High Deryni

by Katherine Kurtz

  Derry allowed himself no answer, forcing himself instead to gaze serenely past Wencit’s head and to focus on a thin crack in the wall behind him. There he spied a spider spinning a thin, fragile web to span the crack. He decided that he would concentrate on counting the strands in the spider’s web so that he could ignore the words of the despicable—

  Snap!

  Pain burned across Derry’s face like a saber cut as Wencit’s whip lashed out.

  “You are not paying attention, Derry!” the master barked. “I warn you, I don’t tolerate dull pupils!”

  Derry suppressed the instinct to cringe away and forced himself to face his tormentor. Wencit was standing not an arm’s length away, the hated whip dangling from his wrist by that blasted thong. The sorcerer’s eyes glowed like twin pools of quicksilver.

  “Now,” said Wencit softly, “you will listen to what I have to say, Sean Lord Derry. And you will not ignore me, or I will hurt you. I will hurt you again and again until you either pay attention or die. And the dying will not be easy, I promise you. Are you listening?”

  Derry managed a stiff nod and forced himself to pay attention. His lips were dry, his tongue felt two sizes too big for his mouth, and he could feel something warm and wet trickling down his cheek where the whip had seared.

  “Very good,” Wencit murmured, trailing the lash of his whip along Derry’s cheek and neck. “Now, your first lesson for today is to realize—and to realize fully—that I hold your life in my hands, quite literally. If I wished, I could make you beg for oblivion, whine for merciful death to end the torments I can bring.”

  Without warning, his free hand lanced out to twist Derry’s wounded bicep. Derry cried out involuntarily, half-fainting with the pain, but it was gone almost before it could fully register.

  “Look at me,” Wencit said softly. And Derry, to his horror, found himself lifting his gaze obediently. Wencit’s hand still rested lightly on the wounded shoulder, but Derry tried not to anticipate what the sorcerer might do next.

  “Oh, did I hurt you?” Wencit purred, kneading Derry’s shoulder with gentle fingers as he smiled a different sort of smile. “Ah, but that is not my ultimate intention. I have no need to torture you, for I already possess all the power over you that I could possibly want or need. You are already conditioned to obey me. And though your mind may shrink from what I require, and may balk, your body will perform whatever I command.”

  With a sly smile, Wencit ran a gloved hand lightly down Derry’s body from shoulder to hip, then stood back to tap his whip thoughtfully against an elegantly booted leg. After a moment, he tossed the whip to Rhydon and pulled the cuffs of his gloves taut, first one and then the other, gazing disdainfully at Derry all the while.

  “Tell me, have you ever been blessed?” he asked at last, interlocking his fingers to further smooth the fit of the gloves. “Has a holy man ever made the sacred signs above your head?”

  Derry’s brow furrowed as Wencit lifted his right hand in an attitude of benediction, for he could not fathom where Wencit was heading.

  “Well, I fear that I am not a holy man; but then, this is not really a blessing, either,” Wencit continued. “You will recall that we spoke earlier of loss of integrity—integrity of body, soul, mind. I think that we begin with the soul, Sean Lord Derry. And by this sign, I place you in my thrall.”

  The upraised hand descended slowly, the fingers curled in a perfect mimicry of priestly blessing, then passed smoothly to the right, then right to left. As the hand passed before Derry’s eyes, he felt an eerie lethargy possess him, sending leaden coldness through his limbs. He gasped, unable to comprehend what was happening to his mind, then groaned as Wencit touched the shackles at his wrists and released him.

  His legs would not support him. His limbs were nerveless, uncontrollable. As his knees started to give way, he felt strong arms beneath his, bearing him up. His head lolled helplessly against the stones of the cell wall, his hair catching painfully on the rough stone and mortar. Then the pale eyes were boring into his and looming closer, a cruel, ravening mouth pressing against his in a hard, obscene kiss.

  When it ended, Derry slid from his captor’s arms to slump helplessly against the wall, eyes tightly closed, jaws tensed in revulsion, his body trembling in unbidden response. As he buried his face against his aching arms, he could hear Wencit laughing through a thick, heavy fog, and Rhydon chuckling with him like a mocking echo.

  Then Wencit’s boot was prodding him insistently in the side, and he was lifting his head to gaze up queasily. Wencit smiled and glanced at Rhydon, who had watched all in amusement, then held out his hand for Rhydon’s dagger. Rhydon flipped it through the air with an easy grace, and Wencit caught it. The hilt was gold, studded with pearls, and the blade gleamed cold and deadly in the gloom as Wencit stooped down to set the tip under Derry’s chin.

  “Ah, how you hate me,” he said in a low voice. “You are thinking that if you could only get your hands on this weapon, you would stab me in the heart or slit my throat for what I have said and done to you. Well, you shall have your chance.”

  Without further ado, Wencit reversed the dagger to grasp the blade, then took Derry’s right hand and wrapped it round the hilt of the weapon.

  “Go ahead. Kill me, if you can.”

  Derry froze for just an instant, unable to believe that Wencit would actually give him such an opportunity, then launched himself hysterically at his tormentor.

  He never made it, of course. Wencit sidestepped neatly, easily wrenching Derry’s fingers from the dagger’s hilt, then pushed him back against the wall again, weak as a kitten. Unable to summon any resistance whatsoever, Derry watched dully as Wencit laughed and bent to slip the blade into the neck of his shirt, ripping down the front of the garment with one deft stroke and then parting the two halves to bare his victim’s chest.

  He then crouched down and brought his right hand to rest lightly on Derry’s chest above the heart, the dagger balanced neatly on the fingers of his left. His eyes were cool and distant in the dim cell, and Derry knew with a sinking certainty that he was about to die.

  What, in the name of all things holy, had ever made him think he could kill Wencit with a blade? Why, the man was a demon!—no, the Devil himself!

  “So, you see, my dear Lord Derry, how very futile it all is,” Wencit said softly. “Your soul and will now are mine—and your body also, if I desire it. And you have lost even the power to kill. You cannot take my life…but I can order you to take your own, and you will obey me. Take the knife, Derry, and rest the point here by my hand, above your heart.”

  As though he were watching someone else’s hand, Derry saw his fingers close around the hilt of the dagger Wencit offered, the blade angled downward, Wencit’s gloved hand closing over his. He watched with disbelief and dread as Wencit guided it to press lightly on the skin above his heart. He felt no sense of panic this time, no sense of struggle against what was happening. He knew that the hand was his and that it would kill him if Wencit so ordered. And there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

  Smiling, Wencit removed his hand and rocked back on his heels, balancing easily in the rustling straw.

  “Now, we shall begin with just a shallow cut, barely drawing blood,” he said. “Do it.”

  The knife moved smoothly beneath Derry’s fascinated gaze, his hand guiding it along a fine line, no longer than the breadth of three fingers. Blood welled from the cut in tiny beads like jewels against his white skin, until the tip of the blade poised just below the breastbone, awaiting its next command.

  “So we have drawn blood together, you and I,” Wencit whispered, his voice as soft as the silk he wore. “And now we may pause together on the brink of death, for just a little while. Make it so, my friend. Only a little pressure…and then we may converse with the angel of death in passing, here in this lonely cell of woe.”

  The point of the blade began to press into Derry’s flesh, more blood welling up where steel met flesh,
and Derry’s face went gray. He could feel the blade piercing his skin, the cold sliver of death moving inexorably toward his heart—and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He closed his eyes against the sight and tried to calm his terror-stricken soul, calling on long-forgotten childhood saints and prayers in his despair.

  Then Wencit’s hand was on his wrist once more, drawing the blade away, and there was a square of white silk pressing lightly against the hurt. Wencit took his right hand and did something to it that felt cold. But then the sorcerer was rising, a satisfied smile on his face, and turning to signal Rhydon that it was time to go.

  Derry struggled to his elbows as the door opened, the knife forgotten in his hand, and watched as the blue-cloaked Rhydon withdrew into the darkened corridor. A guard brought a torch to light the dimness as Wencit paused in the doorway and looked back, raising his riding whip in salute.

  “Rest now, my young friend,” he said, his eyes deep wells of pale sapphire in the torchlight. “I hope you have learned from our little diversion. For I do have a very important task in mind for you. It concerns you and Morgan, and how you shall work to betray him to me.”

  Derry’s hand tightened around the dagger-hilt, and he suddenly remembered that he still had it. He tensed, hoping he could shield the weapon behind his body, but Wencit saw the movement and smiled.

  “You may keep the toy. I doubt that Rhydon will miss it for a while. But I fear it will bring you no great amusement. You see, I cannot permit you to use it, my friend. But you will learn that soon enough.”

  As the door closed and the key turned in the lock once more, Derry sighed and lay back in the straw in exhaustion, the dagger slipping from his shaking fingers. For a few moments he only lay there and closed his eyes tightly, trying to slow his racing heart and calm the horror of the past hour.

  But as his mind cleared and his pains receded, Wencit’s words suddenly reverberated in his mind: You will betray him to me. With a hysterical sob, he rolled onto his side to bury his face against his good arm.

  God! What had Wencit done to him? Had he heard aright? Oh, but he had! The sorcerer had said that Derry would betray his lord, that Derry would play Judas to his friend and liege lord, Morgan. No! It must not be!

  Dragging himself to a sitting position, Derry felt around in the straw until he found the dagger again, snatched it up in feverish hands, and gazed at it in horror. He was distracted briefly by a strange ring glinting on his right forefinger, a ring he could not remember having seen before; but then the flash of the dagger blade caught his eye once more, and he was returned to his original purpose.

  Wencit was responsible for all of this. A horrible cusp had been reached, and now Wencit controlled Derry’s body just as certainly as he controlled his lowest underlings. He had said that he would make Derry betray his master, and Derry had no doubt that Wencit could do it, if he said he would. He had also forbidden Derry’s escape through death—though that, perhaps, could be circumvented. Derry would not, could not, permit himself to be used as the instrument of Morgan’s betrayal.

  Digging down through the straw, Derry used the blade to clear away to the bare clay, hollowing out a narrow hole that was deep enough to hold the hilt. He glanced at the door, hoping that there was no one watching what he was about to do, then lay down on his stomach beside the hole he had prepared, propped on his elbows, and held the dagger in his two hands.

  Suicide. It was an act forbidden even in thought for a man who believed, as Derry did, in the God of the Church Militant. For the believer, the taking of one’s own life was a grave offense, damning one to an eternal torment in Hell.

  But there were things worse than Hell, Derry argued with himself. The betrayal of self, the betrayal of friends…Himself he could not help. He had been tested against the master of Torenth and had been found wanting. There was no one to blame for that. But, Morgan—the powerful Deryni lord had saved Derry’s life more than once, had more than once snatched him from the jaws of death against unthinkable odds. Could Derry, in conscience, now refuse to do the same for him?

  Grasping the dagger by its blade, Derry gazed at the cross-hilt for a long moment, rehearsing half a dozen childhood prayers and discarding them. Then he touched the cross-hilt fervently to his lips before placing it pommel-first into the hole in the floor. A compassionate God would surely understand—and Derry’s faith in that compassion would have to sustain him through that which he must now do…and whatever came after.

  With the blade pointing upward like a silver flame, Derry raised himself from his elbows and shifted sideways, positioning himself with the blade angled up beneath his ribcage.

  It should not take long in his depleted condition. His arms would give out in a few seconds, and he would no longer be able to hold his body off the shining steel. Even Wencit could not prevent the fall of an exhausted body.

  He closed his eyes as his arms started to tremble with fatigue, thinking of a day long ago when he and Morgan had ridden laughing through the fields of Candor Rhea. He remembered the battles and the good horses, the girls he had tumbled in the hay of his father’s stables, his first stag hunt…

  And then he started to fall….

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “The Lord hath delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able to rise up.”

  LAMENTATIONS 1:14

  PANIC! No! He could not do it!

  As the blade began to press deeper against Derry’s flesh, again drawing blood, his arms suddenly stiffened, bearing him up and to one side, away from the death he sought, to collapse into the straw. With an agonized moan, he wrenched the weapon from the floor and tried to slash it against his wrists, against his choking throat.

  But it was no use. He could do nothing to injure himself. It was as though an unseen hand deflected every attempt, always guiding the blade to harmless destinations.

  Wencit! Wencit had been right! Derry could not even kill himself!

  Weeping uncontrollable tears of frustration, Derry flung himself onto his stomach and sobbed, his wounds burning with his exertion and his head ringing. The dagger was still in his hand, and he stabbed it hysterically into the straw-covered clay floor, again and again, until, after a while, the flailing ceased and the sobs subsided. Fading consciousness took with it some of the futility of his situation.

  Once he thought he came to. Or perhaps he only dreamed it. He thought he had been asleep for only a few minutes when he became aware of a gentle touch on his shoulder—the tentative probe of a human hand.

  He flinched and tensed, fearing that it was Wencit, come back to torment him, but the hand did not punish, and the pain did not come. When Derry finally gathered the courage to turn his head toward the intruder, he was astonished to see a gray-cowled stranger gazing down at him in concern. Somehow he was not afraid, though he knew he probably ought to be.

  He started to open his mouth to speak, but the stranger shook his head and placed a cool, warning hand over his mouth. The stranger’s eyes glowed with a silver, smoky hue, a frosty light in the shadow of the monkish hood; and Derry had the impression of silvered-gold hair, that he had seen the face somewhere before, though he could not remember where. But then his vision blurred, and he began to drift again.

  He became vaguely aware of the man’s hands gliding over his body, probing at his wounds, and of a lessening of the hurt from those wounds, but he could not seem to focus his eyes anymore. He felt the man’s touch on his right hand and thought he heard a sigh of dismay as the man lifted the hand to inspect something cold and silvery on the right forefinger; but he could not seem to move a muscle to resist.

  He started to drift again as the stranger rose. He wondered idly if he was truly seeing a nimbus of light around the man’s head, or if he was only hallucinating. Somehow, even that did not seem to matter.

  Then the man was backing toward the door, staring at him strangely. Derry had the distinct impression, as the door closed behind the gray-clad figure, that there was a touch o
f blue to the man’s apparel, that a darker countenance flickered beneath the façade of fairness. The thought crossed his mind that something very odd had just occurred, that there was something he ought to be able to deduce regarding what had just happened.

  But he could not make the connection. With that, his head fell back on the straw in merciful oblivion again, and he slept.

  DERRY could not have known that Kelson’s army even then was drawing near to the plain of Llyndruth. Since Kelson was eager to reach the proposed battle site before dark, the royal army had been on the march since before dawn. Reconnaissance patrols and single scouts had been sent ahead throughout the day, hoping to gain intelligence of the surrounding area before the entire army should come upon danger unprepared. But nothing out of the ordinary had been reported until late afternoon, when they were within three hours’ march of the Cardosa plain. The news, when it did come, was most unsettling.

  One of the patrols had been casting ahead and slightly to the west of the main line of march when they spotted what appeared to be a skirmish band of foot soldiers waiting silently in a brush-filled ravine: perhaps fifty men, with sunlight glinting off the polished steel of cuirass, helmet, and lance—an apparent ambush. Not wishing to reveal their own presence, the outriders had refrained from going close enough to make positive identification of the troop’s battle pennons and returned immediately to inform the King.

  Kelson frowned as he tried to fathom the enemy’s intent. The planned ambush could only be a diversionary tactic of some sort, for so small a band could not hope to inflict serious damage on the entire combined forces of Gwynedd. But such a mission would be suicide for the ambushers—unless, of course, there was sorcery afoot to protect the men and change the seemingly impossible odds.

  That thought sobered Kelson immediately, and after a moment’s reflection he called General Gloddruth to his side. Gloddruth had been acting as Kelson’s aide-de-camp since his return from the Rengarth treachery, and he listened carefully as the young commander-in-chief gave revised marching orders to be passed down the chain of command. Then, as Gloddruth turned to go, Kelson rode forward to locate Morgan and seek his opinion.