The Warrior King (Book 4)

by Michael Wallace

  The Warrior King

  by Michael Wallace

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  The Dark Citadel Series

  Book #1 – The Dark Citadel

  Book #2 – The Free Kingdoms

  Book #3 – The Golden Griffin

  Book #4 – The Warrior King

  Book #5 – War of Wizards (spring, 2015)

  copyright 2014 by Michael Wallace

  Cover Art by Glendon Haddix at

  www.streetlightgraphics.com

  Chapter One

  The old gardener led his apprentice through the courtyards at the heart of the sultan’s palace. Bent and stooped, he leaned on a cane of cedar wood, carved with strange writing and symbols, occasionally using it to point to an upper limb that needed pruning, or to gesture at some strange sign on a flower or vine that indicated too much water or too little, a need for enriching with manure or fish offal. He knew all the plants by name, and occasionally remarked on the medicinal or nutritional value of what looked to the younger man merely ornamental.

  The young man, in contrast, asked questions that betrayed his ignorance of the gardens. A careful observer might have wondered how he’d secured the position. Here in the south, where the desert sun was a hammering fist, a position working in the shade of the sultan’s gardens, with their cool fountains and bubbling courses of water, was a choice offering indeed. Most master gardeners used slaves for the harder labor and trained their own sons as apprentices, but this master was clearly too old to be the young man’s father. His grandfather, perhaps?

  In truth, the young man was scarcely paying attention to his elder’s lectures. Instead, he was studying and trying to memorize the inner courtyards and arcades of the palace. Each one looked similar to the last, and the palace was a vast and confusing maze. Slender fluted columns supported the passageways, and the arches, constructed of alternating red and gray bricks, were decorated with curious symbols chiseled into their surfaces. Occasionally, when he passed from one courtyard to the next, the young man removed a piece of white chalk from a pocket in his robe and used it to make a discreet mark.

  The old gardener was never looking as the young man made these marks, but always took note. And when there were others in the courtyard or arcade, be they slaves, harem girls, or even one of the dark-skinned tattooed mages of Marrabat, the old man would do or say something to draw attention to himself instead of to his young companion.

  The palace grounds weren’t flat, but stretched up the hill at the center of the city. Lookout towers reached skyward along the outer wall, and if scaled would have provided a view of all of Marrabat, but the gardeners didn’t climb them. Instead, they kept picking their way further and further up the hill, deeper and deeper into the palace. It took on an unkempt appearance as they climbed. Some of the walls up top were crumbling under prying fingers of vines. The fruit trees were tangled and overgrown, their fruit small and withered. The roots of trees buckled the flagstones beneath their feet.

  At last the old man stopped. He looked around, took note of the faded red doors in the chambers that surrounded the courtyard.

  “Abandoned, most of them. The others hold slaves. We’ll find an empty one and make do with it.”

  The young man was still feeling unsettled, but trusted his companion’s judgment. He pulled back the hood of his robe, and the instant he felt the sun on his face, it was as though he were waking from a dream, except that he could feel magic evaporating off him like water poured over a baking hot stone.

  “Well, that was unusual,” Darik said. “I thought I really was a gardener. I couldn’t figure out why I was such an idiot. I had no idea what you were talking about, all that stuff about plants and feeding the soil.”

  Markal grinned. “When it comes to gardens, I suspect you are an idiot. My old master would have sentenced you to a month weeding his vegetable garden until you’d done your lessons.”

  “I’m a merchant’s son. Spells and numbers are fine, but I can’t keep all those plants straight.”

  “Don’t dismiss herbalism—it’s an important part of your magical training.”

  “I suppose I’d rather be a gardener than a goat,” Darik said.

  Crossing the mountains a few weeks ago, Darik had changed into a goat—well, a half-goat—and suddenly weeds and thistle had seemed like the tastiest things in all of Mithyl.

  Markal held up the staff. It shimmered in his hand, and then it was a slender blade in a sheath of deer leather, carried with them since the mountains where they’d taken it from an abandoned griffin tower. He had changed it into the staff before they were searched at the palace gates. Now he handed the sword to Darik. “You’ll want to hide this somewhere.”

  “Why not in our rooms?”

  “The sword stinks of magic, and will for several days. That won’t matter much here in the open air, but we won’t want it accumulating inside, where we’re sleeping.”

  Darik couldn’t detect a thing, but his nose for such things was weak compared to that of the wizard. He looked around and spotted a dry fountain beneath a pair of date palms. Leaves and rotting dates filled the bottom, what looked like months, or even years, of debris. It would be a safe place to hide the weapon.

  He told Markal what he was thinking, then asked, “Is it safe to cast a spell to protect the sword from rust?”

  “No, don’t use any magic. Anyway, we’re in the desert now, and the leaves will be dry as sand.”

  Darik wasn’t so sure. Something was watering all these trees. While he was looking up at the palms, a monkey came scampering across the top of the wall behind them. When it got to the end, it climbed a few feet up the edge of a ruined tower of red stone, then took a flying leap into one of the date palms. This disturbed several large birds that had been roosting in the tree, and they flew away, squawking and scolding. One bird with red and green tail feathers and a long, curved beak circled the courtyard three times before swooping over the walls and down the hillside into the palace.

  Darik flinched at the noise. “You’re sure we’re safe up here?”

  “We’re not safe at all,” the wizard said cheerfully. “The palace is crawling with wizards. Some seem quite powerful, in fact. I can sense that mage I tussled with on the Tothian Way. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were the head of this order, he was so strong. And then there are all the wards and traps for the unwary that we came across in the palace. Do you remember that wall of geometric tiles?”

  “I’m not sure,” Darik admitted. “I don’t think so.”

  “Not surprising—I led you to the other side of the courtyard when I saw it. There was a rune of detection there cleverly hidden in the pattern. I almost stumbled in front of it, and then we would have been caught out. That one was meant for us, in particular. Someone who is expecting us. Probably the Betrayer, himself.”

  This was alarming. It had been two weeks since Darik’s brief struggle with Chantmer on the Tothian Way when the enemy wizard and his protector had come out of the Desolation. Markal insisted that he wasn’t the same Chantmer the Tall who had raised a mud gurgolet in the Battle of Arvada, that he was still suffering the effects of his near death, but the more time that passed, the more that would change. No doubt Chantmer could crush Darik’s feeble magic now, and when he’d regained all his strength, he’d be more powerful than Markal as well. And that wasn’t taking into account all of the tattooed wizards.

  “You weren’t expecting it to be safe, were you?” Markal asked. “We’ll be lucky to get out of here alive.”

  “I don’t see
how we expect to defeat Chantmer here, when we couldn’t manage it two weeks ago.”

  “Maybe it’s too late for that.” Again, Markal didn’t sound particularly upset. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t spy around. What we can do is figure out what Chantmer is up to. Will he be working for Sultan Mufashe and his mages, or is he using them?”

  “Using them,” Darik said. “Chantmer is only concerned about the glory and power of Chantmer. If he has to throw in with the dark wizard himself, he’ll be happy to do so.”

  Markal shrugged. “Anyway, this business with Sultan Mufashe and the khalifa’s sister opens intriguing possibilities for us.”

  Darik and Markal had been two days in Marrabat since arriving with the caravan of traders on the Spice Road. The day after their arrival, a second, more impressive party had arrived in the city, this one from Balsalom. In an attempt to secure the alliance of Marrabat and the Sultanates, the khalifa of Balsalom, Kallia Saffa, had arranged the marriage of her beautiful older sister Marialla and Sultan Mufashe. There was now a sizable contingent of Balsalomians living within the palace.

  Darik and Markal hadn’t spotted any of the Balsalomians yet, but surely Marialla would have guards and possibly even wizards in her retinue, these being loyal to the princess and to Balsalom in turn, and thus friends and allies of Darik and Markal.

  “Go on, hide your sword,” Markal said. “We’ll check these chambers and see if we can find one that hasn’t been taken over by foxes or bats.”

  “What about Memnet’s orb? Don’t you need to hide that too?”

  Markal gave a long-suffering sigh that reminded Darik of his childhood tutor when the man had been exasperated at his poor concentration. “I thought I explained that. If the magic is intrinsic to the object itself . . . ”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Feeling foolish, Darik took the sword and turned toward the dry fountain. The key was to pile debris over the sword in a way that didn’t make it look as though it had been recently disturbed. He was bending over the fountain with the weapon in hand when a flash of color and movement caught his eye.

  It was the bird with the curved beak and the red and green tail feathers that the monkey had chased out of the tree earlier. It swooped over the courtyard and landed on the edge of the fountain opposite Darik, where it cocked its head and gave the young man a suspicious look.

  “Go on, shoo.” Darik waved his hand.

  Since studying under Markal, his ears had grown much more sensitive to sounds, to the point where he could hear unguarded voices whispering behind stone walls, or Daria’s slow, steady heartbeat when the young griffin rider was sitting next to him. But he didn’t hear the man approaching. It was only Markal’s sudden, hurried movement that alerted him.

  He turned to see Markal with the clear glass orb in his right hand, facing a tall figure standing beneath the archway that led into the overgrown courtyard at the rear of the palace. It was Chantmer the Tall, the Betrayer. The one who had slaughtered so many of his own forces in the battle against the dark wizard, even Nathaliey Liltige, the second most powerful wizard of the Order of the Wounded Hand, and all to feed his personal vainglory.

  The bird lifted with a heavy flap of the wings and flew over to perch on Chantmer’s shoulder. The wizard’s spy, Darik now recognized. It had been watching them, hidden, until disturbed by the monkey, when it must have flown off to warn Chantmer.

  Darik drew his sword and moved swiftly to Markal’s side. Chantmer cocked his head, not unlike the bird, wiggled two fingers on his left hand, and said, “Graves qua plomum.”

  The slender griffin rider’s sword suddenly felt as heavy as lead in Darik’s hand, and slippery, as though it had been rubbed with butter. Startled by the unexpected magic, he lost his grip, and the weapon clattered to the ground. He bent for the sword, but struggled to pick it up as it seemed rooted to the stone.

  Markal lifted the orb and began to chant in the old tongue.

  “Put that away,” Chantmer said, his tone arrogant and aloof. “There is no need for one of us to die.”

  Chapter Two

  Chantmer could barely contain his fury to see his former companion in the Brotherhood holding the stolen orb. Chantmer had recovered that orb from the Desolation of Toth at great personal cost, had spent uncounted hours over the course of two years coaxing it back to life so it could hold his magic. Then, during the battle in the Citadel, Markal had stolen it and twisted it to his own use.

  “Thank you,” Markal said, wearing a familiar smug look of self-righteousness. “You’ve saved us the trouble of hunting you down.”

  The orb pulsed with white and green light. Chantmer could sense tremendous stores of untapped power within the glass sphere, and even though Markal’s own weaknesses would bleed energy as he called it forth, there was more than enough to destroy Chantmer. Nevertheless, Markal kept the power simmering at the top of the orb, like a kettle just below boiling. The spell he’d been conjuring died on his lips.

  “I told you,” Chantmer said, forcing himself to be patient. “Put that away, or one of us will die.”

  “One of us will die, Betrayer. That much is true.”

  “If you cast a spell, you’ll alert the Mages of Ink. They’ll find you here and destroy you.”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  Meanwhile, Markal’s apprentice fought off the spell Chantmer had cast in his direction. That spell hadn’t changed the nature of the sword, only Darik’s perception of it, making it feel simultaneously heavy and slippery. The young man whispered some spell of his own, which dissolved Chantmer’s illusion. A few months ago he wouldn’t have given the former slave any more attention than he’d pay a biting fly, but Darik had given him trouble during their skirmish on the Tothian Way. He kept a wary eye on the boy.

  Chantmer was still weak, but he’d certainly regained enough of his strength over the past several days to crush Darik if he wished. One of the tattoos inked into his skin would break every bone in the boy’s body, and he was tempted to call it forth to get the troublesome meddler out of the way. But if he did that, he’d never stand a chance of turning Markal to his purpose.

  “Are you so proud that you won’t listen to me?” Chantmer asked.

  “I’m listening,” Markal said.

  Chantmer cast an irritated look at the orb. “Then put that away.”

  “Send away the bird first.”

  Chantmer had almost forgotten about the bird perched on his shoulder. It was one of the whistler birds kept in cages as pets throughout the palace, so called because they mimicked the men who led donkeys through the streets of Marrabat, whistling a tune that brought the thirsty out of their homes to buy refreshing pomegranate or citrus juice. Because they were egg thieves and carrion eaters, the whistlers had a keen sense of smell. Chantmer had simply trained the bird to recognize Markal’s scent and then taught it a particular call to make.

  Other than that, there was nothing particularly magical about the bird, and it pleased him that Markal didn’t know that.

  He brushed the bird from his shoulder. It flew away, whistling that it had pomegranate juice for sale. Somewhere in the palace a small child would be perking up hopefully.

  “The bird is gone, now put away the orb. Good. Now tell your apprentice to put down his sword before he injures himself.”

  They obeyed, but both of them kept a wary eye on Chantmer. He enjoyed their unease, and it reminded him that he was still powerful and dangerous, even though so often these days he felt like a weak, crippled version of the wizard he had once been, a man capable of raising a gurgolet, a flying beast of bone and mud strong enough to do battle with a dragon.

  “How goes the war?” Chantmer asked. “Has your warrior king met his death yet? And your khalifa given birth to the monster she carries in her womb?”

  Darik growled at this and Markal narrowed his eyes. “Speak your mind, Betrayer. We have no time for this.”

  Chantmer gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “You h
ave all the time in the world. I’m the one who is short of time. Tell me, do you know of the sultan’s betrothal?”

  “We know about the princess,” Markal said.

  “And the king? The former king, I mean—Daniel.”

  “Yes.”

  Markal was evidently not going to give up any information. Chantmer decided to try the younger man. “What about the girl? Are you protective of her?”

  Darik stiffened. “What girl do you mean?”

  “Is there more than one? The daughter of King Daniel, of course. Or is she the whelp of King Whelan? It’s a rather convoluted situation, after all.”

  Markal masked his expression, but Darik relaxed. He’d been thinking of some other girl, some giggling young thing that had caught his fancy, no doubt. Beyond that, his confusion told Chantmer everything he needed to know. He allowed himself a smile.

  “Oh, so you didn’t know that Sofiana was in Marrabat. That means you didn’t know that Sultan Mufashe was going to marry the child.”

  “Oh, you’re talking about Ninny,” Darik said. “That’s ridiculous. She’s only twelve years old.”

  “Thirteen as of a few weeks ago. But yes, it is an unseemly and disgusting intention. I would warn Daniel, but the situation is delicate. The sultan holds power in the south. Whether his armies are friendly or hostile will have a great impact on the outcome of the war. If Daniel learns the truth, he is likely to behave badly, and we simply must have an alliance between Marrabat and Balsalom.”

  “You seem suspiciously concerned with the war,” Markal said, “given that you almost single-handedly lost it for us.”

  Chantmer felt a cool sort of anger at this outrageous suggestion. “I did not. I have always been and will forever remain an enemy of the dark wizard. As soon as I return to my rightful place at the head of the order we will surely defeat Toth once and for all.”

  Markal and Darik made scoffing noises at this.

  “You don’t have to believe me,” Chantmer said. “Those issues can resolve themselves later. We only need to work together for the moment.”