The Perilous Tower: The Gates of Good & Evil Book 3

by Ian Irvine

  The spellcaster shot forwards and blasted jagged blue fire at the two Merdrun in the entrance. One fell forwards, his leather armour ablaze. The other went backwards down the slope. The spellcaster attacked the remaining three soldiers one by one, blasting them down unerringly.

  ‘Back, Haggergrind!’ cried Klarm.

  It rotated in its own length, as if inspecting whomever had the temerity to give it orders, rotated again, then drifted out of the cave and hovered above the bloody scene. Wilm eyed it, askance. If it chose to target him, he would die most unpleasantly.

  ‘Haggergrind,’ said Klarm, ‘don’t go near the sus-magiz!’

  The sus-magiz had stopped halfway up the slope, but when the spellcaster killed the last of his soldiers he raced down to where he had left M’Lainte.

  Was he trying to lure the spellcaster through? What a victory that would be.

  It hung motionless in mid-air a couple of yards below the cave mouth, tilted towards the sus-magiz as if watching him.

  ‘Stay, Haggergrind!’ roared Klarm.

  He hobbled after it, leapt out of the cave and landed spread-eagled on top. The spellcaster dipped under the impact but continued to hover, though Wilm could not imagine what Klarm hoped to do – unless he planned to kill M’Lainte rather than allow her to be taken.

  Wilm could not bear to watch.

  Skald crouched low on the slope, watching the secret weapon in uneasy awe. His orders were to bring it back, but neither his martial skills nor the sus-magiz magic he had learned so far equipped him to do so. If he approached it he would die, and the mechanician would be lost as well.

  Yet leaving without it, uninjured when all his troops lay dead, felt so wrong. Would it be seen as cowardice under fire? No, he would not become his father!

  If he could take the mechanician back he would not have totally failed, and he had learned vital information about the secret weapon. He ran down towards the boulder he had left her behind. Durthix could send a stronger force for the device. The three survivors could not carry it far.

  ‘Come,’ he said to her.

  Skald conjured the gate that would lead back to the rooftop of Durthix’s command centre. It was far more exhausting than the gate that had brought him here, and he understood why a sus-magiz sometimes needed to drink lives. The yearning rose but he crushed it down. Focus! Complete the gate.

  As it materialised, the ridiculous little dwarf hobbled to the entrance of the cave, sprang and landed on top of the hovering secret weapon. Was he planning a rescue?

  Skald must not lose the mechanician. He dragged her to the gate.

  One of the arms of the secret weapon rotated towards him. He thrust M’Lainte through and dived after her, but as the gate began to carry them away, the secret weapon blasted.

  Reality went wild, the gate whirling and spinning, shrinking and expanding and shrinking again. Blistering rays seared past him, going in all directions then looping and sizzling back, burning him, blinding him, his knowledge of the destination slipping away.

  The sus-magiz shoved M’Lainte through the gate and backed into it, still watching Klarm.

  ‘Be damned!’ cried Klarm.

  He thumped the top of the spellcaster and a jagged bolt of fire leapt out at the gate, which glowed like a miniature sun. The heat scorched Wilm’s face. Rays roared out of the gate in all directions, then it collapsed in on itself and vanished. He could not tell if the sus-magiz had escaped with M’Lainte, or if they had both been killed.

  Klarm, his hair and beard smoking, let out a whoop and turned the spellcaster up the range, leaving Wilm staring after him, surrounded by corpses.

  ‘You stinking traitor!’ Wilm bellowed.

  The spellcaster slowed, and he thought Klarm was going to come racing back to blast him to gobbets, then it continued up the slope and out of sight.

  On the floor of the cave Ilisial kicked and thrashed and screamed herself hoarse.

  22

  Am I A Beautiful Woman?

  The moment Maigraith heard that Rulke was alive, she had abandoned her two-century-long project to recreate the line of the Charon, though it had been replaced by an even more desperate obsession – getting him back. Now she oscillated between frantic activity and listless despair.

  ‘He swore to me,’ she kept saying. ‘Forever!’

  Aviel, who was lugging two pails of water past Maigraith’s salon to the workshop, stopped. She was seated at a long black table with her back to the door, staring into a pentagonal mirror propped up on the table before her.

  ‘Forever,’ she repeated. ‘And Rulke is an honourable man; he would not lightly go back on his word … yet for all that, he is a man. Will he still want me? My mastery of the Secret Art must almost be the equal of his now. And yet … and yet …’

  She turned her head this way and that, illuminating one side of her face, then the other, with the flickering yellow light of a candle, followed by the harsh white of a glowing globe. Clearly, neither pleased her.

  ‘Aviel!’ she said peremptorily. ‘Come here.’

  Aviel started, slopping water into her boots. No good could come of this. She put down her pails and crept in. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Look at me. What do you see?’

  Aviel did not want to say it. ‘Um … what do you want me to see?’

  ‘Am I a beautiful woman?’

  ‘What’s beauty, anyway? Ask a hundred people …’

  Those scarifying eyes pinned Aviel. ‘You know what I mean. Tell me the absolute truth, or it will go badly for you.’

  ‘Y-you were never beautiful.’ Aviel was shaking. ‘But … you aren’t unattractive … for the age you look.’

  ‘What age is that?’ Maigraith said coldly.

  ‘Um … you might pass … might pass for a woman …’ she gulped, ‘of sixty.’ Aviel was putting the best possible face on it. Sixty-five was closer to the mark.

  ‘Sixty!’

  ‘You asked for the truth.’

  ‘But … sixty.’ Maigraith sank her head into her hands. ‘Rulke is a lusty man. Exceedingly lusty …’ She smiled at a memory. ‘And women are drawn to him. You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aviel.

  ‘How old did he seem?’

  Another loaded question. ‘He’d been ill, and he was in a lot of pain. He was haggard, at first.’

  ‘But after he’d eaten and rested, did he look my age?’ Her voice went hoarse.

  Aviel fought to control her face, to not give the answer away, but by the way the colour drained from Maigraith’s face Aviel had failed dismally.

  ‘The absolute truth, girl!’

  ‘He looked like a man in his forties,’ Aviel said truthfully. ‘Strong and powerful, and handsome.’

  ‘Late forties or early forties?’ Maigraith said relentlessly.

  ‘Mid.’

  Maigraith sagged; she looked seventy now. ‘He might come to me because of his oath,’ she whispered, ‘but he won’t stay with a barren old hag. I’ve got to face it; no oath can bind two people down the centuries.’

  ‘You’re not an old hag,’ said Aviel. Why was she being nice to a woman who had never had a kind word to say to her? ‘Besides, if Rulke really meant his oath he wouldn’t care what you looked like.’

  ‘Easy for you to say, since you’re young and beautiful.’

  ‘I’m not –’ Aviel began.

  Maigraith cut her off with a slashing gesture. ‘Enough!’ She backhanded the mirror, which fell face-down on the table. ‘Rulke’s the last of the Charon. Saving his people from extinction has been his reason for being all his adult life, and I’m way beyond childbearing …’ She peered at Maelys, thoughtfully. ‘Or am I?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The old writings mention certain remedies – rejuvenating spells and potions – that can make a man or a woman young again.’

  ‘The great Magister, Mendark, is said to have used the life renewal spell thirteen times,
’ said Aviel.

  ‘Renewal is a lottery. There’s no way of knowing what body you’ll end up with, or what face. No point making myself younger if I end up even more hag-ridden. I have to be me – but far younger.’

  ‘What about a love potion? There are love scent potions in Radizer’s grimoire.’

  ‘Would you use such a potion to make a man love you?’

  Aviel did not answer. Even if she had been interested in love, the idea was absurd.

  ‘I’m not looking for the appearance of love,’ Maigraith said softly. ‘That would be lying to myself as well as to him. Any love that has to be compelled or deceived is no love at all. Nor do I want my youth back – I never want to revisit that awful time again. All I want is my middle years, and to create, with Rulke, the children he needs to save his people. Is that too much to ask?’

  ‘I don’t see how it could be a bad thing,’ Aviel said carefully.

  ‘But how is it to be done?’

  ‘The other day I overheard Flydd and Klarm talking about the Magister’s spell vault –’

  ‘What about it?’ Maigraith said eagerly.

  ‘Flydd asked Klarm if he had a key.’

  ‘Mendark was Magister for a thousand years, and he collected everything known or rumoured about the Secret Art. Every spell, every kind of power, and samples of all manner of arcane devices, though the spell vault was said to have been sacked and destroyed long before I became Numinator. The lying scrutators must have hidden it from me.’

  ‘Come,’ Maigraith said imperiously, two days later.

  It was late in the evening of a wet and windy day. Aviel looked up from the stench she was extracting from foul earth dug from a slaughter-yard of long ago, and she kept imagining the poor beasts being prodded to their deaths, their wild eyes and their panic. She capped her flasks and washed her hands, for once glad to leave her workshop. Nivol, how she hated it!

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To find the spell vault.’

  ‘Why do you need me?’

  It was a mystery why Maigraith, who had been a loner most of her life, spent so much time with Aviel.

  ‘Maybe I enjoy your company.’

  Aviel snorted and followed her down several streets to a large public building built from red and blue marble. It must once have been imposing, but the six columns at the entrance were broken, it had been gutted by fire and was now in a ruinous state, and the central hall and the public chambers at the front were choked with rubble. They clambered over it to reach a rear staircase that ran down.

  In a basement crammed with furniture grand enough for a stateroom but eaten away by woodworm, Maigraith opened a narrow door, rotted at the bottom, and went along a narrow but lengthy passage. There were boot marks in the dust on the floor. Small feet; probably Flydd’s. The passage ended in the lower basement of an adjacent building, almost magically clean of dust. Seven doors led out, all closed.

  Maigraith moved her fingers in the air and a translucent white globe formed and floated there. She spun it this way and that, studying it with her head cocked to one side. The globe turned opaque, became as clear as glass, and a blue dot appeared on the far side. She sighted through the globe at the dot, which was pointing towards the third door on the left.

  It was locked but she opened it with a touch and they went through, down a set of eleven steps, the white limestone worn down in the centre of each tread, then along and down again. More basements and cellars followed, more doors were scried out with her globe, more staircases descended, until they must have been a hundred feet below street level. Aviel’s bad ankle was throbbing now and, because she favoured the good one, her left knee and hip were aching.

  The air grew thicker and more stale with each level they descended, and smelled ever more strongly of damp and mould and other things, bordering on the offensive, that not even her sensitive nose could identify. Aviel stopped; she did not want to go any further.

  ‘Why are you shivering?’ Maigraith turned to study her by the glow from the yellow crystal.

  The little hairs on the back of Aviel neck stood up. ‘What happened down here?’

  ‘What does it matter? It was long ago.’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘Good people were betrayed, tortured for knowledge they did not have and, when they could not provide answers, cruelly put to death.’

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘It would have been at the Magister’s orders.’

  ‘Magister Mendark? What a monster he was!’

  ‘So quick to judge! Until you’ve been in a desperate situation, with everything depending on you –’

  ‘I have been in desperate situations with everything depending on me,’ Aviel snapped, ‘and I didn’t kill innocent people to get out of them.’

  Maigraith bared her teeth. Age had yellowed them. ‘About time you showed some spine, girl. You don’t get anywhere in this life by being docile.’

  ‘When you’re small and young and poor and crippled and friendless, you have to be docile to survive.’ Aviel added quietly, trying to empathise, ‘I read that you were oppressed and tormented and manipulated by Faelamor –’

  ‘Do you really want to remind me of the worst time of my life, down here?’ Maigraith grated.

  ‘I thought that, having suffered so much yourself, you might feel compassion for other suffering creatures.’

  ‘Suffering is character-building. It made me what I am today.’

  ‘As long as you survive. Many people don’t.’

  ‘Life isn’t fair. You either survive or you perish … and in the end we all perish. Enough chatter!’

  They were in a large round chamber shaped like a squashed sphere. No doors led from it save the one they had come through, up five steps. Seepage ran down the walls. The floor was covered in an inch-thick accumulation of dust that the damp had turned to mould-streaked mud. Here and there were accumulations of small bones from rats or other little creatures. Aviel was so tense that it was hard to breathe.

  ‘Flydd came here,’ said Maigraith, ‘and the dwarf. Why are there no prints?’

  ‘They concealed the way they went?’ said Aviel.

  ‘It’d have to be a mighty concealment if I can find no evidence of it.’

  ‘If the spell vault is that important –’

  ‘Have I been led the wrong way. Can I see truly here? Can anyone? I wonder …’

  Holding the globe high, she climbed the steps and, before Aviel realised what was happening, Maigraith went through, closed the door behind her and the lock clicked. The darkness was absolute.

  Aviel fought an urge to scramble up the steps and pound on the door. Why had Maigraith locked her in? Was she going to come back?

  If she did not, how long before the rats gathered? Aviel would not see them coming, but they would have no trouble finding her.

  23

  There Is No Dark Path

  Locked in! It roused memories of being trapped deep under mad Basunez’s ruined tower, Carcharon, when that vicious drunkard, Unick, had planned to feed Aviel to the summon stone.

  She felt panic building, a scream rising, and she had to fight it or she would never stop. She stumbled in a circle, arms out, trying to orient herself.

  Crack! Pain speared through her left knee. She had whacked it on the edge of the steps. It broke through the panic and she sat on the third step, rubbing her kneecap.

  Maigraith must be testing her, but for what? Aviel’s only gift was for making scent potions. Could it have to do with her acute sense of smell?

  She closed her eyes, not that it made any difference in the pitch darkness, and allowed the odours of the room to wash over her: nose-tickling dust and mould, a hint of decay from the rodent bones, her own cold, clean sweat, and a lingering trace of the new perfume Maigraith had been wearing since she first saw her rival. It was soft as rose petals, but with flinty undernotes.

  And something else, so tenuous that, when Aviel thought about it, she cou
ldn’t smell it at all. She went to the centre of the room and stood there, breathing carefully.

  Lamp oil? No. Nor was it wax, tallow, lard or any other kind of animal fat. It had more of a mineral smell …

  Grease! But why here?

  It must be lubricating a mechanism. For what?

  Something scuttled across the floor and she almost wet herself. She clenched and walked around, bent double. She could not detect any grease down here; the other smells were too strong. She climbed the steps, put her back to the door and went up on tiptoes.

  There it was again, and it had to be coming from above. Aviel tried to remember what the ceiling had looked like, from a brief glimpse in the light of the yellow crystal. It curved up at the sides but was flat in the middle, like the shape made by pressing on an inflated balloon. Was something hidden up there?

  Though she was tempted to pound on the door, she gathered all her self-control and knocked twice.

  Maigraith opened the door. ‘Well?’ she said flatly.

  Aviel smiled to herself. It was good to be underestimated. ‘There’s a mechanism. Up high.’

  Maigraith stood beside her on the top step and reached up with her right hand. Light streamed from each fingertip, harshly illuminating the ceiling, and the slanting shadows picked out a circular indentation at its centre. ‘That’s it!’

  ‘How you going to get up there?’

  Maigraith swept her finger-beams back and forth, though her eyes were closed as if she were thinking. ‘I’m not.’

  She tried several opening spells, one after another, though not to any effect.

  Then she whispered, ‘Descend!’ and with a creaking and a groaning the circular indentation separated from the ceiling and corkscrewed its way down. It now formed the base of a rusty staircase, so narrow that Aviel wondered how anyone bigger than Maigraith could have climbed it. The base of the stair stopped a few inches above the floor.

  ‘Go up,’ said Maigraith.

  Aviel did not move. ‘There might be booby traps.’