A Blight of Mages

by Karen Miller

  Without warning, almost painfully, she was swept head to toe by a dreadful, dark foreboding.

  “No. Wait,” she said, as Venette Martain and Lady Brislyn moved to follow him into the chamber. “Please. Just… wait.”

  Impatient, Venette Martain glanced at her. “For what? Mage Lindin, sit with your brother and be quiet.”

  She felt so sick with dread now she had to blink to see. “Remmie—” She could hardly hear her own voice. “No, Remmie, stop them—don’t let them go—”

  A terrible scream. And then another. A bilious surge of raw power. An odd twisting sensation. A brittle shattering of glass. Muffled shouting somewhere. A sickening shudder through the Hall.

  Morgan appeared in the chamber doorway, a quizzical look on his face. Then a small smile replaced it, and as it widened he snapped his fingers.

  “Justice save us,” croaked Lady Brislyn. “You really are deranged.”

  With a leathery rustling of skin flaps, four inhuman creatures with two arms and two legs gathered at Morgan’s back. In their bestial, fanged faces, nothing of Brice Varen, Sallis Arkley, Shari Frieden or Bellamie Ranowen remained. Only the ragged remnants of their clothing made it possible to guess who had been whom.

  “Extraordinary,” Morgan drawled. “You know, Barl, I can’t believe it. It was the segue between the third and fourth syllables. That’s where I went wrong with Rumm. It catches me every time.”

  The two duty mages, stunned into staring immobility, found their wits—lost their wits—and stupidly made a move toward him.

  Three swift sigils. Eight syllables. The duty mages… changed.

  Tears ran unheeded down Venette Martain’s snow-white face. “Oh, Morgan. Oh, my dear.”

  The monstrous things that moments ago had been human, clicked their talons in confusion and hissed through their sharp fangs. The transmuted councillors hissed with them, uneasily shifting from side to side.

  As Morgan looked at her, one eyebrow lifted in fastidious derision, Barl risked turning to Remmie. He was sickly pale too, but his eyes were determined. He gave her the smallest nod, his faith in her returned.

  But I don’t know what to do, Remmie! I don’t know what to do!

  Sickened almost to heaving, panic threatening to overturn reason, she struggled to think. They needed to get out of this antechamber. Out of the Hall. They needed somewhere safe to hide where Morgan didn’t know where to look. Remmie’s room at the Shooting Star. It would have to do.

  Only we’ll need to incant to it. All of us, at once. Am I strong enough?

  There was no point wondering. She’d have to try it, and find out.

  Because he was her brother, her other self, and he knew her so well, Remmie risked Morgan’s fury by taking Venette Martain and Lady Brislyn by their arms and easing them back. Easing them together.

  Morgan tipped his head to one side. “Are you feared I’ll transmute you, Remmie? You needn’t fret on it. I love your sister, remember? We’re near as brothers, you and I.” He smiled. “It might be nice to have a brother. What do you think?”

  Letting Remmie distract him with a rambling reply, Barl summoned to mind a broad travel incant that would take them to the Shooting Star… if her magework was reliable. If she didn’t kill them instead.

  Oh justice, please, don’t let me kill us.

  She drew the sigil behind her back, breath held hard, terrified Morgan would feel it. But he seemed drunk on power, on the success of his dreadful incant. The creatures he’d created hissed and shuffled and clicked their talons. Waiting to be commanded. His gaze kept sliding to them and he smiled, as though he were proud. With the sigil drawn and burning she whispered the travel incant in her mind. A shiver. Some resistance. And then the magic caught.

  Morgan’s head whipped round. “Barl? Don’t you do it—don’t you leave me—Barl—”

  With a despairing cry she leapt for Remmie, who’d not let go of Venette Martain or Lady Brislyn. Venette Martain flung out her hand, fingers desperately reaching. Morgan shouted again. The nearest hideous creature threw its head back and howled, then flapped toward them.

  Her hand caught Venette Martain’s… and the antechamber vanished.

  Safely hidden in Remmie’s room at the Shooting Star inn, they waited in the darkness, not daring to light a single candle, and listened to the distant screams and the beasting of Elvado. Flinched at the sound of glass breaking, walls buckling, roof tiles falling and smashing to shards. Winced as they felt the burning echoes of mage-mist, encroaching.

  “This can’t be happening,” Venette Martain said, yet again, her voice dull and cracked with disbelief. She was slumped on the bed, shivering. She’d not stopped shivering since they stepped out of the Hall. “It simply can’t.”

  Remmie leaned against the wall beside his pokey room’s little window, curtain tugged aside far enough for him to see into the narrow side-street that ran behind the inn.

  “It’ll be dawn soon,” he said tiredly. “He’ll stop then.”

  Seated beside Venette Martain, Lady Brislyn looked up. “How do you know?”

  “He’ll be vulnerable in daylight. I think he’ll return to his estate, barricade himself behind the strongest wardings he can contrive… and plan what he means to do next.”

  “Well, then.” Her head viciously aching, desperately hoping that the warding they hid behind would hold, Barl dropped into the room’s spindly chair. “I’ll wander out there and pay him a visit.”

  Remmie let the curtain drop, then lit his candle so she could see his face. “No. You won’t.”

  “Be quiet,” said Lady Brislyn. “If you can’t be a Doranen before you’re her brother, best you not say anything at all.”

  Barl looked at him, pretending they were alone, in the cottage. “He won’t hurt me, Remmie. And I’m the only person he’ll listen to.”

  “Barl…” Remmie shook his head, helpless. “You can’t go to him. Look what he’s become. Can you honestly say he’s the man you fell in love with?”

  “Yes. I can. Remmie, if Morgan has lost his reason it’s because he’s beside himself with guilt for what’s happened. In his own way, he’s still trying to save Dorana.”

  “How?” Remmie cried. “By turning every last one of us into monsters?”

  “Please, Remmie. He’s not evil. Lady Martain, tell him.”

  With a shaking sigh, Venette clutched her hands together in her lap. “This is Greve’s fault. That cantankerous, snip-pursed old man, he saw love as a weakness. Never praised his son if there was a chance to berate him, or point out a fault. Never ceased his droning on the greatness of the Danfeys and how it was Morgan’s duty to elevate them. Never once said to Morgan, ‘My dear boy, I love you.’”

  “He ruined Luzena’s locket,” Barl said softly. “Threw it into the fire. I don’t think he cared that his son was lonely, and desperate to be cherished.”

  In the hush, in the candlelight, she exchanged glances with Venette Martain… and for the first time saw approval in the older woman’s eyes.

  Dreen Brislyn was staring at them. “You would pity him, when he is out there turning people into beasts? When he has brought Dorana face-to-face with destruction?”

  Barl met her hot stare steadily. “He didn’t do that alone.”

  “No, Mage Lindin, he didn’t. Which is why you will go to his estate and convince him to stop this madness before it goes any further.”

  Remmie’s fist thudded against the wall. “And who are you to demand that she endanger her life by—”

  “She’s endangered our lives!” Dreen Brislyn retorted. “Every life in Dorana is at risk, thanks to her. And I should excuse it because she was in love? Because an older man seduced her? Because she lost her wits when she lost herself in magework?”

  “Don’t, Remmie,” Barl sighed. “Besides, you agree with her.”

  “That’s different. I’m your brother.”

  “And she is the head of the General Council.”

  The meagre
candlelight showed her his eyes, too bright. “Barl…”

  Moving to him, she kissed his cheek, then turned away. “I’ll go now, so I’m there waiting for him. And if I don’t return?” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Throw Dorana on the mercy of our neighbours, perhaps? Ask them to help us? Brantone and the rest might be our only hope.”

  And with a shrug she left them, before Remmie could weep openly, or anyone could wish her luck.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Morgan came home a scant hour after sunrise.

  Waiting for him in the library, having put the time to good use, Barl sat on the sofa with her spine straight and her hands folded, a careful smile pinned to her lips. Her courage faltered as she heard the leathery flap flap of wings. The scraping click of talons. A chorus of sighing, hissing cries. How many of those ghastly things had he brought with him? It sounded like dozens. Horrible. So horrible. But when at last the library door opened, she was in control again. Brave again.

  Well, as brave as she could be.

  Silent, Morgan stared at her. Heart racing, Barl stared back. He seemed… different. Oh, the familiar desire for her was there. That never left him. But laid lightly over it was a different kind of hunger. Burning within him, a different kind of power. As though the night he’d spent transmuting mages into monsters had transmuted him, too.

  But into what?

  He closed the door, gently, and wandered to the nearest book shelf. Trailed an idle finger along the old leather spines. “You left me.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, showing him only her regret. “But I came back.”

  His face twisted. “You left me.”

  “Morgan…” His pain was genuine, and it hurt her. How could it not, when despite everything she still loved him? She held out her hands, inviting. “I am sorry. I was wrong.”

  He took her savagely, on the carpet, ripping silk, tugging hair. Biting her. Bruising her. Weeping as he battered his way inside her. She didn’t fight him… and for the first time since their first time feigned passion and pleasure.

  Lost in desperation, different, he didn’t notice.

  When he was finished, still lying on top of her, pinning her, crushing her, he held her face between his tender hands and scattered kisses over her skin.

  “Why, Barl?” he whispered. There were tears in his eyes. “Why did you leave?”

  He was breaking her heart. How did we come to this? How could I have let things go so far awry? “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do, my love. Tell me.”

  “You’ll be angry.”

  “I won’t,” he said, and kissed her again. “I promise.”

  He’d know if she was lying, so she’d have to chance the truth. “You frightened me. I thought you’d hurt Remmie.”

  “I said I wouldn’t. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I believe—” That you believe it. For now. “Yes, Morgan. I believe you.”

  Smiling, his altered eyes soft with love, he rolled onto his side and pulled her against him. If the hard floor beneath their half-naked bodies bothered him, he didn’t show it.

  “My poor beloved,” he murmured, his fingertips slowly trailing up and down her spine. Once his touch had thrilled her. Now it made her feel small. Vulnerable. “I never wanted to distress you. Will you feel better if I swear to you, on my father’s tomb, that I will only change as many people as we need to defend Dorana?”

  Her heart was a lump of ice in her chest. “Much better.”

  “Then I swear it.” He kissed her breast, lips warm and soft and loving. “That many and no more.”

  Because he’d wonder if she didn’t, she idled her fingers through his hair. “And once we have our army? What then?”

  He laughed. “Then we teach our neighbours a lesson.”

  “A lesson?”

  “Barl…” He slapped her bare buttock, chiding. “Come, my love. Don’t be slow.”

  Somehow, she managed a seductive chuckle. “I’m not slow. You’ve worn me out. Tell me everything, Morgan.”

  Half beneath him, half beside him, Barl listened in growing horror as he daydreamed aloud about the world he wanted to create. A world in thrall to mages, ruled by mages. Ruled by him. And her, of course. She’d be his consort, splendid in her finery like a Ranoushi concubine.

  “And we’ll have sons,” he said, sighing. “As my father wanted. We will found a dynasty of mages, and live forever, and be in love.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” she whispered. And as she smiled and kissed him, summoned to mind the binding incant she’d taken from one of his books and altered while she waited. Traced the sigils on his drying skin, four with her fingertips, two with her tongue. Drugged with pleasure, this time, he growled low in his throat. Laughed, not listening, as she whispered into his ear.

  And didn’t feel the magic catch fire until it was too late.

  “Barl?” he said, his beautiful eyes filling with hurt and dismay, as the binding strands of the incant began to tighten around him. “Barl? What are you—”

  She stopped his question with a final kiss, tears spilling. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I know this mess is my fault as much as it’s yours. But I have to do this, Morgan. You’re so lost. You need time to find your true self.”

  “Barl…” His eyes widened and then he shouted, a dreadful cry of rage and pain as the barbs of her binding sank deep into his soul. “My love, how could you do this? You bitch, you slut, you treacherous whore…”

  Watching as he fought in vain against her magic, as his will was consumed, rendered impotent by hers, Barl felt coldness seep through her like the slow encroachment of winter. If the night’s horrors had changed him, then they’d changed her as well. This binding of him changed her. She, too, was remade.

  And if he’s been made a monster, then what now am I?

  A monument to remorse. The embodiment of regret. A mage with but one purpose: to undo what she’d done.

  When the sun finally rose, sullen and cloud-veiled, Venette ventured out of Remmie Lindin’s room at the Shooting Star inn to see for herself what fresh calamities the new day had brought them. Dreen Brislyn ventured with her. They left Barl Lindin’s silent brother behind to wait for his courageous, catastrophic sister.

  “I pity him,” Dreen said, as they made their way through the hushed, seemingly deserted inn. “He loves her, and would defend her, but it isn’t possible to defend the indefensible—and he knows it.”

  Venette pushed open the inn’s heavy front door. “You must live a very… uncomplicated… life.”

  “Lady Martain, you astonish me,” Dreen said, staring. “You’d still defend Morgan Danfey? Even now?”

  She didn’t answer. She had no interest in discussing Morgan, at least not with this young woman… and besides, the sight that greeted her beyond the doorway robbed her entirely of speech.

  “Justice preserve us,” Dreen whispered, her voice colourless with shock. “And how are we to mend this? Surely all of Dorana is suffering the same fate.”

  Venette felt her belly churn. Orwin. But she couldn’t afford to think of him… or the rest of their scattered family. Not yet.

  The narrow street on which the Shooting Star sat was riddled and warped and blighted with mage-mist. The filthy stuff clung like fruit-rot to the buildings and the cobblestones, shattered stained glass or turned it to melted slag, poisoned the bright flowers and the spreading, shading trees. Floated malevolent through the air, bright and deadly in the growing sunlight.

  Dreen pointed. “Is that—are those—bodies?”

  A stench of death and too-rapid decay clogged their throats as they picked their cautious way along the street. The silence was eerie. Unsettling. Broken only by the distant, staccato sounds of glass smashing to shards.

  The corpses of two men and a woman huddled on the sidepath. She had perished from mage-mist, her face bubbled into obscurity. But the men—the men—

  “It must have been those things that Lord Danfey created
,” Dreen Brislyn said, her voice shaking. “These wounds—only talons could make them.”

  Nodding, Venette forced herself to look at the spilled entrails, the splintered bones, the punctured, rended flesh. “And fangs.” Oh, Morgan. Morgan. My dear, you are lost. “I wonder if there’s any chance that Mage Lindin could—”

  Above their heads, a slow, dry, leathery rustle of bat wings. And then a thud, a thud, and a thud amidst a clatter of loosened roof tiles.

  “Do not move, Lady Drislyn,” Venette breathed. “Do not even blink.”

  Shadow by swallowed shadow, the rising day crept along the empty street. They waited, unmoving, muscles aching and trembling, breathing in the sour stink of spoiling blood and emptied bowels and viscera strewn like discarded fish guts at the markets.

  After some endless stretch of minutes, with hissing cries and a lazy slap-slap-slap of the air, the three creatures perching on the roof above them flew away.

  Dreen Brislyn’s face was so pale it was almost translucent. “After what we heard last night, Elvado is surely infested. And if Danfey is not stopped, the same fate awaits the rest of Dorana. Lady Martain, we can’t live with those monsters among us!”

  Venette sighed. “Call me Venette. Under these circumstances, formality seems absurd. As for Morgan’s pets…” She felt herself shudder with revulsion. “I don’t much like our chances of hunting them down, Dreen. Not without the aid of magic.”

  Dreen tried to summon glimfire, but only succeeded in scorching her hand. Stung with pain, she stared at the empty sky. “So we’re at the mercy of Barl Lindin’s powers and her intermittent conscience? Is that it?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “Wonderful. I don’t suppose you can explain her magework, Venette?”

  “No. Doubtless Bellamie Ranowen would have puzzled out the truth of it.” But the once-maligned mage was wings and fangs and talons, now. Poor Bellamie. “If I had to guess, I’d say it has something do with the fact that her magic, and Morgan’s, are responsible for these disruptions.”