by T. O. Munro
Maia was on her feet, backing towards the door, pale at the abrupt transformation in the invalid.
“I think you should go,” Kimbolt barked. Maia needed no encouragement, fleeing from the room in undignified haste. He turned back just in time to see Hepdida’s face lunging towards him, teeth bared. He swayed back and leapt from the bed, sobbing that the disease had seized the old Hepdida and dragged her away into this howling demon. The only consolation was that Niarmit slept in her cot, undisturbed by the mania which consumed her cousin.
***
Udecht had seen the magical gates before, the openings between the planes of existence which were Maelgrum’s particular talent. However, this one quite took his breath away; He almost dropped the Helm. The subterranean cavern he had entered was huge, near enough a hundred foot across with a domed ceiling of vitrified rock, half melted by some ancient heat. The narrow tunnel through which Haselrig had led the Bishop was the only means of egress. Apart that is, from the opening on another world in the midst of the space. It stretched from the floor halfway to the roof of the vault and through it Udecht espied an alien landscape, whose daylight illuminated the great cavern. Clouds scudded across a purple sky at impossible speeds, shadows of jagged mountains raced along the floor of a stony valley as a yellow sun flew across the sky. In the foreground a blur of black moved with urgent purpose and then stepped back and turned towards them. It streaked like an arrow towards their side of the gate at such speed that Udecht took a fearful step backwards treading on the antiquary behind him. And then the blur broke through the magical membrane between the worlds and it was Maelgrum striding confidently but with no great haste towards them.
“Ah Bissshop, you have brought the item,” he hissed with cold excitement. “Placsse it on the plinth over there.”
His bony hand waved towards a stone replica of the Helm’s resting place in the throne room, so many hundreds of feet above them. Udecht lifted the ancient artefact onto the smooth surface and stepped quickly back, not wishing to be caught up in whatever plans the Dark Lord had for the Helm. His foot caught on something that gave a tinkling chink as it fell. He bent to pick it up.
“Ssstop!” Maelgrum commanded.
Udecht’s fingers hovered above the object, a shining gem too big to be encircled by his finger and thumb.
“Ssstep back, Bissshop!”
He did as he was bid and, at an intricate flick of Maelgrum’s fingers, the jewel leaped up and balanced on its edge, its cut facets facing the Helm on the plinth. As he looked around the cavern, Udecht saw the glint of other gems refracting the magical illumination of Maelgrum’s hidden hall. They were scattered in seeming disorder along the circular edge of the cavern’s floor, a dozen or more of them perhaps.
“What is that place, Master?” The antiquary had been staring in fascination at the dazzling vista of swirling cloud and shifting shadow visible through the planar gate.
“That isss the realm of Grithsssank, another world entirely.”
“Grithsank?”
“Where Dragonsss come from.”
“Why does their Sun move so fast?” Udecht broke in as the glowing orb disappeared behind a mountain and dark shadows fell on the land beyond the gate.
“It doesss not,” Maelgrum told him icily. “It movesss no fassster than our own.”
Before Udecht could make the obvious and inflammatory contradiction, Haselrig interrupted for the sake of both their safety. “Your reverence, it is not that their Sun moves faster. If you went through the gate, its transit across the sky would be as sedate as our own Sun’s. It is that time in that world runs faster compared to ours, the worlds are not in step. Theirs sprints while ours walks.”
“Hassselrig, dessscribesss it well, Bissshop. He isss a good ssstudent of mine. There isss a realm I once obssserved where you could watch the mountainsss grow in secondsss and the starss flashed on and off like winking glowwormsss in the night.” Maelgrum stared past the edge of the gate, deep into his own memories. “I ssspent many human lifetimesss there, crafting an empire that would endure. Yet, when I returned here, not even a mote of dussst had fallen in the heartbeat of my absssence.”
“What happened to your empire there, Master?”
Maelgrum was silent for a moment. “When I ssstepped back through the gate barely a minute later my Empire wasss all gone, the land was twisssted and no ssstone or mark wasss left that I had ever been there. Sssince then I have but watched sssuch fassst moving worldsss from thisss ssside of the gate. There isss a certain amusssement in watching whole continentsss ssswirl and clash like driftwood in a maelssstrom, but I am not minded to ssseee again how the passssage of time can erassse even my mark from a world.”
He raised his head, with a flash of his red eyepits as he dismissed the memory of disappointment. “Grithsssank’sss time however isss usssefully out of ssstep with oursss. If you obssserve closssely, Bissshop, you would ssseee that a month passsses in Grithsssank while but a day hasss passssed here.”
“And that is where the dragon comes from?” Udecht backed away from the gate, searching its depths for the signs of an approaching winged serpent. He had seen how fast Maelgrum had appeared to move within the realm of Grithsank. He dared not imagine how swiftly a dragon could appear in a world where a minute of time would pass in but a couple of his heartbeats.
“I have cassst the ssspell of sssummoning, the Dragon isss on hisss way.”
“How can you be sure he will come?” Udecht harboured a faint hope that the Dragon might refuse the Dark Lord’s summons.
“We have an agreement binding on usss both. He will come according to itsss termsss.”
“Truly you are the Master, to be able to leash a dragon to your will,” Haselrig gushed.
Maelgrum’s glowing eyes throbbed a slow beat of pleasure at the antiquary’s praise. “The firssst ssserpent I ensssnared wasss in thisss cavern. I tempted it with visssionsss of a vault of treasssure sssufficient to draw it through the gate. Greed wasss ever a Dragon’sss curssse. And then, when he wasss within my domain, I shrunk the gate to a tiny window and let him watch hisss world passs by.
“A year it took, of missserable imprisssonment, of breathing through a rocky straw, of realisssing that there wasss no essscape, and then he wasss ready for any agreement and would ssssubject himssself to any ssspell which enforced it.”
“That was the first?” Udecht remarked. “They must be foolish beasts if there have been others that fell into the same trap”
“Dragonsss are more cunning than you could imagine, Bissshop.” Maelgrum hissed. “However, there hasss been a sssmall hiatusss in my dealingsss with the dragonsss of Grithsssank. In the thousssand idle yearsss I have ssspent in thisss realm, thirty millennia have passssed in Grithsssank. A hundred Dragon lifessspansss is enough to blur the hissstoric memoriesss of any race and allow me to entrap a sssecond lizard with a sssimilar sssubterfuge. ”
“Aeeiii!” Udecht screamed. A dark speck in the distant sky of Grishank had grown with terrifying speed as the Dragon approached faster than a loosed elven arrow. Within seconds the great beast had settled on the other side of the gate, glaring through it with fast blinking eyes and swift flaps of restless wings.
“Can he see us?” the Bishop cried.
“Of course he can, your reverence,” Haselrig upbraided him impatiently, though Udecht noticed a tremor in the antiquary’s voice Apparently long custom made the presence of the dragon no easier to bear.
“What’s he waiting for?”
“My inssstructionsss Bissshop,” Maelgrum answered him. “Thisss isss a tasssk of delicate and precissse ferocssity. He mussst dessstroy the Helm with hisss breath but not bar the pathsss of the freed sssoulsss to the planar prisssonsss I have prepared.”
“Prisons?”
“The Gems?”
“It ssseemsss that after all thessse yearsss, Eadran hasss finally taught me sssomething new. However, I have improved hisss enchantment. The prissson he cassst for me, had no mea
ns of ingresss or egresss for anyone.” Maelgrum gestured towards the glinting gems around the floor of the cavern. Now that he had looked at them closely, Udecht realised there were twenty two of them, the same as the number of Monarchs who had worn Eadran’s helm. “Thessse sssmall traps I have created for Eadran’sss line will ssstill admit me, that I can ssspend sssome fragmentsss of their eternal imprisssonment with each of them.”
The undead lord’s body trembled in parody of an excited shiver. “I am grateful to you, Hassselrig, for dissscovering the meansss by which the Helm might be opened. But you had better leave, it will not sssuit to be here when the Dragon doesss hisss work. Take the Bissshop with you if you wisssh, or leave him here to burn, I care not which.”
Udecht looked up at Haselrig with anxious eyes. The antiquary beckoned him on. “Come your reverence, I may find a use for you yet.”
***
Quintala looked at Kaylan through narrowed eyes as the thief squirmed unhappily beneath her glare. She wondered what reaction he had expected, what reaction he could have expected. Turning to Niarmit, slumped in a chair, the half-elf asked, “Forgive my asking, your Majesty, but why are you telling me this now?”
The Queen gave a shrug, “it seemed the right time, overdue even.”
“You thought I had a right to know?” Quintala chided, the lightness of her tone at odds with the turmoil of thoughts that chased across her mind.
“I really didn’t kill her,” Kaylan spluttered.
“So you have told me, over and over again,” Quintala waved aside his assurance. “The fact that you waited, you both waited weeks to tell me all this is a little … a little disconcerting.”
“Come, Quintala, I was hardly likely to go up to you and say, I pulled my sword out of your Grandmother’s back but I really didn’t put it in her.”
“Hush Kaylan,” she hissed. “This is my brother’s house. They say one is never more than seven feet from one of his spies.” She thought a moment. “Or was that rats? It’s so hard to tell the difference.”
“I’m glad you can still joke, Seneschal,” Niarmit observed with a dry cough.
“I find humour is a serviceable armour against most things that life throws at us, saving perhaps dear Kaylan’s short sword.” She sighed, “but that still leaves the question, why tell me now?”
“You believe me then?” Kaylan gasped.
Quintala shrugged. “The Queen believes you and I serve her, so that belief must bind me also.”
“I have thought long and hard over this, Kaylan has too. We have come to suspect that your grandmother’s murder and Hepdida’s illness are linked,” Niarmit said.
“Oh,” Quintala drew in a breath. This was getting interesting. “How so?”
“I have healed many people of many different injuries and ailments. I have knitted poor Rhodra’s split head together, cured Kaylan of marsh fever, even eased the ravings of a lunatic.” Niarmit said. “Yet in all that time I have never met a disease as stubborn as the one that consumes Hepdida.”
Quintala frowned. “It is unusual yes, but not unknown. Rugan and Giseanne have seen its like before. Indeed the Prince recognised the mark of the illness when he first found Hepdida in the forest. Other priests have tried and failed to cure its victims, your Majesty. That is not so unusual.”
“Perhaps it is not the same, perhaps someone has found a way to mimic that illness.”
“Why would someone injure poor Hepdida in that way?”
“Fenwell!”
Quintala’s head flicked round at Kaylan’s tangential exclamation. “Fenwell? The Bishop’s manservant. Kaylan you have lost me.”
“He is a man with secrets.”
“By the Goddess every man has secrets; that does not make them poisoners.”
“He killed your grandmother.”
Quintala’s eyebrows shot up. “That…. That is an interesting secret yes. Did he tell you this himself?”
Before Kaylan could elaborate further, Niarmit interjected. “He is the man Kaylan suspects, suspects of stealing his sword and seeking to implicate him and possibly me in Kychelle’s murder.”
“An extraordinary claim.” Quintala shook her head in wonderment at this revelation. “Perhaps you should start this story at the beginning.”
“Gladly,” Kaylan waded in before Niarmit could stop him. “You recall that Kychelle had refused passage through or aid from the Silverwood. That decision was to Nordsalve’s great disadvantage.”
“It was a decision she had reversed,” Quintala pointed out reasonably.
“Yes, but the party from Nordsalve did not know that. Besides Kychelle herself, only Rugan, Giseanne, my Lady and you knew that the decision had been changed. Fenwell would have thought he was striking a blow for Nordsalve when he struck Kychelle down.”
“It is a presumptuous piece of initiative for a mere manservant to have taken.”
“He is not a mere manservant and I am sure he had orders from above. If not Sorenson then perhaps he came from Nordsalve bearing Lady Isobel’s instructions to guard her interests at any cost.”
“Then why and how did he poison poor Hepdida?”
“At first I thought I’d made Hepdida ill with worry, involving her of my investigations. She was never happy with what I told her, but I think now it was because she believed she could find the answers herself. She had no reason to go out riding that morning, unless she was meeting someone. I am sure she was going to confront Fenwell, to try to prise the truth from him where I had failed.” The thief shook his head heavy with remorse. “I should not have let her leave. I should have followed her.”
“That is the first piece of sense in your whole story Kaylan,” Quintala said, struggling to fit the jagged pieces of the thief’s puzzle into a coherent picture. “You are saying that Fenwell poisoned Hepdida in the forest because she had exacted some inadvertent confession from him that he had killed my Grandmother in a fit of pique at her rebuttal of the strategic interests of Nordsalve?”
“He is a man of secrets, he speaks with an intonation of the Eastern Lands.”
“Not every foreigner is a villain, Kaylan.”
“Yes,” Niarmit interrupted. “But if Kaylan is right, then Fenwell holds the key to curing Hepdida.”
“Curing?” The question fell from Quintala’s lips; she did not let the rest of her thoughts follow it out. How Bulveld’s death had so closely followed the path on which Hepdida was embarked. How those most attached to the invalid might lack the emotional distance to view the girl’s plight objectively. How skilled an art it was to poison someone so deeply, an art unlikely to be within the compass of a mere manservant, no matter how many foreign lands he came from. No she held back the avalanche of doubt she could have cast at Kaylan’s card castle of hope.
“And that is why we are telling you now, Seneschal.”
Quintala needed only to raise an eyebrow in enquiry before Kaylan began the briefing on her task. “We need you to watch Fenwell, to follow him, to find the proof of what we say. I cannot. He is guarded against any probing I might make.”
The Seneschal nodded. “I did hear he had drunk you under the table a while back.”
“I cannot undertake any enquiry,” Niarmit said. “My time and energy, such as is not spent with Hepdida must be passed on the work of the council and the ordering of the war. But you, my dear Seneschal, you have…”
“I have certain talents?” Quintala volunteered.
“Quite so.”
“Then perhaps you would indulge my poor addled two hundred year old brain, with a few points of clarification in this tale of heinous crime.”
“Certainly.”
“If Fenwell had been uncovered by Hepdida, why didn’t he just kill her?”
Kaylan pounced, eager to present another impossibly shaped piece of his theory of conspiracy. “Another murder would have been too suspicious. Remember we all believed, or had been told, it was an outside assassin who slew Kychelle. Murdering Hepdida would have re-o
pened that whole investigation, but this way he has got Hepdida’s silence and his master Sorenson can appear in high favour by ministering to her.”
“It is…. It is an elaborate plot,” Quintala said. She did not mention that there was a far simpler interpretation, that Hepdida was ill and dying just as Bulveld had been. It would not have been kind to prick the bubble of Kaylan’s hope, a hope it appeared the Queen also shared.
“Will you do it? Will you probe Fenwell and uncover his part in all this?” Kaylan begged.
“I will do as my Queen commands,” Quintala said looking at Niarmit and receiving a nod of confirmation that this was her wish as much as the thief’s. The half-elf turned to give Kaylan a long hard stare. “If Fenwell is at the heart of this as you say, then you must hope he never gives Rugan cause to suspect that it was your sword which was driven into Kychelle. My brother is like to act quickly and unfavourably to your health.”
“I assure you, Quintala, I had no part in his beloved Grandmother’s death.”
“Oh she was not beloved,” the half-elf assured him. “There are few on my brother’s list of truly beloved. Indeed, apart from himself I would struggle to name one who had earned that sobriquet. No, my Grandmother was something much more important than beloved, she was useful to him. Rugan would be far from forgiving of anyone who deprived him of a useful tool and ally in his machinations. Guard your back Kaylan, against that eventuality.”
***
The air was chokingly sulphurous as the antiquary and the Bishop followed Maelgrum down the spiralling passageway. Haselrig stumbled against a rocky wall and flinched at the heat of it. “The rocks are boiling!”
“Of courssse, Hassselrig. There isss no fire hotter than a Dragon’sss breath, sssave in the heart of our incandessscent Sssun. Did you thing a lesssser heat would sssuficsse for our purpossse?”
“No Master, of course not.” In trying to bob his deference and half run to keep up with the swift walking master, Haselrig stumbled again and crashed into the blistering heat of the wall. This time he made no comment, suffering his scalded skin in silence as Udecht helped him to his feet.
