"But.. . you don't mean the Wizard Lord did this, do you? He can't have! It must have been rogue wizards—and then he killed them . . ."
"Swordsman," the Scholar said gently, "rogue wizards are the one thing we know he did not kill here."
Breaker stared at the Scholar, trying to absorb this. He knew it was true if what the Seer and Scholar had told him was true, but how could he really be sure? All he had was their word; the whole story of the Scholar only remembering the truth seemed so convenient, like something out of an old story . . .
But then, he was living in the realm of stories, of heroes and villains—he was the Swordsman, one of the Chosen. He was a hero—and someone here was unquestionably a villain.
But it didn't have to be the Wizard Lord; what if it was the Seer? The Scholar didn't even need to be in on the plot; perhaps he didn't remember the rogue wizard explanation because she had never told it to him, not because it was a lie.
Or wait—it could even be an honest mistake. Maybe she thought she had told him, but she never had; perhaps she had told someone else and confused that unknown listener with the Scholar. She wasn't a young woman, and Breaker knew that older people sometimes had trouble remembering things accurately. Maybe there was no villain.
But there was a destroyed village strewn with human skulls, ler that reeked of horrors they had experienced, and the Wizard Lord had tried to prevent them from coming here.
Or something had; did he really know it was the Wizard Lord who had spoken through the squirrels and crows? He glanced back at the rain-blackened forest.
"We need to be sure," he said. "You're telling me that the Wizard Lord slaughtered an entire village, and that would mean he's become a new Dark Lord. If he has, I have to kill him. I want to be absolutely certain of the truth before I kill anyone"
"Of course," the Scholar agreed. "And it may even be that he had a legitimate reason to do this—though it's hard to imagine what it might be—but you can't seriously doubt that something very wrong happened here, and that the Wizard Lord was involved."
"I can tell that much, yes," Breaker admitted. He could feel the souls of the dead—and now that he had been told, he could not deny that that was what he sensed—shrieking in lingering pain and fear, and he could feel it spike in intensity when the Wizard Lord was mentioned.
And beneath the fear and pain, he could feel hatred, and a desperate need for something—though he was not entirely sure yet what it might be. To tell him something? For him to understand something, or do something?
He could not be sure.
The Seer reappeared in the doorway, holding something in her hand. "It's very hard to imagine anything that would justify this," she said. She raised her hand, and Breaker saw that she held another skull—a tiny one.
A baby's.
"There's half a cradle in there," she said, gesturing. "This was in it." Then she looked up suddenly. "He's watching us."
Breaker turned to follow her gaze and saw a crow flying toward them; he had no way of telling whether it was one of the crows they had seen before, but it easily could have been.
The three of them stood in the muddy dooryard, waiting silently, as the bird came to them and landed atop a broken beam.
"Tell us what happened, Lord," the Seer said. "Did you do this? How did it happen, and why? Tell us what these people did to deserve this. And tell us the truth—Lore won't remember anything else, and we'll know if you've lied to us."
The Scholar started to open his mouth, then stopped; Breaker guessed he had been about to explain that he didn't necessarily forget lies, but thought better of undermining his companion's argument. Instead he said, "This was your home village, wasn't it?"
"I was born here," the crow croaked. It shook itself, then gestured awkwardly with one wing, trying to point. "In that house over there," it said, indicating a pile of blackened stones at the foot of the hill. "My mother died of me; my father died when I was eight."
"And you destroyed your childhood home? Slaughtered your friends and neighbors?" the Seer demanded. Breaker could feel the angry ler pressing toward her, urging her to speak.
"I had no friends!" the bird croaked. "They hated me, all of them. I was small and weak and ugly, and I had killed my mother—they hated me. They called me Stinker, and Pig-face, and Killer—I didn't even have a real calling name once my father died, not for years, just insults. They threw mud at me, and chased me through the stubble until my ankles ran with blood, and beat me when they caught me, and I swore by all the ler that when the time came I would return their cruelty tenfold. I ran away to become a wizard when I was fifteen, and never came back—until five years ago, when I honored my childhood vow."
'This infant never taunted or tormented you," the Seer said, holding up the tiny skull.
"Her father did!" the crow exclaimed. "Or at any rate, her mother's husband; I would not be surprised to learn someone else had sired the whore's brat."
Breaker's blood ran cold at that. "Then you know who this was?" the Seer said. "You killed them deliberately?"
"Of course I knew who it was! I sent my spies and watched them for more than a year before I brought my vengeance upon them; I had to plan, to prepare. I knew that people like you, you Chosen, might not approve, might not understand that I needed to do this for the sake of justice, and so I wanted to ensure that the outside world would never know what I did here. I killed the guides, father and daughter and grandson, to cut Stoneslope's ties to the rest of Barokan, to the decent part of the world, so that I could do as I pleased to the filth that lived here, and I made sure I knew who every soul in the village was, so that I could be certain none escaped my wrath."
Breaker, already strained by the oppressive ler, went numb with horror as he listened to this speech; he wished he could convince himself that it was merely a nightmare, and certainly the talking crow seemed dreamlike, but his rain-drenched clothes and the mud beneath his feet were much too real to be so conveniently dismissed. He stared silently at the bird.
"And did everyone in Stoneslope deserve to die, then?" the Scholar asked. "Were there none who had taken your side, or even stayed aloof, when you were a child here?"
"None!" the crow squawked. "None, none!"
"You had no family here?" the Seer asked.
"I told you, my parents were dead!"
"But who took you in after your father's death? What of the town's priesthood, and the ler? Didn't they defend you, as one of their own?"
"Does it matter? They're all dead, five years dead. And I had sworn, by the ler, that I would take revenge. I had no choice."
"You hadn't sworn revenge on everyone, had you?" "Yes! I had! Those who didn't torture me allowed it to continue!"
"How .. ." Breaker's voice came out almost as much a croak as the crow's; he swallowed, and tried again. "How did you do it?" he asked.
The crow cocked its head. "You don't want to know," it said. "I'm the Wizard Lord, master of wind and fire and steel—do you really want the details?"
"I think we would like to know whether you deliberately tormented any of them, or whether you made their deaths as quick and easy as you could," the Scholar said. "As a matter of record, you understand."
"I struck them down with a plague first," the crow replied. "So they could not flee. When all were in their beds and many dying I sent fires to cleanse, and storm winds to whip the flames, then rain to douse the flames and cool the ashes. Then I came myself, not in this crow or any other such puppet, but in my own flesh, with some of my creatures, to make sure the job was done. I chopped the heads off anyone who appeared intact enough that a spark of life might possibly have remained, and then I left them here to rot. I did not taunt or torture anyone; I would not stoop to that level. I was ridding Barokan of a blight, not taking pleasure in anyone's suffering."
Breaker thought he could hear a note of satisfaction in these words, even spoken in the crow's unnatural squawking voice.
For a moment no one replied; then t
he crow asked, "And will you call me mad or evil now, and seek to slay me?"
"I don't know," the Seer said, before the others could speak. "We will need time to consider the matter, and we should confer with the rest of the Chosen. We are three out of eight, less than half the total—it is not our place to make the decision."
Breaker turned to stare at her.
"I don't want to kill you," the crow said. "But I will if I must, even though it would destroy a portion of my own power."
"And it would certainly mean that the other Chosen would vote to kill you," the Scholar said. "Slaying any of the Chosen is one of the things absolutely forbidden to a Wizard Lord."
"And not just the other Chosen would seek to avenge you, but the Council of Immortals," the crow agreed. "Even if I slew all eight of you, every wizard in Barokan would be out for my blood, and I'd have almost no power left to oppose them."
"I don't think any of us want that," the Seer said. "But you know we'll need to tell the others about what you did here."
"And then the eight of you will decide whether my vengeance was justice or madness, and if you choose to deem me mad, then it will mean war between us, war to the death."
"It needn't be to the death. You could resign your title," the Scholar suggested, "as the Dark Lord of Spider Marsh did, two hundred years ago."
"Perhaps," the crow croaked. "Perhaps."
Then the bird twitched, flapped its wings, cawed, and flew away.
Breaker did not need to hear the Seer's words to know that the Wizard Lord was gone—for the moment.
And he knew now what the ghosts of Stoneslope's murdered inhabitants wanted.
They wanted justice—or no, that was not quite right.
They wanted revenge.
[17]
They were eager to get out of Stoneslope, away from those haunted, overgrown ruins and the restless souls of slaughtered innocents, souls who had had no surviving priests to guide them from this world to the next; there was no need to find more evidence when the Wizard Lord had admitted what he had done, almost boasted of it. They had left swiftly, eager to reach shelter elsewhere— anywhere but Stoneslope—before full dark.
The journey back to the nameless village was relatively uneventful. The mud underfoot seemed even slicker than it naturally should be, and one vine draped itself around the Scholar's throat with malicious intent, but careful walking and a swipe from Breaker's sword disposed of these hazards.
They saw no animals of any kind this time. Breaker wondered about that. What was the Wizard Lord doing? What was he thinking? He knew they had seen Stoneslope, and he must know how horrified they were, but he was not doing anything, so far as Breaker could see. The clouds had scattered, the trail was less hostile—apparently he was making no attempt to prevent them from reaching the outside world, even though he must know they would tell others what they had seen.
What was he doing? Fortifying his tower? Preparing magic to protect himself from their inevitable assault?
He considered asking the Seer, but a glance at her expression convinced him not to address her—and in truth, he was not sure he could speak calmly at the moment, as the emotions of the ghosts of Stoneslope still lingered in his head, ready to burst out.
Besides, what if the Wizard Lord was listening? Or what if ordinary ler were listening, that might pass the word to others? Breaker knew that news could sometimes spread through the land itself, without human intervention, and he was not at all sure that they wanted this news to be turned loose just yet.
So he said nothing, the whole way back to the nameless village.
The sun was low in the west and the priest was waiting for them just beyond the boundary shrine when they emerged from the forest; some ler must have informed him that they were coming. "You're alive!" he said, without preamble.
"I certainly hope so," the Seer muttered as she stumped past the black marker, ignoring the faces that peered at them from the distant cottages.
"Did you expect the wild ler to kill us, or the Wizard Lord's creatures, or what?" Breaker asked, genuinely curious, as he paused and leaned against the weathered boundary stone.
The priest shrugged. "Who knows? All I knew was that no one had come alive from Stoneslope in five years. Our ler had said something about a plague—but the ler can be vague and unreliable sometimes."
"Just like anyone else," the Seer said, stopping some twenty feet inside the village and turning.
"There was a plague," the Scholar said. "Stoneslope's people are all dead, and the secrets of their priests presumably lost."
"Horrible, horrible! What can I do to aid you, then?"
The three Chosen exchanged glances.
"A warm bath, a hot fire, a hot meal, and a warm bed would be welcome," Breaker said.
"Of course, of course! I'll have them prepared." The priest turned, and ran toward the village square in a thoroughly undignified fashion, as the weary Chosen followed at a more leisurely pace.
The baths were not as warm or as generous as Breaker would have liked, the fire was distressingly smoky because the unnatural rain had soaked much of the village's stock of firewood, the meal was just oatmeal, and the beds were straw ticks in the village's communal hay barn that crunched and rustled underneath them, but the villagers did their best to provide what the three had asked for. In exchange, once they had bathed and before heading to their beds they described what they had found in Stoneslope; for the most part they answered the villagers' questions as best they could, but by unspoken mutual consent they never mentioned that the Wizard Lord had been responsible for the plague or the subsequent fires. They were not yet ready to tell all the world that a ninth Dark Lord now reigned over Barokan. Breaker was not entirely sure of his own reasons, but he knew he did not want to be the first to reveal the truth; he knew that once released, that truth could never be recaptured, and that he did not know what the consequences might be.
"I suppose no one was well enough to fight the flames," Breaker said, when asked directly what started the conflagration.
"Why didn't their ler protect them?" a girl of ten or so asked.
"Perhaps their priest angered the ler somehow," the Seer suggested. "We don't really know. All we know is what we found."
"And you found your way there safely?"
"Easily," the Scholar said, setting down his half-eaten oatmeal. "The ler of the forest did try to hinder us, but their efforts were really quite trivial. If anyone should care to negotiate new terms with the ler of Stoneslope, a new settlement might be established there."
Breaker stared at him in astonishment. No one could live there until the ghosts were exorcised, the spirits of the dead calmed and sent on their way! What was Lore thinking?
The Seer saw Breaker's expression and gestured for silence.
The villagers stirred, muttering and shuddering. "And risk another plague? I don't think so!" a woman responded.
"And we have no idea how the priesthood there operated, in any case," the priest said. "We don't know whether they negotiated with the ler, or commanded them, or were enslaved by them. Anyone trying to create a new priesthood would be risking his life if he chose the wrong strategy."
No one could deny that—and Breaker supposed the Scholar had known this would be the response. Still, his suggestion had seemed bizarre.
When at last the crowd had dispersed, and the three travelers had retired to the barn to sleep, Breaker asked quietly, "Now what?"
"Now we gather the Chosen," the Seer said. "The Speaker lives just a few days' travel northwest of here, the Archer not much farther. The Thief lives in the eastern Midlands and the Leader is traveling not far from there, while the Beauty lives in Winterhome. We're fortunate that no one is in the northern valleys, or out on the islands, or in the far marshes."
"That's assuming they don't move around," the Scholar pointed out. "Just because most of them are home at the moment doesn't mean they'll stay there. They may well be on the islands by the time we catch
up to them."
"We can send word somehow," the Seer said. "Especially once we find the Speaker."
"But we're in the Galbek Hills," Breaker protested. "The Wizard Lord's tower is just a few miles away, isn't it?"
"About thirty miles," the Seer agreed, pointing to the southwest.
A little of the remembered fury of the ghosts of Stoneslope scratched at Breaker. "But you want us to go wandering all over Barokan, while the Wizard Lord builds up defenses and prepares for us, instead of just going there now and killing him?"
The Seer sighed. "That's right," she said.
"You can go try to kill him yourself, if you want," the Scholar said, "but you would be acting alone, and the rest of us would feel no great need to do anything about it if the Wizard Lord were to kill you in self-defense. Once we have agreed that he must be removed, then any harm he does to you would bring our collective wrath down upon his head, but now? Seer and I saw Stoneslope, and felt the ler there— while I can't speak for her, I think killing the Wizard Lord is more than justified, it's essential. But we are only three; the other five were not with us."
Breaker frowned. "The three of us could go to his tower together," he said.
"Are you that eager to kill him?"
Breaker bit off his immediate reply of "yes," and before he could say anything else the Seer spoke.
"Are you that eager to die?" she asked. "He could kill us easily."
"But. .. very well, then, would eight be so much more formidable than three? He could kill all of us, just as he wiped out that village."
The Seer shook her head. "No," she said. "He would destroy his own magic in the process, and the other wizards would make quick work of him."
"And we are immune to his magic, his diseases and fires," the Scholar added. "He could undoubtedly kill us, but not in the same way he slaughtered his townsfolk."
"But... he could still kill us, surely."
"Three of us, yes," the Seer said patiently. "But if the eight of us act together, he cannot kill us without destroying his own power and leaving himself defenseless against the other wizards. If he knows he faces all the Chosen he may see sense and surrender his position without a fight; against three, that's far less likely."
Watt-Evans, Lawrence - Annals of the Chosen 01 Page 18
