by Jude Fisher
Up came his sword arm again: light as air it felt, the muscles somehow imbued with golden fire instead of blood. Again, the blades rang and Ravn Asharson fell back, bemused.
In the Eyran ranks, one man stared hard, shaken out of the miasma of concentration in which he had been wrapped. Magic! he thought, suddenly furious at this intrusion on his own domain. He’s using the spell of ultimate defence! For a second, maybe two, this realisation permeated Rahe’s ageing brain; then he knew who the man in crimson truly was. ‘Virelai!’
‘What?’ The Earl of Stormway was immediately at his side, his regard disapproving beneath those great white straggling brows. ‘What did you say? Have you cast your protective net over our king yet? It certainly does not look that way . . .’
‘Damned upstart! Little runt! How dare he steal from me and flaunt his theft thus! I’ll show him why I am called the Master. Now he will meet his match, the worm, the insect, the . . . the . . . rat’s turd!’
Bran frowned. He had little trust for sorcery and seers at the best of times, but this old man was clearly mad, and working himself up into a fine frenzy.
Seconds later, he felt dizzy, disorientated, as if the world had subtly shifted out of kilter. Then Egg Forstson was stumbling against him, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he glimpsed Aran Aranson, the Master of Rockfall, carrying an unconscious Ravn Asharson from the battlefield. But when he turned back to the sward, there was his king, as real as ever, battling fiercely against the Istrian. He blinked, shook his head, feeling slightly nauseous.
He cleared his throat, glanced at the Earl of Shepsey. ‘Are you all right, Egg?’
Egg Forstson looked at him curiously. ‘Funny you should ask,’ he said, screwing up his face. ‘For a moment there I felt distinctly odd. A bit woozy. Didn’t sleep much last night, you know.’
Bran turned and scanned the spot where he had been so sure he had seen his king. But there was no one there now, though the guards beside the royal tent looked strangely blank-faced.
‘Oh!’
A great cry went up from the watching soldiers: for Ravn was now bearing down upon his foe with a real fury, his sword scything the air as if he would shortly harvest the Istrian’s head. The Lord of Cantara reacted with extraordinary speed and skill and together the blades swung, ratcheting off one another with a sound which offended the ear. Then the two men spun away from each other, changing their stances, and circled like two wolves assessing each other’s form.
Almost, the watching Eyrans forgot that the outcome of this contest brought with it either rousing victory or humiliating defeat, so swept up were they in the skilful play of feet and hands and brawn and iron. None had ever seen a battle like it. With bated breath they waited for the next charge, the next clash of blade on blade. Who would ever have thought the soft southerner who had practically fallen from the horse which had carried him out of the city gates might show his mettle in such a brave fashion?
‘So, Virelai, now we shall see what you have learned from your trove of stolen secrets!’
Inside the shimmer of the spellcraft which showed the likeness of Ravn Asharson to the onlookers, Virelai glimpsed the identity of his opponent. The shock was so great, he almost vomited.
‘Master . . .’ he gasped.
‘Yes, you slug! The master whom you robbed and left to die, such was your gratitude for all the years I raised you as my own.’ Spittle sprayed out of the old man’s mouth, showering Virelai with a slimy mist. ‘The master whose greatest possession you stole away, without the least understanding of what you did or had. The master whose store of knowledge you ravaged and destroyed!’
This last, at least, was grossly unfair, since it had been Rahe himself who in the grip of a sustained despair had set about dismantling his icy kingdom and the treasures within; but Virelai had neither the energy nor the will to deny him.
Nor had he time to utter a single word, for suddenly tentacles were wrapped around his neck, tentacles with suckers which leeched onto the skin and tightened like a noose.
‘Aaaargh!’ Repulsed and terrified, he tore at them, but they coiled harder, and then there were more of them – six, eight! – all snaking out from Rahe’s torso to seek a hold on him. With a superhuman effort he lopped off three of the vile appendages and, squirming, shrank to half his size. The tentacles fell away from him, but now Rahe was towering over him with a snarl of triumph on his livid face. Perhaps the shrinking spell had not been a good idea. Virelai reversed it swiftly, and then it was he who loomed over the old man on legs which were abruptly ten feet long and – though the Lady knew how on Elda he had managed this – bent backwards like a crane’s.
‘Very nice, Virelai: quick thinking, if not entirely stylish. But can you counter this?’
A solid pack of muscle rammed his legs out from under him. He hit the ground with terrible impact and lay there, his heart thumping so loudly he could barely hear the curses of his opponent. He pushed himself up on elbows which would hardly take his own weight and stared in horrified fascination. The bull the Master had transformed himself into was mutating even as he watched, its neck elongating, its head changing shape. Teeth flowered briefly on its face and chest, then died back and were replaced by feathers. Spines shot out of its back. Its tail fell off and wriggled away across the ground.
Then the bull was back, pawing the ground, its vast horns lowered to gore. Virelai, himself again, leapt to his feet, his heart pumping with adrenalin. Shape-shifting to this level was beyond his powers. The smaller magics of seeming and unseeming might fool the eye of an ordinary beholder; but there was nothing he could do against a mage with the powers of Making and Unmaking.
Trembling, he faced the monster with sword outstretched, his arm shaking so much that the tip of the blade wavered blearily in the sharp morning light. A sound much like a laugh erupted from the creature. Then it charged. Pulverised earth shot up from its pounding hooves into clouds of dust.
Dust . . .
Muttering frantically, Virelai whipped the dust into a sandstorm that mazed the charging beast. Then, under the cover of its gritty blanket, he ran.
He did not get far. Something shot out and curled around his left ankle, yanking him off his feet. His sword flew out of his hand. He hit the ground face down, unable even to see what horror it was that had floored him.
Perhaps it was just as well. While all the spectators could make out through the kicked-up earth and the blur of movement were two men engaged in a deadly combat, Virelai, when he finally turned his head, found himself confronting an entity flung from out of the bowels of the earth. Fiery red it was, and all over scales. Men had made legends of it and called it ‘drake’ and ‘dragon’; but this was no creature of myth, nor did it much look like the splendid but etiolated beasts the women of Eyra had stitched on their ancient tapestries, with their bat-stretched wings, their intelligent heads and gripping claws; neither did it resemble the noble adversaries to the first gods which the poets Callisto and Flano had wreathed about in dramatic phrases and cadenced verses.
He cried out in despair.
Inside his splendid disguise, Rahe smiled. Let the boy whimper and imagine his cruel death; let him believe the transformation was one of fact, not seeming: he would die, one way or another; if not from wounds, then from fear.
Virelai knew the creature: from books, from tales; and from that last grim day in Sanctuary, as the Master conjured and destroyed the magics he had hoarded for millennia. Then he had been terrified beyond his wits, even though it offered him no harm: it was a beast that was made to chew the bones of the earth and regurgitate them as streams of lava. No man, surely, could withstand it.
Its multifaceted eyes, as alien and unreadable as any blowfly’s, watched him, unblinking. Then, with its tail wrapped around Virelai’s foot, it inched forward across the sward, crushing the grass in its wake; but all the Istrians watching from the battlements could see was their lord lying prostrate and the Eyran king advancing on him with slow
menace.
Virelai reached deep inside himself, and found . . . nothing. Not a word, not a spell, nothing but an eerie silence. Gone was the man who had garnered the courage to flee the icy fastness, to make a life out in the world; gone was the man who had lived off his wits and the Rosa Eldi’s charms; gone was the man who had loved Alisha Skylark and seen her child struck down on a muddy riverbank by Jetran militiamen; gone, too, was the man who had been resurrected by the deathstone, and who had felt its power flow through him to restore the conjurer and Saro Vingo. Fear rippled through him, reducing him, mote by mote.
In place of the man was the frightened boy he had been in Sanctuary, bullied and mistreated by the man who had become as much a monster in his mind as the beast which now confronted him.
He had often heard men say that imminent death brought memories of one’s life flitting through the mind like moths to a fire, to offer their colour and vitality, and then burn to ashes, one by one by one, and so he found it now, images tumbling chaotically and at random. Quite abruptly and with a sudden clarity he remembered the scrap of paper he had found discarded beneath the charred table, last remnant of the Book of Making and Unmaking . . .
The words swam before his eyes; a partial magic, but had he learned enough since then to complete and adapt it?
He closed his eyes and found it helped not to see the terrifying thing that advanced upon him.
And then, forehead to the chilly grass, he repeated those words he could recall; and added a name he had found in the Master’s grimoire. Then he risked a look behind him.
For a moment the chimera froze to the ground, one massive forefoot poised in mid-step; then it began to dwindle. First, it shrank in size, though still maintaining the form in which it had appeared; then its outline blurred and shifted, took on mannish characteristics, and became smaller still. Scales gave way to skin, claws to fingers; the tail shrivelled completely away. A moment later, there was the mage, an old man, naked on the grass, loose skin hanging in swags from his belly and arms where the beast’s wings had been; then he, too, was shrinking. A young man stood before him for a brief while, handsome and arrogant, his long hair and beard a brilliant red in the sun; then he was no more than a boy; a toddling child; a baby; a foetus . . .
Virelai stared in amazement. He had done this. He, Virelai, hopeless apprentice and skivvy; thief and procurer; coward and mountebank. He had cast a spell upon the most powerful sorcerer ever to have walked Elda’s hills, and reduced him to – what? He pushed himself cautiously to his feet and gazed at the place where the mage had stood. An egg? A seed? He could not even see what was left of the Master at all.
Pride swelled in his chest; pride, followed by a sudden, unexpected sorrow. He turned his face up to the battlements to see what had been made there of his strange victory; but the spectators gazed back, bemused, a little dissatisfied. Then someone shouted, but he could not catch the words. He screwed his face up and they shouted again; it seemed a warning, or an admonition. He turned; and was shocked to see the Master resurrecting himself, clothing, sword and all: rising up from the muddy grass to advance upon him with an expression of murderous loathing.
From the castle walls, men began to shout and women wailed: where moments before it had seemed to them that Ravn Asharson had fallen and – well, vanished into the ground, now the northern king was on his feet, sword poised for a killing thrust; and their lord was weaponless, and seemingly unmanned.
Virelai knew then that he was going to die and that all the magic in the world could not save him.
‘You cannot kill me, Virelai. Haven’t I told you that a thousand times and more? Though I am most impressed by the increase in your skills since you left my tutelage. Where is the cat, I wonder? Did you rip the magic out of Bëte, and leave the poor beast gutted for the crows?’
When there was no response to this, the mage took another step towards Virelai, till the pale sorcerer could feel the old man’s breath upon him.
‘And I wonder,’ said the Master, his eyes the cold blue of deep ice, ‘whether I can kill you. Is it, indeed, possible to kill a thing which never lived? Now there’s a question for the philosophers.’ He watched Virelai’s face with delicious curiosity, but saw only puzzlement there. Excellent: the boy had not the least idea of what he was talking about.
‘Did I ever tell you how I came upon you, Virelai?’
‘As a baby. In the southern hills,’ the sorcerer quavered. ‘Left out to die. You took me to your stronghold to raise me as your own . . .’
‘My own. Ah yes, I made you my own.’ He scanned Virelai’s face. ‘Made you, you hear me, boy?’
Virelai felt something inside him break. ‘What do you mean?’
The Master narrowed his eyes.‘You look different, Virelai.’ He squinted, came closer. ‘You are different. Not so fishlike and wan. Quite hale, in fact. And that’s surely against nature: away from the source you should have crumbled away to naught by now.’
‘Crumbled?’ Horrible suspicions began to itch at his skull. He remembered how his skin had begun to dry and flake, how he had sought Alisha Skylark’s aid, how her unguents had held back the process. And he remembered how she had touched him with the death-stone . . . ‘What source?’ he asked sharply.
‘Why, me, you fool! And Sanctuary: the source of magic.’
A chill ran through Virelai then.
‘I am a thing of magic?’
‘Oh yes: did I never tell you?’
Virelai stared down at his own hand, flexing impotently at his side. It looked real enough: pale of skin, slightly freckled by the southern sun, the knuckles swollen, the blond hairs sprouting at the wristbone. Then he looked back at the mage.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said softly. ‘I’m as real as any man.’
‘I ripped you from her belly. You were half-formed, a fishy thing, all bulbous eyes and limbs like fins. I would have left you there to expire, on the desert ground; but she implored me. I did it for her, to begin with,’ he mused. ‘Strange really, how even as she lay there, bleeding into the sand, she had a mother’s instinct. You wouldn’t expect that from a goddess. But when I took her magic from her, she forgot about you. She forgot about everything. Even herself.
‘It’s a disgusting tale, really. You were the spawn of incest – her brother’s brat. They have no morality, these deities, none at all. They count themselves apart from the rest of us, you see: different, better. I proved her wrong: you should thank me, really, for I made sure you would never repeat the brother’s transgression, nor be as a man with her. And then, since you were worse than nothing, I took you for myself. I filled you with my magic: I gave you life. You were my greatest experiment, Virelai: but see how you repaid me!
‘Now here we stand, father and son, as it were; battling it out for supremacy. The way of the world, over and over: human nature will always revert to type. Not that either of us are very human!’ He barked a vicious laugh.
‘No fight left in you, boy? Ah, you lost your sword: that is a shame. Still, you fought bravely while you were able. Well, the best man has won!’
‘Mother, save me—’ Virelai whispered. He stood there, swaying, his vision filling with a swarm of black flecks. Then he felt his knees begin to buckle.
From her tower-room window, the Rose of the World looked down upon the battlefield far below, drawn from her bed by the pull of sorcery. She saw the contest play itself out in two planes of existence, the apparent and the magical. She saw how Virelai was sent out to face the man she had known as her husband, and how he defended himself as well as he could with the small spellcraft he could muster; then she saw the mage who had imprisoned her in his ice-world stride onto the field. That was what had fully woken her, in the end. There was a rage inside her when she saw him at last, that wicked old man, stumbling out across the field, draped in the guise of the handsome northern king, for all the world like some legendary hero. She saw how with a swiftly spoken spell of seeming the Master confused the onlooke
rs so that they missed the clumsy transition as he took Ravn Asharson’s place. But no detail did she miss: how the mage placed his hand on the Eyran’s breastplate and with a sleep-spell quelled his fighting spirit, just enough to render him unconscious and transfer him into the arms of a tall Eyran with hollow eyes and a ravaged face, who dragged her husband from the sward. She saw how Rahe had to touch the greatsword with a spell of lightness in order to heft it at all; saw the veins bulge blue and knotted in his weedy old arms; saw his eyes alight with killing fervour as he bore down upon his erstwhile apprentice.
The chimeras bothered her not at all, though they clearly terrified poor Virelai. Could he not see they were only illusions, that the old man was not strong enough in his powers to become the beasts he presented so ferociously? Apparently not. She watched as the old man hooked Virelai’s ankle out from under him; she watched as Virelai fought back with magic; as the mage flowed back through his own self and out the other side.
And she saw, for seconds only, but seconds which burned themselves on her retinas and her memory, the man the mage had once been, long centuries ago – tall and redhaired, hawk-nosed and arrogant: a king among men. That was how he had looked the day he had entrapped her brother, cast him down in a sorcerous stupor and imprisoned him deep in the volcano. The day he had caught her and bound her, all unknowing as she was of the ways of trickery, with a clever net of spellcraft; the day he had torn her clothes from her and raped her on the sand. Before he had stared at her belly and—
Words drifted up to her. Strange words. Sad words.
Mother, save me . . .
She gazed down at the combatants, watched as Virelai crumpled to the ground in a dead faint. The Master advanced upon him, grinning. He grabbed up a handful of the sorcerer’s long white hair, knotted his fist in it, brought Virelai’s chin off the ground . . .
