The Oathbound

by Mercedes Lackey

  She slid carefully along the wall, left foot testing the ground at the base of it for loose pebbles that might slip underfoot or be kicked away by accident. The moon was behind her; so her side of the wall was entirely in shadow so long as she stayed close to it. Five steps—twenty—fifty—her outstretched hand encountered a hinge, and wood. She’d come to the gate.

  She felt for the bar and eased it along its sockets until one half of the gate was freed. That gave Kethry her way in; now she would scout ahead.

  She waited for another of those scudding cloud-shadows; joining it as it raced across the courtyard. Cobblestones were hard and a trifle slippery beneath her thin-soled boots; she was glad that the first sole was of tough, abrasive sharkskin. Dew was already beginning to collect on the cold stones, making them slick, but the sharkskin leather gave her traction.

  She reached the shelter of the temple entrance without incident; Warrl was waiting for her there, a slightly darker shadow in the shadows of the doorway.

  Ready? she asked him. She felt his assent.

  She reached for the door, prepared to find it locked, and was pleasantly surprised when it wasn’t. She nudged it open a crack; when nothing happened, she opened it enough to peer carefully inside.

  She saw nothing but a barren antechamber. Warrl stuck his nose inside, and sniffed cautiously.

  Nothing here—but something on the other side of the door beyond; people for sure—and, I think, blood and incense. And magic, lots of magic.

  Tarma sighed; it would have been nice if this had been a false alarm. Sounds like we’ve come to the right place.

  Shouldn’t we wait for Kethry?

  You go after her; I want to make sure there isn’t anyone on guard in there.

  Not yet. I want to know you aren’t biting off more than you can swallow. Warrl waited for her to move on, one shadow among many.

  She slipped in through the crack in the door, Warrl a hairsbreadth behind her. Moonlight shone down through a skylight above. The door on the other side of the antechamber stood open; between it and the door she had entered through was nothing but untracked dust.

  She hugged the wall, easing carefully around the doorpost. Once inside the sanctuary she could barely see her own hands; she continued to hug the wall, making her way by feel alone. She came to a corner, paused for a moment, and tried to see, but could only make out dim shapes in the small amount of light that came from various holes in the ceiling of the sanctuary. It was impossible to tell if those sources of light were more skylights, or the evidence of neglect. Dust filled the air, making her nose itch; other than that, lacking Warrl’s senses, she could only smell damp and mildew. The stones beneath her hands were cold and slightly moist. Beneath the film of moisture they were smooth and felt a little like polished granite.

  She went on, coming at last around behind the statue of the rain-god that stood at the far end of the room. The shadows were even deeper here; she slowed her pace to inch along the stuccoed wall, one hand feeling before her.

  Then her hand encountered emptiness.

  A door.

  I can tell that! A door to where?

  To where the blood-smell is.

  Then we take it. I’m going on ahead; you go back and fetch Kethry.

  Now she was alone in pitchy darkness, with only the rough brick wall of the corridor as a guide, and the faint sound of her footsteps bouncing off the walls to tell her that it was a corridor. She held back impatience and continued to feel her way with extreme caution—until once again her hand encountered open air.

  She was suddenly awash with light, frozen by it, surrounded by it on all sides. She would have been prepared for any attack but this, which left her blind and helpless, with tears of pain blurring what little vision she had. She went automatically into a defensive crouch, pulling her blade over her head with both hands from the sheath on her back; only to hear a laugh like a dozen brass bells from some point above her head.

  “Little warrior,” the voice said caressingly. “I have so longed for the day when we might meet again.”

  “I can’t say I feel the same about you,” Tarma replied after a bit, trying to locate the demon by sound alone. “I suppose it’s too much to expect you to stand and fight me honorably?” She could see nothing but angry red light, like flame, but without the heat; perhaps the light was a little brighter above and just in front of her. She tried to will her eyes to work, but they remained dazzled, with lances of pain shooting into her skull every time she blinked. There was a smell of blood and sex and something more that she couldn’t quite identify. Her heart was racing wildly with fear, but she was determined not to let him see how helpless she felt.

  “Honor is for fools—and I may have been a fool in the past, but I am no longer quite so gullible. No, little warrior, I shall not stand and fight you. I shall not fight you at all. I shall simply—put you to sleep.”

  A sickly sweet aroma began to weave around her, and Tarma recognized it after a moment as black tran-dust; the most powerful narcotic she knew of. She had only that moment of recognition before she felt her control over herself suddenly melt away; her entire body went numb in a single breath, and she fell face down on the floor, mind and body alike paralyzed, sword falling from a hand that could no longer hold it.

  And now that you cannot fight me, said a silky voice in her mind, I shall make of you what I will ... and somewhat more to my taste than the ice-creature you are now. And this time your Goddess shall not be able to help you. I am nearly a god now myself, and the gods are forbidden to war upon other gods.

  The last thing she heard was his laughter, like bronze bells slightly out of tune with one another.

  Kethry fretted inwardly, counting down the moments until she was supposed to try the gate. This was the hardest part, for certain; the waiting. Anything else she could manage with equanimity. Waiting brought out the worst fears, roused her imagination to a fever pitch. The plan was for Tarma and Warrl to check the courtyard, then unlock the gates for her. They would precede her into the temple as well. They were to meet in the sanctuary, after Tarma had declared it free of physical hazards.

  It was a plan Kethry found herself misliking more with every passing moment. They were a team; it went against the grain to work separately. Granted, Warrl was with Tarma; granted that she was something of a handicap in a skulk-and-hide situation like this—still, Kethry couldn’t help thinking that she’d be able to detect dangers neither of the other two would notice. More than that—her place was with Tarma, not waiting in the wings. Now she began to wish she hadn’t told the Shin‘a’in that she intended to investigate this place. If she’d kept her mouth shut, she could have done this properly, by daylight, perhaps. Finally her impatience became too much; she felt her way along the wall to the wooden gates, and pushed very slightly on one of them.

  It moved.

  Tarma had succeeded in this much, anyway; the gates were now unbarred.

  She pushed a little harder, slowly, carefully. The gate swung open just enough for her to squeeze herself through, scraping herself on the wooden bulwarks both fore and aft as she did so.

  Before her lay the courtyard, mostly open ground.

  Remembering all Tarma had taught her, she crouched as low as she could, waited until the moon passed behind a cloud, and sprinted for the shelter of the dried-up fountain.

  Under the rim, in shadows, she looked around; watching not for objects, but for movement, any movement. But there was no movement, anomalous or otherwise. She crawled under the rim until she lay hidden on the side facing the temple doors.

  She watched, but saw nothing; she listened, but heard only crickets and toads. She waited, aching from the strain of holding herself still in such an awkward position, until the moon again went behind a cloud.

  She sprinted for the temple doors, flinging herself against the wall of the temple behind a pillar as soon as she reached them. It was then that she realized that there had been something very anomalous at the gate.


  The aged gates, allegedly locked for fifteen years, had opened smoothly and without a sound—as if they had been oiled and put into working order within the past several days.

  Something was very wrong.

  A shadow bulked in front of her, and she started with alarm; she pulled the sword in a defensive move before she realized that her “enemy” was Warrl.

  He reached for her arm and his teeth closed gently on her tunic; he tugged at her sleeve. That meant Tarma wanted her.

  “You didn’t meet with anything?” Kethry whispered.

  Warrl snorted. I think that they are all asleep or blind. A cub could have penetrated this place.

  This was too easy; all her instincts were in an uproar. Too easy by far. She suddenly realized what their easy access to this place meant. This was a trap!

  And now Kethry felt a shrill alarm course through her every nerve—a double alarm. Need was alerting her to a woman in the deadliest danger, and very nearby—

  —and the bond of she‘enedran was resonating with soul-deep threat to her blood-sister. Tarma was in trouble.

  As if to confirm her fears, Warrl threw up his head and voiced his battle-cry, and charged within, leaving Kethry behind.

  And given the urgency of Need’s pull, that could only mean one thing.

  Thalhkarsh was here—and he had the Sworn One at his nonexistent mercy.

  The time for subterfuge was over.

  Kethry pulled her ensorcelled blade with her left hand, and caused a blue-green witchlight to dance before her with a gesture from her right; then kicked open the doors of the temple and flung herself frantically through them. She landed hard against the dingy white-plastered wall of a tiny, cobwebbed anteroom, bruising her shoulder; and found herself staring foolishly at an empty chamber.

  Another door stood in the opposite wall, slightly ajar. She inched along the wall and eased it open with the tip of her blade. The witchlight showed nothing beyond it but a brick-walled tunnel that led deeper into the temple proper. Warrl must already have run down this way.

  She moved stealthily through the door, and into the corridor, praying to find Tarma, and soon. The internal alerts of both her blade and her blood-bond were nigh-unbearable, and she hardly dared contemplate what that meant to Tarma’s well-being.

  But the corridor twisted and turned like a kadessa-run, seemingly without end. With every new corner she expected to find something—but every time she rounded a corner she saw only another long, dust-choked extension of the corridor behind her. The dust showed no tracks at all, not even Warrl’s. Could she have somehow come the wrong way? But there were only two directions to choose—forward, or back the way she had come. Back she would never go; that left only forward. And forward was yard after yard of blank-walled corridor, with never a door or a break of any kind. She slunk on and on in a kind of nightmarish entrancement in which she lost all track of time; there was only the endlessly turning corridor before her and the cry for help within her. Nothing else seemed of any import at all. As the urgings of her geas-blade Need and the bond that tied her to Tarma grew more and more frantic, she was close to being driven nearly mad with fear and frustration. She was being distracted; so successfully in fact, that it wasn’t until she’d wasted far too much precious time trying to thread the maze that she realized what it must be—

  —a magical construct, meant to delay her, augmented by spells of befuddlement.

  “You bastard!” she screamed at the invisible Thalhkarsh, enraged by his duplicity. He had made a serious mistake in doing something that caused her to become angry; that rage was useful, it fueled her power. She gathered it to her, made a force of it instead of allowing it to fade uselessly; sought and found the weak point of the spell. She sheathed Need, and spreading her arms wide over her head, palms facing each other, blasted with the white-heat of her anger.

  Mage-energies formed a glowing blue-white arc between her upraised hands; a sorcerer’s wind began to stir around her, forming a miniature whirl-wind with herself as the eye. With a flick of her wrists she reversed her hands to hold them palm-outward and brought her arms down fully extended to shoulder height; the mage-light poured from them to form a wall around her, then the wall expanded outward. The brick corridor walls about her flared with scarlet as the glowing wall of energy touched them; they shivered beneath the wrath-fired mage blast, wavered and warped like the mirages they were. There was a moment of resistance; then, soundlessly, they vanished.

  She saw she was standing in what had been the outer, common sanctuary; an enormous room, supported by two rows of pillars whose tops were lost in the shadows of the ceiling. Tracks in the dust showed she had been tracing the same circling path all the time she had thought she was traversing the corridor. Her anger brightened the witchlight; the green-blue glow revealed the far end of the sanctuary —the forgotten god stood there, behind his altar. The statue of the gentle god of rains had a forlorn look; he and his altar were covered with a blanket of dust and cobwebs. Dust lay undisturbed nearly everywhere.

  Nearly everywhere—she was not the expert tracker Tarma was, but it did not take an expert to read the trail that passed from the front doors to somewhere behind the god’s statue. And in those dust tracks were paw prints.

  Desperate to waste no more time, she pulled her blade again and broke into a run, her blue-green witchlight bobbing before her, intent on following that trail to wherever it led. She passed by the neglected altar with never a second glance, and found the priests’ door at the end of the trace in the dust; it lay just behind and beneath the statue. It had never been intended to be concealed, and besides stood wide open. She sent the witchlight shooting ahead of her and sprinted inside, panting a little.

  But the echoes of running feet ahead of her as she passed into another brick-walled corridor told her that her spell-breaking had not gone unnoticed.

  Common sense and logic said she should find a corner to put her back against and make a stand.

  Therefore she did nothing of the kind.

  As the first of four armed mercenaries came pounding into view around a corner ahead, she took Need in both hands and charged him, shrieking at the top of her lungs. Her berserk attack took the demon-hireling by surprise; he stopped dead in his tracks, staring, and belatedly raised his own weapon. His hesitation sealed his doom. Kethry let the el dritch power of Need control her body, and the bespelled blade responded to the freedom by moving her in a lightning blow at his unprotected side. Screaming in pain, the fighter fell, arm sheared off at the shoulder.

  The second hired thug was a little quicker to defend himself, but he, too, was no match for Need’s spell-imparted skill. Kethry cracked his wooden shield in half with a strength far exceeding what she alone possessed, and swatted his blade out of his hands after only two exchanges, sending it clattering against the wall. She ran him through before he could flee her.

  The third and fourth sought to take her while—they presumed—Kethry’s blade was still held fast in the collapsing body. They presumed too much; Need freed itself and spun Kethry around to meet and counter both their strokes in a display of swords manship a master would envy. They saw death staring at them from the witchlight reflected on the blood-dripping blade, from the hate-filled green eyes.

  It was more than they had the stomach to face—and their lives were worth far more to them than their pay. They turned and fled back down the way they had come, with Kethry in hot pursuit, too filled with berserk anger now to think that a charge into unknown danger might not be a wise notion.

  There was light ahead, Kethry noticed absently, allowing her rage to speed her feet. That might mean there were others there—and perhaps the demon.

  The hirelings ran to the light as to sanctuary; Kethry followed—

  She stumbled to a halt, at first half-blinded by the light; then when her eyes adjusted, tripped on nothing and nearly fell to her knees, her mind and heart going numb at what she saw.

  This had once been the in
ner temple; Thalhkarsh had transformed it into his own perverted place of unholiness. It had the red-lit look of a seraglio in hell. It had been decorated with the same sort of carvings that had ornamented the demon’s temple back in Delton. The subject was sexual ; every perversion possible was depicted, provided that it included pain and suffering.

  The far end of the room had been made into a kind of platform, covered in silk and velvet cushions, plushly upholstered. It was a clichéd setting; an overdone backdrop for an orgy. The demon certainly enjoyed invoking pain, but it appeared that he himself preferred not to suffer the slightest discomfort while he was amusing himself. The platform was occupied by a clutch of writhing nude and partially clothed bodies. Only now were some of those on the platform beginning to disengage and take notice of the hirelings fleeing for the door on the opposite side. Evidently not even the demon foresaw that Kethry would be able to get this far on her own.

  The demon and his followers had been interrupted by her entrance at the height of their pleasures. And it was the sight of the demon’s partner that had stricken Kethry to the heart—for the one being used by the demon himself was Tarma.

  But it was Tarma transformed; she wore the face and body the demon had given her when he had first tried to seduce her to his cause. Though smaller and far frailer, she was still recognizably herself—but with all her angularities softened, her harshness made silken, her flaws turned to beauty. Her clothing was in rags, and she had the bruises and the look of a woman who has been passed from one brutal rape to another. That was bad enough, but that was not what had struck Kethry like a dagger to the heart; it was the absence of any mind or sense in Tarma’s blank blue eyes.

  Tarma had survived rape before; were she still aware and in charge of herself, she would still be fighting. Mere brutal use would not have forced her mind from her, not when the slaughter of her entire Clan as well as her own abuse had failed to do that when she was a young woman and far more innocent than she was now. No—this had to be the work of the demon. Knowing he would be unable to break her spirit, Thalhkarsh had stolen Tarma’s mind; stolen her mind or somehow forced her soul out of her body.