Curious, Sean ventured out farther amongst these people. Larry, Elias, Ferris and Cordan followed him. Perhaps some of the people recognized him. Perhaps they just figured out who he might be because of who followed him and the crest they wore – it was impossible to tell – but anyone close reached out a hand and touched him. No one crowded around to do so, but if they were within a couple steps, they did. Some farther away merely held out a hand toward him, as if they were caressing the air he passed through.
It was an odd feeling to be touched in this way. As many kids do at some time or other, Sean had dreamed of being a rock star and having gorgeous girls screaming after him and even tearing his clothes off, etc., etc., etc. This was so very different. No one screamed. Some people smiled at him, but they were sad smiles. No one grabbed for his clothes. The touch was more like something someone might give to a friend if a favorite pet had just died.
One old woman came all the way to him. Sean was surprised to see her here, she moved so painfully. She tottered over, folded her arms around him and rocked him for several seconds before letting go and returning to her tent with the equally old man who had to be her husband. He had held Sean’s hand during the whole thing. Neither of them said a word.
This is getting depressing. Sean moved out of the scattered campsites and away from the somber people, seeking an unobstructed view of the city. The walls were white and taller than he had expected them to be. Farther inside, he could see higher walls, then still higher walls inside of those. Nowhere did he see a single roof above any of the walls. It reminded him of the White City, Minas Tirith, in Lord of the Rings, only not so steep and without the central spike of Orthanc or the citadel on top, though there appeared to be a palace complex in its place. “Is there any news from inside?”
“Nothing,” said Elias. “From what I can gather, they closed the gates soon after the first pilgrims showed up. We don’t even know if the residents are aware of what’s been going on or why the gates have been closed.”
“I’m going to go find out,” said Sean.
“You can’t go in there,” said Ferris.
“I’m not going in there. Not right away, but we all know I have to go in there eventually, and the sooner the better.”
Muscles jumped in Ferris’s jaw.
He’s lost weight. Sean turned to look back over the people. This is not an army. Sure, there are some fighters out there, and I’m sure there are men who could fight if they had to. There must be thousands of people here, and maybe more on the other side. If I were to try and rally them, I’m sure I wouldn’t get more than a few hundred swords. That and a couple hundred more pitchforks or staffs, and perhaps a few bows used for hunting rabbits. I might even get lucky and find some mages with some strength.’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not good enough.’
Sean looked back at the city. I wonder how many people are in there. He assessed the size. There are probably just as many people inside those walls as are out here. He shook his head with regret. I personally made sure several destriers and demons were in there. I never bothered to find out how Ludwyn reacted to them. I don’t even know if he has his own such forces like most of the other garrisons. If I accomplished nothing else, I should have caused my uncle to build up his defenses. I should have kept an eye on him. What do I know of waging a war? I have been such an idiot; I’ve made way too many mistakes. No, there is no way I am going to assault the gates and beat my way into the city. Well maybe, if every man, woman and child out here was a warrior hot for Ludwyn’s blood. Even then, losses would be tremendous, and most of those losses would be before breaching the first wall. He remembered fighting such a battle once in Dungeons and Dragons and he remembered the numbers, and he didn’t even have any war machines to help.
He strode toward the city. Ferris growled as they followed him, but they didn’t try to stop him. About half way to the walls, Sean stopped and studied the city once again. He could see several guards pacing the walls on all the levels. They were vigilant. He could pick out a few archers taking aim; any closer and they would fire. He definitely had their attention.
“Move back a little,” he said. He began to work a magic he hadn’t touched since his first week here. Cisco had given him a few seeds and instructed him to make them grow. He took a six-foot swath of grass and made it grow and change. Several minutes later, he had a travesty of a tree two hundred feet tall with a gnarled and twisted trunk, but instead of branches and leaves, it was topped with the six-petaled, six-colored ‘flower’. It wasn’t a flat representation either; the six, ten-foot, peg-like ‘petals’ protruded from the central hub in six different directions, and the six different colors were bright and vivid. When he was finished, he turned his back on the tree, and the city, and returned to their camp.
Inside the tent, he sank down on the closest cushion. It’s hard making something from nothing, I should know, I’ve been doing it all up and down the plains. But why do I feel so washed out now? The magic wasn’t that hard. When Elias knelt down in front of him, he could see the concern on his face again. “I’m all right, Dad,” he said. “Dad, something’s strange here. Cast a spell at me. Make my hand burn.”
“No Seanad…” he started.
“Don’t worry; I won’t let it burn me. I just want to test something.” He held his hand up between them.
Sean’s hand burst into flames. He put it out quickly and it didn’t do any more damage than to singe the hair on the back of his hand. Watching your hand burst into flame is rather freaky. “Did you feel it? Was it at all difficult?”
“Other than the fact that I’m a little out of practice, it felt okay to me,” said Elias, frowning.
“The magic feels dampened here. It works all right, but it’s dull. I’m not complaining though; that’s probably what’s keeping my ghosts away.”
Larry came in with Jenny. “What was that you made out there? I had to show Jenny; I couldn’t describe it.”
“It’s supposed to be the family crest, but I needed to make it big enough for those in the city to see clearly; ‘Woohoo, here I am’, then I had to make the whole thing balanced. If I had made it look more like a real flower, the first wind that came along would have broken it off. How would that look for my message?”
“No,” said Jenny, as she gave Sean a peck on the cheek. “We don’t need any bad omens.” She brushed a thumb under his eye. “You look tired. You should get some sleep.”
“Jenny, I’ve been sleeping for days. I’m tired of sleeping.”
“Well then, if you’re not tired, I think you should find whoever it was who punched you in the nose and return the gesture.”
Larry laughed. “You do kind of look like someone punched you. You got some nasty dark circles under your eyes.”
“I’ll have something ready for supper in a couple hours,” said Mattie. “I’ll wake you then.”
Sean was tired. Maybe that’s why the magic feels so dull. He slept until supper, then he went back to bed again shortly after, but before he let himself fall asleep again, he used the alone time to take a look around the city.
What Sean saw was daunting, and yet sad too. The sun was sitting on the horizon, the tall walls shadowed the city, and the streets were quiet. Whatever passed for commerce had long since wound to a close, taking its traffic with it. He saw a hooker wander down the street hoping for a warm bed for the night. He also spotted a few beggars hunkering down in dark corners. He even noticed what could only be a burglar making his way across the rooftops on some errand only he knew. But in truth, these sightings were few and far between. Tramping through the streets at intervals of a single city block or less, were entire squads of heavily armored soldiers carrying pikes, and armed with heavy swords at their hips. The display made Sean wonder why Ludwyn was so worried about the rabble gathered outside the walls. In his opinion, there was no contest.
He looked farther. Peeking inside windows, he saw families gathered around the table in varying stages of their evening life
. Most of these families had children. All of them glanced toward the window or door whenever the guards marched by. Then Sean noticed another small detail – all of them had their curtains closed. Were they closed against the spying eyes of the guards, or was there some other reason? If it had been winter, he would have assumed that they were closed to hold in warmth, but the night was warm, coming close to being hot.
Passing on deeper into the city, Sean saw a young man in the custody of one of the squads. He was kicking and screaming every inch of the way. He was obviously not a beggar or a thief; his clothes said as much, but they also said that his family wouldn’t likely be able to come up with the bail, if that was even possible here. Remembering Errol and what had happened to him at the hands of other such guards, Sean clouded the guards’ eyes and numbed their hands. He held them that way until the young man was well out of sight before he let them go.
After a hasty search of their immediate location, the guards immediately retraced their steps. Curious, Sean followed them. One rabbit had escaped them. They were going after another, he was sure, and if not they were going to bait the trap. As soon as Sean was certain they had zeroed in on one particular house, he hid it from their sight. The frightened eyes of a woman peeking out between the curtains decided his action. The guards’ eyes merely slid from the house of one neighbor to that of the other without resting on the woman’s house at all. The guards were confused. Perhaps they had taken a wrong turn in the dark.
Sean wondered where the young man would go. He couldn’t leave the city on his own the way it was all closed up, and if he was at all smart, he would know that his home would be the first place the guards would look for him. Sean would keep an eye open for him; if he saw him, he would take him out of the city.
When he finally found the market, Sean saw two heavy cages under equally heavy guard. Inside the cages were destriers, and chained to their backs were their demons. They stood quiet now, as did the guards. The red-eyed stares of the demons and their mounts confirmed their killing insanity. They watched the potential targets with patient hunger, waiting for the heavy bars to be taken away. Chained to the outside of the bars were the bodies of three men and two women; they hadn’t survived long after being chained there. The amount of blood around their feet said as much. The bars had prevented the creatures within from pulling the bodies inside, but it didn’t protect them from being shredded through the bars until they died of shock and blood loss. Sean was sure that their screams had been heard across the city.
Sean had little patience for someone who would torture an animal, but he found that he had even less patience for someone who could stand by and allow something like this to happen. Even if he didn’t have magic, he would have put these creatures out of their misery long ago. He did that now. The entire display sank to the ground without a whimper. He included the guards in his wave of death – they deserved it for allowing such a thing to continue, plus he didn’t want to send up an alarm. He hung the White Star banner on the bars over the bodies that hung there – the message was clear; the White Star had been here. The White Star had done this.
Little was different in the next level of the city. The sun was below the horizon now. The hookers he saw were dressed in silk or satin. If there were beggars and pickpockets here, none were obviously visible or sleeping in the streets where Sean could see. He wondered if there was a guild house where such people could go to get off the street.
The people Sean saw were few and might have been out at this hour only because they were attached to the military. Even so, their passage past the patrolling squads was not the passing of friends. Archers and soldiers also paced the walls; the city’s defenses would be hard to crack.
By the time he found the market square, the streets were deserted, leaving a display of destriers and guards in front of the tall buildings that likely housed the merchants’ guilds. No one was chained to these bars. Sean wasted no time dealing with the display and it’s perpetual guards this time. He didn’t need to see the insane hunger in their eyes.
In the high city, he saw no street people at all. Perhaps they didn’t dare to ply their trade so close to the king, or perhaps they just kept their business behind closed doors and out of sight. The guards that paced the streets were no less frequent than were the archers on the walls, even here, this far inside the city; it made him wonder who their targets were.
At this late hour, the houses were all dark, but judging from the appearance of the houses themselves, the people who lived here were definitely of the upper class. Rather than a market square with destriers and their cages, there was a small, colorful park with carefully tended gravel walkways and flowerbeds. Near the center was a whipping block that looked something like a breaching whale. Its arching surface sported a single man whose back had recently received the gentle attention of a very sharp whip. Though he wasn’t moving, he was still breathing. Sean wouldn’t leave him here, but he had to for now, so he moved on quickly. He would pick up this poor soul when he left.
Overlooking the park was the next wall, and inside was a single, sprawling structure that could only be the palace, and its perimeter bristled with guards. The courtyards teemed with activity, even this late at night.
Inside the palace, guards paced the halls in pairs, one pair never being out of sight of another pair. The throne room was spotless, and uncharacteristically empty, except for its contingent of guards outside each door. Lit only by moonlight, Sean could see no sign of his past gifts – he looked.
Sean wasn’t interested in seeing who slept in the rooms on the upper floors; he was fairly certain that Ludwyn would have few guests in-house. He left the palace and explored the riverside of the city. Facing the river, it was little more than a wall, then down to a street; the next wall, and down to another street; then the last wall that overlooked the river and the handful of slips there. A short distance to the right, Sean could see three low bridges leading across to the other side of the river and the other half of the city. A fourth looked to have succumbed to age or disrepair, as a good deal of it was under water. The dark made it difficult to see what was over there, but it was obvious that the walls contained only the flat sprawl of humanity – Minas Tirith stopped at the river.
Movement down below caught his attention. These walls and streets received no less military attention than any other area of the city, but there were no houses or shops here. Ludwyn had a veritable army inside the walls of his city, and it was likely the same on the other side of the river. No wagons had passed through any of the three landside gates of this half of the city, and no barges were docked at the slips on this side of the river. Though he could pick out the masts of quite a few ships docked on the other side, nothing moved on the river. From his high vantage, Sean could see the smoke of many campfires on the far north side of the city, so he expected the same was true there as well. With no traffic on the river, it was impossible to determine how he fed his army.
Sean was beginning to feel the drag of magic; it was time to get back, time to get some sleep. He returned to the garden square of the high city to find that a squad of guards had arrived. They had decided to give the man on the whipping block a little more attention before they continued their rounds. They were having such a good time. In malicious fury, Sean flayed their backs without disturbing their armor, and under the cover of their screams; he displayed his banner on the wall overlooking the park, then left, taking the prisoner with him.
The man was still screaming when he appeared in Sean’s room, and of course, his cries brought everyone in the vicinity bursting in. Sean was at his side in a second and had pushed his pain away, then he healed his back.
In the quaking aftermath, the man looked up at the men surrounding him. “Who are you?” he whispered, then his eyes landed on Sean’s armor where it draped across the T-shaped stand someone had made for it. “So, you’re him. The rumors are true.”
Sean helped him to sit up on the floor and Ferris handed him a mu
g of water. He drank it thirstily while he stared at Sean.
“What brought you to this?” asked Sean, when the man had drained the mug.
The man looked around at his audience again. His distrust was obvious. They were, after all, the enemy. He shrugged and answered anyway. “Under the influence of too much drink, I had the audacity to miss roll call yesterday.”
“Jesus, Seanad, did you have to bring in a guard?” asked Elias.
Sean shrugged. “I won’t ask you where your loyalties lay,” he said to the man. “Nor will I bind you. You can come and go as you please, but to protect us, I must compel you. You will do no harm here, nor will you reveal anything you learn here to our enemies, do you understand?”
The man’s head reared back and he bared his teeth in a grimace. “Uh…I understand,” he hissed between clenched teeth. The empty mug fell from his shaking hands, which gripped the floor to keep him from crumbling again. A few breaths later, he asked, “Who are you to have such strength in magic? My lord would destroy you if he knew.”
“I already sent my message to my uncle,” said Sean. “Why don’t you get some sleep? There are cushions in the outer room that are much softer than that whipping bench where I found you.” He nodded and Ferris led him out, steadying his shaky progress as he went.
Soul Dance
Nearly half the night was spent by now, and he was hungry again, but Sean still had no desire to sleep; his mind was filled with the things he had seen in the city. Now that his flag was displayed, there was no reason to believe things wouldn’t develop just as it had at the other cities, and since Ludwyn was so close, the results could be much more bloody. I am running out of time.
Sometime later, the distant sound of sad music penetrated his thoughts. The tune was haunting, and it sounded like it came from a flute, or perhaps a violin.
The Making of a Mage King: Prince in Hiding Page 21
