by Victor Milán
At contact, the saber flared and crackled with lightning. Evil! Zaranda thought.
Immediately the big man retracted the axe for a follow-up, finishing stroke. Zaranda fell back, braced herself with one hand, and stabbed with the other. The baron went tiptoe to avoid the thrust and jumped back, giving her time to scramble to her feet.
They squared off, feinting left and right, each trying to provoke the other to commit to an attack. Zaranda quickly sensed she was the more skillful, but he was quick as well as horribly strong, and her attention kept getting distracted by the desire to do something to interfere with the wizard at the window.
The combat continued thus, inconclusive, for what seemed like hours but was probably seconds. Then the baron, noticing the glances his opponent kept darting past him, growled over his shoulder, “Ho, Whimberton! Leave off that play and make some magic so I can put this wench out of the way and deal with her minions myself.”
The wizard jerked as if slapped. Lowering the opalescent sphere with visible reluctance, he turned to Zaranda and began to gesticulate and mutter. Frantically, she tried to get a clear shot to cast her own remaining spell, but Baron Lutwill, grinning savagely, launched a fierce attack, forcing her to concentrate exclusively on keeping her skull unsplit.
Whimberton threw out his hand. The air seemed to congeal abruptly around Zaranda, freezing her in place. A holding spell! She fought back with all her will, but her exertions, magical and physical, had sapped her. In a moment, she was trapped.
The baron stepped back, leaned on his axe for a moment, admiring his magician’s handiwork. “Hmm. Since I didn’t have to damage you at all, maybe I won’t be so quick to separate your head from that lovely slender neck. After all, I can always collect the reward.” He turned away. “Well done, Whimberton. Now you can get back to your games. But see you don’t use up all the juice, or whatever it is that drives that thing.”
The mage smiled. “It is dweomer, Lord, the stuff of all magic. Yet this object can be recharged merely by attaching it to the weathercock when a thunderstorm rages.”
The baron gestured airily with a hand. “Whatever.”
He turned back to Zaranda, began to caress her cheek. “You know, this has interesting possibilities—”
A scream interrupted him. Zaranda could not move so much as her eyeballs, but she could focus vision past her captor, to the window where the mage had raised his sphere once again. He was surrounded by a swarm of tiny, indistinct things that seemed to shimmer with a faint light of their own. He beat at them, frantically, then began to slap at his face and robe, shrieking louder and louder, until he stumbled and fell back against the window.
Whoever installed the window had not worked up to the exacting standards of Tethyrian artisanship. It gave way at once. Window and mage fell out into the night, the latter trailing a thin dwindling scream.
The spell broke. Zaranda drove a knee into the baron’s crotch. He bent over with a gasp and staggered back, but recovered almost instantly, and swung his axe horizontally.
Zaranda leaned away, going to one knee. Her free hand found a wolfskin. The axehead whistled by, a finger’s width from her face. She flung the pelt over the baron’s head and shoulders and stabbed her glowing blade right through it.
Again. And again.
At last, when for some time the only cries sounding within the chamber had been her own and the voices coming through the now-vacant window, she stopped and turned. Chenowyn stood in the doorway, face so pale her skin looked like a sheet of parchment and her freckles like drops of paint.
She flew forward to catch Zaranda in a wild embrace. “You disobeyed,” Zaranda said, hugging her tight. Then, to her own astonishment, she burst into tears.
Ten volunteers died in the fight for the castle, including Osbard’s daughter Fiora, blasted by a lightning bolt. Many more were wounded. So brutal was the battle that Goldie, released from the stables, forbore to complain about the indignities Farlorn had heaped upon her in the course of their masquerade.
But whatever the cost, they had won. And once the news of what had transpired reached Masamont, the villagers streamed forth to take up the casualties, bind their wounds, and bear them gently off to their own beds, where the local clerics could see to healing them.
What the wondrous rechargeable magic artifact Whimberton had used to such deadly effect was, Zaranda never learned. It had shattered on a paving stone beside its wielder.
Despite the horror of seeing friends die and suffering magic attacks they were powerless to prevent, the young warriors were exultant. Even the wounded laughed and joined in the singing as the townsfolk carried them to the village on improvised litters.
That would pass, Zaranda knew. When the hot rush of victory died away, the despair that came after would be as hard for some to bear as the pain of sword cuts and spear thrusts. With the help of Farlorn’s gold-glib tongue, Zaranda would help them through that ordeal as best she could.
When the time came. But meantime, after the wounded were taken off and the castle secured, in that breathless hour before dawn, Farlorn came to her, in an apartment she had chosen to take sorely needed rest.
And it seemed to Zaranda Star the most natural thing in the world to go into his arms, and surrender herself to the hunger that had been growing in her for long, weary months.
Part III
The Whisperer in Darkness
“We are troubled,” the halfling in the maroon and purple gown piped.
Sitting in a simple chair in his eight-sided chamber at the top of the Palace of Governance, Baron Faneuil Hardisty turned away from a design sketch for his coronation robe and regarded his trio of visitors. They stood in a ray of spring sunlight that slanted from the skylight to graze the tabletop on which the baron’s model city stood.
Malhalvadon Stringfellow, the only halfling currently seated on the city council, hopped impatiently from one bare black-furred foot to the other. Baron Zam stood unmoving in his robes of blue and gray. He was tall, astringent, bloodless, with a wisp of iron-gray hair surrounding the dome of his skull. His slit eyes, narrow nose, and pinched mouth were situated on a face that came to a severe point at the chin. Korun, the lone councilwoman, wore a slashed green-velvet doublet over a yellow blouse and orange hose, her hair blonde and short, her eyes green, and her pert-nosed face handsome. She wore her peaked yellow cap at a rakish angle, pheasant feather aslant, and held arms akimbo, as if impatient but amused. The sunlight, ungallant, brought forth the parchment dryness of her skin; she was not so young as she liked to present herself.
Baron Hardisty sighed and handed the sketchbook to his attendant Tatrina, daughter of Duke Hembreon. He had many All-Friends waiting upon him these days, courtesy of Armenides, who stood behind his right shoulder and beamed like an indulgent tutelary spirit. Tatrina made a curtsy and withdrew. Armenides’s hazel eyes followed her until she was out of sight around the columned doorjamb.
Korun and Zam likewise watched her go, with much different expressions. Each had a son in the All-Friends. Neither felt entirely at ease with that, but they were reluctant to mention it in Armenides’s presence.
“What troubles you, noble Stringfellow?” Hardisty asked with that great apparent sincerity that served him so well.
The halfling bobbed, tousled his curly dark hair, rubbed his snub nose with a thumb. “It’s these Star Protective people,” he declared. “They’re a threat to our plan to restore order to Tethyr.”
“Meaning,” Lady Korun said in a mockingly vibrant contralto, “that they interfere with the bandit chieftains who kick back a share of their plunder to you and call it ‘taxes.’ ”
“No such thing!” the halfling fluted. “Besides, I’m not the only one.”
“Let us say we all feel the pinch,” said Zam, and pinched was a fair description of his voice. “Her impertinence becomes alarming. Her private army grows in leaps and bounds, and just today we received word that she has been welcomed by the city council of Ithmong,
having escorted a great caravan thence from Myratma. The first to pass that way since the monarchy fell.”
“She’s a sorceress!” Stringfellow cried. “She’s got the people bewitched, I tell you. She even has them believing that monstrous orc who travels with her is a paladin!”
“She’s done much to restore commerce to the roads of Tethyr,” Korun said, “and it’s all bypassing Zazesspur. At this rate, the people of Tethyr, to say nothing of Zazesspur, will soon begin to wonder what they need us for. Clearly this can’t go on.”
“What do wish me to do about it?” Hardisty asked mildly.
“You’re the man who would be king, Faneuil,” Lady Korun said. “You tell us.”
“Very well,” Hardisty said crisply. “She shall be dealt with. Enough?”
“And who will do the dealing?” Stringfellow asked.
Hardisty grinned. “Why, I should say—none less than the lord of Zazesspur.”
“You ask much,” Baron Zam said.
“He will deliver much,” Armenides said serenely. “He is touched with destiny.”
“He’d best be,” said Zam.
“Our Malhalvadon grows importunate,” Armenides said when the councilors had gone. “Perhaps it’s time he gave way to one of the Brothers Hedgeblossom. Or both. Surely the council has other bits of deadwood that want pruning.”
“You surprise me, Father. The Hedgeblossoms are our staunch foes. They seek to overturn everything we’ve worked for.”
Armenides smiled. “Why, isn’t that all the more reason to bring them on the council? In every time and every clime, there’s nothing scarcer than a rebel who stays avid to cast down power once he shares it.”
Hardisty thought about this. Like many things Armenides told him, it sounded bizarre at first, until his mind began to fit itself around the concept.
“What of the other council members? Some of them might object to raising up such firebrands.”
The priest spread his hands. “Then they are obstructers and unworthy of the positions they hold. Retribution has a way of seeking such out.”
Here was a different Armenides than the ever-smiling figure the public knew, but one in truth no less benevolent. The common ruck might not understand, but Hardisty did.
He had done things he was uneasy about. Some even gave him nightmares. But he knew the truth of what Armenides taught: when one served Good, to hold back from using any tool available was dereliction to the point of affirmative evil. Just as one must sometimes spank a child less it race heedless into the path of an oncoming carriage and be trampled, so sometimes apparently cruel measures were in truth grandmotherly kindness.
“You must keep pressure on the council to crown you king as soon as possible, my lord,” the cleric said. “The One Below has great patience, but even that wears thin. And we have much need of him yet if we are to bring your visions to fruition.”
Baron Hardisty shuddered, as he always did at mention of the hidden partner in their great enterprise. Politics made strange bedfellows: just look at that stiff-necked old tower of rectitude Hembreon and that rogue Anakul. The way the two voted in council, you’d think they sat next to one another in temple.
Him Below could be … handled. Armenides assured him of it.
“First I’ve got to settle this matter of the Countess Morninggold,” Hardisty said. “Despite what I told our friends, I really don’t know how.”
He shook his head. “I suppose it’s too late to give her her wretched caravan back.” Perhaps the greatest of Zaranda Star’s many impertinences was that she was running Star Protective Service as a profit-making venture, and it was returning handsome profit indeed, from what his spies reported.
The cleric shrugged. “Raise an army and crush her.”
“That might not be easy.”
“Good my lord! However they may style themselves, her followers are naught but peasants playing at soldiers. You’re a proven war leader, and command real soldiers.”
Hardisty went to his chair and sat. “War’s an expensive game, Father. And here’s the cursed thing about it: You can never know who will win.”
He shrugged. “Zaranda Star’s a seasoned commander, too, and we won’t do well to underestimate her. Oh, it’s not that I doubt we’d prevail against her and her rabble. But such a victory could prove costly. If we weaken ourselves too much in crushing her, we might find others stepping forward to challenge us—Ithmong, to name one.”
Armenides nodded. “Very well, my son.” He smiled benignly. “Fortunate it is that we have … other assets.”
“You mean you have other assets.”
“Indeed.”
“Then pray, make use of them. Oh, and when you go, could you send for the girl who was assisting me before, Duke Hembreon’s daughter? With all due respect for your All-Friends, Father, I find most of them pretty dull fish, though helpful as can be. She, on the other hand, is quite vivacious.”
“An air of gravity is concomitant with a certain stage in studying the mysteries of Ao All-Father,” Armenides said. “Young Tatrina has not yet attained that stage; that’s all.”
“Well, thank goodness for that. Good afternoon, Father.”
When Armenides arrived at his quarters on the palace’s uppermost floor, the columnar doorposts—which were magic things, and alive, a fact quite unknown to the palace’s builders—did not voice their shrill, tormented warning of intrusion. Reassured, the cleric entered.
The magically warded chambers were redolent with steamy, welcoming smells of cooking. They were simply and sparsely furnished. On a shelf sat the brazen head. Its eyes and mouth abruptly lit with yellow fire.
“Report! Report!” it demanded in a voice Zaranda Star would have recognized, though not as coming from it. It was a whisper, dry as wind over long-dead leaves.
“There’s little enough to report,” Armenides said. “I urged him to get tough with the council about recognizing him as lord of the city. He seems of a mind to. Beyond that, it’s business as usual.”
“Not enough! He is weak.”
“He is weak in ways that serve us. Likewise is he mighty in rationalization.”
“He must become king soon. Only then can the transformation take place.”
“I assure you no one is more eager to see Baron Hardisty made king than Baron Hardisty.”
“And the girl? What of the girl? Why do you not bring her to me?”
“Sweet Tatrina? She’s more useful as she is, another golden cord binding him to me. He’s quite infatuated with her.”
“All the more reason to make sure of her.”
“Come, now, we’ve been over this before. She can scarce beguile him if she starts acting like a zombie. And she’s eager enough to do anything I ask, not that I’ve requested anything too controversial.” He chuckled. “It’s for the love of Ao, after all.”
“You had best be right.”
“I am. Now: attend. Trouble not the sleep of Zazesspur tonight. I have a message I need sent over some distance. It will take concentration, even for you.”
“Do not command me! I command! Do not dare command me!”
“Forgive me, O mighty L’yafv-Afvonn, I beseech thee. I abase myself, I grovel, I truckle, I’m lower than dirt. Now will you please just do it?”
“What do you want?”
The cleric explained briefly. When he finished, the fire went out of the head’s eyes and mouth. Both closed.
After a moment the bronze eyelids opened. “You can’t imagine how vexing that is,” the head said in its customary voice, “serving as mouthpiece for that thing in the cellar.”
“I don’t care to try,” the priest said.
“Why don’t you just listen to me? I can reveal unto you secrets—awful, indescribable secrets. All I ask—”
Armenides silenced it with a hand wave. “Little that is awful and indescribable,” he said, “is secret from me.”
So saying, he passed on into his innermost room. This was occupied by a fi
re pit, over which bubbled a great black iron caldron. From a hook set in the ceiling he took a large ladle and stirred the contents, infant limbs and organs aboil in spices.
It was time for lunch.
In the waters of the river Ith, the stars were tiny streaming pennons. “I dream about flying a lot,” Chenowyn said as they walked along the red-brick river path.
The night air was charged with the scents of lilac and honeysuckle. The river, which sprang with considerable violence out of the Snowflake Mountains, had matured considerably by the time it reached Ithmong; it was broader about the middle, but had replaced frantic force with deliberate power. It chuckled to itself, complacent over what it had become, and slapped the stones that reinforced the banks.
Zaranda turned her face so the girl couldn’t see her grimace. She, too, had dreamt last night, but not of flying. It was as if she heard that whisper again, the hated sibilance that had made her nights in Zazesspur so hideous.
She sought refuge in a different subject: “If you keep applying yourself as you’ve been—and also get lucky, since I don’t know any such spells—you just might someday get to fly.”
Chen shook her head. “Not like that, by magic. I feel as if I have wings. I spread them and drive myself into the sky like a bird. But I’m not a bird. I’m something different. But I’m still me, and it feels … right.”
She noticed that she and Zaranda had fallen out of step, skipped to synchronize herself with the older woman. Zaranda frowned. Chen wasn’t the only person she knew who was obsessive about staying in step with whomever she was strolling with. Her concern went beyond that.
From an urban feral child—ragged, gaunt, and filthy—Chenowyn had grown into a healthy, lovely young woman. She had put on an amazing growth spurt in the near-year since Zaranda first found her in that Zazesspurian alley, becoming more than a hand taller. Which should be small surprise, Zaranda reflected; Chen ate like a half-starved owlbear.
