“I knew of it, of course. But why should I care about this other mage’s purpose,” he posed at last, “as long as it increases the presence of my dark magic in your world?”
“But this mage was not even of the Black Robes!” exclaimed Guerrand.
The god frowned, reconsidering again. “It is somewhat distressing to have power drained without devotion paid to the proper god.” He shrugged. “Still, the end result is the same.” His slyly slanted eyes narrowed still further. “At least he was not scribbling on my moon.”
“The inscriptions are only temporary,” revealed Guerrand in his most conciliatory tone.
“You think that mitigates the fact that they are there at all, and without my permission?”
Desperate, Guerrand dropped to one knee and bowed his head. “Then I humbly ask your leave now.”
“Too little, too late, don’t you think?”
Guerrand looked into the god’s sparkling star eyes and said gravely, “I know only that it grows late for my sister and the others whose very lives depend on me hiding the rays of your moon for this one night.”
“We are between times here,” Nuitari said dismissively. “It will not pass for those you left behind until—if—you return.” Again he drummed his dark nails, considering some point. After staring at Guerrand’s red robe briefly, he seemed to come to a conclusion.
“Perhaps it’s not too late for both of us to benefit from this unfortunate episode,” he said in a soft, gray voice. “Never let it be said that I let anger cloud my vision from opportunity.”
Guerrand shook his head slowly, fearfully. “I don’t understand.”
Nuitari gave a patronizing roll of his shadowed eyes. “What I’m saying is, cast your little spell to change my moon to two dimensions—temporarily, that is,” he said. “I will even advise you, free of obligation, that you would be better served to rearrange the final two symbols. Doing so will lengthen the duration of the dimensional change, to last until the rising of the sun.”
“That’s it?” Guerrand asked, incredulous. “You’re going to let me return to Thonvil and finish the spell?”
The god looked amused. “Nothing is ever that easy, mage of the Red Robes.”
Guerrand jumped as if electrically shocked when Nuitari reached out with black, manicured nails and gently fingered the cloth of his red robe. “I ask only one thing: Remember this favor I have granted you.”
Every muscle in Guerrand’s body froze. He played the god’s words through his mind again in disbelief, then shifted just one eye up to Nuitari’s pale face. “Are you asking me to change …?”
“I’m asking you nothing,” interrupted the god of dark magic. “I have no use for another minor supplicant at this moment. Later?” Nuitari shrugged. “Who can say? For now, simply remember the favor I have granted you. I will.”
Guerrand bowed his head and said nothing. When he looked up, for a brief moment the features of Rannoch, the black wizard who haunted his dreams, played across the face of the god of dark magic. Guerrand blinked in disbelief and the illusion was gone, some trick of his overtaxed mind, he supposed.
Nuitari’s laughter rang in Guerrand’s ears as the glass floor sagged beneath his feet. There was a loud ping! as if a large bubble had burst, and then Guerrand dropped into the darkness of the heavens. He plummeted head over heels, past bright Solinari, past the red glow of Lunitari, past a thousand unnamed stars. He didn’t know whether he would live or die, whether Nuitari had already reneged on their unspoken deal, only that he was falling.
And then, in the blink of an eye, he stopped. Like a teleport spell, one moment he was tumbling through space, and the next he stood in the exact place and position, arm gestures and all, as before he’d been thrust into the heavens by Nuitari. The moment had held.
“Guerrand? Uncle Rand!” The last was a bark from Bram’s mouth.
The mage’s vision finally sighted the face of his nephew. Guerrand’s gaze traveled to his sister lying beneath the lone tree, looking wan and hopeless in the moment before her death, and he well and truly came back from wherever he had been.
Except in one regard. Guerrand silenced Bram with a stinging glance. He snatched up one last piece of parchment, hastily scrawled the rearrangement of the final two symbols he had placed upon the black moon, and sent Zagarus skyward one more time.
Guerrand waited for some earth-shattering, cosmos-shifting sign. But white Solinari and red Lunitari drifted without concern across the dusky sky as before. There could be no question that the sun had set, for no last orangy beams stretched eastward from the west. Guerrand refused to look at Kirah, to even turn his head slightly to see if she still moved. Neither he, nor Bram, nor Kirah seemed to draw breath. A few dead leaves skipped over the cobbles in the breeze, and still the three waited, as still as statues, for the end to come or the beginning to start.
Bram blinked in wonder at the sky. “The night seems brighter than usual, as if daylight’s wick has been turned down just one notch.”
“Nuitari’s black light,” Guerrand began to explain, his voice thin but growing, “usually mutes the intensity of Solinari and Lunitari’s rays. Without it, the moonlight is much brighter.”
“And that’s not all,” Bram fairly shouted. “Look, near the crown constellation!”
Guerrand scanned the sky looking for the familiar crown-and-veil arrangement of stars. It was obscured, not by clouds or night mist but by dark, fleeting shapes. The sky seemed suddenly crowded with them in the area where the crown of stars usually twinkled. Guerrand saw nothing obscuring the nearby constellations: the graceful double ellipses of Mishakal and the massive bison zodiacal symbol of Kiri-Jolith were clear. To the far side of the bison, where the constellations should have portrayed a broken scale and a dragon’s skull, the stars were again obscured by darting bits of darkness.
“What does it mean?” Bram wondered aloud, turning in a circle to view the odd sky.
“I can only guess,” Guerrand replied. “Those constellations that are obscured tonight must usually reflect the light of evil Nuitari, now absent. It is a good sign, I think.”
Guerrand’s musing was cut short when Kirah’s snakes suddenly became agitated. Her limbs thrashed wildly beyond her control, upsetting the blanket she had insisted upon covering herself with out of an uncharacteristic sense of vanity.
At first Guerrand and Bram were worried that the fighting was some new manifestation of the disease, until they noticed that the snakes appeared to be in great pain. Then the creatures began to attack and bite each other, those conjoined on the same limb, as well as from one limb to the next. Kirah struggled in vain to get as far from her warring reptiles as possible. She had to settle for turning her head and squeezing her eyes shut, though she couldn’t silence the sound of their violent hissing and thrashing. She began to scream, a long, low wail of pain that gave the snakes only a brief pause. Finally Kirah fell still, unconscious, either from shock or as an escape, or both.
Guerrand and Bram watched helplessly, both wondering if they should stop the snakes from killing each other, but not knowing how to go about it. Bram made a move toward the thrashing black creatures, but Guerrand stayed him by grasping his arm.
“For better or worse—for Kirah’s sake—we’ve got to let the malady reverse itself,” he said softly.
Then Bram emitted a gasp and pointed down the street. “Look, Guerrand—snakes!”
Guerrand followed Bram’s pointing finger until he, too, saw them. Knots of thrashing snakes were clearly visible in the bright moonlight. They had emerged from their hiding places all around town and, like the snakes on Kirah’s limbs, were fighting to the death in squirming knots. Bram picked his way carefully down the street to the village green. When he returned, he reported that hundreds of snakes were attacking each other all over the town, seemingly driven mad by the light.
The last snake on Kirah’s body, vibrant colors now dull, died of its wounds just before sunrise. Kirah was unconscious
until that very moment, when her eyes flew open wide, hopeful, and instantly alert. As the first rays of the fourth day’s sun cut across her face, the lifeless snakes simply slipped away with the last traces of moonlight, replaced with fully formed arms and legs the pinkish hue of a newborn babe.
Face shining with joy, Kirah planted her new legs beneath her with the awkward gait of a colt. Bram stumbled forward to help his aunt, while Guerrand stood back and watched with joyous amusement, recalling Kirah’s first toddling steps as a child. They could hear the jubilant shouts that began ringing all over the village that, just yesterday, had been as silent as the tomb it had become.
Kirah’s pale eyes welled up as she looked at her brother. “I’m sorry I doubted you, Rand. Ever.”
Guerrand sank to his knees with relief at the sound of her voice. He struggled to control the flood of emotions coursing through him, to find something uplifting to say, but no clear thought would settle upon his lips. His nephew squeezed his shoulder encouragingly.
The mage felt utterly empty of magic, could sense the void where his power should be. He was certain it would take some time before it returned, at least a night’s sleep. What he had done to turn the moon had drained more from him than any act of magic ever had. Yet, seeing his sister restored, hearing the villagers’ happy shouts, Guerrand thought all the strain had been worth it.
The mage found himself raising his eyes to the heavens in silent tribute. But the smile upon his face froze, and his heart skipped a beat. Clear to his view for the first time, next to the white and pink bones of Solinari and Lunitari in the lavender morning sky, was the darker shape of Nuitari.
The moon no decent person could see.
The celebration was brief, considering Kirah’s weakened condition. She, of course, wanted to dance in the streets, but a few coltish steps proved the young woman was a long way from doing a jig. At last Kirah agreed to let Bram carry her, frail but with restored limbs, across the road and up the stairway to her room, where she could rest in comfort.
Seated upon the bottom step near the entrance to the bakery, which was still dark, silent, and scentless, Guerrand waited for him to return. The mage scarcely noticed the street around him; he stared at it, without really seeing.
What did it mean, seeing the black moon? Was he disposed toward Evil now? Guerrand didn’t feel any different. Maybe that was the point. Perhaps evil people weren’t all the same, or even as different on the inside as he’d believed. Hadn’t Justarius said that same thing after Guerrand’s Test?
Bram slipped down the staircase and joined his uncle. “Kirah’s as scrappy as ever,” the young man said fondly. “Tried to talk me into taking her for a walk in the sunlight, but I finally got her settled. She fell asleep before I could get to the door.”
Guerrand nodded his head to acknowledge the comment. One by one the limbs of plague-stricken villagers had returned to normal, reassuring them that the plague’s spell had been broken. Just yesterday Thonvil had looked and sounded like a ghost town, the deadly stillness that had pervaded broken only by a groaning spring wind. This sunny morning a handful of people walked the streets, stirring up the noises of living, though where any of them were going when no shops were yet open was anyone’s guess.
But the greatest sign that fear had passed was that folks would meet each other’s eyes again.
“They don’t even know you’re the one who saved their lives,” Bram said when a young girl and her mother, both with head shawls lowered to feel the heat of the sun on their chocolate-brown hair, nodded in greeting.
“It’s better that they don’t,” Guerrand said soberly.
The men fell into a dull silence, watching the village slowly come back to life.
“I should get home—I mean to the castle, to see how everyone there has fared,” Bram said after a while. The young nobleman stood reluctantly, turning the gesture into a long, slow stretch. His eyes traveled south, over the buildings of Thonvil, to the distant, dark fortress that rose up between blue sea and green earth like a mountain of cold stone.
Bram didn’t look at his uncle as he said, “You should come with me.”
Guerrand thought the centuries-old fortress appeared more foreboding and entrapping than the Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth, which had been designed to look that way. “I … don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?”
“Perhaps not,” Bram agreed soberly.
“Besides,” Guerrand said, standing also, “I should be getting back to Bastion.”
Bram’s head swung around, his eyes wild. “So soon? You arrived just days ago.”
“Is that all it’s been?” Guerrand shook his head in amazement. “It feels like years since …” He stopped himself short of mentioning Lyim’s death. So much had happened in so short a time.
“I know what you mean,” Bram agreed, plucking at his filthy clothing. “I’ve worn this same tunic and trousers for so long they’re stiff.”
Bram’s observation left a thoughtful silence. His expression grew sober. “Strange, but it feels like only hours since I found you.” The young man looked away and said softly, “I’m just not willing to say good-bye again yet. Didn’t Justarius’s note say you could take as much time as you needed?”
“Yes,” acknowledged Guerrand, “but my work here is done.”
Bram’s adam’s apple rose and fell slowly. “I was hoping you’d welcome the chance to get to know your nephew again.”
Guerrand felt his throat thicken. Meeting his nephew’s gaze, the mage wondered what growing up at Castle DiThon had been like for Bram. Probably as frustrating and fatherless, considering Cormac’s state of mind, as it had been for Guerrand. From all accounts, life at the castle had gotten steadily worse in the last decade. Rank poverty didn’t usually improve things. Bram’s mother, Rietta, was … well, Rietta. As for his father, Cormac had always seemed distant from his only son, and now he was crazy, gone even when he was present. Guerrand was reminded again of Wilor’s dying words.
Bram could see his uncle weakening. “One afternoon, that’s all I ask,” he pressed. “One calm afternoon, where I can learn what lifepath took you to Bastion, what interests or irritates you and what doesn’t.” Bram gave his most persuasive smile. “I know a place where nothing intrudes except the rodents in the thatch overhead.”
“Truth to tell,” said Guerrand, “I’m not in that great a hurry to return to where there is no grass or sky or trees.” He looked sidelong at Bram. “This place you know, is it one where a man can put up his feet and have a decent cup of tea?”
“The best!” Bram was already three steps down the street, forcing Guerrand to hurry to fall in stride with him. Rounding the corner on the far edge of town, they came into sight of a run-down shack.
“I sat with Nahamkin through the plague just before I left to find you,” Bram explained. “I was more than a little surprised this morning to find that the villagers hadn’t burned down his cottage.”
At first glance, Guerrand thought it wouldn’t have hurt the look of the village if the shack were gone. The thatch was old and black all over. The walls were of rocky mud, crumbling in places. And yet, as he got nearer, Guerrand couldn’t help but see the comfortable, lived-in and well-loved look about the place. The garden appeared to be struggling against neglect and the season to renew itself.
The cottage reminded him of a run-down version of the one he’d shared with Esme in Harrowdown. There came that familiar tight feeling in his chest, as of the apprehended return of pain that always came with thoughts of Esme, especially now. He resolved to try to contact her before he returned to Bastion, when his magical strength returned.
“Nahamkin,” Guerrand repeated. “Wasn’t there a farmer who lived in the surrounds by that name?”
“One and the same,” Bram said. “Nahamkin’s family more or less abandoned him once the plague struck. I was his only friend, and he mine.” He said the words matter-of-factly.
Bram stopped and stooped before the od
dly tilting wooden door, as if recalling some pleasant memory, then stepped inside and waved Guerrand in.
Pots and tins and wooden buckets were on every available surface, but no drips fell from the rotted roof today. Hanging from the rafters was a year’s supply of butter-colored candles in a variety of shapes and sizes. The place smelled of moss and worms and long-dead ashes.
Bram returned from the well with a pail full of water that he set by the hearth. The young man dropped to his knees with a sigh. “Damnation,” he cursed softly. “I didn’t even think to grab flint and stone to start a fire.” He stood and looked around with a frown on his face, hands on his hips. “There must be something around here I …”
Guerrand knelt next to Bram, nonchalantly lit the logs with a simple cantrip, then dropped into a caned ladder-back chair by the hearth.
Bram regarded his uncle with obvious admiration before moving to Nahamkin’s dry sink. Underneath he shifted around crocks until he found the one he sought. Standing again, he shook his head. “I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve always thought my herbal skills were pretty useful,” he said, sifting two pinches of dried rose hips into Nahamkin’s best pewter mugs. “Now they seem pretty inconsequential compared to your magic.”
He gave a self-deprecating snort while he added hot water to the mugs.
Guerrand shifted uncomfortably under Bram’s admiring glance. “You’d be surprised to hear, then, that there are mages whose range and knowledge are greater than mine. You met two of them at the Tower of High Sorcery.”
Bram sighed wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give to cast even one of your spells.”
The room was still dark. As the young nobleman reached for a candle atop an empty, narrow-necked bottle and held it to the new flame in the hearth, he appeared struck with a sudden thought. “Perhaps you could teach me a few spells! That fire one would certainly come in handy.”
“Magic is not something to be learned piecemeal,” Guerrand said, “like knot tying or scrimshaw carving.”
The Medusa Plague Page 24
