by Brian Daley
The shoulder moved away. Gabrielle’s eye, fluttering open from what could only have been a kiss, fell on him. She said something softly; the curtain was thrown back. There stood Hightower, hand on his broadsword hilt.
The Warlord stopped in surprise. His hand instantly dropped from the weapon. Springbuck, too, was immobilized; only Gabrielle’s calm was unfailing.
“Yes, Springbuck?” Her eyes didn’t avoid his.
He condemned himself for not having seen it sooner. On several occasions now, she and Hightower had been absent at the same time. She’d always made it quite clear that she was her own woman.
“You did not bid good-bye to Andre,” he reminded her lamely.
“We made our farewells last evening. I mislike partings.”
He turned to go. “My Lord,” called the old warrior, halting Springbuck, “for what it may mean, Gabrielle and I had been—close, in times far back. We never did this to wound your feelings, and indeed, denied one another so long as we could. But there are ties that may not be gainsaid.”
Springbuck resolved to be as ungrudging as Van Duyn had been when the scholar had lost Gabrielle to him. “Neither of you owe me explanations, my Lord. We are all free souls,” Gabrielle’s expression, hearing that, was satisfied. It made him feel no better.
“There are matters of policy that need advice from both of you,” he continued, drawing a shaky breath. “Until later, then, good day.”
He went his solitary way. She faced the Warlord. “I said as much; he is an older man in a young one’s skin. He understands.”
Hightower disagreed. “He accepts. I doubt he understands. Be that as it may, all courses turn toward Salamá, as in days long gone. Will they hold as much tragedy as they did then?” His arm went around her. “It begins anew.”
Within the ironclad circle, she leaned against his chest. “For us, it never ceased.”
On an occasion of rare self-indulgence, in the Hour of the Drug, Yardiff Bey, satisfied with his revivified plans, drifted in reverie back across the centuries.
He saw a small boy squatting in the dust of a teeming marketplace, scene of variegated color, bewildering sounds. A wandering illusionist was playing with tongues of flame and momentary flowers plucked from the air. The watching boy’s father was the Bey, regional governor, Prince in his own right, but the boy had crept away from his manor house and teachers to watch this small magic.
The boy was fine-featured, destined to be aristocratically handsome. His cheekbones were high, lips full and dark. His eyes, watching minor enchantments with consuming interest—though he knew these were barely magics at all—were black, liquid with fascination.
It had been his misfortune or accidental lot to be born under ominous stars. The portents had spoken of disorder, ruin, cataclysm. His name would dominate the mightiest struggles. His mother had grieved for that, but the boy found it intriguing. His father discounted any words that didn’t lend themselves to his own will. It was to occur to the boy, Yardiff, later in life, to speculate whether he’d made those prophesies come true by accepting them.
The boy, being groomed for his father’s lofty station, had already decided he would never assume it. There were no magicians in his background, so it was hard to say from whence his preoccupation had come. His forebears and father were lordly, arrogant men, subtle warriors, merciless in battle. But in this generation, in this boy, under dire signs, the union of cold intellect and imperial pride had taken a new bent.
The nomadic magician was leaping and capering, half the fool, half the prestidigitator. He skipped around the circle of watching people, offering flowers that faded instantly away. He extended his fingers with tiny spits of flame that didn’t burn. Most onlookers were afraid to touch them; those brave souls who did found that the flames evaporated at once.
Until he came to the boy.
A hand extended, and the clown-magician waited, scoffing. Yardiff's wide eyes shifted from the man to his pyrotechnic fingers, and back to the man. He put his hand forth calmly; uncertainty and apprehension had long since been driven out of him.
Tongues of fire were somehow transferred; it wasn’t clear to the crowd just how. Now he held them, but the fires didn’t disappear as they had for others. Instead they burned high, higher than for the magician himself. They flickered brightly in colors, then Yardiff waved his hand, dismissing them with a gesture of impatience. The crowd murmured. Some few dropped coins in the dust. Others covertly thrust forefinger and little finger at the wanderer, to fend off any evil he might harbor. The magician scrambled in unseemly haste again, to gather meager pickings. People went their various ways, except the boy. When they were alone, the wanderer came to him. There was, in his features, the joy of a miner who’s found a rich gemstone. He took the small hand that had so recently accepted his fire, pressed it for a moment, left something there. Then he twirled to go, once more the capering fool.
Yardiff didn’t move, watching him until he was out of sight. Only then did he open dark, delicate fingers to see what was there. It was a plaque of malachite; picked out on it in silvery material was a flaming wheel, a mandala. The thing he’d so vaguely longed for had now found him. He tucked the token into his safest inner pocket and set out for his father’s manor house. There were deceptions to work, lip service to pay, eventual disengagement to be made from the career being forced upon him. His destiny had made itself known; he embraced it fervently.
Centuries before the Great Blow, Yardiff’s thin brown legs carried him home tiredly through sun-baked streets.
Sorcery was his contagion.
His delights were the coruscating spells that bent men and the world to his will. He rejoiced in them as viands, as he thought, for some inner hunger.
It was inevitable from the start that he should enter the service of the darker influences, the more terrible forces.
As journeyman, he’d roamed the world, contesting, learning, along the hidden orbits of enchanters. He faced spells, demons, strange beasts, and hostile men and women. He grew from each incident.
He heard of a mountain bandit who’d devised a clever means of binding men to him. Disguised, he went to spy it out for himself. The outlaw would slip a prospective follower food drugged with Earnai, then have him borne into a secret garden. There the initiate would awaken, in seeming paradise, to eat and drink his fill and take his way with compliant women. Drugged again, he’d be returned to the “mortal plane” and made the simple offer of eternal joy in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The technique seldom failed to produce a fanatically willing vassal.
Revealing his puissance to the bandit, Yardiff Bey showed him true sorcery: The bandit—Ibn-al-Yed, who later became Bey’s mask-slave—threw himself at the magician’s feet. His burgeoning realm of criminals and murderers became a keystone in Yardiff Bey’s own concealed empire.
Bey had gone from task to task, always climbing in the dangerous favors of his Liege, the demon Amon, until the mighty attempt of the Great Blow. Then, the Masters had uprooted the Lifetree and made their fearsome effort to open the way between mortal plane and infernal, to summon up hordes from Hell. But it had been despoiled, though the world had been transformed forever in the disaster, and the Unity ended.
In the wake of that failure, with the darker forces harried closely by their opponents, Yardiff Bey had risen in perilous, opportunistic service; he’d kept the Crescent Lands from driving out every vestige of the Masters’ influence. Eventually, the Five had solidified their power, and foremost among their agents stood Yardiff Bey. They’d revealed to him a fragment of his destiny, that his hope for ultimate success lay in three children he would beget, the first a girl, the second a boychild, and the third both, yet neither.
He’d subverted the many Southwasteland tribes, forging them into True Believers for his Masters. He’d brought down the vengeance of the Bright Lady on Glyffa by encouraging its king in the suppression of women. He’d distorted matters to Springbuck’s greatgrandfather, so that Bl
azetongue was wrongly taken from Veganá in a battle that should never have been fought. In disguise, he’d prompted Hightower into that defiance that had left him blinded, hateful and disillusioned for decades. Bey had raised the great fortress at Death’s Hold, on the westernmost shore of the Crescent Lands, and filled it with vicious armsmen, only to see it fall once it had served its purpose.
A great challenge had come, when the Deep-Rock Folk, the clans of tiny subterraneans, had cried out for protection. His name had long gone abroad; he’d answered their plea, for few heroes had survived.
The Deep-Rock Folk had been set upon by a creature from the lower Depths. Bey fought it in a lone combat through the strata of the earth, he and his adversary stalking and attacking one another in a series of duels that had lasted weeks.
Yardiff Bey’s hand came up to the silver-and-malachite ocular he wore where his own left eye had been. The price of victory had been that eye. As replacement, he’d taken the single eye of his monstrous antagonist, confining its terrible energies and making it his own with the eyepiece he’d fashioned.
Then he’d stated his price. The Deep-Rock Folk had labored for twelve years to build a vessel, an adamantine shell in which he could imprison a fire-elemental and harness it. In the end he’d had Cloud Ruler, his flying ship.
He’d insinuated his way into the confidence of generations of the Ku-Mor-Mai. At last, he put his own bastard son, Strongblade, on the throne.
Then things had begun to go wrong. First the madman Van Duyn had appeared. Next, Springbuck had escaped house arrest at Earthfast. The Five had lifted their attention from darkling meditations to a premonition of divergence. But Bey had convinced them he still controlled events, and thought he did.
Gil MacDonald had come, summoned by the deCourteneys and Van Duyn, to shake the whole network of ordinations. Bey’s plans had been destroyed before his eyes in Court at Earthfast, by magic and force of arms. Compelled to flee, he had seen his world unravel.
Yardiff Bey thought about that, in the Hour of the Drug. He recalled those last moments, striking down Dunstan and abducting him, escaping in Cloud Ruler, seeking sanctuary among his remaining supporters. At last he’d sought refuge in Death’s Hold, gathering a few loyal adherents. But exile had held no fulfillment; he literally would rather have been dead. He’d come at last to Salamá, to the Five, and been granted another chance, a reprieve. Who else but Yardiff Bey was suited to ferret out the secret of the ancient mage Rydolomo?
His plans were meshing again. It had been unfortunate that the deCourteneys hadn’t been lured north together, but at least they were separated; their whole was greater than the sum of its parts.
Better, the Heir of Veganá and the sword Blazetongue were on the move, occupying the attention of Andre deCourteney, permitting Bey to hunt out the secret he needed so badly. Once he’d secured it, no opposition would matter.
Let child and sword come south. In time they, too, would fall into his fist. He thought with special, shuddering savor of how good it would be to have the wizard, the baby, the sword and MacDonald in hand.
An eternally lucid part of him told him the Hour of the Dreamdrowse was drawing to a close. His last indulgence was a pulse of satisfaction. The endless effort would soon yield a final product.
He rose to go. There was an incredible amount to do yet, in order to become as a god among the new Masters of Reality.
PART II
Jeopardies of a Two-Bard Commission
Chapter Six
“I struck the board, and cried “No more; I will abroad!”
George Herbert
“The Collar”
AT first, the going was pleasant.
Springbuck’s letter of transit, bearing false names and authentic seals, let the party go without interference, barely noticed. The silver brassard of Angorman’s Order opened many doors, to busy inns, lonely huts and spartan outposts. Gil got used to seeing caps doffed to the Saint-Commander and the badge of his Order, but remained suspicious of everyone. Angorman was sometimes asked for a special benediction, which he never failed to impart. Andre, too, usually seemed to know a good stopping place not too far away. Gil never knew whether the evening would give him a straw mattress in a priory cell, a hard, narrow bench before a tavern hearth, or a comfortable bed in a local Lord’s keep. Wherever they stopped, one of the four men would sleep near Woodsinger, or stretch out with his back to her door. Despite Angorman’s prestige and Andre’s providence, they were sometimes compelled to bivouac under the sky, with Woodsinger and her charge inside the one small tent they’d brought.
Andre, Ferrian and Angorman relieved Woodsinger of her burden from time to time, quieting the baby if she woke by night but wasn’t hungry.
Gil didn’t. He shared any other chore or problem, but flatly refused to become involved with the infant herself. No one pressed him to do differently. To make up for it, he always bore the carry-rack when Woodsinger rode with the baby held inside her cloak; it was his tacit apology. The child took the trip well. Woodsinger was extremely capable, looking after her well-being, keeping her healthy, clean and fed without commotion. They rode with Angorman at their head, leading one packhorse’s rein, Red Pilgrim usually propped butt-in-rest like a lance. Gil followed, with Woodsinger and the baby behind. Ferrian was next, leading the other pack-horse, guiding his own mount with his knees, Horse-blooded style. Andre brought up the rear, bow in hand, watchful at their backs.
Coramonde’s diversity amazed the American. He met dashing, egotistical bravoes from Alebowrene, in the Fifty Lakes Territory, and reserved, puritanical men of Matloo, patrolling their flat, grassy province in huge, armored war-drays. Passing through the Fens of Hinn, marshes abundant with fish and game, he kept sharp watch, but saw few of the elusive, cantankerous people who inhabited them. Then, for eight solid days, they passed under the tangled, gloomy forest canopy of Teebra, famous for its eagle-eyed archers.
The Tangent frequently held some traffic: a trapper with furs, a farmer with produce, wary shepherds with their flocks or a boisterous column of Free Mercenaries off to their next job. Now and then a wealthy man or Lord would go by in a polished coach drawn by a matched team of six or eight horses. They encountered bands of tinkers, bangled and sly, who offered goods of dubious origin and mules and horses with cleverly doctored markings. Every so often the party was forced to make way for a military dispatch rider, his straining mount throwing off flecks of foam. They overtook ponderous convoys of merchants’ wains, leaving them behind quickly. These were guarded, but Gil still thought they were a fat, inviting target. Springbuck had been right; joining one would have been a mistake.
There were roadside shrines, most of them the Bright Lady’s, and no two images of Her were quite alike. One statue embodied Her as highborn, hair arranged painstakingly, with a haughty tilt to her chin and a patronizing smile; the next represented Her as a big-boned peasant woman, bobbed hair gathered in a kerchief, skirts tucked up for field labor, barefoot and laughing heartily. But all Her many personae were quite clearly one, the ever-changing, omnipresent Lady.
The party stayed, by and large, to the Western Tangent. Its straight, unobstructed course made the going far easier than any local road could have. Gil had been worried that the Tangent’s hard, tractive surface would harm the horses’ hooves, but the others reassured him there was nothing to fear, and were right. Apparently, that was one of the qualities of the Tangent, a highway predating the Great Blow, the Unity’s most visible single artifact, certainly its most useful one.
Everywhere were signs of doubt or discontent. The corrosion of Springbuck’s authority was more advanced on the fringes of Coramonde. Twice, nearing the Dark Rampart, the travelers left the Tangent to skirt areas where, they’d been warned, warfare had erupted. They saw thick, dark smoke smudge the sky, from battle and siege. Once, a distant fire lit the night, a burning village.
People were storing food frantically; this promised to be a severe winter. The American became used
to eating as his companions did, with the left hand. The right stayed free, theirs near hilts and helve, and his close to the grip of the Mauser, his holster flap left open.
They were even more cautious traversing the Dark Rampart range. There, the Tangent cut between sheer mountain walls or spanned stomach-wrenching chasms on delicate-looking arches. Refugees, fugitives and deserters had fled up here during the war to hide and live as they must. The party came across graves from which the bodies had been stolen by the starving. When they camped at night, they picked as defensible a spot as they could, even if they had to stop early or go on in dusk. Three times, it took the flash of swords and great-axe to discourage small bands of shabby, sunken-cheeked men who blocked their way. They saw no other women or children, and Gil assumed none had survived up here. Armored, mounted, the party wasn’t pursued or molested.
All hospitality had ended, and any amenity they hadn’t brought with them. They all began to reek, their clothes and gambesons stained and itchy.
Their stocks grew low. Soon, they had only a dwindling supply of dried fruit and rock-hard travelers’ loaves that reminded Gil of Logan Bread. They cut consumption drastically, except Woodsinger, who must nurse the baby. All game had disappeared, prey and predator alike. Angorman and Andre were adept at gathering edible roots and plants, but even these were scarce. They came on a hermit’s cabin, high in the chilly peaks. Andre managed to barter, at scandalous price, a supply of the only meat the old recluse had, dog. It was salty, chewy and greasy, but far from the worst thing Gil or the others had ever eaten. By the time the last of it was gone, Gil found that he missed it, thinking of their shrunken stock of fruit and stony loaves.
