Delbin looked at the food, then at the elf, then at the food again.
“It involves an interesting lock.”
The kender’s eyes gleamed. “Where is it?”
“This way.” Elf and kender swept out of the room. Kaz snorted in amusement. Trust Argaen to come up with the one thing more important to a kender than food.
They each took a share of the soup and the bread. The bread was still warm and had that delicious taste only a fresh-baked loaf could have. Kaz decided there and then that sorcery had its useful aspect after all. Perhaps there was some way that Argaen could teach him the minimum spells for whipping up a stew.
“Truly, this is excellent,” Darius succeeded in saying between mouthfuls.
Tesela, on the other hand, was not so enthusiastic. “It smells good, but there’s a funny taste to it.”
“Tastes fine to me.” Kaz was just finishing the contents of his bowl and trying to calculate exactly how much they had to leave for Delbin.
“I’m not saying it’s not delicious, but the taste just doesn’t seem quite right.”
“Would you trade some bread for your soup? I’ll eat it if you don’t want it.” Kaz hoped she would take his offer.
She gave him a smile but declined. “The bread is good, but the soup is healthier. Maybe it’s just me.”
Kaz, disappointed, watched her take a couple more swallows. As she took the second one, he noticed something.
“Human … Tesela … why does your medallion glow?”
“What?” The cleric put her bowl down with a clatter and stared at the artifact hanging from the chain around her neck. “I’ve never seen it do that before!”
“Does it have to pulse like that, Milady Tesela?” Darius asked. He was sweating. “It makes my head spin.”
“I don’t know what it’s supposed to do, because I don’t know why it’s doing it!”
“It must be … must be …” Kaz could not recall what it was he had wanted to say. Like Darius, he was sweating profusely now. “I …”
A groan from Darius prompted him to turn his head, though the action took an eternity as far as the minotaur was concerned. He watched helplessly as the knight fell to the floor. Tesela moved to aid him, but she herself was having trouble standing straight. Kaz felt his mind begin to separate from his body. With what little of his wits remained, he put one clawed hand against his leg and sank his nails into his leg. The pain washed over him, reviving him somewhat.
Tesela, he could see, was no longer trying to reach Darius. Instead, she was on her knees and holding the medallion above her head. The strain was obvious on her face.
Half-delirious, Kaz rose to his full height and stumbled toward the hall. Delbin, his mind repeated. Delbin had to be in danger! He made it halfway before his legs gave out and he fell onto the floor. Delbin in danger … and Argaen?
Kaz could no longer move. Even breath seemed a laborious thing, almost a waste of time. Argaen. The minotaur’s mind slowly made the connection. It had to be. It simply had to be.
* * * * *
“Mishakal! I plead with you! These two are needed! I know I’m not the best of your clerics and my skills are few, but give me the strength to bring them back!”
The harsh voice broke through the sweet, warm darkness that had enveloped Kaz like a fur. He wanted to tell the voice to leave him in the quiet solitude of his slumber. What right did the voice have to disturb him? He was tired and needed rest, a long rest.
“Kaz! Hear me!”
He wanted to tell the human to go away. The human named Tesela. The human named Tesela who was a cleric. The human cleric named Tesela who was trying to pull him from his sleep.
Not sleep! a part of him whispered.
His mind, which seemed to have fragmented, began to coalesce again. Tesela was a cleric of Mishakal. She would not disturb him without a reason. The human was trying to help him. The thought of a feeble, human female helping a full-grown male minotaur amused him for some reason, and he started to laugh. It came out as a gurgle.
Tesela must have heard it, for her voice became excited. “Thank you, Mishakal! Thank you!”
“Stop …” Kaz forced his mouth and tongue to work. “Stop shouting … in my ears.”
“Kaz!” He felt the warmth of another body on his. The minotaur began to feel other things as well, especially a nauseating sensation swelling in his stomach.
“Move!” He bellowed in a voice loud enough to make his own ears ring. Tesela moved away from him, and Kaz rolled over just in time to keep from drenching his own body with vomit. It seemed for some time that every meal he had ever eaten was departing his body in haste. Gradually, however, he finished. Disgusted, he rolled away.
It was some time before Kaz felt up to facing the others. Tesela gave him water and a cloth. Wiping his snout dry, the minotaur glanced at the two humans. Both were pale, especially Darius, who looked at least as bad as Kaz felt.
“What … what happened?”
“We all became ill,” Tesela said gravely. “We were poisoned, I think.”
“I had a wild notion about that before I—” Kaz’s eyes widened. “Tesela, how close was I to death?”
“As close as Darius. You’re bigger, but you finished your bowl. He was only halfway through.” The cleric beamed. “Mishakal guided my hand. Through the medallion, she could protect me, but not you. I had to act as her channel. That was what the medallion’s glow meant. It was warning us of the danger.”
Kaz stumbled to his feet. The selfsame pot of soup still sat on the table. Kaz sent the pot and its contents flying. “Sargas take that elf! Where is he?” The minotaur turned his gaze toward the window. “It’s dark. How long has it been?”
“Midnight is upon us,” Darius offered. “We owe a great deal to the lady here, and to her mistress.”
Tesela shook her head in wonder. “I didn’t think it was possible to heal someone so quickly. Not someone as near death as you. I think, given practice—Mishakal forbid!—and the will, I might be able to do it as quickly most every time! If only I’d known! The lives I could have saved!”
Kaz felt his legs grow steadily stronger. Try as he might, though, he could not yet lift his battle-axe properly. “Where is Argaen Ravenshadow? For that matter,” Kaz suddenly recalled, “where’s Delbin?”
“Mishakal forgive me!” Tesela leaped to her feet. “He could be dying of poison at this very moment!”
The trio searched the main room of the library as quickly as possible. It became apparent that neither Delbin nor Argaen were in the immediate vicinity. With a sinking feeling, Kaz knew where they should look.
“The vaults!” he muttered.
That Delbin could get past the much-vaunted safeguards of the Knights of Solamnia was a certainty in the minotaur’s mind. Why Ravenshadow would try to poison them was another question.
“What can we do?” a pale-faced Darius asked.
Kaz shook his head, trying to clear it. He lifted his axe and knew that he still lacked the strength to use the weapon properly. Battling against crazed knights was not something he wanted to do, anyway. And Kaz did not doubt the abilities of Argaen Ravenshadow. Somehow he had gotten Delbin to agree to try to enter the vaults, perhaps by holding as incentive the lives of the two humans and Kaz.
“We’ve no choice,” the minotaur said reluctantly. “I can’t leave Delbin, and I can’t fight. I think we should demand an audience with the Grand Master. Sane or not, I think that any warning I give will be enough to stir Oswal’s interest. You two had better remain here in case I’m wrong.”
“Would you call me a coward, minotaur?” Darius demanded. “And yourself a fool? You have more of a chance of succeeding if you are accompanied by a member of the knighthood as your guard.”
“They might run both of you through without a second thought,” Tesela reminded them. “Argaen said—”
Kaz snorted angrily. “Argaen said a lot of things that I find suspect now.”
* * * *
*
The column slowed. Bennett had no desire to call a halt now, but advice from his uncle rang in his head.
“Making good time in the day is no reason to go blindly in the night, lad,” the elder knight would say. “Many’s the time a patrol rode straight into an ambush. Go slow … steady but slow.”
“Steady but slow,” he muttered.
“What was that, milord?” the ranger next to him asked.
“I want you to go scout up ahead. Be careful. We’ll be following at a slower pace.”
The man looked at him critically. “You intend to travel during the night?”
“We must. Can’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“The—” How can I put it? Bennett wondered. “The—presence—has withdrawn! We should have felt it by now, tearing at our minds, threatening our sanity.…” The knight let his voice fade away as he recalled some of the things he had done under the sway of that power, that spell. He cursed silently.
The ranger was happy his face was hidden by the darkness. His nervousness always grew worse when Bennett talked like this. There was always the fear that the madness had left a permanent mark on those he rode with. The ranger sighed.
Bennett was still insistent. “We will move on! You have your orders, man!”
“Yes, milord.” The ranger urged his horse forward and rode off.
Staring off into the darkness, Bennett tried to make out Vingaard Keep. He knew that, on a sunny day, the outline would have been visible near the horizon. Sunlit days were a rare commodity in recent months, however. It was almost as if the war were beginning all over again.
A bad feeling was developing, a feeling that something was going to happen very soon, and that Bennett was going to arrive too late to do anything about it. A disquieting feeling.
With a wave of his hand, he summoned one of his aides. The knight saluted his lord. “Sir?”
“How are the men holding up, Grissom?”
“We are Knights of Solamnia, milord!”
At one time, that would have been all the answer Bennett needed to go charging pell-mell through the dark toward Vingaard Keep. Not now. Another knight, these five years dead, had taught him otherwise.
“How are they really holding up, Grissom?”
The broad-faced knight shrugged. “They could use rest, but none of them are unfit. We could ride three more days before the first would begin to keel over. I think some of the horses would go first.”
The hint of a smile touched Bennett’s lips. “If we ride through the night, we can be at Vingaard before morning. Have you felt anything at all, Grissom?”
“Nothing, milord.” The aide sounded hopeful. “Could that mean the threat has been crushed? That the spell has been broken by our brethren who remained behind?”
“Unlikely, if you recall our own minds as we rode off to—what was it, anyway?—to crush our nonexistent enemies to the south or something?”
“I … forget.”
Bennett nodded. “I force myself to remember. We have much to answer for, spell or no spell.”
“What do you think is happening at Vingaard, then, milord?”
Gauntleted hands tightened their grip on the reins. “I cannot say for certain, Sir Grissom, save that I think our final destination will be a true trial of our strength, in mind as well as in body.” Bennett muttered a small oath to Paladine, then added, “It’s time we moved on. Send word down the column. Slow but steady, Sir Grissom.”
“Milord.” The other knight turned his horse around and departed.
Bennett continued to stare in the direction he knew Vingaard Keep had to be, trying not to think too much about what he would do once the column made it there. He wondered whether they would be, as he feared, too late really to do anything.
CHAPTER 14
“You realize,” Darius whispered, “that this plan of yours might be the product of the same sorcerous madness that has affected Vingaard and the lands surrounding it.”
Kaz nodded almost imperceptibly. “Very much so, but then, everyone we’ve been dealing with suffers from the same affliction, so that means what we’re doing is practically normal, doesn’t it?”
The silence of the empty keep was at least as eerie in its own way as that first night when they had been stalked by the winged thing and attacked by the wild knight. Time almost seemed to be holding its breath, waiting. The hair on the minotaur’s back began to rise.
“Look!” Tesela whispered.
Blinking, Kaz joined Darius and Tesela in staring at the scene unfolding before them.
The amassed figures did not resemble the phantom knights, though distance and the flickering light of the torches made it impossible to say for certain. Kaz estimated maybe four dozen. The thought occurred to him that maybe these were phantoms, too, but he discarded that idea almost immediately. These were flesh-and-blood Knights of Solamnia, and they looked ready to defend the stronghold of the Grand Master at any cost.
“They still haven’t seen us,” Darius whispered quickly. “You two could remain in the shadows. I am one of them.”
In lieu of a reply, Kaz straightened and stepped into sight.
Not one of the knights so much as turned a head. They remained where they were, resolutely guarding against … what?
Darius, accompanied by Tesela, quickly stepped up behind the minotaur. One knight slowly turned his helm toward them. Then another. And another. Like some bizarre puppet show, ten or twelve of the figures turned to stare in the direction of the trio. They stared—and did nothing else.
“I like this not,” Darius muttered.
“Really?”
At Kaz’s whispered suggestion, the three walked toward a knight whose armor indicated he was of some rank in the Order of the Crown. Acting as if he were the minotaur’s captor, Darius ordered Kaz to come to a halt. With great uneasiness, he steeled himself and stepped forward to speak with his fellow knight.
“Knight Darius, late of the keep in the province of Westia.”
With his helm completely obscuring his face, it was impossible to tell whether the other knight even took any notice of Darius.
“I have with me the minotaur named Kaz, brought here at the command of the Grand Master himself.”
A mournful howl filled the air of the keep. It was answered by other howls from all about the citadel.
“They’re coming!” the knight Darius had been speaking to shouted suddenly. All around them, the forms were beginning to move with a determination that amazed the trio. Lances were made ready. A few knights secured their torches and reached for bows. The arrows they fitted had tiny bits of moist cloth tied to them. Kaz realized the men were making fire arrows.
In the shadows all around, they could hear the padding of feet, the harsh breathing of several large creatures, and the occasional repetition of the mournful wail.
Kaz glanced at the knights. “They’re ignoring us.…”
The howling was replaced by growls.
“Interesting timing,” Kaz commented sourly.
“What do you mean?”
“After the day’s quiet and Argaen’s betrayal, I just think that this attack is too well timed.”
“A diversion!” Darius blurted.
“Here they come!” someone cried.
White shapes began to burst from the shadows, long, sinewy white shapes so very familiar to Kaz. Baleful blind eyes, burning red, contrasted greatly with the dead flesh of the hairless beasts.
“Dreadwolves!”
The others looked at him. From him they knew of dreadwolves, but actually to see one was quite another matter. The repulsive dreadwolves charged toward the thin line of valiant knights.
Darius could not stand it. “Kaz, we cannot abandon my brothers! Mad or not, they fight for their lives!”
“Our mission is just as important! Whatever Argaen plans, I want to make certain that he doesn’t end up bringing Vingaard Keep down around us!”
A fiery arrow caug
ht a dreadwolf in midleap. The creature tumbled to the side, then rose again. When it realized it was on fire, it began to roll on the ground. The arrow snapped and the head buried itself deeper in the creature, but it didn’t concern the dreadwolf. It was not alive but was merely a parody of life.
Kaz, frustrated, took Darius by the collar. “Listen, human,” he snorted madly. “In times past, the dreadwolves were controlled by the sorcerer, Dracos! Dracos should be dead, but someone or something is controlling those monsters! I think the key lies in the vaults! Someone should go down there and investigate!”
Another dreadwolf became skewered on the end of a long lance. Somehow the defenders were succeeding in keeping the battle a stalemate.
As Kaz released his grip on Darius, the truth of the situation dawned on him.
“You’ve nothing to worry about, Darius,” he said quickly. “They’re like the knight we fought—illusions!”
They watched another dreadwolf, pinned to the ground, vanish. The knight who had pinned him down with his lance seemed to take this in stride, calmly awaiting the next one.
“Come on!” cried Kaz. “I doubt we have too much time!”
Though they had half-expected it, it was still a bit of a shock to discover that the building was empty. Their footsteps echoed loudly in the halls. Kaz, the only one of the three who had ever been in the Grand Master’s citadel, led the way.
Kaz only hoped that Oswal had no intention of hanging him from the point of a lance. It would certainly spoil the reunion, not to mention any chances of catching Argaen before it was too late. Kaz wondered what the elf’s plan was. What did he intend to do with whatever artifact or power lurked down in the vault?
They turned down the hallway and found two elaborately decorated doors blocking their path. Kaz tried the doors and, when they proved to be locked, clasped both hands together, raising them high in the air and bringing them down hard where the two doors joined.
The doors burst open with a loud crash. Splinters flew everywhere.
Beyond the entrance, seated in a throne atop a dais and guarded by a dozen stern figures, was the still-majestic form of the Grand Master of the Knights of Solamnia. Even from where he stood, Kaz could see the strain that Lord Oswal was under. Despite that, Oswal continued to radiate a power of majesty.
Kaz the Minotaur Page 16
