had been sent galloping off to Balthar and Sothofalas, and he was certain additional armsmen and healers would swarm towards Chergor as soon as those messengers reached their destinations. Eventually, of course, Markhos would retire either to Balthar or to his capital, but no Sothoii king would leave a field where so many had fallen in his defense until he’d personally seen all the survivors properly cared for. That meant Markhos would be anchored to the vicinity of the burned hunting lodge for at least the next day or two, and all he really needed to be was within a half-mile or so.

  The kairsalhain Varnaythus had carefully planted under the hearth in the main lodge was undoubtedly buried under collapsed, charred timbers and masonry, but the most intense mortal fire would scarcely affect the stone. It was formed of the same crystal as his gramerhain, fused in the heart of a working beside which the most powerful lightning bolt was but a weak and pallid thing. And, like his gramerhain, it had come from the working with an affinity for the art. It was sensitized, attuned to the art-no larger than a child’s thumb, yet capable of focusing and storing workings that could have destroyed a city the size of Trofrolantha itself. Yet that was only one of its possible functions. Kairsalhains could be-and often were-used as repositories for such spells, as well as…more subtle ones, but they could also be used as beacons, anchors, or keys.

  Varnaythus was still uncertain exactly how the mage wind-walking talent functioned, but it was clearly different from the spells of teleportation available to a wizard, for a wind-walker could travel to places he’d never been, never even seen, if he made the journey in short enough stages. A wizard couldn’t. The art needed a focus, an aiming point, and (also unlike wind walkers) it cost a wizard dearly in gathered power and concentration to teleport himself over long distances even with a focus; trying to transport anyone else at the same time drove the cost upward exponentially. Almost anything could be used as a focus at need, as long as the wizard had prepared it properly before he or someone else deposited it at his intended destination, but kairsalhain was best, because it could be charged before it was placed. The wizard could draw upon the energy stored in the stone rather than expending freshly gathered (and sometimes…unruly) power, which let him arrive undrained, with his command of the art unimpaired-not a minor consideration when colleagues who wished one ill might be awaiting one’s arrival.

  There were other advantages to using kairsalhains, of course. A wizard’s wards created a shielded area into which no teleportation spell could reach, for example. But if he’d placed a kairsalhain within it and properly attuned it to the individual idiosyncrasies of his wards, he or an ally with the correct words of command could still pass directly through them without difficulty and without the need to lower those wards and expose himself to someone else’s attack. And teleportation spells weren’t the only workings a kairsalhain could store.

  Like the one under the heat-cracked hearth of a burned hunting lodge.

  He touched his wand again, stroking it lightly, feeling the power quivering against his palm. He had only to speak the word of command here in his working chamber, and hundreds of leagues away that stone would awaken in a blast of heat and fury like the very kiss of Carnadosa. The crater would be almost a mile across. The forest around the lodge would be flattened, splintered, turned into a roaring inferno that burned for days. And Markhos and Tellian and Arm Shahana and Leeana Hanathafressa would be wiped from the surface of the earth as if they had never existed.

  He felt the aching need to do just that, to crush the opponents who’d defeated his tools without ever even realizing who their true enemy was. To show these Norfressans the true power rising once again in Kontovar. But Sahrdohr was right. Satisfying as it might be in the short term, it carried enormous risks, risks the Council of Carnadosa was loath to run…and the greatest of which was Wencit of Rum.

  Varnaythus
could have lived with the thought of forewarning Norfressa that Kontovar was once again prepared to move. Without wizards of their own, there would be little the Norfressans could do with that warning. But that had been true for centuries, and still the Council had waited, watched, planned and spied but never dared to step out of the shadows and into the open, and the reason it had not was named Wencit of Rum.

  For twelve hundred years, Wencit had held the wizard lords of Kontovar at bay, and his very name touched altogether too many of them-including one named Varnaythus, he admitted-with terror. No wand wizard in his right mind would willingly face a wild wizard, not in arcane combat. Wencit’s sheer power would have been enough to frighten any sane opponent, but he held more than power in those scarred, ancient hands of his. He held the keys-the keys to the spells which had strafed Kontovar, seared cities and fortresses into bubbled plains of glass, burned forests, melted mountains, turned glaciers to steam and rivers to desert. He’d created those spells for the Last White Council. He alone knew their secrets, knew their innermost workings…and they remained active to this day.

  The Council of Carnadosa had probed them with the utmost caution. Tested to determine that they still stood ready to his hand, awaiting his command. They dared probe no deeper than that, but the connection was there, the conduit was open, singing with the unmistakable vibrations and imprint of his power, and Wencit was a wild wizard. It had taken the entire Council of Ottovar to raise those spells under his direction; a wild wizard would need no one else’s aid to use them a second time.

  But the old bastard doesn’t want to use them, Varnaythus reminded himself. He remembers last time too well, remembers how the sky burned above Kontovar for weeks, how the smoke choked a world in The Year That Had No Summer. He remembers the screams, the destruction, the walls of flame marching across a continent. He watched it all in his grammerhain, saw every instant of it; it haunts him still, and that’s his ultimate weakness, the chink in his armor. He doesn’t ever want to call down that devastation a second time…but that doesn’t mean he won’t. He did it the first time; drive him hard enough, and he might yet do it again, despite his memories. Carnadosa only knows what provocation it would take to drive him to it, but none of us ever wants to find out.

  And that was the risk of using the kairsalhain, for in its own way, the entire continent of Kontovar was one huge kairsalhain for Wencit of Rum. He could reach his fist into its bedrock and twist any time he chose, any time he was willing to kill enough millions of the wizard lords’ servants and slaves. And if those wizard lords used the art too openly here in Norfressa, he might decide that time had come.

  “We’ll wait,” he said softly, taking his hand from his wand, sitting back in his chair. “It was never anything but our ultimate fallback plan, anyway-like the kairsalhain under Markhos’ throne room in Sothofalas-and the Council won’t be pleased if we’re driven to using it in the end.”

  Sahrdohr nodded, his relief obvious despite his carefully controlled expression, and Varnaythus’ lips twitched in a sour smile. The magister was right; the Council wouldn’t be pleased if they used the art so openly…yet he could live with that if he must. His orders came from Carnadosa Herself, and whatever the Council might think, that was all the protection from its wrath he would need. Wencit wouldn’t be swayed by it, of course, but at least his fellow wizard lords would have no choice but to accept the deed once it was done.

  Yet She wouldn’t like it either, really, if not for the same reasons as the Council. No, even though it would be precisly what She’d commanded him to do, She’d still be furious because the prize would be so much less valuable than the one She’d set out to claim. But if he waited, if he held his hand long enough to see what happened on the Ghoul Moor, he would be able to divert Her anger to a much safer target, for the failure against Bahzell would be Anshakar’s failure, not his. Bahzell had always been the main focus of this entire elaborate operation, and he could always point out that he’d warned Anshakar of the danger Bahzell presented, cautioned him not to take his task too lightly, too overconfidently.

  He would have done all he could to make the attack a success, and then-and only then, after Krashnark’s servants had failed in every aspect of their mission-he would bring Her the death of Bahzell Bloody Hand’s wife. That prize, purchased at whatever price in the open use of the art, would be far, far better than to bring Her nothing at all.

  And who knew? If Tellian and Markhos both died-and especially if he used the kairsalhain under Sothokarnas to destroy the fortress, half of Sothofalas, and Markhos’ wife and children, as well-the Kingdom might yet dissolve in civil war after all. There was still Yeraghor to think about. He’d be desperate when word of this reached him, and if that was followed by a power vacuum, an adroit advisor might well be able to convince him that…

  “Markhos’ assassination was secondary to our main objective, anyway,” he told the magister, “and we damned nearly succeeded in it despite that busybody Brayahs and Tellian and his bitch of a daughter.” He shrugged. “Bahzell was always the main target, and no meddling mage is going to change a single damned thing that happens on the Ghoul Moor. It would take a god to change that!”

  He bared his teeth, tapping his gramerhain, summoning up the view of Tellian’s marching army once more.

  “We’ll wait,” he repeated, gazing intently down on the tiny, crystal clear images in the heart of the stone. “If Anshakar is half as mighty as he seems to think he is, we won’t need to worry about Markhos or the Sothoii. And if it should happen Anshakar isn’t strong enough to deal with Bahzell, there’ll still be time to kill the King and his precious family. And just between the two of us, Malahk,” his eyes were hard and hating as he glared at those distant images, “I find the notion of killing Bahzell’s wife and father-in-law curiously soothing at this particular moment.”

  ***

  At least it wasn’t raining.

  Bahzell Bahnakson would have been much happier if he’d been able to convince himself the absence of clouds was simply a natural change in the weather. Or, failing that, that it was because whoever or whatever had caused all those dreary days of rain had been dismayed by the steady advance of no less than three champions of Tomanak and decided to take the rain-and himself-elsewhere.

  Unfortunately, he could convince himself of neither of those things.

  ‹ Neither can I, Brother,› Walsharno thought at him. ‹ But at least it means we can see whatever’s coming before it gets here. And our two-foots’ bow strings won’t be wet!›

  “No, that they won’t,” Bahzell replied, his voice pitched too low for anyone else besides-possibly-Brandark, riding beside him, to hear. “And truth be told, I’ll take whatever it is we can get, and grateful I’ll be for it. Not that I’d be finding it in my heart to complain if it should happen we were offered more.”

  ‹ Nor I,› Walsharno agreed, tossing his head in assent. ‹ Nor I.›

  Bahzell stood in his stirrups, stretching and simultaneously trying (vainly) to see a little further. Not that he expected to see very much. The Ghoul Moor was both more uneven and more heavily overgrown with scattered clumps of trees than the Wind Plain. In fact, it reminded him very much of the land further north and west, around Hurgrum, except for the absence of farmsteads. Ghouls did raise some crops, as winter fodder for their food animals, and Trianal’s mounted foraging parties would be keeping a lookout for any such sources of supply they could sweep up along the way. But those crops tended to be closer to the ghouls’ occupied villages, and the villages in the area here along the Hangnysti had been largely deserted since mid-summer.

  They’d scouted this region cautiously over the last week or two, confirming that the villages in it remained empty. Since the rain had finally eased, though, their scouts had found tracks churned across the mud, indicating that quite a few ghouls had at least passed through it. Nor was that all they’d indicated, unfortunately. Ghouls were scarcely known for tactical or strategic sophistication, y
et at least some of those tracks clearly suggested they’d been sending out scouts of their own, keeping an eye on the allied expedition. The possibility that the other side might know more about them than they knew about it for a change wasn’t exactly comforting, but the Sothoii scouting parties had at least turned up sufficient tracks to suggest conclusively where the ghouls had gone. They were gathering along the Graywillow River, a tributary of the Hangnysti about three hundred miles west of its junction with the Spear, which made entirely too much sense from their perspective.

  The Graywillow was scarcely two hundred miles long, but it had a lot of small, winding tributaries which drained an extensive, often marshy floodplain, and the main stream was close to seventy yards across where it joined the Hangnysti. That made it a significant water barrier, and the terrain along its course-especially as it neared the Hangnysti-was rough, its banks lined with thick, tangled thickets of the willows from which it took its name. Farther upstream the willows gave way to dense stretches of mixed evergreens and hardwoods which could provide dangerously effective cover for troops as irregular as ghouls…and which would break up the formation of any infantry which tried to go in after them. Taken all together, it was an unfortunately good defensive position. On the other hand, with all the rain which had beset the Ghoul Moor in the last month or two, the Graywillow had to be running high and deep-probably deep enough to be a barrier even for ghouls, if they could catch them between their own advance and the stream.

  Beyond the riverline, between the Graywillow and the Spear, a rolling expanse of grasslands stretched east and south almost to the border of the Kingdom of the River Brigands, offering grazing space for enough meat animals to supply an enormous horde of ghouls, assuming any imaginable power could force the ghouls in question into some sort of cooperative effort. Which was a sobering thought, given what appeared to have been happening.