“If I am right about what is going on in your head, well then, I think I have the key to unlocking it.” He turned to the guard and gestured with the hand holding the candle towards the nearby table. “Put her there, if you would.”
The woman mumbled something, but was in no position to resist as the guard roughly shoved her towards the scarred wooden table, then onto it. He had some fuss getting her on her back, but once there she simply lay there moaning softly.
Allystaire heard the chains bound around his wrists creaking, felt the metal digging into his skin.
“There will be no heroics from you, I think,” the sorcerer said, and raised a hand. The chains binding Allystaire’s limbs suddenly glowed, not with heat, but from the power Bhimanzir commanded. Suddenly their weight was tenfold what it had been, twenty. They drew tighter, and Allystaire felt his hands and shoulders and ankles going numb.
“Now, boy. Hold this.” He moved the candle in the direction of his student without looking back at him, and the boy glided noiselessly to the sorcerer’s side, reaching out and taking the silver and glass lamp by its curled handle.
The sorcerer moved to the table and laid a red-tipped hand upon the rack of instruments. His fingertips danced over them: shears; a long, flat blade with no point; a very long and thin knife; and a wicked, black-crusted hook with a wooden handle.
“All blood carries power. One of the gifts of my order is the ability to unlock it, you see,” the sorcerer said, and his intentions, which Allystaire was already certain of, became perfectly clear. “Why, I believe you saw some of what Gethmasanar could do with even the thin, weak stuff of peasants.”
The paladin felt the song of the Goddess’s anger begin to flood his limbs, and yet the music was distant and hard to hear, and his arms were weaker than they should have been.
The chains did not budge.
The sorcerer took the shears and began cutting away the woman’s filthy dress. She was an older woman, Allystaire saw. Not elderly, but a few years older than him, probably, and she could only struggle feebly, with her hands bound behind her. She was, he suddenly realized, of an age with many of the women who’d been taken from Thornhurst. He remembered Idgen Marte’s words to him back in the village, on the day the Urdarite monks had come. Someone did see value in enslaving women of her age after all. The chill that had danced along his spine returned, only with a drumbeat of certainty in his thoughts.
They were sacrifices.
Allystaire strained against his ensorcelled chains, and he thought he felt them move, yet he was still bound. Certainly they rattled, he thought, grimly. That’s something.
The student had turned to him, drawn, perhaps, by the noise, but his darkly shaded eyes flitted back to the sorcerer.
Impulsively, Allystaire spoke. “Boy. You, without a name. Is this the man you want to give you one, eh?”
The sorcerer turned to Allystaire then, his eyes narrowed red slits. “Why are you talking to my student?” Then his attention turned to the boy. “Did you speak to him? Were you instructed to do so? No!” the sorcerer roared, and the guard near the doorway quailed at the power in his voice. The woman on the table let out a long and loud sob, and Allystaire felt his ear pop.
The sorcerer backhanded the boy across the face, and while the student stumbled, he didn’t drop the candle. He simply regarded his master silently.
“Answer me. Answer me or I will have you upon the table, regardless of what Gethmasanar tells me about your untapped power. Perhaps it is your blood that will unlock this upstart for me!” He leaped forward and seized the boy’s tunic in one hand, dragging him close.
“You said yourself he was a clumsy fool. He is a coward as well, afraid to ply a blade to anything not bound for him. And you would have a name he bestowed?” Not sure what good this is doing, Allystaire thought, for while the boy’s face turned to him, he still did not speak.
The sorcerer turned, eyes wide open and raging red, leaped towards Allystaire. “I will be reading signs in your vitals next. The haruspicy warned of a mother, and so I took mothers and I read the signs in them, and it showed me death. Death! As if something as insignificant as you could threaten me. I will have three upon my table tonight and I will wade in your innards till this farce is clear to me!”
As the sorcerer was raging at him, the student, still holding the candle, raised his free hand, and Allystaire felt some new note in the music that played, slow and dim, in his body.
The glow upon Allystaire’s chains winked out of existence. They were no longer a heavy weight. They were linen, or silk, laying lightly against his skin.
The boy nodded, Allystaire thought, at him.
The sorcerer whirled upon his student, a wordless roar of frustration emanating from his lips.
The wooden frame Allystaire had been bound to exploded into splinters as he suddenly ripped his hands free of it, links of chain scattering across the floor. He leaped to his feet, his body flooded with rage, and he took but one step forward before his left hand closed around the sorcerer’s neck. He meant to crush his throat, to tear his head from his shoulders if need be. It felt possible.
But when his fingers found the sorcerer’s flesh, something rushed into them, some throb of knowledge suddenly in his hand. Rather than squeeze, Allystaire poured the anger, the crying out for justice, the molten power his body thrummed with, into the sorcerer’s body.
And healed him.
The red glow in Bhimanzir’s eyes and his fingertips guttered and died, and the sorcerer collapsed with a strangled cry.
Allystaire leaped past him and barreled straight into the guard, delivering a powerful over-handed right fist directly into the man’s mailed chest.
The guard had his sword half out of his scabbard when Allystaire hit him, and he staggered backward against the door, breathing raggedly. His hauberk was broken where Allystaire’s blow had landed, and blood trickled through where the torn rings of his mail had pushed into the meat of his chest.
“Painful,” Allystaire said, as he crouched over the guard and snatched his sword away by simply ripping the scabbard from the belt. “Yet not fatal.” He drew the sword, tossed the scabbard away, and said, “I will remedy that if I must.”
Allystaire stepped to the table where the intended victim still sobbed quietly. He helped her sit up, quickly tugged the leather thongs binding her wrists free with finger and thumb, and then turned back to the guard.
He reached down and hauled the wounded man to his feet with his free hand; it felt like picking up a blanket. Pointedly, he lifted the man clear in the air before setting him back on his feet.
“Was the woman kept nearby?”
The guard nodded, clutching at his wound with one hand.
“Boy, can you manage the woman?”
There was a pause as the student considered, his head tilted to one side. “Yes.”
“Good. Bring your former master’s tools as well.”
“Why?”
Allystaire wasn’t listening to the boy’s questions. He bent down, lifted Bhimanzir from the floor with his left hand, tightened his right around the hilt of the unfamiliar sword, and leveled it at the guard.
“Take—”
A strangled cry from the limp sorcerer gave him pause. With his sickly red light gone out, the candle seemed to blaze brighter than it had, and Allystaire peered closely at the old wisp of a man clutched in his hand. Before his very eyes, age overtook Bhimanzir’s features. The sorcerer’s skin creased and folded; his eyes clouded over and sank into their sockets. His cleanly shaven head sprouted hair that began brown but faded rapidly to silver and then to white as it grew, and all of this in the span of a breath.
He heard the nameless apprentice stepping closer behind him, could practically feel the boy’s attention focusing on his master.
Bhimanzir raised a hand slowly, feebly, reaching for t
he boy. The skin turned papery and thin, as if the very bones were rising up against it. The sorcerer croaked some words Allystaire could not make out, then fell forward to the stones of the torture chamber and lay still.
Allystaire put a hand to his neck and probed with the Goddess’s Gift for any spark of life. There was nothing but a dark and impenetrable blackness, something harder and meaner than mere death or injury.
“What was he saying,” Allystaire asked.
“He was trying to utter a curse, but his power had utterly left him. How did you do that?”
“I am not quite sure,” Allystaire replied. “I am sure that now is not the time to discuss it.”
The boy walked forward and squatted down, putting his hand in front of the sorcerer’s mouth, satisfying his own curiosity it seemed. The boy stepped back, then extended the toe of his boot to touch the sorcerer’s limp head. Hair, skin, and bone crumbled away like ash, and the rest of his body followed, till there was nothing left but a pile of dust.
The boy stood and tucked the case of knives and hooks under one arm.
“He was a fool,” the boy said. “I am glad he is dead,” he added, simply, as he stood waiting, looking expectantly at Allystaire.
Meanwhile the guard had started to edge away. Allystaire cleared his throat meaningfully and the guard halted.
“Take us to where the women are kept,” he said to the soldier. The guard looked from the sword that had never wavered to the sorcerer’s limp and desiccated form, swallowed hard, and waved one hand.
It was not a long walk; the stone corridor outside was well lit. The torches lining the walls made each step brighter than the one before.
They rounded a curve, the guard in front, when a voice suddenly called out.
“Back for another one so soon? Well, we’re empty. He usually takes a little longer. Be a mess for the mornin’ change t’clean up.”
Another guard, green-tabarded, mailed, sat on a stool in front of an iron-banded oaken door. Keys dangled from his belt, next to a heavy flanged mace.
The tone of his voice struck Allystaire, the casual discussion of the prisoners they guarded, of their fate. The disregard. It ignited the fury of the Goddess to a pitch beyond his endurance, and before he realized what he was doing, he had shouldered the first guard aside, lunged forward, and driven the point of the borrowed sword straight through the key-holder’s chest, cutting him off in mid sentence. Allystaire didn’t stop; he kept pushing the blade forward, stepping close till his bare skin brushed against the guard’s mail and surcoat, till the hilt was buried in the dead man’s body and his blood had poured in a torrent over Allystaire’s arm and chest.
When the paladin stepped back, the sword he’d stripped from the guard was buried a foot deep in the stone of the dungeon wall. The guard’s body slumped forward against it obscenely, the stool clattering away from under nerveless limbs.
Allystaire ripped the man’s belt away with his suddenly weaponless hand, and threw it over his shoulder, drawing the heavy mace free and brandishing it at the guard who was backing away.
“You knew,” Allystaire said, his voice cold and menacing. “You knew what you were guarding these people for. What end you brought them to. You knew,” he repeated, spitting the last word out like a curse.
The guard backed away another step, a small well of blood seeping up between his fingers where he clasped his wounded chest. Allystaire stood before him, naked, half of his torso covered in fresh blood, his white knuckled grip so hard the haft of the mace he held cracked.
It was too much. The guard’s nerve broke; he turned and ran.
He got two steps before the thrown mace took him in the back of the head. His skull crumpled like a curled leaf under a heavy boot, and he fell to the ground.
Allystaire spent only a moment contemplating the two corpses. “Take these,” he said, tossing the boy the belt with the ring of keys still dangling from it. The boy was small, with thin, gangly limbs, dark eyes deep-set on his dusky face, with his head shaved so close there was no trace of hair upon it.
He caught the belt and simply wrapped it twice around himself, tying off the ends where Allystaire broke them.
Meanwhile, Allystaire picked up the mace and broke down the door. It took two blows. The first bent the door inward. The second ripped it clean off its hinges. Inside was a dimly lit stone room, much like the one where he’d been held.
“I do not think there are any more slaves,” the boy called from behind Allystaire, and the paladin whirled on him, glowering.
“They are not slaves, boy. No one is a slave, not in my sight. Not in the sight of the Mother.”
The peasant woman cleared her throat. Her eyes were red but her sobs had ceased, though she maintained a wary distance from Allystaire. “It’s true though, m’lord. I was the only one bein’ kept there.”
Allystaire nodded, but strode into the room anyway. On the back wall, heavy iron rivet-loops had been driven into the stone, each holding a ring for chains to be threaded through. Allystaire set down the mace, took a ring in each hand, and, with a twitch of his song-filled arms, ripped them free; he moved first one way down the wall, then the other. There were a dozen rings when he started, and a dozen holes in the dungeon room when he was done.
“This work was new,” he murmured, as he strode out, and reclaimed the dead guardsman’s mace. “At least that much is true.” He took a deep breath, fearing, if only briefly, the wavering of the Goddess’s song, and the power it brought. But still Her presence filled his mind and powered his limbs.
“Do you know where my armor was taken? My arms?”
“No, but the guards you killed are wearing some. Is yours so different?”
“Different enough. Even so, your point is not entirely without reason.” His ears alert for any sound of clattering footsteps, the jingle of mail or weapons, but hearing none, Allystaire paused to strip the dead guard of his tabard, and to throw it on over his otherwise naked body. Cold of a lot of good it’ll do to stop a sword, or an arrow.
“What time is it?”
“Almost three turns past the new day,” the boy answered, without pausing to think.
“Where does the Baron sleep?”
“I don’t know.” The boy tilted his head to one side, wrinkled his brow, and asked in a tone as if he addressed a simpleton, “Why would you think I would?”
“Never mind,” Allystaire said. He thought about stripping the hauberk from one of the dead guards, but just as he knelt on the stone, he heard the sound he dreaded—the stamp of boots. Stone swallowed the noise, and the corridor ahead of him branched in three directions, so he could not locate precisely where it came from.
“Boy, is there anything you can do to help me in a fight?”
“Give me time to think on it.”
“We may not have any,” Allystaire replied, and as soon as he did, the shouts down a corridor became clear. I know orders being yelled when I hear them. How would they know so fast?
He heard some member of the detachment, a sergeant or bannerman, he was sure, yelling ahead of them. “Intruders in the keep! Fire! Ware the guards. Stand to, every man!”
Fire? Intruders? Allystaire had little time to puzzle over this before ten guards, spears at the ready, poured into the far end of the corridor.
He raised his mace and said, “Boy, good woman, stay behind me.” Cautiously, holding the weapon in two hands, Allystaire began to move forward.
Two guards, he saw, cocked their arms and readied to throw, bracketing him with their aim from either side. Solid plan, that, he noted, then he charged, barreling to his right as he did. The spear thrown to that side took him in the left shoulder as he pushed himself against the wall, while the other clattered harmlessly to the stone.
More spears were raised, and he was still ten paces away and unarmored. He took a deep breath, expecting th
e pain, expecting the spear. Then, unexpectedly, he felt something, a presence, and he allowed himself a smile.
A long-limbed shadow materialized amidst the guards and began weaving between them, a crescent of darkness extended from one of its hands, cutting their legs out from under them, tearing throats open.
Allystaire paused for just a moment, switched the mace to his left hand, and pulled the spear free from his shoulder. The pain registered in his mind more than his body.
He reversed the spear in his right hand, took a step, and threw. It whistled in the air and made a horrifying crunching sound as it pierced one of the guards through the side of his body, punching through mail, flesh, and bone. He dropped, blood pouring from his side and his mouth, as Allystaire tossed the mace back into his right hand, and pressed his left awkwardly against his own wound. In a moment, it closed, and he let it be. There will be pain, and a scar. As it should be, he thought, followed closely by, It was freezing stupid to walk in here like I did.
There was little work left for him to do among the guards. When the Shadow had killed two and cut the legs from two more before the others could even react, it had taken the fight out of them. Allystaire’s spear-throw had broken a pair of them, who turned and ran, but three now pressed upon the form that had ambushed them. She was still a figure of weaving shadow, hard to see, harder to catch, but one of the three remaining men—the sergeant Allystaire had heard bellowing—was smart.
“Backs to the wall,” he ordered, “spears set for a charge.”
Idgen Marte—he knew it was her as soon as he’d felt her moments before she’d appeared—vanished from sight. Unable to come at them any way but from the front, her advantage was diminished. Allystaire, the strength of the Goddess’s Gift still flowing in his veins—longer than it ever had before—recognized the man giving orders as Chaddin, the sergeant of the detachment that had imprisoned him.
“Chaddin,” Allystaire barked out, hoarsely. “Throw down your spears. You can better serve your barony if you listen to me. If you do not, all you can do is die.”
The sergeant’s gaze swiveled towards Allystaire, though the point of his spear never wavered. “I see it three against two. Even if one is some kind of demon.”
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