The Ryel Saga: A Tale of Love and Magic

by Carolyn Kephart

Above the dirty cowl the robber's hideous eyes met the wysard's in a hard lock. "I don't know nothin' about dead people, magus." He quivered, then, as if from either the drugs' grip or the night's chill, and turned away.

  Ryel caught the stranger's sleeve, angrily. "Who told you Lady Belphira was dead?"

  "What, are you goin' to bring her back? That'd be a sweet trick, sorcerer." The robber struck away the wysard's hand. "I'm tired of talkin'." He fell back onto the sand, his eyes shut. "Go 'way." Another moment and he was unconscious.

  Ryel gazed down at the motionless figure. "So this is what became of you," the wysard whispered.

  He knew beyond any doubt that he had found Guyon Desrenaud. He knew by report the uncommon stature, now uncloaked and at length in the sand; knew by instinct a brother in the Art, or at least a half-brother; knew by his heart's certainty the man who had gone through fire to save his life. But he would make absolutely sure nonetheless. He would see for himself how much remained of the beauty that had stunned Agenor's imperial court, and been the admiration of the North.

  With greatest care Ryel unwrapped the Shrivrani headcloth, unveiling the face; at once recoiled.

  A solid mass of sores and suppurating growths covered the face above and below the eyes. The nose was all but eaten away, the ears were no more than stumps. The disfigured features twitched as if in sudden sharp torment, and the encrusted slash that was the mouth grimaced, revealing white teeth gleaming and even, horribly incongruous amid the pustulent degeneration. Sickened, Ryel uncovered the rest of the head, only to find the same leprous growth enveloping the scalp, crowding out the hair save for random hanks dark with dirt.

  Quelling his disgust with Markulit stoicism, Ryel sat back and studied the ghastly flesh-wreckage that had been Guy Desrenaud—but only for a time, before other concerns made him stand up and walk down to the water, stopping only when the tide-rush reached his ankles. At his back he could feel the raging fire on the crags, while before him the moon was rising out of the sea, pale and cold. His raw pain flinched at the salt of the sea, and the sky crushed him.

  A thread of mist whirled downward out of the air, and another upward out of the sea. The conjoined vapors took on a semblance vaguely manlike, weirdly enlivened by two glowing gem-purple eyes.

  Ryel watched, stupidly amazed. "Pukk?"

  The flickering entity seemed to incline what approximated its head.

  "What do you want, vapor?"

  "Tos ervy ou."

  "You're too late. Michael's dead."

  "No."

  Ryel trembled, but at last with hope. "What do you mean?"

  "Th eredhai redone didn otburn."

  Ryel stared into the srih's refulgent violet eye-spaces. "But he was—" Suddenly, electrically, the wysard remembered. "Yes. Of course. Fire and rock cannot harm him. They're his elements." But then he looked back at the burning ruin, his sorrow sea-vast. "Still, it's too late. Whole as Michael's body might be, it's dead."

  Pukk wavered in contradiction. "Hel ives. Heis inMar kul."

  Ryel started. "Markul? But how?"

  "Ibrou ghthim the re. Toyour ho use. Helie sin yo urbed."

  The wysard felt his mouth falling open. "My bed? Why in the name of All did you put a dead man in my bed, instead of in the Jade Tower where his body would be preserved? He'll only decay, and then—"

  "Ther edhair edone's bod ywilln otrot," Pukk said in his infuriating burr.

  The wysard stood immobile, the tide lapping at his knees. He felt the sand sliding beneath him, and fought to stay upright. He understood. "Michael Essern is in the Void."

  To the wysard's knee-weakening relief, the wraith seemed to nod.

  "But how?"

  The wraith guttered. "Ask Th eOne Im mor tal."

  For a long moment Ryel felt intolerably stupid. "The One Immortal," he whispered at last, dazed by the enlightenment. "Riana of Zinaph, of the First of Markul?"

  "Wha toth er?"

  Not even Pukk's insolence could shake the wysard's amazement. "Then all the fables were true." But then indignation overcame awe. "And if she indeed exists, why did she not come to my help long before? Why did she not stop Dagar from the outset?"

  Pukk guttered indifferently. "Askth eIm mor talOne."

  "Tell me what became of Dagar," Ryel demanded. "Is he in the Void, too?"

  "No," Pukk breathed.

  Ryel let his head fall slowly back as he let out a breath that seemed to have been trapped in him for years. "Then he's dead. At last."

  "No tde ad."

  The cold air of the night prickled in Ryel's nape as his head snapped to attention again. "Not dead? Then Dagar has … has entered the body of another?"

  Pukk again appeared to give assent.

  "By every—whose body? And where?"

  Pukk made no reply.

  Faint though the waves ebbed around his knees, Ryel felt as if they would knock him down. "Is he still as strong?"

  "No tas bef ore," Pukk replied. The wraith hovered indecisively. "Doyo uwis hanyth ingelse?"

  "No," Ryel said, heartily tired of Pukk's conversational style. "I want nothing, you—you blur. Vanish."

  Pukk melted into the moonlight. Wearily Ryel returned to the fire. Wrapping Edris' cloak about him, he sat down next to Desrenaud. He felt very cold, and without thinking he commanded the fire to burn brighter. When it would not, he resignedly gathered an armful of sticks and threw them on, and for a very long time sat looking into first the blaze, then the embers, reliving the battle of the day, the horror of the night. He was hungry and athirst and shivering, but those bodily sufferings were as nothing to his mind's torment.

  "It isn't over," he whispered.

  It might never be over. Dagar might survive forever, far past Ryel's lifetime. Might eternally slip from one embodiment to the next, moving from strength to strength, regaining his lost powers, re-wreaking his old evil.

  "You might have stopped him, Lady Riana," the wysard murmured, rage heating his heart. "But apparently your existence is far too rarefied to concern itself with anything as inconsiderable as a World—much less a life risked to save it."

  Ryel would not think of what might have been, or what had to be. He lay down and dissolved into sleep, the sea crashing in his ears.

  *****

  Soft kisses nuzzled his face. He kissed back.

  "Diara." But the Sovrena of Destimar never had such furry lips or large teeth. Opening his eyes, Ryel wakened wide.

  "Jinn!" Wrapping his arms around her neck, he let her pull him upright as he buried his face in her mane, dizzy with consolation. "I never thought to see you again, little beauty. I was sure I'd lost you."

  Even as he rejoiced he examined her for signs of harm, and to his relief found none. He then searched through her saddlebags and ascertained, to his strong surprise, that nothing was missing. Only then did he remember Desrenaud, and realize that the Northerner was gone. The beach up and down was empty. Ryel's next action was to check his journeybag and see how much had been stolen. But everything was where it should be, except the phial of celorn, some of his gold coin, and a flask of Dryven whisky, gift of Dame Gwynned.

  You've gone back to Ormala, Ryel thought. But you require my help now, as much as I needed yours there in the castle.

  The last thing the wysard wanted was to track down Desrenaud in that infamous City, but he could not desert the man who had saved his life; the man that Belphira Deva loved, and that Lady Gwynned called grandson, and that Jorn Alleron deemed a hero. Shutting his eyes, the wysard cleared his mind completely. With every breath he drew he felt the strength of his Art return to him, embuing his body with fresh life, his mind with new-found force. He suddenly realized that he was very hungry, and in killing need of chal.

  "Breakfast," he said, and a few words more. In another moment a Steppes feast appeared magnificently dished on a low table of precious wood, amidst a bright island of soft carpets and cushions. More than a little pleased with this lavish display of his srihs' obedience,
Ryel put all thought of the future from him, and enjoyed his first food in days with leisurely pleasure. The air was already warm, deliciously fresh, and only once or twice did a whiff of smoldering cinders remind Ryel of the annihilated castle at his back, and the events of the night before.

  "Try your worst, bone-lord," the wysard said, pouring another cup of chal, stretching in well-fed contentment. "You couldn't have me, and you won't get Michael. I'll bring him back, along with Edris."

  The Red Essern's claymore had been left behind by Desrenaud along with Ryel's belongings, and in all reverence the wysard drew it from its sheath and read the inscription aloud, rendering its noble runes into approximate rhyme.

  "Earth for my resting, my rescue and freeing,

  Water to wash my sick spirit of stain,

  Fire to drive out the dross of my being,

  Air sweet to breathe when I breathe it again.

  Then will my heart's thirst at last know a quenching,

  Then will my soul be as steel tried in flame,

  Then will I face my self's storm without flinching,

  Then will I know my true land, my real name."

  Silently Ryel remembered the red wysard, his brother even to the blood. "This weapon I will return to you, Michael Essern," he said. "And may our next fight be a friendly one." Closing his eyes he lifted the gleaming blade in both hands, and touched its incised flat to his forehead.

  *****

  Even with Jinn's swiftness Ryel did not reach Ormala until nearly dark, but long before that he had detected its near presence by the greasy gray-brown pall that hung in the air miles down the coast. As he drew ever nearer to the City, he remembered all that he had heard concerning it.

  Markul the Good lay mist-hidden and high-walled in trackless steppe; Elecambron the Cruel stood proud and cold, moated in the midst of a great frozen sea that swallowed up into its icy depths every interloper not aspirant or adept; Tesba the Gentle concealed itself in lush jungle rendered impenetrable by both nature and Art. But Ormala the Vile welcomed all comers; Ormala the Foul embraced every charlatan, every mountebank; Ormala the Unclean gathered to itself the scum and offscourings of the Art's desecration. The Ormalan Art was a farrago of base cunning and blatant deceit, cheap fakery and mumming sham. Lacking the skill necessary to command spirit-servants of the Outer World to serve their needs, ignorant of any Mastery, incapable of Crossing, the adepts of Ormala—or rather inepts, as they were scornfully termed by the other Cities—were constrained to other shifts, all of them low. Of all the Art-brotherhood only Ormalans trafficked with the World, dealing in love-philtres, elixirs of youth, communications with the dead, predictions of the future, alchemy, necromancy, astrology, flummeries of cards and crystals and candles—gross impostures that either enriched their practitioners or destroyed them, with the latter fate most frequent. By reason of their flagrant turpitude, Ormalan sorcerers were regularly persecuted and done to death in the World; adepts of the other three Cities either avoided dealings with mere men, or had Art enough to evade any threat.

  And Ormala's promiscuity did not confine itself to debasers of the Art. Many were the World's offscourings who made their home in its reeking alleyways—escaped felons, faithless mercenaries, swindlers and rogues of every species, prostitutes of every kind, all of them enslaved by drugs mortally dangerous, drugs for which they would commit any treachery however atrocious or obscene. Their prey of choice were the deluded or desperate folk who came to the City seeking supernatural remedies for their hardships and maladies; and such easy victims were only too plentiful. For these and many other reasons Ormala was considered by both the World and the Art-brotherhood to be one of the most dangerous places on earth, more perilous even than the beast-infested plague-ridden southern swamplands of the Azm Chak.

  "You've been strong to survive it, Guy Desrenaud," Ryel thought as he rode ever closer to the grimy skyline. A contrary breeze blew the smell of the town to him, and he stiffened at the stench.

  Ormala had no walls or gates, but sprawled raggedly along the dirty littered oceanside whose waterline was marked by foam as greasily discolored as the air that hung above the City. Only a few people were on the beach: a woman mutteringly raving, her wild sunken eyes fixed on the sun now dissolving in miasmatic fog; three thugs in drunken brawl; an old man picking among the refuse. A couple of starved black dogs raced along the filthy foam, yipping and howling.

  Ryel entered the City guarded by strong charms to protect himself and Jinn. From his saddle's vantage-point he scanned the streets and their denizens, searching for Desrenaud. But he encountered no tall veil-masked brigand among the crowded squalid lanes; only debased and inhuman ugliness exposed without shame, and hopeless despair nakedly vulnerable.

  Deeper into the City he went, deeper into the misery and the evil. In a corner two ruffians tormented a young girl, grabbing at the bundle she clung to weeping and pleading. At once Ryel leapt down from Jinn and drove the attackers away with his sword-flat and a few Art-words, then turned to the girl.

  "Are you hurt?"

  "No." She thrust the bundle at him. "But my baby. They killed my baby—"

  She burst into hysterical tears. Gentle and horrified Ryel took the limp little burden from her; examining it only a moment before covering it up again. It was grotesquely malformed, beyond any help; death had come as a deliverance, and all too clearly had come several days before.

  "You must save him," she said; and her eyes were mad. "Bring him back to life. Heal him."

  "There is nothing I or anyone else can do."

  She snatched the dead child from him; and now her crazed eyes glittered, but not with grief. "Then do you have any drugs?"

  He stared at her. "Drugs?"

  "Mandragora," she said impatiently. "Hrask. Quiabintha. I'll take whatever you've got."

  "I don't—"

  "I'll do anything you want." And she named some of those things, every one of them appalling, until Ryel waved her to silence.

  "I know you're in pain," he said. "But the drugs you want will only make it worse. I can heal you."

  "I don't need your healing," she snapped. "I need hrask. Xantal."

  "No." Gently he laid his hand on her shoulder. "Only let me—"

  Her features, a horrible mixture of fresh girl and haggard trull, twisted in hatred, and she slapped his hand away, cursing foully. Before Ryel could stop her she darted away down the alley, the infant corpse wedged under her arm like a dirty packet of rags.

  So this is the death after life, the wysard thought, numbly watching. A hand clutched at his sleeve and he turned about, ready to strike. But the one who had touched him cowered away with a placating grin, ducking his head and blinking.

  "Sorry. Sorry. No harm." With a wriggling bow the creature—it was a man, Ryel knew, but the rattish look of its pointed teeth and sharp long nose and recessive brow and chin was disconcerting—sidled near. "That wasn't her brat, you know. She found it dead in the gutter. Used it to elicit pity. That's her way. A depraved child."

  The wysard put his hand to his dagger. "What do you want?"

  The stranger grinned again, frantically servile now. "It's not what I want. It's what you want."

  "I don't understand," Ryel replied shortly. "Let me pass."

  "Secrets of the universe," the other hissed, peering about as if for spies. "You know."

  The wysard was about to dismiss the fellow as mad, but a glance at the rags he wore made him hesitate. They were Ormalan robes, tattered now and stained, but for all their squalor recognizable as the garb of an Art-brother. At the neck of the robe the flat head of a viper protruded, regarding Ryel with vicious black beads of eyes.

  Ryel looked from it to his accoster, loathing both. "Secrets, you say. Tell me one."

  The Ormalan's rat-eyes twinkled, ugly in that pockstrewn pallor. "They cost. Five gold pieces for each."

  "Too high," Ryel said, turning away.

  The stickily furtive fingers clutched his arm once more. "Wonde
rs. All you've ever dreamed of. Think of it. Four gold pieces only."

  Ryel considered. He had money enough, and this Ormalan might actually be offering something worth the buying. "Two."

  "Do I look a fool, sir? Two coins only, for treasures infinite?"

  Ryel turned away again. The Ormalan cursed most foully.

  "Rob me, then. Rob me blind, and blame it on your blue eyes. Two coins."

  Ryel shrugged wearily. "All right. Three." He handed over the money, which the Ormalan avidly snatched, squintingly assessed, and immediately pocketed.

  "Here. Don't let anyone see." Ryel felt something cool and smooth pressed into his hand. In another instant the Ormalan scurried away, his rags a-trail behind him as he rounded a corner.

  "Now what—" Ryel held the object up to view it clearer. It was a little slender tube of clear glass, half-full of amber liquid like honey. The phial was made in a single piece, and to get at its contents Ryel would have to break off its top. "Some unclean deadly bane, no doubt," he said. "I'll save it for a special occasion."

  He dropped it into his coat-pocket and swung onto Jinn's back, progressing deeper into the City. No one else challenged him as he progressed, although the atmosphere of danger deepened with every step. Faces became more rodent-like and ravaged the further he went, and many a shifting eye fell covetously upon his Kaltiri blade and sleek horse; but no hand was so bold as to reach for either. The wysard's Art was like a bright light burning clean, driving all danger before him; and though danger skulked in every byway, and though each gang of carousers and blackguards held up its torches to his face, none offered him so much as a word, but stood back in silence as he passed.

  "Yes. You're all at bay now," he murmured to himself. "But for how long, before your Master returns?"

  Strident music caught his ear, and then the uproar of coarse voices joining in song coarser still, braying from the interior of what appeared to be a drinking-haunt. Ryel would have passed it by, had he not observed one of the horses tethered there. It was a great black hunter, and blazoned on its saddle-skirts was a full-rayed golden sun set in a disk of green, half-obscured by a seemingly deliberate layer of dirt.