by K. G. McAbee
The guardians of the gate were feeding.
The heavy wooden door to the study, its surface scratched and pitted and marked with runes of power, bowed out toward Garet.
It sounded as if the greatest tempest ever to manifest was raging on the other side of that frail, damaged door.
***
"Valaren!" The high, shrill screech ripped across the devastated chamber, a sound like a thousand bats in direst agony. "Brother!"
"Isole…" came a low, despairing wail in answer; a wail that trailed away into ghastly, hopeless silence.
***
Garet opened one eye. He regarded the door to the chamber—now silent and still—with a curious and considering eye.
The pitted wooden slab hung loose by one hinge; warped and twisted and smoking, it gave off a faint smell of sulfur and…was that roses, Garet wondered?
Scrambling to his feet, the boy dusted his breeches with meticulous care, straightened his jerkin, and gave a disapproving 'tsk' at the slice that ran across the front of his shirt, its smooth edges stained a rusty brown. Beneath the sliced material, the somewhat dirty white skin showed not the slightest sign of damage.
Garet pattered to the damaged, loose door, reached out and gave it a shove.
The door creaked open a hand's breadth and hung in that position for a pair of heartbeats. Then the only remaining iron hinge gave way, with a tearing sound like rotten cloth, and the massive timber fell with a great crash to the stone floor. The entire mass disintegrated into a shower of splintered wooden fragments.
Garet shook his head.
"What unbelievably shoddy construction," he murmured in disgust.
Then with extreme care, he climbed over the heap of wood…curious to see what other damage he had managed to inflict.
The study was a shambles. That was the only applicable word.
Garet nodded and gave a satisfied smirk. Good. He had always wondered just precisely what a shambles might look like, and now he knew.
The window that had once opened onto a starry indigo sky was gone. In its place a great hole gaped, its edges rough and jagged. A part of the ceiling had fallen in just over the hole, so that now the pattern made by the stars was framed in choking dust and rubble.
The pattern made by the stars.
Garet checked the brilliant sparks, took a quick count to make quite sure.
Excellent. Just as expected.
Garet picked his cautious way over the littered floor toward the cold stone table—once Isole's desk and then the rack where Madryn had been chained. Two of the rusty iron manacles had vanished, but the other two were still there, connected by lengths of chain to the table's legs; they lay like coiled vipers on the rubble-strewn floor. The top of the table was bare, swept clean by the tumult that had ravaged and destroyed this room.
Under the table, Garet could make out two huddled shapes, their arms in a tangle about each other. The boy laid a finger on the tabletop—then drew it back with a hiss and at once stuck it in his mouth.
The stone was still sizzling hot from the overwhelming forces that had been unleashed.
Garet squatted and peered under the table.
"I believe it's quite safe now. You can come out," he said in a loud voice. "We really need to get on our way, you know. The stars will be out in a little while, and the portal will open."
A face, filthy and covered with blood from a graze across the forehead, looked out and violet-gray eyes stared in wonder at Garet's scrawny form.
"But the stars…" Madryn said, "I thought they were…"
"Already up?" asked Garet. He grinned a gap-toothed grin. "So did Isole. That was my plan, you see."
Madryn gave a soft shake to the bulky, silent form that lay across her lean body.
"Val?" she whispered.
Another shake.
"Val?"
A groan like a lion's roar came from the huge mass.
"My head," complained Val as he slid one arm from around Madryn and reached up to rub his face with a filthy hand—then snaked the arm back around her and continued, "my head feels like it's been danced on."
"By large men with heavy boots, no doubt," agreed Garet tartly. "Be glad that the nearly useless thing feels at all. Now, can you get up? Be careful of the table…it's still just the faintest bit warm."
With slow and ponderous care, Val helped Madryn slide from underneath the table—but not before he tightened his arms around her and gave her a mighty squeeze. Then he followed her, stifling his groans as aching muscles popped and grumbled.
At last, they were both able to stand, with Garet's assistance.
"What happened?" asked Val. "I remember...beasts at the door to the tower…and then waking up with Madryn in the middle of a tornado."
"All in good time," promised Garet, "but explanations must by need wait a little. The stars are rising and the portal will open shortly thereafter. If you recall Aanakun's instructions, we should be on our way as quickly as we can."
"But what about the guardians?" asked Val as he pulled Madryn to him with one brawny arm, gathered up a handful of Garet's jerkin with the other hand, and marched toward the fallen study door with them both.
"They're both busy just now," Garet squeaked, scrambling to keep up with Val's long legs. "Having dinner, you might say."
When they reached the bottom of the crumbling stairs and stepped to the door, Val and Madryn could see what Garet had meant by 'supper.'
The two great creatures were positioned comfortably on either side of the bridge over the moat—and they were feasting on their former masters. A white arm here, a severed head ripped from its flimsy hold on a withered body there, were all that remained of the two evil siblings, Valaren and Isole.
"How do we…?" Val began uneasily. The creatures looked fully capable of enjoying the three of them for desert, and his sword no longer hung by his side.
"Don't worry, they'll be satisfied—for a while," insisted Garet. "Look. The seventh star. We must hurry if we are to reach the portal in time. And I, for one, have no desire to spend a night in this place. You might just ask the mistress what's it like…but I advise that you wait until we're home before you do."
For reply, Val seized both his companions by the hand and dragged them after him, across the eerie landscape and toward the portal, shining pale and inviting in the distance.
The eighth star winked down at the travelers with a knowing eye.
***
Val could clearly remember their first journey, from the portal to the tower—it was after that when his memory suddenly became dim and faulty—and he marked off the landmarks in reverse as they struggled past them. He had caught Garet's sense of urgency, but it was unlike the urgency he remembered from days past. Inside his aching, bruised and panting chest, his heart was singing.
Madryn was by his side.
Val snatched glimpses of her as they struggled through fields of clinging mud and circumnavigated round pools. Madryn's face was scraped and filthy, she was covered in splattered mud, her wrists and ankles were bloody and torn, her feet bare—and she was quite the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in all his days.
As if she felt his eyes upon her, Madryn looked up at him—and smiled. Her eyes, those glorious eyes that had once reminded him of a sunset after a stormy day, were wide with amazed shock…and a certain amusement. She gave his hand a squeeze as they struggled forward, Garet continually urging more speed as he kept a wary eye upon the sky.
Twelve stars danced in a sky as dark as burnished ebony.
Val, Madryn and Garet stood before the portal, watching in relief as a tiny central spiral began to form. Winds, warm and inviting with the faint hint of the desert, began to blow around their exhausted, aching bodies.
"Get ready," ordered Garet as he watched the sky. "Only one more to go."
The thirteenth star opened its brilliant eye. The spiral that hung within stone pylons, between two worlds, grew and swirled and coalesced. The winds shifted and ga
thered strength from the potent forces of both worlds.
Val took a fierce grip on Garet and Madryn. He had no intention of losing either of them, ever again. He gauged the time, kept an eye on Garet, and when the boy gave a short nod, the three flung themselves into the open portal.
An instant later, the portal snapped shut on the frigid and silent land.
But on the other side, the swift desert twilight had just begun. Sand that had been bombarded with the intense rays of the sun all day began to offer up its hoarded heat, as Garet and Madryn and Val felt full well.
They tumbled out from between the pylons and fell into the edge of the sand dune that had collected at its foot.
Garet rose, spitting sand out of his mouth. "Warm," he breathed. "I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever be warm again."
Val rose up on shaking legs and pulled Madryn up beside him.
"Could someone please tell me what just happened?" he pleaded.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Aanakun passed the leather bottle of fermented camel's milk to Garet. The boy took a swig, shuddered and made a face, then passed the bottle to Val.
The four of them were seated outside the small cave, in the side of the ravine just around the bend from the tall stones of the portal. The desert night, with its cold blanket of stars, blazed over their heads.
"We have been watching Isole and her brother for some time," Garet continued in his squeaky voice. "Valaren was easy to watch while he was here in our own world, of course. When Isole snatched her brother's beheaded corpse and took it back to her own world, we suspected that she would reanimate his corpse and seek revenge."
"We?" asked Madryn.
"The Malmillard," Garet admitted. "Our order is a sort of watchdog for, er, unpleasant magic workers, you might say."
"A watchdog? Then why," Madryn asked, "when Valaren was alive in our world, did you not stop the things he did to others?"
"We did," said Garet, and laid a gentle hand on her clenched fist. "We managed it so that you would meet him. We knew…well, we hoped that you would not give into his powers, and that you would not allow something like Valaren to live."
Madryn wrenched her hand away from Garet's. "Hoped? You hoped that I would not fall under his spell and blindly follow his orders…as so many others did?"
Garet watched Madryn twist both her hands together in her lap. The boy glanced at Val. Val was watching them too.
"We depended on you, on what we knew of your strength, your honor, your sense of self," Garet replied. "We did not expect you to stay free of his spells—"
"As I did not." Madryn gave a bitter laugh, as sharp as broken glass.
"—but we did expect you to be able to overcome his power. As you did."
"So," said Madryn, looking over Garet's head at the rough rocky wall behind him, "you threw me like a rock at his head, hoping I'd bash his brains out for you…and you could keep your own hands clean? And then, this midsummer, you sent word to me that he still lived, so that I would go and find him—and what? Make sure that the second time I killed him, he stayed dead?" The tone of her voice, strained and bitter, made Val long to reach out to her.
But he knew she would fling his hand and his comfort away.
"Not precisely," said Garet; he shifted uncomfortably on his blanket. "We Malmillard hide ourselves behind many barriers—appearance, location, even position. We are not allowed to take an obvious hand in most events, for fear of exposing our true selves. But sometimes—not often, thank all the gods—sometimes there comes a particular situation that threatens the stability of all the myriad worlds, and not just our own. This, er, episode with Isole and Valaren was just such an occasion. We made a mistake. So one of our number was forced to help rectify it."
Aanakun smiled through his grizzled beard. "I do not think that killing a beast like Valaren could have been a very big mistake," he pointed out, then turned up the leather bottle.
"Not killing him, no," agreed Garet. "But the things that his death set in motion, here on our world and in his own, were. If both Isole and Valaren, fueled by their desire for revenge, had managed to take on new bodies—your bodies and, by extension, your own quite interesting skills—then their own powers would have increased enormously. They would soon have been able to inhabit not only this world and their own, but many others…and they would have been in a position to spread their own particular kind of diseased fear and torment throughout all of them."
"I understand that you had to stop them," Val growled. "But I don't see how you could destroy them in their own land?"
"I didn't destroy them," said Garet with a grin. "To be precise, they destroyed themselves. You see, Isole released a huge amount of power, to fuel the transition between their bodies and yours. But the power turned on her and her brother instead…after I had managed a bit of legerdemain with the stars, you see."
"You kept them from appearing?" Aanakun asked.
"I'm afraid that would be a bit beyond my small powers," admitted Garet with a small smile that said 'but not by far.'
"Then what did you do?"
"I convinced Isole, with a small trick or two, that the stars were up beforetime," Garet explained. "This made her proceed with her quite proper spells—but at precisely the wrong time. And, as everyone knows, the right spell at the wrong time equals—disaster."
"So her spell turned back upon her and her brother," clarified Aanakun with a delighted chuckle.
"Yes. The power that they had was not as large as they wished, and this made them see it as larger than it was," Garet said cryptically.
"I think I understand," Val said, his eyes still locked on Madryn's twisting, twining fingers. "But why can't I remember what happened in that place? Why is my memory so…dim?"
"Valaren's mind had almost taken over yours," Garet explained. "I suspect that you have been having strange dreams? And for quite some time now, no doubt?"
"Yes," Val admitted. "I was…it was an alley in Karleon…there was a voice, and a smell…and the next thing I knew, I was waking up while a boy was trying to rob me. I wanted to tell you," he said to Madryn, "but I did not know how to even start…."
"Isole had made a Sending. You were implanted with Valaren's memories in that alley. It was only your incredible stubbornness and strength that kept you from becoming Valaren here, in our world; that was why they finally had to bring you to theirs, to enact the final spell and complete the process that would allow Valaren to don your body.
"But Isole grew greedy. She decided that if her brother was to have a new body, why shouldn't she have one of her own? There was Madryn, bait to bring you to them…and with a perfectly good body as well. So Isole's plans changed and burgeoned…as did her pride."
"So Val and I have been the Malmillard's puppets from the beginning?" asked Madryn.
"No, not puppets at all," Garet said. "But we have made full use of you, I admit. You and others. For that I am truly sorry." The scrawny boy hung his head for a moment. Then he looked back up with an irrepressible grin. "Still, it turned out very well, you know. You have each other," he pointed out.
Val felt his face grow as warm as the desert sun.
Have each other? Do we? How can I hope to believe that Madryn feels anything for me? I am an escaped slave, less than the dust beneath her feet.
"Madryn saved my life when she rescued me from the hunt," Val shrugged. "I was only returning the favor."
"Why, you great lumbering lummox!" shouted Garet. "She loves you, imbecile!"
Madryn looked up at last, to find Val's eyes locked onto her face, willing her to see the surprise—and the love—that poured from them for her.
"I am not worthy…Valaren was able to control me…he made me do…what if there is someone else who can…I cannot allow…you cannot be…."
Madryn's voice stuttered and stumbled into silence as Val pulled her into his arms and covered her protesting mouth with his own.
"Fools, the pair of them," commented Garet with a si
gh and a shake of his shorn head.
Then he took another sip from the leather bottle and grimaced with distaste.
#####
About the author of The Malmillard Codex
K.G. McAbee has had several books and nearly a hundred short stories published, some of them quite readable. She takes her geekdom seriously, never misses a sci-fi con, loves dogs and iced tea, and believes the words 'Stan Lee' are interchangeable with 'The Almighty.' She writes steampunk, fantasy, science fiction, horror, pulp, westerns and, most recently, comics. She's a member of Horror Writers Association and International Thriller Writers and is an Artist in Residence with the South Carolina Arts Commission. Her steampunk/zombie novella, BLACKTHORNE AND ROSE: AGENTS OF D.I.R.E. recently received an honorable mention in the 2013 3rd quarter Writers of the Future contest and will be published soon by Pulp Literature Press.
Other works by K.G. McAbee:
The Journal in the Jug
The Heiress on the Island
Queen Elizabeth's Wizard
Lady Abigail and the Morose Magician
Ray Was Right
Me and the Bank
Time Is of the Essence
Professor Challenger and the Creature from the Aether
The Case of the Sinister Senator
E.U.C.B.
With Murderous Intent
A Dilemma of Dark and Dangerous Dimensions
Mightier Than the Sword
Aunt Clytie's Canning Jars
Currents of Doom
A Rollicking Band of Pirates We
Soul of Diamond, Heart of Glass
