Lady Of The Helm (Book 1)

by T. O. Munro

  The third occupant of the throne room was instantly recognisable, the long silver hair of scalp and beard striving to reach the cord belt that gathered his white robes of office. The crescent symbol which hung around his neck was full two hand spans in width and a clumsy implement to wield in the casting of priestly magic. Yet it was a token of office that marked him as the foremost cleric in the Salved Kingdom, prelate of the diocese whose first pastor had been Saint Morwena wife of the Vanquisher.

  Quintala went to kneel beside Eadran, but Gregor waved her up as he levered himself from the throne. “This is not a time for formalities, Quintala.”

  “Sire,” she contented herself with a low nod and extended the same courtesy to the cleric. “Archbishop Forven.”

  “Seneschal Quintala.” The Archbishop’s chin dipped a fraction of an inch, his lips an unsmiling line above his beard.

  “Quin!” Eadran cried as he rose to his feet. “It is terrible, Thren … he’s…” The young Prince grasped the half-elf’s arms but couldn’t complete the sentence, lips working noiselessly to shape words he dare not utter.

  She gave Eadran’s hand a squeeze of comfort as Gregor confirmed what all who did not know had already guessed. “My son is dead, the ankh cannot lie, and the beacon fires are lit so Sturmcairn is in grievous peril, may even have fallen.”

  Forven made a ponderous sign of the crescent as Quintala probed. “How? What news have we?”

  “Very little. A cavalry squadron are on their way to the pass now, but still it is three days of hard riding there and another three back. I need information now.”

  “Of course, sire.”

  “I have need of your arts. Is there a way you can spy from afar, or travel there at speed?”

  Quintala grimaced. “Sire, you over rate my skills. I can cast a spell to allow a man to run as fast as a horse, I could open a window to view perhaps the city gate, but no further afield than that.”

  “A horse?” Gregor repeated. “No faster?”

  “Why not fly like a bird?” Eadran suggested. “Or mayhap turn into one?”

  “Flight on its own is impossible to sustain for more than a few seconds, while I could transform myself, or another even, into a bird the transformation would become permanent long before Sturmcairn was reached.”

  “You’d be stuck looking like a bird?” Gregor quizzed.

  “I would be a bird sire, in thought and deed. I would lose the will to be anything else, that is the way of transformation spells, powerful but dangerous.”

  Forven sniffed. “It seems that the grace the law gave your ilk to study magic is of little succour in our nation’s hour of need.”

  “Archbishop,” Gregor upbraided him. “You will use Quintala with more courtesy, if you please.”

  “No matter, Sire,” the Seneschal reassured him, flashing a broad smile at the aged prelate. “His great-grandfather was just the same.”

  Forven huffed in discontent, and touched his crescent emblem automatically. The gesture and the questioning combined to trigger a half-remembered fact for Quintala. “There is a way, sire. Archbishop Forven holds the key.”

  “How so?” Gregor and Forven spoke as one, though the king’s eager tone was in sharp contrast to the hesitant anxiety in the prelate’s voice.

  “It was when I was barely a child, my father was still Seneschal then.”

  “The time of Queen Nena?” Gregor’s query drew a nod from Quintala.

  “Two hundred and fifty years ago!” Eadran quickly calculated.

  “What of it?” the Archbishop was impatient for elucidation.

  “At Queen Nena’s passing, by the same sickness that took her child, it seemed there was no heir. The line of Eadran appeared broken,” Quintala hastily explained. “However the royal Ankh revealed there was an heir, remotely related to Nena by blood and also remote by distance.”

  “Gregor the first that would have been. He was living as a minor lord in the Eastern Lands,” the current King Gregor reflected, stroking his beard lightly.

  “It was my father’s duty, as Seneschal, to travel there and find him and bring him back and do it all before the country should descend into crisis. There is much in government that requires one of Eadran’s blood to be seated beneath the iron helm. But a journey by sea would have taken weeks there and back.”

  “What did he do, Quin?”

  “It was his reverence’s predecessor who found a way to get my father to Salicia in the twinkling of an eye.”

  She had their rapt attention now. The journey to Sturmcairn was but a fraction of the distance across the sea to the outpost of Salicia. If that had been possible two centuries ago, then an excursion to the perilous fortress of Sturmcairn was suddenly achievable.

  “How?” Gregor gasped.

  “He prayed for a spell from the Goddess to allow him to access the planes.”

  “No.” The trembling Archbishop crescented himself twice rapidly. “That is a spell for the direst of emergencies. The Goddess grants it but once in a generation and only to those of purest heart.”

  “Well generations have certainly passed and I rate this the gravest crisis I have ever faced, so we need only hope your heart is pure enough, Archbishop,” Gregor growled. “I am disappointed that I need rely on my Seneschal’s longevity and good memory to be advised of a power you could have told me of yourself. Now go pray to the Goddess for this spell and do not return until you can send me a man into the fortress of Sturmcairn.”

  “Sire,” the Archbishop gave a stiff bow and retreated unhappily from the room.

  ***

  Xander suddenly tensed, his head tilted to one side straining to hear something. “He comes,” the traitor Prince exclaimed.

  “Aye,” Haselrig concurred without surprise. Whatever had alerted Xander seemed to have been known to the ex-antiquary for some moments. The hooded lady, equally forewarned, did not even deign to comment. However, the burly outlanders put away their outsized toothpicks and yanked their ragged dress into some kind of order. The big orc stamped its feet restlessly, head swinging left and right in some animal anxiety.

  Udecht fought the urge to step backwards. Even his un-attuned senses had picked up the growing strength and rhythmic beat to the gusts of winds which caught at his sleeves. It was still pitch black, but for the flickering shadows cast by the distant beacon fire. To the West nothing could be seen, yet it was thither that his captors stared. As Udecht followed their gaze, he detected a darker mass to the looming blackness, a piece of shadow that seemed to have detached itself from the fabric of the night. The perspective was deceptive and, though the shape’s size convinced Udecht that this object must be close at hand, still it loomed closer and larger until it seemed to fill the sky. The party in the courtyard struggled to remain upright against the gale force downdrafts which accompanied it.

  “By the Goddess!” Kimbolt muttered, stirred from his desolate muteness by the apparition which had at last condensed from the black night.

  Thick leathery wings flared out, spanning half the length of the courtyard wall. A long serpentine body as thick as Sturmcairntor curled up for landing. Four great taloned feet, with claws the length and width of a man’s leg, sank into the hard rock of the inner courtyard. A great reptilian head loomed before them, yellow eyes as big as a guardsman’s shield, a gaping mouth, full wide enough to swallow a horse whole. Sulphurous fumes rose from its smoking nostrils, bringing tears to Udecht’s eyes.

  “A dragon,” the trembling Bishop said superfluously.

  Having landed, the great wyrm folded its wings, yawned a foul miasma of rotten eggs and brimstone at the little reception committee and laid its head flat on the ground. At which point, terrible as this reptile was, Udecht realised the dragon had a rider. Tall and black, but man shaped and man sized the figure swung a leg easily across the dragon’s neck and slid smoothly to the ground. As Udecht’s jaw dropped further, the wyrm’s rider strode with neither haste nor a backward glance towards the waiting troop o
f conquerors and captured.

  Udecht found time to wonder what make of man could ride a dragon and, still more incredible, what make of man having ridden such a beast would turn his unprotected back to it.

  ***

  Eadran and Quintala crossed the palace courtyard in silence, second born Prince and half–elven Seneschal easier in each other’s company than in any other aspect of the tumultuous night. Three times she had heard him draw breath to speak and then, with a small sigh let the words remain unuttered. It wasn’t until they were passing the statue of Saint Morwena that the young prince found his voice.

  “I don’t think I can do this Quin!”

  “Don’t worry. The Constable will handle most of it. You just have to stand there while the guard pledge allegiance to you….”

  “I don’t mean the swearing in ritual, Quin. It’s the whole thing. I can’t be the Crown Prince. That was Thren, it was always Thren, never me.”

  Quintala seized Eadran by the arm. “Enough! This is not a choice you get to make. It is your destiny. Embrace it!”

  He was shaking his head, avoiding her gaze. She grabbed his chin, turning his face to hers. ‘By the vanquisher’s blood,’ she thought. ‘The boy’s crying.’ The young Prince, sensing her disgust, wiped his hands across his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that Quin,” he muttered. “I hate it when you look at me like that.”

  “You can do this, Eade,” Quintala said in a softer tone than he deserved. She experienced a pang of guilt at the hopeful grin her use of his pet name elicited.

  “It’s bad, Quin isn’t it, really bad?” When her only response was an uncertain grimace he pressed further. “Have you ever known anything this bad? The beacons lit and the Crown Prince dead in the same night?”

  She shrugged. “Probably not, but then I have not always been held close in the counsel of kings. There were some of your forefathers chose not to trust my mixed blood for advice or guidance. Mayhap they encountered a worse peril than this and yet mastered it all unbeknownst to me.”

  “I trust you Quin,” the young Prince replied with shining eyes. “With my life.”

  She gave him a foolish grin and squeezed his hand in an echo of past intimacy. But when he bent his head towards hers lips slightly parted eyes closing in anticipation of a kiss she pulled away. “Come, my Prince,” she snapped. “There is much to do this night.”

  Quintala led the way, cursing inwardly at the weakness of human hearts and minds. Eadran stumbled after her, his eyes hooded in perplexity as childish disappointment joined the confusion of emotions writ large across his face.

  ***

  Kimbolt supressed the urge to run screaming from the sight, though he suspected his legs would not answer the call of his panicked and racing heart. The dragon made no move, raised not so much as a scaly eyebrow, towards the vulnerable back of its former rider. As the figure drew closer Kimbolt noticed the thin wisps of condensing vapour that trailed behind it, the very moisture frozen out of the air by some unearthly cold. He saw the shreds of ragged but once rich clothing that hung from a skeletal frame, saw the face, a noseless skull, papered with the thinnest of cracked age blackened skin and saw, in the depths of hollow eye sockets, two red glowing pits of malice.

  “Ww.. what is that ?” The question forced itself from his mouth.

  “Behold, Captain Kimbolt,” Dema indulged him. “His name was once Magister, though he is pleased these long years to accept the title Maelgrum the Lich which his enemies bestowed on him. The greatest wizard living or dead this world has ever seen.”

  “It can’t be,” Udecht stammered. “Eadran the Vanquisher destroyed him near a millennium ago. Maelgrum is gone. Finished.”

  “My dear Bishop, he isn’t exactly alive, I grant you,” the hooded Medusa teased. “But he is certainly a lot less dead than you would like.”

  “Isss your chatter quite finissshed?” The low voice hissed from the creature’s unmoving mouth with a quiet but icy clarity. It was not so much that he raised his voice, rather that other sounds fell silent in deference to him.

  Xander hurried to bow before the undead mage. “Oh Maelgrum, Sturmcairn is yours to command, taken as your Eminence planned.”

  The undead wizard’s foot flicked out with unlikely force, depositing the outlander traitor on his back some yards behind the line. “Not exxxactly asss I had planned.” A bony finger shot out to point at the blazing crest to Sturmcairntor. “How iss it that the beacon hasss been fired?”

  Kimbolt sensed the dread in the Maelgrum’s three henchmen. Haselrig was first to speak. “An accident, your Eminence. Prince Thren distracted us. Another lit the beacon.”

  The lich homed in on the unwise ex-priest. “an accsssident ? you were dissstracted ? A loyal ssservant of Maelgrum would not ssssuccumb to sssuch mortal failingsss, or at leassst not with any hope of sssurvival.”

  “It was Xander, he entranced one of the guards, but did not notice when his feeble magic wore thin.” Dema threw the blame in a different direction.

  “Think, my dear Medussa, from whom friend Xander learned hisss magic artsss, before you ssseeek to decry his talentsss.”

  Dema made a low bow. “I seek only to point out the limitations of the pupil. I know the skills of the Master are without fault.”

  The flattery pleased the Lich and he nodded slowly, before turning his attention to the squirming Xander who had just recovered his feet. Hastily the fawning Prince flung a counter accusation, “ask her where this human is, your Eminence. Ask her what she has done with the man who lit the beacon.”

  “Indeed, I ssshould like to sssee hisss body,” Maelgrum acknowledged. “Once I have dealt with a ssservant who ssso forgetsss himself asss to give me ordersss.” A blackened digit pointed briefly in Xander’s direction and a dozen flaming bolts streaked towards the trembling outlander Prince. Ten shot harmlessly past him, towards the breaking dawn, but just as he grew sure his master sought only to frighten him, the last two thundered into his chest. With a howl of pain, Xander fell writhing to the floor, arms folded across his scorched body.

  As Xander searched for his scattered wits, Maelgrum turned back to Dema. “Now where isss the man who lit the beacon?”

  Dema stepped aside, revealing Kimbolt. “This is the man, your eminence. A captain of the garrison.”

  Maelgrum stepped toe to toe with Kimbolt, sniffing him almost. Kimbolt tried not to meet the flame red gaze, to shut his nostrils to the foul miasma as the not-dead wizard inspected him closely. “He appearsss to be alive and in no immediate pain?” the Lich exclaimed. “Why isss thisss?”

  “He is to be my slave,” Dema proclaimed with a confidence she could not feel.

  “He hasss disssrupted my plansss. He mussst sssuffer for that before he diesss.” Maelgrum stated.

  Dema stood defiantly before Maelgrum. “He is mine. My property. My prize.”

  The lich was virtually enveloped in a cloud of vapour as three quick strides brought him to the Medusa. A bony hand seized hold of her snake hair, two serpents in his grasp froze into instant death, a fate which brought cries of pain from Dema’s lips. Despite the agony in her scalp she reached and pulled off her mask. Sparkling eyes met the flame red sockets of Maelgrum’s skull. A glance that would petrify any living thing, brought merely a mocking hiss from the Lich’s fleshless mouth.

  “You think to ssstone me, Dema?”

  “He is mine, Maelgrum. Mine. I have earned him.” Through the pain she still resisted.

  He twisted the dead snakes. “Think, my fine friend what you risssk. I am angry. I am consssidering ssspiking out thossse eyesss of yoursss, ssslicing of these petsss that conssstitute your coiffure and casssting you into the ssskull crussshersss camp. I believe that orcsss know well what to do with a bald blind medusssa. If physssical gratification isss what you ssseek, they would be happy to oblige you endlesssly.”

  “He is mine Maelgrum.”

  “No, Dema. You are mine, you are all mine. It ssseemsss that you forget it.” />
  “You could not kill me.”

  “Isss it the power or the inclination that you doubt I posssesss?” The Lich drew her face close to his, frost formed on her skin in the freezing air that surrounded him.

  “I serve you well. Who would command your armies, save I. No him at least!” she waved an arm towards the watching Xander who, until that point, had been enjoying the Medusa’s discomfort at their Master’s hand.

  “That isss a point in your favour.” She dropped to the floor as Maelgrum released his grip.

  “Can I have him?”

  “One human life, what isss that worth?” Maelgrum asked the night sky before suddenly swinging his ice cold hand hard across the kneeling Medusa’s cheek. The force of the blow flung her half stunned across the courtyard. “Yesss, I think that isss about right. A blow of my hand isss the price. You have paid, you can have him - when you can ssstand again of courssse.”

  ***

  The borrowed horses were uneasy, either with the circumstances that had brought them to their present riders, or the tension that filled the air between the two humans. Niarmit led on the roan mare, Kaylan followed at a distance of carefully calculated deference. Neither thief nor Princess had the inclination to break the silence as their mounts picked a careful way along the stony pass rising into the blue tinged peaks of the Hadran mountains. Each rider was alone with their thoughts while the wind whipped around their muffled faces. The climb from foothills to the crest of the rarely used pass was near halfway done, when the steady clip-clopping of Kaylan’s steed stopped.

  It was a moment before Niarmit realised, swivelling on her own mount to look back at her stationary companion. The thief was standing in his stirrups, head inclined as though sniffing the air. Niarmit was about to ask what he was listening for when she heard it too, carried within the wind the unmistakeable howl of wolves.