The young nobleman came to the second fork in the road just as a pack of unseen creatures, like enormous moles, burrowed under the path in lumpy waves. Instead of cracking apart, the brick path heaved up like a gently snapped rope, throwing Bram to his knees. He dug his fingers around the loose edges of a brick and clung to it to stay on the path. Breathless, Bram waited many moments after the rumbling and heaving stopped before he crawled back to his feet and hastened on.
At a distance, the third path to the left looked the same, a little wider, a little brighter, perhaps, than the first two. The sight instantly renewed his flagging energy, for he felt certain it couldn't be much farther to Wayreth after the fork. He approached the turn with lighter feet.
Bram heard rustling in the bushes in the right V of the fork and he jumped back, instinctively putting a hand to the coin at his waist. Up popped a man, waist- high in greenery. Eyes on Bram, the man pushed his way through the bushes toward the fork. When he emerged, the nobleman could see that the man was actually a centaur. The man's naked, muscular chest stretched back into the chestnut-brown body of a horse. Four hooves clattered on the cobblestones as the creature moved to plant himself in the middle of the fork. A sword was strapped across his back, and he held a staff before him defensively, his expression distrustful.
"Which way will you go, stranger?"
"Left," said Bram, trying to get a better look at the oddly beautiful being.
"You may not go to the left," the creature said.
Bram frowned at the centaur's tone. "But I was instructed to take this fork to the left."
"You can only go to the right at this fork," explained the centaur unhelpfully.
Bram shook his head. "I don't want to take the right fork. I was instructed to follow the left fork because it is the only one that leads to Wayreth."
"But you can't."
Bram's eyes narrowed. "I can't go to Wayreth, or I can't take this fork?"
A corner of the centaur's mouth drew up slightly. "It appears for you they're one and the same."
"Look, Mr. Centaur," Bram said with thinly veiled sarcasm, "the tuatha gave me a coin and said that it would allow me to go anywhere I wanted in the faerie realm, including to Wayreth."
"You have a coin?" said the centaur. "Then the tuatha spoke truly to you. Give the coin to me and you can go anywhere you wish."
"If you know about faerie coins," Bram said evenly, "then you also know I can't give the coin to you and still get safely to Wayreth."
The centaur shrugged. "Then you can't go left."
Bram slammed his hands on his hips. "Who are you to tell me where I can and can't go?"
The centaur lifted a brow and looked over his shoulder to the weapon on his back. "I'm the centaur with the sword."
And I'm the man with the vegetable peeler, Bram thought ruefully, recalling his little knife. "Yes, I suppose you are," he said instead.
The centaur continued to look at Bram expectantly, rhythmically tapping his staff in his hand.
Bram turned and stared back down the path he had walked. It looked the same behind as it did ahead. In fact, the intersection looked nearly identical from any direction. He paused, momentarily confused. He had come down the path and tried to veer to the left, which was now behind him to his right. An idea came; it was not necessarily a good one, for it interfered with his original plans somewhat, but it might pacify the centaur.
"What if I go back the way I came and take the right fork?" Bram asked. "Would that be acceptable to you?"
"I don't care where you go," said the centaur in a bored voice, "as long as you don't take the left fork."
"Yes, I hear that's not allowed," Guerrand said as he turned around and set off down the path.
Behind him to his left, the centaur shouted, "Where do you think you're going now? That's not the way you came."
The exclamation was punctuated by clattering hooves and a great deal of crashing and scraping, as the centaur bounded through the thick brush that hemmed in the Y intersection.
"It's not?" Bram exclaimed innocently, looking over his shoulder to where he had come from. "I guess I got all turned around and confused by your rules."
"There's nothing confusing about any of this," snapped the centaur. "You're just simple-minded." The centaur extended its left arm and pointed behind Bram. "Now turn around and go right."
Bram quickly spun about and retraced his steps. "Turn right here?" he asked, standing at the intersection again. Straight ahead was the path he had already traveled, and to the right was the path he had wanted to take from the start.
"Yes, yes, yes!" exclaimed the centaur. "My, you humans are thick. I'm certain I explained all this to you clearly. You may turn right, just not left. Now do it and leave me in peace, before I have to get nasty." To emphasize its point, the creature reached behind its back and placed a hand on the hilt of the sword slung there.
"Try not to be so thick in the future!" the centaur called after him.
Bram bowed his head in mock deference, then proceeded. He was scarcely ten steps down the left fork when he felt his vision shift and blur in a vaguely familiar way. He blinked once, twice, thrice; the magical path beneath his feet disappeared and he stood before wondrous gates of gold and silver.
Chapter Nine
Lyim looked out across the awakening hillsides that sloped gently toward Thonvil, and he sighed with satisfaction. He had teleported to the eastern dirt road to give himself this view of the sleepy little burg. Despite its current run-down state, Thonvil's half-timbered buildings with thatched roofs looked warm and inviting against a backdrop of greening grasses and cornflower-blue sky.
It must have been a wonderful setting in which to grow up, Lyim thought, and not for the first time. Any place would have been better than the ugly and unyielding village of mud huts in which he'd lived on the Plains of Dust. The unfairness of the dichotomy was another entry on the ever-growing list of reasons to hate Guerrand DiThon.
The first time he'd had such envious thoughts was when, as an apprentice to Belize, Lyim had traveled to Thonvil on behalf of his friend Guerrand. That had ended in the disaster that was Lyim's hand. He'd come to Thonvil then to save Guerrand's family. Now he was here to destroy it. It seemed somehow fitting to Lyim, a closing of the circle.
Every hideous and pain-racked death occurring this spring in Thonvil was on Guerrand's head. Lyim had no doubt about that and felt no guilt. Death knells rang here two and three times a day because of Guerrand's unwillingness to bend the rules to help the friend who'd given his hand saving Guerrand's life.
Lyim adjusted the fingerless leather glove over his right hand and tucked it inside the overlong cuff on his coarse brown robe. It would not do, particularly considering the prevailing air of suspicion and fear, to advertise his profession by wearing his usual red mage's robe or allowing anyone to see his snake hand.
Lyim followed the road into the village. The mage kept his eyes averted and drew into himself so as not to attract notice as a stranger, a habit he had developed since the accident that had changed his hand. He could scarcely remember the days when he had sought the spotlight by both deed and dress. The man in the drab, dun robe had once worn the brightest, most flamboyant colors in the newest styles. He had once made it a goal to get to know the people in any small village he visited for more than a few days. Especially the ladies. Those days were far in Lyim's past.
Women still admired him, he had noticed with some small measure of pride. Lyim's handsome looks had changed little in nearly a decade, with no care paid to them. His hair was long, dark, and wavy, though he no longer took the time to fashion his signature top braid. The rigors of his life had kept his muscles toned and defined as only a strict regimen of exercise had before. Yes, women still looked at him with eager eyes, until they inevitably saw the snake that was his hand.
Lyim felt the creature shift annoyingly inside the thick leather glove. He gave an angry shake of his head and turned his stride toward the vi
llage green encircled by Thonvil's timbered buildings. Standing in the shadow of a tree, Lyim watched as two men dug a grave in the newly softened soil. He counted eleven fresh mounds of dirt in the square that until recent weeks had but two or three new additions each year. The plague was turning out to be as deadly as he'd hoped.
Lyim could scarcely believe the luck of overhearing the whispered conversation of a sailor who had recently returned to Palanthas from the Minotaur Islands. The sailor spoke with horror of fleeing Mithas when a new and vile pestilence had sprung up among the smattering of humans there. "The medusa plague," they were calling it, a disease whose arrival and spread they were blaming on the unclean living habits of the bovinelike minotaurs who inhabited the isles.
Lyim had been struck by the plague's similarity to his own situation, however different some of the symptoms. He had never shed skin, and he'd lived with the affliction for many years. But the snakes… it was too coincidental to ignore, and so he decided to travel to the islands northeast of the Blood Sea to see this disease for himself.
En route, he had briefly entertained the hope that unlocking the secret of the minotaur plague might provide some clue to curing his own affliction, but that died when he saw the first victim. The man's limbs had changed to three-headed snakes, not the single head that was his hand. What was more, the victims all turned to stone within three days and died, so Lyim realized there was no link to his own condition to be found here.
But he was a mage with a bitter grudge to settle, and the random pestilence in Mithas gave him another idea. A more delicious idea, in that it would allow him to cure his hand and get the revenge that he had longed for in the handful of months since Guerrand had refused to grant him entrance to Bastion.
Lyim spent two months among the brutish minotaurs, living in the most squalid conditions he'd endured since leaving the Plains of Dust. Most of the buildings on Mithas were of either mud or rough planking, with nothing better than a dirt path between them, even in the capital city of Lacynos. Despite horrid living conditions, the minotaurs were among the most honor-bound creatures Lyim had met in all his travels. They thought he was examining the stone bodies to find a magical cure. If they had known he was actually collecting the pestilence from the dead bodies and storing it in a specially prepared magical gem, they might have killed him, or worse.
Lyim saw spreading the plague in Thonvil as the perfect, triple-edged sword to use against Guerrand DiThon. As if inflicting an epidemic upon Guerrand's people weren't revenge enough, Lyim had added a curse to the pestilence so that Guerrand himself would appear responsible for the magical sickness. But the most useful of all the repercussions of the plague was that the news of its spread in Thonvil might very likely draw Guerrand from Bastion. Lyim would then have the opportunity to breach the stronghold more easily, gam entrance, and seek to reverse the process that had mutated his hand.
It had been a simple matter, under cover of a dark night less than a fortnight ago, to add the collected pestilence in the magical gem to the water in the village well. While monitoring the plague's progress was enjoyable. Lyim had returned this day primarily to discover whether news of the sickness had reached Guerrand.
The mage left the gravediggers in the square and sought the one person who was the likeliest to know: Guerrand's younger sister, Kirah. If anyone here still communicated with Guerrand, it would be she.
Lyim hiked the quarter league through unplanted fields toward the black and imposing stone castle perched on the Strait of Ergoth. Not usually of a mind to notice that spring had truly arrived, even Lyim could see that all patches of snow had disappeared into the earth, and the pale beige of winter was slowly turning to olive-green. The progress of the plague had put Lyim in an uncommonly good mood, and he launched into the uplifting last refrain from 'The Lark, the Rave, and the Owl," singing in an aggressive and undisciplined base:
Through night the seasons ride into the dark, The years surrender in the changing lights, The breath turns vacant on the dusk or dawn Between the abstract days and nights. For there is always corpselight in the fields And corposants above the slaughterhouse, And at deep noon the shadowy vallenwoods Are bright at the topmost boughs.
Lyim hadn't found much to sing about in recent years, though singing had been a favorite pastime of his since his days at the feet of bards in the smokey, decadent inns of his youth.
The brown-shrouded mage came to the last green, gentle slope that led to the portcullis on Castle DiThon's northern curtain wall. Staring up at the castle, blatant symbol of elitism, Lyim was struck again by the inequity between Guerrand's upbringing and his own. Cormac and Rietta DiThon had served as Guerrand's parents. Though nobly born, he knew from his own brief encounter with them that they were of no more noble spirit than his own poor parents. It was difficult to say of which pair that was a greater indictment.
Ardem Rhistadt and Dinayda Valurin were considered trash by the worst trash of Rowley-on-Torath. Lyim's parents had never married, in fact had done no more than pass each other in the dark one night, as was common with Dinayda's profession. Lyim was the result. Ardem Rhistadt had done no more than allow the child to take his name. Dinayda always maintained that she did the best she could, which was to let Lyim run wild, with the understanding that he always had a place to rest his head if he wanted it. Lyim didn't want it after the age of six. When he was ten, Lyim heard that his mother had died of one of the unspecified diseases that commonly killed women of her occupation.
By that time, Lyim's father had long since moved away from Rowley. That as good as made Lyim an orphan, but practically speaking nothing had changed. He was earning a few coins and some scraps of food as a general errand and clean-up boy at the local inn. It was there, one night in Lyim's twelfth year, that he saw something that would forever change the direction of his life.
A traveling sleight-of-hand artist-a charlatan trickster, really-was passing through Rowley. The magician, a tall, lanky man with a dirty yellow cape and hair, was earning coin by doing tricks for the patrons, such as making coins appear in their ears or under their tankards. Lyim was mesmerized; he'd never seen anything like this magic before, nor seen the power it held over the viewer.
Staying to clean up the inn long after the patrons had left, Lyim had opportunity to watch the magician count the evening's take; it was more money than the youth expected to earn in a lifetime. For one night's work! By Lyim's standards the magician was wealthy, even after he gave Mowe the innkeeper his due. The young boy knew in that moment that he had earned his last turnips from sweeping floors.
Lyim begged the magician to take him along as an unpaid servant, in exchange for teaching all he knew about magic. He quickly learned that Fabulous Fendock saved all his charisma and good humor for his performances. Off stage, what lessons he offered Lyim were impromptu and enigmatic, and more often than not they left the young man disgruntled and frustrated. But sometimes, when ale softened Fendock's mood, he could change radically, becoming ebullient, almost (but not quite) genial, and he would bring precious gifts of insight to the information-starved boy.
Lyim learned two truly useful things from Fendock. First, he learned that the man was a prestidigitator who played at performing simple cantrips, because true magic was a far more complex and powerful thing and was well beyond Fabulous Fendock's ability. In many ways it was unfortunate that Lyim proved to be a quick study, for Fendock punished the young boy for outdoing him in subtle and obvious ways.
The harshest and most far-reaching punishment came as a result of the other thing of value Lyim learned from this odd "apprenticeship": the name of a true wizard both revered and resented by Fendock. That lauded wizard's name was Belize.
One night, after the magician had drunk too much during a particularly well-received performance in Lantern on the East Road, he had pridefully shown Lyim his most prized possession: a spellbook written by the great mage Belize. Fendock's good mood caused him to confess with arrogance that he'd stolen the small to
me from a patron some years back. He was in such a good mood, in fact, that he let young Lyim open the book, confident that the contents would be beyond the urchin's understanding. But Lyim's natural magical abilities had allowed him to read one or two of the words in the magical books before Fendock had furiously slammed the book shut and told him to never touch it again.
Lyim had seen the jealous look in the man's eyes, and he quickly realized that the magician didn't have the skill to read the book himself. Fendock was like a man who could appreciate fine music but was totally without skill to play it. Lyim's punishment for demonstrating that he possessed the ability Fendock lacked was the cessation of even the pretense of magical lessons.
When, on one dark night after a year of intolerable servitude, Lyim slipped away from Fabulous Fendock's wagon, he took with him Belize's writings. The young man reasoned that the magician could never utilize Belize's work properly and that he had served Fendock beyond what he had received in magical training.
"Never explain, never defend," had become Lyim's motto ever after. It was why he'd lied without remorse to Guerrand about getting the book from some elves. He had no shame about lying, but plenty concerning his blood and magical heritage.
Lyim came to the Castle DiThon's portcullis and was surprised to see it closed, as well as the vast double door behind it. He had never seen it so, even when the residents should have been expecting an attack from the family whose land Cormac DiThon had confiscated.
Puzzled, Lyim looked up to his right, to the guard tower. "Hallo? Who defends Castle DiThon this day?"
After a time, Lyim heard a squeaky voice that sounded vaguely familiar coming from the ramparts above and to his right. "What is it? Yes? We're not having any merchants from the village."
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