A servant appeared at the door, waiting silently for him to notice her existence. He admired the woman for a moment—not for her own looks, but for the new livery he had ordered. Scarlet and gold: the scarlet of blood, the gold of the wealth he intended to grasp. The livery matched his new device, now blazoned above his throne, replacing the insipid oak tree of his father. A winged serpent in gold, upon a field of blood-red, poised to strike.
Hulda should have taken note of that new device, and thought about what it meant.
Hulda thought that she had him under control, but she had not counted on the more mundane methods of dealing with an enemy. He had placed spies among her servants, loyal only to him, their loyalty ensured not by spells, but by fear. He had chosen these people carefully, finding those for whom death would be preferable to losing someone—or something. For some, it was a family member or a lover that they would die to protect. For others, it was a secret. And for a few, it was a possession that made life worth living. Such passion meant control—and such control could not be revealed by magical means.
These servants followed Hulda's every move, and let him know when she was so deeply engrossed in some activity that he would be able to act without her guessing what he was up to. She was not infallible—for instance, she did not possess a spell that he had read about, one that permitted the caster to see into the past. Whatever he did while she was occupied, she would not know about. She also did not possess the mind-magic that enabled one to read the thoughts of others. Well, neither did he, but that was of little matter at the moment. What was important was that she could not detect his control of her servants from their thoughts. So as long as she did not torture their secrets from them, he would always know where she was and what she was doing.
She might have servants of the same sort watching him; in fact, he had planned on it. His propensity for taking young, barely post-pubescent girls was well known—as was their regrettable tendency to not survive such encounters. He still enjoyed such pleasures, but as often as not, the girl was incidental to something magical he wished to achieve. There was great power in a painful death—something about a life being ended prematurely released incredible power. He did not think Hulda knew that he knew this; after all, his preferences had been well established long before he learned of the power these acts released. So he would wait until Hulda was occupied, then select one of the little lambs in his private herd and repair to his own chambers for an enjoyable and profitable candlemark or two.
His hand-picked servants watched Hulda, and guarded his secrets against her.
The woman waiting for him to acknowledge her, for instance, was Hulda's personal maid, and privy to her comings and goings. She was common enough to attract no notice; middle-aged, neither plain nor pretty, neither fat nor thin. And well-trained; she would not have slipped away, she would have waited for Hulda to dismiss her—and yet, at the same time, she would have arranged to be so attentive that Hulda would not dismiss her unless the mage wanted privacy. What a shame she wasn't younger.
He raised his eyes and nodded. The servant crossed the floor silently, her eyes lowered, and prostrated herself at the foot of the throne.
"Speak," he said quietly.
"Hulda has retired to her chamber in the company of the muleteer I told you of, Majesty," the servant replied, in a voice carefully pitched so as not to carry beyond the immediate vicinity. He had not chosen this chamber as a place to sit and brood without thought; it was impossible to be spied upon effectively here, and impossible to be overheard, given the acoustics of the place. It had been built to enable a semi-private audience in the midst of a crowded court. Such clever design gave him true privacy without making it obvious.
He raised his eyebrows in sardonic surprise; the muleteer must be a remarkable man, for this would be the fourth time he had graced Hulda's bed. Then again, Ancar had heard that the man had the strength and stamina of one of his mules... and perhaps shared more with them than Ancar had guessed.
The King had no fear that this muleteer might be an agent of Hulda's own; he knew everything there was to know about the man. Gossip in the kitchens had first alerted him to the muleteer's unusual abilities, although none of his excellence was in the area of intelligence. Hulda's muleteer was as dense as a rock and possessed of very little wit, only one short step above absolute simpleton. And Ancar had, in fact, arranged for his erstwhile tutor to hear about the muleteer's physical attributes. It had been no surprise to him when she immediately found an excuse to go down to the secondary stables to see the man for herself. As he had expected, once Hulda had ascertained that there was no hook attached to this very attractive bait, she had taken it.
Yes, well. The "hook" is the man himself, and his ability to keep a woman occupied and heedless of anything else for several candlemarks at a time. Not something Hulda would be looking for.
So, once again, Hulda and her new toy were amusing themselves. He wondered how long this toy would last. She tended to be as hard on her playthings as he was on his.
"Very good," he said in reply. "You may go."
The servant got slowly to her feet and backed out, closing the door behind her. Ancar did not immediately rise from his throne; he would wait, and give Hulda the opportunity to become completely engrossed in her lover before he moved.
No, there could be only one ruler in Hardorn. He was going to find a way to rid himself of Hulda, sooner or later.
That was, in a way, something of a pity. She was the only woman above the age of fifteen that he found desirable; perhaps that was because her sexual experience was so vast, and so unique. She constantly found new ways to amuse him. And it would be very pleasurable to somehow reduce her to the level of one of the servants; to strip her of all ability to challenge him, and yet leave her intelligence and her knowledge intact. That would be a triumph greater than conquering Valdemar.
No, I don't think that will ever happen. No matter how powerful I became, there would be no way I could strip her mind bare without fearing she would find a way to release herself. She would never accept any kind of role as an underling. It would be a waste of power I could better spend elsewhere. Once I am an Adept, once I have defeated her, that defeat must be followed by her death.
Finally, when he was certain he had given Hulda enough time to put everything except the prowess of her muleteer out of her mind, he rose and took his slow, leisurely way to his own chambers.
And not to his official chambers either.
"Keep watch," he told one of the guards outside the chamber—another of his hand-picked armsmen, but this one controlled directly, as all his personal guards were, by spells controlling his mind. He turned to the other. "Tell my chamberlain I am not to be disturbed unless there is an emergency."
Then he turned just outside of the double doors of the audience chamber and entered one of the corridors of the sort used by the servants. The guard followed him, walking about three paces behind. This was not a heavily trafficked corridor, either; in fact, it was likely that no one walked it except to keep it clean and keep the lights burning along it. It led to a set of dark stairs, which led downward, directly to one of the oldest parts of this castle; one of the round towers that had once anchored this building against siege. Seldom used now, but he found the round shape of the rooms very useful.
He held the only key to the door on this level; he unlocked it, after first making certain the spells and physical devices meant to insure his privacy were still intact. The wooden door had a copper lock; very useful in that copper retained the traces of any magic that might be used on it. He let himself into the bottom room of the tower and relocked the door behind him.
This room held his collection of peasant girls, gleaned from the countryside by his troopers, all housed in neat little cells built about the exterior wall of the room. They were carefully chosen by his chamberlain and himself; he looked for deep emotional capacity, and his chamberlain looked for a lack of awkward relatives who might miss them. A
spell of silence ensured that they could not speak to one another, nor communicate in any other way. Every day he had food and water delivered to them by a servant; each cell had all the facilities of one of the finer guest rooms in the castle itself, even if the space was a bit cramped. No vermin here, and no dirt either. He was quite fastidious about his person, and what he permitted in close proximity to it. Every girl here was under a minor coercion spell, set by one of his tame mages, that forced her to eat, drink, and keep herself neat and bathed.
The aura of terror in this room was quite astounding, and wonderfully sustaining. The spell of silence only made waiting more frightening to his captives.
Hulda assumed that this was the only purpose of the tower; she had never looked beyond this chamber and the one immediately above. She had no notion of what lay in the windowless third-story room, under the round, peaked roof.
He would not be availing himself of the services of any of the girls today. He had already charged himself with as much power as he could handle yesterday, and the little that had leaked off in the interim was insignificant.
He crossed the chamber to the spiral staircase that rose through the middle, taking it up to the room above. He ignored this room as well; he had no use for the couch, the rack, the chest of instruments. Not today. He permitted the room to remain in darkness, lit only from the chamber below, as he crossed to the staircase that curled up the stone wall and rose to the third and final room.
It, too, lay in near total darkness. He lit a lantern at the head of the stairs—without the use of magic. He would need all the power he had for what lay before him; the manuscript he meant to follow today had made that much quite clear.
Once the lantern gave him some light to see by, he made a circuit of the room, lighting every burnished lantern within it, until it was as bright as possible in a room with no windows.
This wood-floored room was ringed with bookcases, exactly as the ground-floor room was ringed with cells. And here lay the prisoners of his intellectual searches, the captives of his quest for knowledge. Hundreds of books, of book-rolls, of manuscripts; even mere fragments of manuscripts. All of them were handwritten; the kind of knowledge contained in these words was not the kind that anyone would ever commit to a printer. He had been collecting these for more than the two years of his disenchantment with his mentor, but it was only within the past two years that he had begun studying them and trying the spells described in them without supervision.
He fully intended to try another of them today.
He did not know what this spell was supposed to do, but he had some hopes that it might be the long-sought way to tap safely into the power of nodes, the spell that would finally make him an Adept. It was in this very manuscript that he first found the word "node," and realized from the antique description that these knots of energy at the junction of two or more ley-lines were the same energy nexus-points that he had been, thus far, unable to tap himself.
This was one of the incomplete manuscripts, and it was the many pages missing and paragraphs obliterated that had made him hesitate for so long before trying anything contained in it. The real purpose of this spell was in the pages that were missing, and the pages he possessed were riddled by insects and blurred by time. Still, this was the closest he had come in all the months of searching, and for the past week or so, he had felt ready to attempt this "spell of seeking." For some reason, today felt right to try it.
He had managed a week ago to restore some of the manuscript at least; a clear description of the level of Adept that could tap into the "nodes," though not the safeguards that would make such tapping less hazardous. This was the first time he had seen such descriptions, or the directions on how to use the node-power once he obtained it.
Hopefully, if he were strong enough, the safeguards would not be necessary. He had never once seen Hulda using any such safeguards when she accessed the power of "nodes."
Then again, his more cautious side chided, she could have established those protections before you were in a position to watch her. She could have been hiding them from you.
The spell described was not the same one that Hulda used, of that much he was certain. This spell required the construction of some kind of "portal"; he could only assume that it was a portal to the node-power. That made sense; he already knew that he, at least, could not touch these things directly.
He settled into a chair he often used for his meditations and suppressed a shiver. He recalled only too well the first and last time he had attempted to touch the nodes directly.
He had been able to see these power nexus-points, as well as the lines leading to them, from the time he reached the level of Journeyman. From the time he was first initiated by Hulda into the world of magic, he had been able to see the power that all things created, all the colors and intensities of it. But until Hulda drew power from those points during an attempt to pierce the sky above one of the Valdemar border towns with magic and let loose a plague of poisonous "insects" there, he had not known they were useful for anything. That was when she had told him—a little too proudly, he thought—that he would not be able to copy her example until he was an Adept.
He had tested that himself, when he realized that she was never going to assist him to achieve that status.
The power had been wild and startling; he had known immediately that he did not have the ability to control it at all, much less do so safely. It had felt as if he were suddenly juggling red-hot stones, and he had quickly released his tenuous contact, suddenly grateful that it was so tenuous. He had felt "scorched" for days afterward, and he had never again made the attempt.
But this time—perhaps through this "portal"—
The manuscript had been very clear on one point; that the only energy he would be able to use to form this portal was the energy he contained within himself. A pity, but he saw no reason to doubt it; hence the conscientious effort to fully charge himself, as if for a battle. Now he was as ready as he would ever be.
This room was perfect for use as a mage's private workroom; the wooden floor could be inscribed with chalk for diagrams, the peaked roof allowed a great deal of clearance in the center, and the only furniture was the bookcases, two chairs, and one table. There were no windows that needed to be shut or barred, and the stone walls were thick enough that very little sound penetrated. The old tower had been relegated to storage until he took it over, and most of the servants were unaware it was being used for anything else.
The portal required a physical foundation; he used the frame of one of the bookcases, an empty one, since he did not know what would happen to the contents once the portal was complete.
He sat bolt upright in a chair, took a deep, settling breath, and began.
He raised his hands and closed his eyes. He did not need to see the bookcase; what he wanted was not within the level of the visible, anyway. Within the framework of the bookcase he built another framework. Its carefully spun energy intertwined with the grain of the wood. The new framework was composed of energy taken from Ancar's own reserves.
I call upon the Portal—
Those were the words the spell called for; within the structure of those words he built up his frame of power, building it layer upon layer, making it stronger, spinning more and more of himself into it. The words were a mnemonic, a way of keeping track of the anchoring points for the spell; one for each syllable, there, there, and there, seven points. He concentrated on manipulating the energies exactly as the manuscript had described.
Then he reached the place where the manuscript had ended. From this moment on, he would be working blind.
He hoped that at the proper moment the portal would extend to one of the nodes, and enable him to take in the node's wild power without harm. In fact, he thought of that as he built up his portal, hoping that the thought would be echoed in the power, as often happened in higher magery. It was yet another reason why complete control was paramount to an advanced mage; stray thoughts would alway
s affect the final spell.
Steady now; control and command. You rule the power. Shape it to your will, keep it in your hands.
The interior of the bookcase warped away from him and vanished, leaving behind a lightless void. He began to lose strength, as if his life were bleeding away into the void.
No reason to panic. The manuscript said this would happen. I just have to keep it from taking everything.
Then came the unexpected.
The portal's edges pulsed, then extended tendrils in all directions! Lightninglike extrusions of power began spinning out from his carefully-wrought framework, waving aimlessly, as if they were searching for something.
Then, as a thread of fear traversed his spine, they reacted as if they felt that fear, and began groping after him! And he was paralyzed with weakness, unable to move from his chair!
Gods and demons! No!
He couldn't tell what had gone wrong, or even if this was somehow what was supposed to happen—
No, this couldn't be what was "supposed" to happen; if those tentacles touched him, they would suck the rest of the power from him before he could even blink. He could tell by their color, they had to be kept from him. Something had gone wrong—very, very wrong. This was worse than when he had touched the node—for this thing he had created was part of him, and he could no more cut himself off from it than he could cut off an arm. What now?
The life-energy tentacles reached blindly for him, threatening to create a power-loop that would devour him. All he could think of was that an Adept would know what to do if this spell was going wrong. At this point, he would gladly have welcomed any Adept; Hulda, an Eastern mage, even one of the disgustingly pure White Winds
Adepts. Anyone, so long as they knew what this thing was and how to save him from it!
At that moment, the groping tendrils stopped reaching for him. They hovered and flickered, then responded to his panicked thoughts and reached instead into the void, growing thinner and thinner....
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