by Janny Wurts
"Your reason for coming here puzzles me," the steward confessed. "This is the traitor's cell. A man held for any length of time in this place loses his sanity. Though that point is likely a moot one, in your case."
Korendir volunteered nothing. The pattern indeed had a presence, one that was creepingly unpleasant. As he stared at the spell-shot tallix, he felt as if insects too tiny to see clawed for entry through the pores of his skin. Absorbed, even thoughtful, the mercenary set down the lantern.
In the moment while he seemed preoccupied, his erstwhile captive seized advantage. The steward fled through the doorway, spun, and in ungainly haste jerked a grille from a slot to one side. The steel rattled closed. A bar clanged down and trapped Korendir within.
The duke's servant heaved a sigh of overwheening relief, then asked, "What possessed you to ask for the traitor's cell? My lord will see you screaming before you die."
XVIII. Trial and Judgment
If the spoken threat of torture left an impression on Korendir's awareness, he showed no reaction. Neither did the prospect of captivity appear to trouble him. The tallix within the traitor's cell absorbed him totally as he exchanged the knife in his hand for another, uglier blade, all pitted and stained with age. Left curious by his detachment, the wine steward lingered in the corridor.
Korendir shifted grip on his dagger, then knelt at the pattern's center. Ruddy light touched his face; not caused by lantern flame, but by some refracted brilliance cast back from the crystal beneath. Magic lurked there, a coiling malevolence that flurried the mind with doubt. With tentative care, the mercenary touched his steel to the axis of Tir Amindel's wardstone. A tingle of energy surged up his arm. Hair prickled at his nape, and the protective pendant from Ithariel heated on its chain until contact with the stone burned flesh. Korendir repressed a shudder. Each passing moment undermined his will with a reluctance that radiated through the tallix itself. He knew he must smash the crystal instantly, else forfeit the attempt.
Again he set his knife to the jewel's starred eye. He held the weapon upright without flinching; then, oblivious to his onlooker's curiosity, Korendir raised the lantern. He hammered the weighted base downward toward the dagger held poised against the tallix.
The motion engaged every latent defense Majaxin had enspelled in the stone.
Ithariel's protection failed to compensate; ward energies burst and her sliver of tallix heated like a meteor and shattered. Splinters raked Korendir's neck and chest, then spun like flying sparks across the cell. The steward in at the doorway gasped and flung back, and lost his moment to flee.
The lamp struck. Impact against the dagger haft jarred bone and muscle and nerve to the junction of Korendir's shoulder. A snap whined on the air; the great tallix which enspelled Tir Amindel split like a fissure in ice. Sorcerous ruby light rinsed the traitor's cell, then flickered out. For an instant the crystal's crazed facets turned depthless and black. Then the lantern snuffed out. The stone glimmered, woke to redoubled power with a sultry flare of orange. Up from its faulted surface boiled a cloud of caustic smoke. Enveloped by a shining mist that burned and painfully blinded, Korendir of Whitestorm cried out.
The surge of Majaxin's spellwork sheared through his flesh and recognized his hand as the one that had sundered the tallix. His vision cleared. Surrounded by a whirlpool nexus of sorcery, he looked, and saw his fist still clenched to the knife he had only one instant in the past set point-first against the crystal in the floor. Now, most horribly, the tallix had redirected the weapon's original thrust.
Korendir's fingers glistened with new blood. Although, beyond question, he remained in the cell, the impossible confronted him: his blade was sunk to the hilt in the eye of the little beggar girl charged to watch over his horse.
His recoil yanked the steel clear. Revulsion overset his control and brought up the contents of his stomach. He staggered upright, miserably retching, and the spark-shot cloud of magecraft moved with him. His thoughts reeled with agony. The knife he would rather have sheathed in his own flesh; except now its spell-worked edge was a melted lump with no trace left of temper. Korendir cast the steel away. Struck to the heart by remorse, he fought through the sparkle of sorceries toward the corridor.
The grillwork had blasted away from the door; riven metal embraced the dripping remains of the steward. Korendir stumbled. Bent double by a second bout of nausea, he fled into the corridor beyond. The orange smoke streamed after him, vengeance-bent as a swarm of hornets. Destruction followed in its wake.
Cracks ripped up the stonework, and pillars groaned and canted.
Korendir ran while the ceiling crumbled. He did not move to save himself, though chips of masonry silted his hair, and the floor under his boots heaved and buckled. Columns crashed around him and archways toppled at his heels, but his eyes remained blind to peril. Lost to all memory but the blood-wet corpse of a child, and his hand on the knife that had butchered her, he forced his legs to bear weight. To the limit of his strength, he sprinted, whipped onward by revulsion that dismembered thought and condemned him past forgiveness as the killer Haldeth had reviled.
The staircase wound upward in jumbled disarray. Between the landing and a fallen riser was a wadded rag that once had been a sentry. Korendir leaped over the remains. Buffeted beyond reason by the writhing mist that hunted him, he scaled the piled masonry on hands and feet like a beast.
He kept no count of which turnings he missed or took; by reflex and instinct, he gained the upper levels only to lurch onward, to slip over blood-smeared bodies that littered his path at each stride. Members of the duke's household perished before his eyes, here a servant pulped between buckled floor beams, and there an aged noble who stumbled through masonry that bounced and rolled like devil's dice and dashed in his balding head. Korendir ran past unscathed, while the bane unleashed from Tir Amindel's tallix remorselessly pursued.
He escaped the palace through a gap in tumbled walls. The courtyard beyond was a graveyard of jumbled stone. The dead, the dying, and the mangled by now were too numerous to count. The squall had not abated. Rain sheeted down in torrents, rinsed streaks across shattered paving, and spilled into red-tinged puddles. Korendir heaved air into a chest too tight for breath. His body spasmed with dry heaves. The force aroused when he broke the tallix was not abating, but levelling Tir Amindel stone by carven stone; his fault, the suffering, and his burden, the shattered lives and hopes and dreams. His act magnified the malice of Majaxin and left nothing. The inhabitants of the city were smashed haplessly as pebbles before tide in a posthumous passion of spite. He, who should have been first to die, was the only soul left untouched.
Korendir remembered nothing of his purpose. He forgot Ithariel's tears, and the pitiless beauty that had lured generations of enchanters to entrapment. The centuries they had suffered within spell-wrought walls held less meaning than the wind-driven spatter of rainfall. Korendir fled and wished for oblivion. Lashed by the storm, goaded on by orange sparks, he split his knuckles scrabbling over walls; like a harried dog, he tore his way across rose gardens, shouldered through locked doors, and kicked down wicket gates. In time, his mindless run carried him to the archway where he had earlier taken shelter. His horse waited still, reins pinned by a tumble of broken marble. Crumpled nearby lay the cloak he had left to comfort the street child; one of the corners streamed red. The face it half covered lay tipped at the sky; one eye was open to the rain, and the other inhumanly savaged by the blade of a spell-turned knife.
Korendir succumbed again to sickness. Bile stung his throat and his breath labored. The spasms brought no relief; his stomach had emptied long since. He fumbled like an old man, grasped the gray's saddle with wet fingers. The stallion sidled, then stood with its ears flicking backward and forward in unease as its rider found the stirrup. Korendir pulled himself astride. Hunched over with cramps, he jerked the dirk from his wrist sheath, leaned forward, and slashed both reins at the bit rings.
The stallion surged in recovered freedom. He flung into a ha
lf-rear, while Korendir jabbed heels into streaming flanks and howled in mindless pain.
The horse from High Kelair bolted through streets transformed by catastrophe. Through screaming crowds and chaos he galloped, his eyes white rings of terror, and the breath from his distended nostrils flaring in snorts of condensation. Muscles coiled like whip-leather in shoulder and haunch and gaskin; legs cabled with tendon folded and straightened, driving a powerful stride. The horse poured its heart into running, over cobbles and flagstones and polished marble courtyards that rang with the clatter of its flight.
But the sorceries of the dead wizard gave chase with a tenacity more constant than flesh. The shining, unnatural mist streamed after Korendir like the wraith of a thing damned.
The mercenary clung to the stallion's back. He made no effort to guide or choose direction, but rode with closed eyes and tucked head, hands locked in the whipping golden mane. No surcease existed to block sound. The grinding crash of stonework flanked the stallion's course. Spired towers toppled and fell, accompanied by screams from men and women and children, battered down in-the course of their escape. The revenge of Majaxin spared no life and no edifice the walls of his city had encompassed.
Except for a racing gray stallion and a rider too tortured to care.
The horse cleared the tangle of the east wall portal with a jump that would have lamed a common mount. As his hooves touched ground, cracks like forked lightning jagged across the gate turrets. Weakened granite thundered down and swallowed a mother and grandmother who struggled with a bundle of wailing babies.
The stallion flattened its ears in a spurt of fear-charged rage. He galloped while stonework tumbled and rolled an avalanche of rubble at his heels; but the rider never moved. His mind was lost to thought, and his flesh knew only pain. The ruin of Tir Amindel might fall behind, yet Korendir still heard the shrieks of its murdered inhabitants. Their screams blended with other screams from his past until his skin felt needled by knife cuts, as if each cry from massacred thousands held physical power to torment.
The stallion lengthened stride as his burden shivered and flinched. All nerves and jangled panic, he swerved off the road. The nimbus of orange trailed after, a banner of crackling sparks. Majaxin's sorceries did not disperse as the horse gouged a track through the meadows beside Kelharrou Lake and crashed through the thornbrakes beyond. The scrub that surrounded tilled fields gave way at length to unbroken forest.
Thick growth compelled the horse to slacken pace. Branches raked furrows in his lathered coat, and the crack of hooves on dry ground became deadened in drifts of old leaves.
Korendir slumped with his cheek against the stallion's neck, limp wrists crossed on the crest; his feet slipped clear of the stirrups, and the irons clanked against his ankles in rhythm with the animal's stride. He made no effort to ease his brave mount. Neither did he concede to his own needs. Harrowed past self-preservation, he recognized no hunger or thirst, but only wretchedness and a gut-tearing chain of horrors set off by a beggar child's death.
The gray picked a path through moss-scabbed trees, and the orange smoke closed like an aureole around the rider's head.
Korendir shot straight with a cry that sheared echoes through the trees. He belted his heels against the stallion's sides. The animal lunged with a violence that nearly unseated him and iron-rimmed hooves left a swath of lacerated stems as the pair sprang again into flight.
Time passed unheeded. The rain ceased and the sky cleared. Sunset glowed briefly through the forest's mantle of leaves. Then dusk faded into gloom, and the sorcerous mist bronzed the bark of the passing trees. The stud lapsed back to a walk. He plowed on through a white water ford as if knowing where he wished to go.
Through the night, the sorcery leached Korendir's strength with horrors that damned, and wrapped all his nerve ends in fire. Over and over he saw his blade strike through a beggar child's eye. He felt the spurt of hot fluids and the jarring scrape of bone and the shudder that racked her small body as the steel cleaved on, through skull and butter-soft brain. Consciousness became defined by suffering for which the mind held no release.
Dawn lightened the haze to silver; the air rang with birdsong and the reddish rays of first sunlight dappled the boughs overhead. Korendir did not rouse. Slumped with glazed eyes in his saddle, he did not stir when the stallion shouldered through a last stand of saplings and carried him into a glen beside a lake. A tower arose by the shoreline, in lines and style reminiscent of Tir Amindel's fallen grace, but on a scale less grand, and without the adornment of marble and stained glass.
An aged man mantled in power awaited on the sand before the portal. He wore dyed boots and a cloak of ocean gray, and his brows were gathered in a frown. He made no move; but as though called in by a beacon, the gray quickened its exhausted stride and halted quivering before him.
Enfolded yet in an angry glimmer of orange, Korendir sprawled face downward across the tangled mane of his mount. His eyes were sightless and wide, and his fingers were locked against his teeth in the effort to contain an unending need to scream.
The old man caught the stallion's bridle. His autocratic touch reflected small affinity for beasts, yet the gray settled as if it knew him; its terrible trembling eased as fingers gentled by spells stroked the muzzle between lather-rimmed nostrils. They continued up the hard neck, then explored with critical care down shoulder and flank, and each mud-splashed, sweat-marked leg. The tendons were cool, which surprised the elderly wizard. He straightened from his examination and fixed his piqued gaze on the horse.
The word he spoke was not in the language of mortals, but the stud understood. His ears swept back, and his head jerked; the rider in his saddle stayed astride.
"So then, he did not abuse thee," concluded the enchanter. He shrugged back his hood and scowled at the black-clad, bronze-haired mortal who remained mounted by the sole volition of the gray.
"Fool and daughter of foolishness," the old one snapped. He stepped to the stallion's shoulder and laid his palm on Korendir's damp forehead. As the breeze off the lake stirred through his beard, the ancient tilted his head back and raised his voice in song.
The fog which mantled the mercenary's form hissed protest. Song and spell-wrought sorceries collided in dissonance, and raised a sound like water-splashed embers. The glimmer of energies flared bright, and Korendir stiffened. His limbs flinched and shuddered, and he gasped like a tear in cloth.
The old man's chant did not falter. He raised his other hand and cradled the mercenary's brow. With his wrists half buried in bronze hair, he finished each phrase of melody in a voice that stayed crisp and well-pitched. The notes resonated through the morning stillness and slowly, finally, wrought change. Evil leached out of the mist that bound Korendir. Faded and insubstantial as smoke, Majaxin's curse of vengeance wisped away and dispersed in the sunlight.
The enchanter sang one line more, and Korendir fell slack as a gutted fish. Sure hands caught his fall as he spilled from the stallion's saddle.
"Fire and earth, I'm too old for this," the wizard grunted. He shouldered the mercenary's weight so that half of him rested on the horse and called out a guttural name.
The tower gate cracked open. An eye appeared behind, all wrinkles and merriness, and black as an unplanted seed. "He's alive, that one?" a raspy voice called back.
"Neth." The ancient returned a nettled glance. "Would I bother supporting a corpse? Get your short bones over here before I drop him altogether."
The door gaped wider. A stocky dwarf in a red cap and jerkin bounced out and rushed to assist.
Small the fellow might have been, but the muscles under his gathered sleeves were gnarled like the trunk of an oak. He bore Korendir up with an ease much belied by his colorful string of curses. After an anxious glance at the horse, the dwarf stumped with the man back across the glen toward the tower.
The wizard watched the mercenary's trailing heels carve grooves in the sand by the entry. Unsmiling, he twitched his sleeves straight o
n his wrists. Although he disdained a groom's chores, he loosened the stallion's girths. He removed both saddle and bridle, then slapped a palm on sweat-sleeked hide. "Go, you," he murmured to the horse's back-turned ear. "Roll in damp grass all you wish, for you at least are blameless. Your part in this unpleasantness was well and bravely done."
* * *
The dwarf untangled his grip from a sweated mat of bronze hair, tripped the latch, and kicked open the last of three iron-bound doors. Still huffing from his ascent of steep stairs, he said, "Your man has arrived."
Within a shadowed alcove, Ithariel stirred, but did not look around. Recently changed to a leather tunic and hose cross-gartered for riding, she twisted her hands through the strands of pearls which girdled her waist. "Is he alive?"
"If he wasn't I wouldn't be packing him, would I?" The dwarf shuffled in and dumped the torso of his burden with a thump on Ithariel's best divan. As an afterthought, he lifted the man's ankles and arranged the long legs on the cushions. The boots were rain-wet, and the leather smelled pungently of horse.
The dwarf reviewed his handiwork with his head cocked to one side. Then, as if scratched and bleeding men on his mistress's brocades were commonplace as gardening, he straightened his cap over his black hair and added, "Archmaster's madder than Neth was on the day the dark spoiled His creation."
Ithariel fumbled, and pearls spilled with a clatter through her fingers. "Now whose fault is that, Nix?" She chose a nickname, since the one given by the dwarfs mother was ridiculously difficult to pronounce. "I sent no word to Dethmark."
The dwarf shrugged, his cheeks puffed out like autumn apples. "You think he's deaf, Lady? I know better, I do indeed. When the whole of Tir Amindel gets razed by sorceries, and the Archmaster doesn't hear, then Neth almighty'd better worry. The breaking of Majaxin's tallix disrupted continuity clear through to Alhaerie."
"Oh, you should earn your keep by telling tales in the taverns!" Ithariel snapped in exasperation. "Now will you leave, or must I throw you head first through the casement?"
