“Well, that’s bigger news than anything I can tell you. Congratulations, my dear.”
Selinda looked away, changing the subject. “But what is the word from over the mountains? As I said, they tell me nothing.”
“Jaymes took his army all the way through the pass and down to Vingaard Keep. I understand that he intends to stand firm and that he doesn’t expect Duke Kerrigan to agree to his terms.”
“So-there will be civil war?” asked Selinda, despairing.
“I hope it won’t come to that-I trust it won’t!” Coryn replied without a great deal of conviction, to Selinda’s ears. “I’m sure they will come to some kind of understanding. The duke has to recognize how important the riches of his realm are to the restoration of empire.”
“ ‘Empire.’ Such an old-fashioned word, it seems to me,” Selinda replied. “I would have thought that, perhaps, the modern world has outgrown such concepts.”
Coryn shook her head firmly. “There will always be a struggle between order and chaos, between light and dark. And a strong empire-an empire that upholds the Solamnic Code, the Oath and the Measure-is the greatest defense we humans have for the future. It is the only thing that can protect us from the scourges that have befallen the elves, from the menace of minotaur invasion that has swept over so much of Ansalon. Of that I am certain.”
“And Jaymes Markham is the only man who could forge such an empire, isn’t he?” the princess asked.
“Frankly, I have invested all of my hopes in him,” Coryn answered. She looked sincerely at the other woman. “He has brought our fractured land together, led our defense against unspeakable evil. He is a great leader-though he has his faults. Even so, I never imagined he would keep you virtually imprisoned here!”
Selinda looked out the window for a long time before squeezing Coryn’s hand and looking again at the enchantress, staring deep into her dark eyes. “Coryn, I need your help.”
“What is it? I’ll do anything I can,” pledged the wizard.
“This baby…” Selinda spoke softly, and her face was wrenched by an expression of raw emotion-grief, rage, and frustration all twisted together. “I am so afraid-I don’t know if I can bear it! What kind of father could Jaymes be? What kind of mother will I be?”
Coryn sat back, shocked. “But-you-you’re pregnant!” she finally stammered. “The die is cast. I mean, it’s natural for you to be afraid-all young mothers are. But… how can I help you?”
“I will not let my life be carried away by this current beyond my control!” Selinda declared in utter sincerity. “Will you advise me, help me? Is it possible… to bring about some delay? To let me think, give me time to reach some decision?”
The wizard stood and moved to the window. Selinda could see that Coryn was trembling, her legs shaking. The White Robe wrung her hands together, stared outside for several interminable seconds, then turned back to the emperor’s wife.
“I–I don’t see what I could do to help,” she said, and Selinda sensed that she spoke candidly. “There is nothing in the repertoire of a white robe wizard that would enable me to do anything even if-”
“Even if you wanted to help me?” the princess finished bitterly.
Coryn sat back down and took both of the other woman’s hands in her own. “I do want to help you. I meant that, and I still mean it. But I spoke the truth: I have no skill, no ability to change or delay this reality.”
Selinda’s eyes welled even as she clenched her jaw. “Isn’t there anyone?” she asked. “Anyone I can turn to?”
The wizard thought for a very long time. “I don’t know, not for sure,” she finally said, speaking very deliberately. “But perhaps you could speak to a priestess… someone you know… a wise woman who could counsel you, could help you to understand, to cope.”
The princess of Palanthas nodded as she worked to keep her expression cool and mask her disappointment. Of course, Coryn was speaking the truth-it wasn’t a matter for a wizard of the white robes.
“There is… there is something I can do that might alleviate your troubles,” Coryn said softly. She removed a slender silver band from a finger on her right hand. “I give this to you-it will assist you in escaping from your prison here.”
Selinda took the tiny circlet and looked at the enchantress curiously. “How?”
“It’s a ring of teleportation. Put it on your third finger-there, like that. To use it, simply twist it three times around your finger, and say the name of the place where you wish to go. It must be some place known to you, and you need to picture it very clearly in your mind. The magic will transport you to that place.”
The princess had a look of awe in her eyes as she examined the little ring, gleaming and silver, on her right hand.
“Thank you,” she said. “Indeed this will help.”
The burly Freemen moved quickly, grabbing Duke Kerrigan and leaping to restrain the two nobles sitting beside him. Chairs tumbled over as the fourth member of the party, Sir Blayne, dived to the ground and, for just a second, eluded the grasp of the guards. The young knight no sooner broke free from the clutching hands than he abruptly disappeared from sight.
“Where’d he go?” demanded one of the Freemen, looking around in confusion.
His partner reacted with more imagination, diving onto the ground where the knight had disappeared, grappling with an unseen presence there. Abruptly a sharp smack sounded, and the guard’s head snapped back. Blood spurted from his nose as he lay, stunned, in the tangle of chairs and feet and milling confusion.
“He’s made himself invisible somehow,” Jaymes declared calmly, pointing as one of the chairs was knocked out of the way. An edge of exasperation crept into his voice. “Surround him! Stop him!”
Then the bearlike Lord Kerrigan suddenly broke free from the two men holding him. With a strangled cry of rage, he lunged toward the emperor, his hands outstretched. One of the Freemen, blade raised, lunged to intervene, and the duke ran headlong onto the blade, forcing the swordsman back a step. With a groan, Kerrigan staggered, dropping to his knees.
“Damn!” snapped Jaymes, grimacing. He looked down at the stricken duke, a crimson blossom spreading across his chest.
And chaos still reigned in the camp. The emperor barked at his men, who ran around like clucking hens trying to locate the invisible Sir Blayne. “Fools!” he demanded. “He’s getting away!”
Another man stepped forward from the army’s entourage. He didn’t wear a knight’s mailed shirt; instead, his tunic was emblazoned with the Kingfisher. He was Sir Garret, one of the mages who like the clerists, had become an integral part of the emperor’s military machine. Garret spoke a word of magic, holding out his hand, fingers splayed.
Immediately young Blayne appeared as the dispelling incantation took effect. The knight could be seen, crouched between a pair of guards, looking around wildly; at first, he didn’t seem to realize that he could be seen.
“There he is!” cried a dozen men at once. As Jaymes’s men lunged for him, Sir Blayne vaulted away with a wild spring-bursting out of the council circle as if he had been shot out of one of the bombards. He streaked toward the waters of nearby Apple Creek with shouts trailing after him.
“Run! Get away from here, my lord!” cried Vingaard’s priest of Kiri-Jolith, firmly in the grasp of several burly Freemen.
Lord Kerrigan writhed on the ground, bleeding from the wound in his chest, breathing bubbles of blood from his mouth and nose.
“More magic, this one a haste spell,” Jaymes remarked, standing above the dying man. “He surprised me. He was prepared for anything, your son.”
“He was prepared-for you!” challenged the duke, struggling bravely for breath, the words bubbling thickly from his bleeding mouth. “He had your measure… I was a fool to think there was a reason… to parley.”
Jaymes shook his head in irritation. That was not in his plan. “Lord Templar!” he shouted. “We need you-at once!”
“Yes, Excellency!” the Cl
erist Knight reported, dashing up to the emperor and kneeling beside the dying man.
“See if you can help him,” Jaymes ordered irritably.
The priest touched the deceptively small wound, murmuring a prayer to his just and lawful god. The emperor ignored the healing attempt, gazing off into the distance instead, watching as the young knight darted right, then left, evading the rush of a dozen men-at-arms. Horses reared as he darted past a picket line. The alarm was spreading; a score of men moved to block his path.
Still running like a madman, Blayne dropped to his hands and knees and scooted right under the belly of a startled charger. The horse reared, feathered hoofs flailing in the faces of the pursuing men, while the fleeing knight popped to his feet, dashed past another line of picketed horses, and rushed to the riverbank.
He shucked his tunic off, the silken material seeming to hang in the air briefly as the human was bared. Then, inches ahead of his pursuers, he made a clean dive, plunging into the cool, deep water with barely a splash. He disappeared beneath the waters as the knights shouted and pointed and waded in different directions. But Blayne was halfway across the creek before he surfaced, swimming with amazing speed downstream, toward Vingaard Keep. The magic propelled him. Arms churning, legs kicking, he seemed to swim even faster than a man could run.
“Archers! Ready a volley! He can’t outrun an arrow!” shouted an enthusiastic sergeant of longbows. His men, some fifty of them, had been standing guard duty, so their bows were already strung. They put arrows to the strings and drew them back. The sergeant raised an eyebrow, looking at the emperor.
Jaymes frowned and shook his head, a very slight gesture but enough to cause the sergeant to hold his command.
“Let him hie back to the castle,” the emperor said calmly. “We’ll catch up with him later, when we conquer the place.” He looked down at Lord Templar, who was gently closing Lord Kerrigan’s eyes.
“I am sorry, Excellency,” the clerist said. “His heart was pierced-there was naught that I could do.”
The emperor nodded, turning to the other prisoners. The Vingaard priest, squirming in the arms of two brawny Freemen, looked at Jaymes with eyes spitting hatred.
“So you’ll take Vingaard?” he challenged, looking helplessly at his slain duke. “You have killed our lord! You will destroy our keep! And then what? Thelgaard? Solanthus? Palanthas? How long are you going to make war on your own country?”
“As long as it takes to build the future,” Jaymes replied.
“You have no sense of honor, no sense of tradition-you mock the greatness of this country. You’re a blight on Solamnia.”
“And you think it’s honorable to withhold taxes and men, the lifeblood of the nation, from its lawful ruler? Is that right? Is that the kind of virtue you espouse?”
“Est Sularus oth Mithas!” declared the priest stiffly.
“Your honor is your life?” Jaymes repeated the oath contemptuously, his tone drawing looks of unease from several of the knights in his own entourage. He ignored their expressions.
“That’s your luxury, then-worry about your honor, your life. As for me, I must look out for the greater good.”
CHAPTER FOUR
DARKNESS AT DARGAARD
Everywhere loomed chiseled faces of granite, their color so dark a gray that it almost looked black. The mountains offered no sheltered groves of aspen, no rounded shoulders gently cloaked in a mantle of firs or pines. The open rock faces seemed to have been assembled without a pattern: one summit was a knife edge of two cliffs rising back to back; the adjacent peak was nearly flat at the top, a broad smooth shelf of rock dropping off on every side like some great towering cube. The gorges were deep, shrouded with shadows, sometimes slashed by raging torrents of icy water.
Snow still lingered in the shadowed couloirs and swales, but it was a dirty kind of gray slush, thick and wet and slowly melting away. There was water in the mountains, but it mirrored the colors of the rocks. Lakes and ponds were flat and the color of slate, lacking reeds at the shore or lilies in the sheltered bays. The streams connecting those pools were the only breaks in the monotonous landscape: they tumbled through cataracts, over falls, through rock-choked chasms, like ribbons of froth against a backdrop of ash.
There were no houses in the heights of the mountains, not a farm or village, not so much as a single herdsman. Anyone who tried to live off the land would find a world that was barren, cold, and to all appearances lifeless. Even the sky was gray, like a lid of cold iron pressing close above the mountain summits.
There was one lone structure, an eminence rising from the mountain’s gray stone. The color of the structure closely matched its surroundings, yet the sheer walls, looming gate, and lofty tower marked that building as a thing that had been constructed.
The dark castle occupied a cleft in the dark range. A deep moat, with a bottom lost in shadow, surrounded the entire fortress. The moat was spanned in one place by a long, slender bridge that had been built upon a single arch, with the span anchored at each side of the deep barrier. Tall, sheer walls looked down on the moat and the bridge, and the small valley beyond. A single keep rose within those walls, and that building was dominated by a tall tower-which was just a slight shade darker in color than the rest of the castle and the surrounding landscape.
A man stood in the window at the top of that tower, gazing out on the castle and the valley, the mountains, perhaps the whole world. He too was as dark and gray as the mountains, his skin swarthy, his once-black hair growing thick at the brows and on top of his head streaked with enough white to render it gray. A gray cape hung near where he stood, on a peg in the wall.
He wore a black cloak, wrapped like a toga about him, as he stared wordlessly, for a very long time, from his lofty perch. Leaning forward, he let one hand rest on the stone sill of the window, allowed the cool air to brush his features, chilling him as it evaporated the sweat beaded onto his forehead. He looked at the slate sky, at all the gray facets of his world, and he frowned.
“Hoarst? Why don’t you come back to bed?”
Hoarst turned slowly to look at the woman who had spoken. Her shock of hair, snowy white, spilled across the pillow as she stared at him, lazily lying on her side. Her skin, as white as her hair, looked as cold as ice-though he remembered its heat against his flesh. She was Sirene, and she pleased and served him in many ways, willingly giving him her body, even sharing drops of her blood when he needed them for various spells and potions.
At that moment, she simply repelled him.
“Leave me,” he ordered. “I will have need of you, but not until later.”
The albino woman’s eyes widened slightly, but she quickly scooted away, out the far side of the bed, gathering up her clothes and, barely taking time to throw a robe over her slender shoulders, darting out the door. Even in her haste, she remembered to close it very gently.
Hoarst exhaled slowly, relishing the precise control over his breathing. Disdaining the use of magic for now, he took an inordinate amount of time to wash and dress himself, heating a metal bowl of water over a small brazier, cleansing his face and hands, shaving carefully. He smoothed the wrinkles from his gray tunic and leggings before donning them and even buffed, slightly, his worn and comfortable boots. He took pleasure in the mundane tasks, which he could easily have accomplished merely by casting a few simple cantrips. He was saving even the tiniest expenditure of his power for something, anything, more interesting than his ablutions.
He picked up a gray robe and draped it casually over his arm as he finally emerged from his chamber in the high tower. He took the steps one at a time, counting them silently as he rounded the spire again and again in a descending spiral. At one hundred four steps, he reached the door at the bottom, drew a slow, contemplative breath, and emerged into the heart of his stronghold.
What had once been the keep’s great hall, Hoarst the Thorn Knight had converted into a huge laboratory for the working of his magic. A great oven had been inst
alled along one wall, with benches of burners, centrifuges, glass vials, and a myriad of components arrayed on both sides. A pipeline of water had been diverted to run along the length of his primary workbench, with several spigots operated by hand screws, so he could turn on a flow of water at any one of them simply by adjusting the valves.
The other side of the room was devoted to rows of tall cabinets, which stood like wardrobes, each stocked with the odds and ends of magical experimentation: bats and rats and bugs, sometimes dried and whole, sometimes divided into useful components such as eyes, livers, and tongues. There were more than a dozen live birds, some of them tropical creatures of colorful plumage, but including a scruffy crow, several hawks, and a leering vulture, all caged in one corner of the room.
Above the great fireplace, poised over a warm bed of glowing embers, a cauldron large enough to hold a man’s body was suspended. Within that vat bubbled a brew of dark brown, with bits of organic matter-the tip of a tentacle, a bit of leathery wing, an eyeball, something that looked distressingly like a child’s hand-occasionally roiling to the surface. A miasma of steamy vapor lingered above the cauldron but also seeped outward to infuse every corner of the great room.
All that was Hoarst’s creation, and all of it he ignored, stalking through the laboratory and on through the anteroom, where three wide halls converged at the keep’s front door. He gave no thought to the locked door at his left, though behind that door was the long stairway leading deep into the rocky ground. Down there, behind a succession of locked doors-and guarded by other, more devious threats as well-was the trove of treasure and possessions that made Hoarst one of the wealthiest men in the world.
Not very long ago, a mere stroll down into that dungeon, with its permanent light spell cast broadly over the piles of gleaming coins, the chests full of precious gems, the bullion and statuary, paintings and vases and chandeliers, would have gladdened his heart, rescued him from the deepest depression. Much of the treasure he had plundered from Palanthas, when he had been the chief Gray Robe of the ruling Dark Knight Council. Oh, there had been lords who outranked him, generals with greater authority than the Thorn Knight Hoarst. But he had feared none of them-no, they had feared him, and he had prospered by their fear.
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