by David Weber
“Amusing, he says!” Kenhodan shook his head and slid enough further down to sit, leaning against the bank opposite Wencit while he eyed the wizard sourly. “All they’re trying to do is kill us and—assuming I’ve got this right from all your hints and forbodings—conquer Norfressa and enslave every single person living on it. If that’s amusing, gods preserve us from anything you’d find hilarious!”
“Their acts are seldom amusing,” Wencit conceded, reaching into his pack for his pipe, “but the way they make their plans really is rather humorous, in a black sort of way.”
“Would you like to explain that?”
“Why not?”
The wizard took his time as he filled his pipe, tamped the tobacco with his thumb, put away his tobacco pouch, and snapped his fingers. A flame kindled at the end of his index finger, and he applied it to the pipe, drew deeply as he coaxed the tobacco alight, and—finally—expelled a sigh of smoke before he banished the flame from his hand.
“Wizards,” he said at last, “are extremely predictable when they’re black or white. The shades of gray can tax the imagination, but the black and white are easy, because any wizard’s decisions reflect—or are shaped by, if you will—his basic orientation. The trick is to figure out what data your opponent has. If you know what he knows, it’s fairly simple to deduce roughly what he’ll do with that knowledge.”
“I can see that…I think. But what makes that so amusing just now?”
“Watching black wizards in action, and they don’t come a lot blacker than Wulfra. They’re all convinced they’re vastly more subtle than any white wizard, and she and her allies are no exceptions to that rule.” He chuckled and blew a jet of smoke against the dimming sky. “I suppose they think that way because we always keep our promises, which is the main reason white wizards tend to be unwilling to make promises very often. On the other hand, it also accounts for the reasons we can trust our allies, but your typical black wizard will never truly understand that, because he equates cunning with treachery. He thinks you can’t be really cunning unless you’re planning to betray—or at least allowing for the virtual certainty of being betrayed by—others. It’s really rather sad, but every black wizard seems to be convinced deep inside that he personally invented treachery…or perfected it, at least.”
“And you find that amusing?”
“Certainly I do! Think of all the Carnadosans, every one of them scheming to betray the others and simultaneously spending half his energies simply guarding himself against counter treachery. Think of what they might achieve if only they trusted one another enough to really work together! Isn’t it amusing for them to cripple themselves trying to be ‘cunning’?”
“I suppose so,” Kenhodan admitted.
“It’s useful, too. They despise us for our honesty, but they don’t appreciate that honesty’s what lets us find those reliable allies of hours. And they can’t seem to grasp that we understand their viewpoint and include it in our own calculations. We’re such bluff, unimaginative sorts that they never suspect we might use their own treachery against them.”
“How?” Kenhodan asked curiously.
“One way’s to make it seem profitable for them to discard an ally for a temporary advantage. Another is to deny them information—or, even better, to feed them carefully chosen information. That’s risky, but sometimes it actually makes it possible to dictate their strategy without their ever realizing what you’ve done.”
“I suppose that is useful,” Kenhodan mused. “But treachery—even in an enemy—makes me uneasy. Treachery caused the Fall, after all.”
“No,” Wencit said softly, his amusement suddenly fled. “No, treachery wasn’t the root of the Fall…or not the only one, anyway. The real cause was complacency.”
Kenhodan’s eyebrows arched, and the wizard shrugged. It was a weary gesture, that of a man tired and worn but far from defeated, and he leaned back against the bank beside Kenhodan with a grim expression.
“You see, Kenhodan, the Strictures were never any sort of eternal natural law, and Ottovar and Gwynytha had no moral ‘right’ to create them in the first place. They did it without really consulting the other wizards of Kontovar at all, purely by virtue of their own power. Ultimately, creating them made their authority stronger, because their subjects knew only the Strictures stood between them and black sorcery, which is one reason the Ottovaran Empire lasted so long. And it’s true that the Strictures were built on their determination to protect others. Yet it’s also true that the Strictures were always artificial—an eye in a hurricane, but one which could endure only so long as it was made to endure, and that was something their descendants could forget only at their own peril, because not everyone wanted it to endure.
“In a very real sense, Ottovar and Gwynytha put every wizard into chains. They were right to do it, but denying someone the right to use his own abilities to their fullest, in the way that seems best to him, generates a terrible resentment. That’s true for any ability, but it’s even more true for wizards, because there’s a power, a passion like a fever, for those who can touch the art. It’s a compulsion, and not every wizard feels compelled to use his abilities for good. Even at the height of their empire, there were wizards who would have liked to be what we call ‘black’ and saw no reason—other than Ottovar and Gwynytha’s brute power—why they shouldn’t be exactly that.
“Ottovar and Gwynytha knew it, of course, which is why Ottovar gave Hahnal the Crown of Ottovar. His own ability to create the Strictures in the first place had stemmed from the fact that he was both wizard and warrior—and a wild wizard at that, which meant he was very long-lived. His heirs were much longer-lived than most humans, but they weren’t all going to be wizards, and he knew it. So he gave them the Crown, the major function of which was to detect black wizardry. When a black act was committed, the wearer of the Crown sensed it immediately and knew where it had occurred. Then Ottovar deeded the Council of Ottovar the Isle of Rūm as a center for study and teaching of the art, decreed that any wizard must be trained, vetted by a board of his peers, and licensed before he was permitted to practice the art at all. And then he required the Council to punish black sorcery with death under the direction of the Emperor.
“And it worked. In fact, it worked too well.”
“Where did they go wrong?” Kenhodan frowned in perplexity. “How could something like that work ‘too well’?”
“Easily, I’m afraid. The Crown was too successful, you see. Everyone knew it detected dark wizards before they wreaked major harm—even the Council knew that, and relied upon it for warning rather than developing other means of detection, until the realm’s security against black sorcery depended entirely upon the Crown.
“But the Crown had other powers. No device can scry a continent without producing side effects, and one of the Crown’s was that it gave the Emperor the ability to sense the very thoughts of those about him. In fact, unless he had an extremely powerful and well-trained personality, he couldn’t not read them. Worse, everyone knew that whenever the Emperor wore the Crown he was reading their thoughts, whether he wanted to or not.”
Wencit shook his head in the dusk.
“No one wants his thoughts known, no matter by whom. The most honest man has some memory he wishes kept secret, and who should blame him? There’s a reason the magi are carefully trained and sworn to avoid exactly that sort of intrusion, and the ability of any mage ever born to intentionally invade another’s thoughts pales into insignificance beside what the Crown did unintentionally on the head of anyone not strong enough and sufficiently well-trained in that strength to avoid it.
“During the first few centuries, that caused little trouble, because the memory of unchecked wizardry made the intrusion bearable, if not palatable. But time passed, memory and experience receded, and people who’d grown to adulthood under the Gryphon Throne’s protection and the rule of the Strictures gradually felt less threatened. It was understandable enough that, under those circum
stances, they’d become increasingly uneasy at having their secrets known, and the situation grew worse as Ottovar and Gwynytha’s blood thinned and the Ottovarans produced fewer rulers with the inherent talent or strength to control the effect.
“The inevitable happened, and it’s not really fair to blame the Ottovarans. I suppose it’s true they forgot the dangers their House had sworn itself to stand against, but they were scarcely alone in that. Eventually, as the centuries passed with no resurgence of the Wizard Wars, they decided they owed their subjects mental privacy and wore the Crown less and less often. Finally, they adopted the practice of reserving it solely for state occasions.
“And that was the beginning of disaster. As the Crown was worn less often, chances to violate the Strictures became more common and a handful of really evil practitioners sprang up. And they’d learned. They formed the Council of Carnadosa to match the Council of Ottovar, to train and discipline their own ranks, but where the Council of Ottovar limited the art to protect non-wizards, the Carnadosans enshrined the unlimited use of the art for the benefit of the minority who could command it.
“And the Council of Ottovar failed to detect them. The Council knew—knew—the Crown protected the entire Empire, even when that was no longer true. Yet it was almost true, for as long as the Crown was worn even occasionally, no dark act could be too blatant, lest it occur while the Crown happened to be on the Emperor’s head.”
Wencit paused to relight his pipe and sighed heavily.
“But great evil grows from small evils, Kenhodan, and the Carnadosans grew gradually stronger in secret. The Strictures chained them, but they worked and studied, planning for the day that would no longer be true. And finally they found a way to make that day come.”
His voice had become very soft, sad, his earlier amusement vanished.
“Emperor Cleres was a strong ruler, Kenhodan, and he suspected what was happening. He wore the Crown more often than it had been worn in the last two reigns combined, and he started the Council of Ottovar doing what complacency had stopped it from doing long since: perfecting other means of detecting black sorcery. But he was too late. The Carnadosans had gathered too much power and forged an alliance that was unholy in every sense of the word—one which combined every faction which hated the imperial authority: dark wizards, those who worshiped the Dark Gods, and—always—the powerful who cherished ambitions for still greater power. Three of the greatest nobles of the Ottovaran Empire defied the Emperor and rejected the Strictures, and civil war began in Kontovar.”
Kenhodan watched the wizard’s face in the gathering dusk and saw the anguish on his features. His wildfire eyes were wrung with pain, and he looked down into the glowing bowl of his pipe as if it were a gramerhain.
“And somehow—to this day I don’t know how—the Carnadosans committed the most heinous crime in Kontovar’s history. They stole the Crown of Ottovar and hid it so well that no living eye has seen it since. They couldn’t destroy it, for Ottovar had bound too much of the wild magic into its making. To destroy it would have released that magic, destroying not only those who released it but every wizard, warlock, and witch within thousands upon thousands of leagues. No one knew how many would have died, and no one dared find out.
“But they didn’t have to destroy it, for merely stealing it unleashed the Dark Lords in all their power. Cleres had named me Lord of the Council of Ottovar five years before the Crown was stolen, but that wasn’t long enough to repair our neglect, and we were handicapped by the Strictures. They weren’t, and they’d spent decades perfecting obscenely powerful offensive spells. We hadn’t, and it was all we could do to parry their arcane attacks, and we couldn’t—wouldn’t—recruit our armies as they recruited theirs: with spells of enslavement and summonings from the darkest corners of every hell. There seemed no end to the armies they could marshal and hurl against us, yet even then we might have held, but for the final treachery. I saw it coming. I knew it would happen, and I warned Cleres, but he refused to believe me.”
Wencit’s voice turned even softer, deeper.
“He had two sons, and the younger of them wanted the Gryphon Throne. He wanted it with a hunger that was a madness, and when the Crown was stolen, he joined the Carnadosans. He did more than join them. He was a great noble in his own right—Grand Duke of the Gryphon as his brother’s heir—and he took in his entire armed might to the side of the traitors. In the end, he sold his very name and soul to Carnadosa herself in return for the power of wild wizardry, and he—an Ottovaran, second in line for the throne—became the Lord of Carnadosa.”
Wencit rose slowly, standing like a dark, accusing silhouette against the fading light, and his flaming eyes burned down at Kenhodan.
“And so what had been a rebellion became a dynastic war between Ottovarans, each claiming the throne for his own. It weakened the imperial authority at the very moment when it needed its greatest strength, and the Empire of Ottovar crumbled. Not quickly, not overnight, but inexorably—unstoppably. And I watched it happen.”
He turned away in his pain, staring out into the night.
“You know how it ended, and what I did after the end. But the worst burden I bear, Kenhodan—the very worst burden of all—is to know that, faced with the same choices and the same knowledge, I would do it all—every single bitter, bloody, step of it—all over again.”
He stood very still, and Kenhodan shuddered inside as he finished in an agonized whisper.
“And knowing that, knowing you would kill millions yet again, allow those you loved as dearly as life itself to die yet again…that, my friend, is a weight to crush your very soul.”
Wencit walked away into the hum of night insects and the cries of night birds. He left Kenhodan alone, staring after him, humbled by the ancient wizard’s sorrow. The red-haired man longed to follow him, to comfort him, but what could ever comfort such pain?
The voices of the night twittered and buzzed about him, and Kenhodan could find no answer to that question.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Hidden Ways
Moonrise found the travelers once more on the move.
There wasn’t a great deal of conversation. Bahzell and Walsharno had the lead, moving well ahead of the others while their keener senses sought the easiest trail through the darkness in obedience to Wencit’s general directions. The two of them were too deeply linked as they focused on that responsibility to spend much time conversing with anyone else. Chernion, on the other hand, rode without speaking for reasons of her own, grimly resolved to avoid giving the wizard an opening for yet another of those disconcerting verbal jabs of his. Kenhodan rode in matching silence, but in his case, it was a silence born of compassion. Wencit seemed outwardly unaffected by their conversation, yet Kenhodan had come to know him too well. Somewhat to his own surprise, he realized he saw even deeper into the old wizard than Bahzell did, and he felt the pain lingering within him.
Eventually, however, they turned south once more and paused, resting the horses, as a heavy growth of trees loomed before them. The forest had risen slowly as they approached; now it was a dark, solid black mass like some ominous natural fortress entrenched across their path.
“I’m thinking we’d do better turning in and sleeping than traveling on in such as this, Wencit,” Bahzell said, gesturing at the trees while they listened to the wind-sigh and branch rustling of its nighttime breathing. “It’s not so very much even Walsharno and I could be seeing under those branches. We’ll likely break our necks—or a horse’s legs—if we’re after keeping on in the dark.”
“We won’t break anything,” Wencit retorted. “Unlike some people, I know where I’m going.”
“Which is more than I do,” Bahzell rumbled. “What about you, Border Warden? Would it happen you’re after knowing your way about these woods?”
“I’ve never traveled through them, but I’ve heard of them, and none of what I’ve heard is good,” Chernion replied shortly. “This is the Scarth Wood, and pe
ople who go into it don’t come out.”
“Nonsense,” Wencit said comfortably. “What you mean is that people who try to go through it don’t come out. The Dragon Ward lies right down its middle. That’s enough to provide all sorts of…accidents for anyone who tries to cross it, and the dragons tend to exterminate anyone who actually gets past it to intrude upon them.”
“This is the Scarth Wood?” Bahzell asked, gazing thoughtfully at the ancient trunks before them.
“It is. It’s also our path to Torfo. Follow us.”
He touched Byrchalka lightly on the neck and the courser pressed forward into the total blackness beneath the towering trees. Walsharno cocked his head, ears pricked, and gave his fellow courser a long, steady look, but Byrchalka never hesitated. He only glanced back with an unmistakable snort of amusement and shook his head hard enough to flap his mane. Then he turned back to the trees and Walsharno gave a snort of his own—this time an encouraging sort of snort to Glamhandro and the horses. Glamhandro moved out willingly enough at the touch of Kenhodan’s heel, followed by Chernion and the packhorses while Walsharno brought up the rear of their changed formation.
The tree cover wasn’t actually as heavy and complete as it had appeared from outside the woods. Moonlight penetrated patchily, pooling on drifts of long-undisturbed leaves, but Kenhodan felt uneasy, despite the better visibility, as he followed Wencit. If the wizard or Byrchalka felt the least apprehension, they hid it admirably, yet he seemed to feel a humming presence all about him—a sense of barely restrained power looming in the darkness, ready to pounce and entirely too near to hand for his comfort. Or was that simply his imagination, produced only because he knew the ward was near?
Somehow he didn’t think so as he watched the others. Neither Bahzell nor Chernion seemed eager to dispute with Wencit and Byrchalka for the honor of leading. Clearly, they, too, sensed that this forest was unnatural, a wood even their formidable skills were ill-suited to deal with, and they picked their way carefully, following their wizard guide without straying from the path he chose.
