The Sword of the South - eARC

by David Weber

  She shook her head irritably. The reds were dangerous. Unlike their lesser brethren, they understood the wild magic in their blood. They could even use it to a limited extent, so it was possible a red could block her perceptions. But why? Unless it was because of that damned black!

  Then again, what had actually happened was unimportant. She needed a pretext to demand more aid, and the dragon might provide it. She wasn’t the cat-eyed wizard’s equal, but neither was she a fool. If he needed her alive long enough to lure Wencit into whatever trap he’d set, he might at least give her additional protection against the dragons in the meantime. And spells strong enough for that might prove useful against Wencit, too.

  She nodded. She would report what her watchers had seen. If he became nervous enough to aid her, well and good, yet if he refused, she lost nothing.

  “You may go, Tenart. This time.”

  She added the threat almost absently, for her mind was busy and her eyes were dreamy as she pondered her next action.

  The guard captain backed away quickly, heaving a great—but very silent—sigh of relief for his escape. The decision to disturb her hadn’t come easily. In fact, only the fact that death would have been certain if he’d failed to deliver a message which later turned out to have been important had sent him to her. Now he wiped his clammy forehead and breathed deep. Life had been so much calmer when her father was alive! He considered desertion, but once more put the temptation aside. He knew too much. If he ran and was lucky, he’d end on an assassin’s blade. If he was unlucky…

  He shivered and fled the dreadful garden. Phrobus only knew what deviltry the baroness was embarked upon, and Tenart devoutly hope the Dark One would keep it to Himself. He was a simple soldier, he was, caught in a wizard’s web through no wish of his own and sick of it into the bargain. What he really needed was a stoup of wine, and he hurried off to find it.

  Behind him, Wulfra walked slowly to her tower and her waiting gramerhain.

  * * *

  Chernion woke with sunlight burning her eyelids and lay motionless, searching her memory and setting her identity in place before she showed any sign of awareness. Then her eyes opened slowly and she stared up into a canopy of lacy leaves. Elderberry and willows stirred in the breeze, throwing wispy shadows over the moss on which she lay, and she blinked and turned her head.

  Kenhodan looked down at her, his head upside down from her prone position. Her eyes widened in memory, and she threw off her covering blanket and rolled to her feet with one hand on her dagger. She rose cat-quick and angry, her eyes narrowed, and half an inch of steel scraped from her scabbard.

  “Good morning, Elrytha,” he said calmly.

  “Don’t waste your good mornings on me!” she snarled, easing more dagger from the sheath. “I’ve had a belly full of wizard’s tricks!”

  “Wizards?” Kenhodan shook his head. “I’m no wizard, Border Warden.”

  “Faugh! You had me fooled—I’ll admit it! But if you’re not Carnadosa’s own, I’ll eat this!”

  She whipped the dagger free and faced him across its keen-edged menace.

  “That would give you indigestion,” he said, sitting back on his heels and apparently completely at ease.

  “Not as much of a bellyache as it’ll give you if you press me!” she spat, eyeing him suspiciously. Yet even as she snarled, she realized this smiling man wasn’t the Kenhodan she’d thought she was coming to know. The old Kenhodan would have been hurt and apologetic; this man wasn’t. Had his diffidence been as much a mask as her own borderer’s role?

  “Then I certainly won’t press you,” he said. “I only thought you might be shaken by your experiences. It seemed best to try to explain, if you were.”

  “I want no explanations!” she flared. “You caught me in a spell, but you won’t do it again!”

  “A spell?” He plucked a grass stem and chewed it thoughtfully. “I suppose I did,” he acknowledged after a moment, “and for that I beg your pardon. But it wasn’t intentional. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to try to explain what happened.”

  “Hah!” she snorted, but his posture was eloquently unthreatening, and she let herself relax slightly in response. Her dream’s terror was less real in this peaceful sunlight, and her predatory instincts told her one fright wasn’t enough reason to throw aside the power she sensed Kenhodan offered.

  “What I played,” Kenhodan said very carefully, “is a very old piece of music called ‘The Fall of Hacromanthi.’ I don’t remember when I learned it, but it’s about the end in Kontovar, and apparently it has some very strange powers of its own. Powers which affect anyone who hears it.”

  “Sorcery,” Chernion spat. “You’re a wizard.”

  “I’m not, and I don’t know if its sorcery or not.”

  “Men who cast spells are wizards,” she said flatly.

  “Only if they do it intentionally and knowingly,” Kenhodan argued.

  “Don’t fence with me! Either you cast a spell, or you didn’t—and I say you did!”

  Kenhodan recognized the justice of her accusation and tugged an earlobe as he sought an equally just defense.

  “Let me put it this way. You heard a piece of music I’d really rather not play at all, but it was the one I had to play when Torfrio demanded a tune as his price for carrying us over the river. In that sense, I suppose a spell was cast on me even more than on you. I’m sorry it was unpleasant for you, but it was unpleasant for me, as well—and almost as much of a surprise to me, come to that.”

  “It was a vile trick,” she said levelly.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” he said softly. “I don’t play tricks like that on my friends, Elrytha. The visions that song opens are…horrible.” He met her eyes levelly. “They’re different for different people, I think. For myself, I see visions of the Fall itself. For Bahzell, it’s mostly memories of his own battles—and the gods know they’ve been bad enough! Wencit won’t say what he sees, which is his right, and no one will ask what you saw, either. I promise.”

  He seemed so earnest she had to believe him, although she had no intention of telling him her own visions had relived all of her assassinations. She shuddered inwardly. The last part of her dream, when her victims had risen to pursue her with Ashwan at their head, she would tell no one, not even herself.

  She glared at him for another tense, endless minute. Then she sighed and re-sheathed the dagger slowly.

  “All right,” she said finally. “I believe you, and I’ll accept your apology. You’re a good companion and a better fighter, and I can forgive anything short of attempted rape when that’s true. But if you ever—” she held up a forefinger “—and I mean ever—do that again, I’ll skin you out to cover my saddle! Is that clear?”

  “Clear and daunting,” he assured her. His lips quivered, and her own humor roused in answer. Her eyes danced as morning sun and birdsong drove away the last of her creeping terror, and he smiled. “And I truly am sorry, Elrytha. I’d never willingly cause you unhappiness.”

  She stared at him, then looked quickly away. Surely Sharnā wouldn’t play that sort of trick on her! She had no use for such emotional claptrap as friendship. Yet his words had somehow pierced her armor of expediency.

  She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. Ah, no! Surely not. It was impossible—it couldn’t be!—for her to become emotionally involved with a target. The very thought shocked her, and she fought for mental balance as she tried to understand what had happened to her.

  No, she realized abruptly. Not to her. The change was in Kenhodan; the only change in her was the way she reacted to his change. He’d always been a powerful personality, whether he’d realized it himself or not. Now that inner strength was even more focused, with a magnetism that reached even into an assassin’s heart, and it was frightening to contemplate such power. But her innate hard headedness couldn’t evade the conclusion…or the worse one that she liked the change.

  He rose and bowed ironically as that bittersweet pa
ng of realization stabbed her. He extended an arm to her, and almost against her will she took it in a whimsical imitation of a court lady, bestowing a half curtsy upon him in return. Her eyes laughed suddenly, with a warmth foreign to her, and the two of them picked their way from her thicketed bower to find the others.

  Neither smelled the pipe smoke drifting from the nearby willows, so neither glanced in that direction to see Wencit…or the pain in his eyes as he watched them go.

  * * *

  Cat eyes slitted thoughtfully and their owner whistled tunelessly while he considered Wulfra’s latest plaint. Strange things were afoot, he conceded; things he hadn’t anticipated and for which his plans hadn’t allowed. That was only to be expected, of course, and trying to allow for all contingencies led to clumsiness, which was why he normally allowed a certain…elasticity to his strategies. Too many loopholes, unfortunately, could be deadly, and he’d seen through Wulfra’s half-truths to the heart of her report. He understood her motives and dismissed them, yet what she’d reported might still be worth his attention.

  A dragon had crossed the Dragon Ward. That was rare and nothing to take lightly, but it wasn’t unheard of, either, and his mind ranged the roster of red dragons as Wulfra’s had. Torcrach or Torfrio, he decided, and he had no wish to engage that father and son pair just yet. Dragons had long memories, and it had perhaps been unwise of the Carnadosans to compel their service in the war. Still, the Dragon Ward penned them inside their safe little haven in the Scarthū Hills, powerless to harm anyone outside it except in direct and personal self-defense. Best to take a few additional precautions, but as long as the ward stood, the threat was slight, even from Torfrio.

  Yet even allowing for that, there really might have been a display of wild magic north of Torfo, and that bothered him, for Wencit was the only wild wizard. It was entirely possible Wulfra’s watcher might have misunderstood what he’d seen, but it was just as possible he hadn’t. So it could indeed have been Wencit, but why should he risk exposing himself that way? He’d covered himself with a glamour he knew Wulfra couldn’t possibly pierce, but he also knew about the existence of the baroness’ network of watchers. Why give away his position with a burst of wild magic not even a half-blind soldier without a trace of talent for the art could miss seeing after he’d gone to such lengths to deny her any knowledge of his whereabouts? Yet if it hadn’t been Wencit, what had it been?

  He stopped whistling and turned to a bookshelf, running a fingertip down the tooled spines of books which had survived the Fall itself. Many of them had come from the personal library of the first Lord of Carnadosa himself, and the wards protecting that collection had been strong enough to stand even in the face of the White Council’s final, despairing counter stroke. True, some of them were a little singed around the edges, but that hadn’t affected their contents, and he perched on the edge of his desk as he found the one he sought and opened it with the sort of reverence it deserved.

  Dragons were wild magic, and there was no doubt a red with the proper training and strength could shield himself against almost any wizard’s scrying. In fact, he had half a memory…

  He flipped through the index to the entry he’d thought he recalled, and his lips curled in amusement as he found it and turned to the proper page. His eyebrows quirked as he scanned the text, and confirmed his fragmentary memory. It was even more…explicit than he’d remembered, and his smile grew broader as he considered the best way to make use of it. Should he contact Wulfra and read her a brief treatise on the mating habits of dragons? It would certainly be amusing, and it might even explain the display in Kolvania. Even if it didn’t, it could be made to, and suggesting that one of the reds had sought a partner from beyond the ward would give him a reason to refuse her any further power.

  He resumed his whistling as he mentally composed his little lecture, weighing word choices carefully in search of the ones which would extract the maximum entertainment from the situation.

  * * *

  “Why are we heading north?” Chernion asked. Afternoon had stretched its weary arms over them as they rode, and her question broke a comfortable silence.

  “I have my reasons, Border Warden,” Wencit replied cheerfully.

  She waited, but he said no more, and when she eyed him askance he looked back with a sardonic grin. Damn him! She no longer had the patience or desire to play games, for she sensed a crisis approaching behind this false calm, and she was ill prepared to meet it. There were too many ambiguities still, too many hints of events sliding towards cataclysmic confrontation, and her own ambivalence over Kenhodan was more unsettling than she cared to admit even to herself.

  “And those reasons are?” she asked sweetly, hiding her fuming self-anger at the way she’d risen to the bait he’d trolled so skillfully past her. And her matching anger at him for giving her no choice.

  “First,” he said after a moment, “Wulfra has more than arcane watchdogs, and her watchers are certainly straining their eyes for us at this moment. We’re no more than twenty leagues from her, and I want to skirt the areas they can see.”

  “And secondly?” she prompted impatiently, thirty seconds later, when he showed no sign of continuing.

  “And secondly will become clear in time…Elrytha.”

  She heard the bite as he used her assumed name, and it took all of her hard earned skill to simply nod in acceptance. It was almost in the open between them now, but not quite, and she understood his warning. She had far more to hide than he did, and she must accept his secrets or see her own exposed to Bahzell and Kenhodan…at which point she would cease to be a problem for Wencit of Rūm ever again.

  Well, let him look to himself. There was clearly a reason he hadn’t unmasked her, and that reason—whatever it was—might prove his undoing rather than hers. Some people kept adders as pets, but the pleasure of owning the snakes made them no less deadly. The thought pleased her, and she smiled sweetly at the wizard as she reminded herself her fangs were sharp when the moment came to show them. Let Wencit of Rūm remember that!

  * * *

  The cat-eyed wizard watched his crystal with silent admiration despite his amusement. Wulfra lay in a canvas chair atop her keep, naked in the sunlight, and he had to admit she was a fine figure of a woman. What a pity.

  His viewpoint darted down to probe the cavern of the sword, and he noted that she’d put still more effort into the trap spells between the maze and the cavern proper. That was good—but the presence of her gramerhain in the sword chamber was bad, especially in light of her sunbathing.

  He’d spent years studying Wulfra’s habits, learning to get inside her mind and thoughts, and because he had, he knew exactly what she was thinking now. It made sense for her to move her command post closer to the sword, yet her decision to soak up all the sun she could argued that she meant to move in soon and remain there for the duration, and that gave one to think.

  She hadn’t enjoyed his homily on dragon breeding, though she’d tried to hide her fury. But suppose…just suppose she planned to move into the cavern to be certain she and Wencit did meet face-to-face. Given the balance of strength, the cat-eyed wizard had expected her to stay as far from Wencit as possible, but what if she wanted to communicate with the wild wizard before they engaged? She was scarcely the cat-eyed wizard’s equal, but that didn’t mean it was impossible for her to have learned—or guessed—far more about his true plans than he thought she had. It was entirely possible she’d learned something valuable enough she might actually hope to betray him in a bargain for her own life. Wencit wasn’t known for extending forbearance to anyone who violated his precious Strictures, but there was always a first time for anything. And if Wulfra truly had discovered something significant about the cat-eyed wizard’s own identity or intentions, she might well decide it was worth seeing if it would turn her into the exception to Wencit’s policy of obliterating any dark wizard who drew herself to his attention. After all, she’d be no deader afterward if she discovered that sh
e couldn’t convince him her information was worth her life, and under the circumstances, knowing she’d put a finger into his eye before she died would afford her a certain final pleasure.

  The cat eyes danced with silent laughter as they returned to the sunbathing sorceress. Poor Wulfra was so predictable! It really was a pity, he thought, eyeing her appreciatively. He could have used a full partner with her beauty and deviousness, if only her power had matched her ambition or her beauty. But it didn’t, which relegated her to the role of bait.

  It was such a shame. Still, it wouldn’t do to let her treachery succeed. He could kill her now, but that lacked subtlety and there was no way it could fail to make Wencit suspicious if he heard of it. Anyway, the poor dear was totally unaware of how he’d improved her spells in the cavern, or that he now controlled that particularly nasty piece of nastiness, not she. All he had to do was wait for the proper moment, and then—poof!—no more Wulfra…and possibly no more Wencit.

  He rocked with mirth and blanked the crystal with a gesture.

  * * *

  Kenhodan followed the elusive sound to the edge of a small but steep-sided hollow and blinked in surprise as he realized the humming was coming from Wencit. Somehow, hummed drinking songs and scandalous ditties about barmaids with an aversion to clothing weren’t something he associated with the mighty practitioner of sorcery from all the ancient tales. But apparently he would’ve been wrong about that, and the eyes which had blinked narrowed as he stepped over the edge of the hollow, slid to its bottom, and came face-to-face with a Wencit who was grinning. Not smiling; grinning.

  “What, if I may ask, is so amusing?” Kenhodan asked quietly as he slithered to a stop.

  “I beg your pardon?” Wencit broke off humming to raise an eyebrow.

  “I asked what’s amusing you so.”

  “Oh. I was just considering the nature of black wizards.”

  “That’s funny?”

  “No, but it is amusing, sometimes.”