Kelrob’s eyes were drawn this way, and he squinted against the sun’s waning disc, somehow aware that things were happening beneath those unseen branches, one of the strange ceremonies that always occurred there at times of high celebration among the nithings. Judging by the state of the grapes it was the wrong season for a festival, and the rottenness of the crop itself should have precluded any unscheduled frivolity, but nonetheless Kelrob was certain he could hear the distant mutter of ceremonial drums rolling over the hillock. Dimly this aroused his waking memories, of the House of the Setting Sun and its accompanying horrors, of strange lovely Jacobson and the coming of Tamrel, but Kelrob was fallen nigh-completely into the weft of the dream, and he stood on his tip-toes, eager to absorb as much of the sound as he could. The drums of the celebrants had always stirred him, given an exotic jolt to his blood, though he had never dared confess as much to his father and brother. Now, seemingly alone, he smiled and lost himself in the tribal pattern, the crude all-encompassing beat. His body, still on tip-toes, began to sway in jerking time.
At length, the rhythms grew louder, the beats growing faster and more frantic. Kelrob ascertained by the swelling sound that the revelers had left the treeline, had advanced onto the forbidden land of the Kael-Pellin estate. Vaguely he thought of calling for a servant, or for grizzled Osseus, the household’s aged majordomo and chief man-at-arms, but he knew that his cries would be wasted. The house was empty. Slowly he lowered from the tips of his toes, though his body continued to jerk unpleasantly with the war-like cadence of the revelers. Kelrob could hear new instruments joining the fray, timbrels and horns and shrilly piping flutes, devices whose music had scarce reached his window in childhood. Torches flared at the height of the hillock, and Kelrob drew back from the casement, his breath coming thick and fast. The punishments for intruding on a laird’s private dwelling were harsh in the extreme; never in Kelrob’s lifetime had one of his family’s underlings dared tread uninvited on Kael-Pellin soil. Yet here they came, streaming down the hillock and between the rows of swollen grapes as the last sliver of sunlight vanished behind the prominence. Beams of crimson streamed over the hill’s crest, a halo of blood; below, in the small valley adjacent to the central household, all was draped in a dense purple twilight marked with the firefly passage of torches. The music grew louder, a vortex of twangling and thudding and atonal blowing, all now underscored with a cackle of singing voices. The din was too great to discern the matter of their song, but Kelrob shivered at the primal tones, knowing without knowledge that he heard no lament or pastoral reverie, but a vengeful cry in search of sacrifice.
The revelers drew closer to the manse, clustering in the vacant carriage-yard. The light of their torches revealed the upper portions of their bodies only, and Kelrob saw on every face a mask in imitation of an animal or plant or element. The song rose until the casements rattled; several books tumbled from the overstacked shelves. Kelrob looked on in terror as the very foundations of his ancient family abode began to crack and crumble, the slanted chimneys collapsing in a cascade of stone. The mage could not bear the sight, but returned his attention to the revelers, horrible shades in mask and firelight. Six men dressed in hollow-eyed guises depicting a proud stag, replete with wickedly sharpened antlers, came forward in twitching time with the music, their arms laden with dry tinder. This burden they stacked in the carriage-yard before the shuddering manse, laying each branch with exquisite care, until a small pyre stood on the hard-packed earth. Then, withdrawing knives from thongs bound at their ankles, they sliced open their wrists and sprinkled blood on the waiting wood, mumbling strange words that rose sonorous over the music. Kelrob clutched his hands to his throat, frozen in place as the floor pitched and swayed beneath his feet. He wondered if the pyre was for him. In some strange way he yearned for the privilege.
But no; there was his father, Amon Kael-Pellin, emerging from the main entrance of the manse. Kelrob watched in silence as the man he knew as teacher and sire walked at a stately pace to confront the revelers, his long arms swinging in easy tandem with his lanky frame. Amon Kael-Pellin was a middle-aged man fraying into the twilight of his years, rendered old by a life of crushing ambition that had expanded his ancestral holdings by 600 acres and flooded his line’s long-suffering coffers with wealth. His hair, once a tenebrous and glistening black, had dimmed to a curl of iron gray fibers. He was tall and rail-thin, but walked with a distinct hunch incurred not from harsh physical labor but from countless hours of counting coins and measuring scales. Nevertheless, he strode with staid dignity to confront his tormentors, approaching the pyre and staring at the masked throng over that meticulously arranged and blooded bier. His eyes, dark like Kelrob’s, roved over the press of bodies, the fluttering torches, the screeching prancing minstrels; then, to the mage’s horror, he very calmly and lucidly mounted the pyre and laid down amid the dried tangle, crossing his arms over his chest and casting his eyes up to Kelrob’s window. There was something in them, perhaps a sadness, perhaps a regret; Kelrob cried out, but all sound fell leaden from his mouth. He could only watch as four women emerged from the throng, naked save for the bright swathes of paint coating their skin. They bore torches of roaring fire, and their faces were obscured behind stylized depictions of earth and air and water and flame. Drawing close to the pyre, they encircled the supine body of Amon Kael-Pellin, shrieking and wailing in voices that reminded Kelrob of the haunting east wind, which often swept in from the distant sea to lose itself amid the hills and valleys of his aptly-titled homeland. The women circled the bier, raised their torches, and, to Kelrob’s immense horror, reached between their painted thighs to coat their hands in nether-blood. This they sprinkled over Kelrob’s father, menstrual flecks painting his unflinching face; then, with a final keen, they raised their torches and brought them down to touch the parched, hungry wood. The blaze rose immediately, with a roar like that of some ancient beast; amid the flames Amon Kael-Pellin lay unmoving, issuing no cry as the flames licked over his robed body. Kelrob cast himself down against the casement, and wept empty tears, his eyes as dry as his tongue. It was several minutes before he raised himself to look down at the conflagration, though its roar pounded unremitting in his ears, drowning out the bestial music. When he did raise himself to peer anew, he saw that the fire was total. There was nothing left of his father, no charred remnant or curl of blackened bone. The pyre raged higher, topping the peaked crest of the manse’s roof; down in the carriage-yard the revelers began to scream in unison. Slowly they began to circle the house, ululating hideously, their torches stabbing up into the last dying sunlight.
It was enough. Kelrob turned and staggered from his rooms, emerging into the long, many-doored hallway that terminated at his father’s counting-room. The house was quivering and groaning, plaster sifting from the ceiling to cloud Kelrob’s vision as he hurtled for the nearest stairwell, seeking the ground floor and escape. The stairs tipped crazily beneath him, broke and shattered, opening up a throat of splintered wood that reached down to the manse’s nethermost cellar. Kelrob cried out silently and retreated, dashing back into the hallway just as a sharp, bonelike crack indicated that the stairwell at the hall’s far end had also given way. He was trapped, trapped on the uppermost floor.
Kelrob flew into a panic, tugging at the handles of the hallway’s many doors. Each would open onto a familiar room, a familiar scene, but all were locked, and the mage was without a key. At last, his fingers numb from tearing at the brass handles, Kelrob returned to his room, his only room. The books had all now tumbled from the shelves, lying in heaps on the wildly-shifting floorboards. Running to the window, Kelrob stared down at the still-rising pyre, at the writhing bodies of the revelers, and bowed his head. He watched from the corner of his eye as the righthand wing of the manor-house began sinking into the earth. The room shuddered about him, and suddenly Kelrob realized that the pyre had not grown higher, that the manse and everything within it was being methodically consumed by the
eager soil. Even as he comprehended this the stink of sod clouded his nostrils, the bite of dust infiltrated his lungs; the house shook so violently that the casement cracked, the windows dangling askew so that their bubbled panes reflected the light of the circling revelers. There came a grinding sound, a roaring sound, and Kelrob raised his eyes, watching as his rooms ground closer to the devouring land. He hoped, half-crazily, to leap from the window when it grew close enough, but his plan was foiled by the revelers, who rushed forward with sharp spears and tines of whittled bone. They hovered at the descending window, so close that Kelrob could smell the stink of sweat and hot woad, of blood and strange, savage perfumes. He made several attempts to clamor through, each one more frantic, but always they prodded him back within, within, until the first trickle of soil spilled over the sundered casement. Now they withdrew, and Kelrob made one last scrabbling lunge, but the dirt slipped under his hands, sending up clouds of dry, famine-scented earth. At last, laughing madly, he fell back against the far wall and watched as the tide of soil crept nearer, watched as the casement was glutted with earth, obscuring all sight of the revelers and their raging pyre. Thus he remained until the dirt rose around his ankles, rose around his waist, at last reaching the gulping bulb of his neck and finally the flaring caverns of his nostrils. Only then, with a start and a choking gurgle, did he awake.
He was underwater. Clawing upwards, desperate for air, Kelrob broke the surface of his finely perfumed bath. Clambering over the edge of the bathing tub he collapsed, gasping, onto the tiled floor. For long minutes he lay there, his lungs roaring with precious air, the damp stink of the tiles and the melange of herbal perfume accompanying every breath. Then, rising unsteadily, he stumbled down the marble steps and went to the cabinet containing the robes, fetching out a sumptuous drape that he wrapped around his shivering, naked form. The dream raged still in his mind, almost as real in waking as it had been in sleep; clutching the robe tightly about himself, Kelrob shakily unlocked the door to the chamber and staggered out into the hallway. For a moment he panicked, thinking he had returned to the nightmare, but this hallway boasted fewer doors, all of them hanging ajar.
At the far end he could see a light burning in the study. Slipping on the finely carpeted floor, Kelrob staggered towards the glow, finding Jacobson hunched over a large leatherbound volume. The big man looked up at his entrance, and Kelrob almost screamed at the sight of the mask. Instead he swooned, falling against a reading desk; within moments strong arms were around him, dragging him upwards, thick hands pushing the sodden locks from his face.
“Lad,” came Jacobson’s voice, startled and sick with worry, “what in the Gyre’s name have you been about?”
The mage shuddered and lolled back his head, meeting Jacobson’s blue eyes behind the mask’s pale veneer. “I don’t think I can do this,” he said faintly, then burst into a storm of helpless tears.
15: Bending
After Kelrob vanished to the inner chambers, intent on cleansing himself, Jacobson had begun pacing. Back and forth, before the flickering hearth, his feet scuffling over the heavy curling carpet, he pondered his absurd fate and idly eyed the immense, forbidden wealth stacked all about him. In a different time, a different life, he would have crowed for joy and ransacked the place, vanishing into the night with his pockets swollen with jewels and an enchanted blade slung on each hip. Gods, he might have even done that last week, but the unfortunate liking a certain self-aware mask had taken to his features had changed his heart, though not his nature, irrevocably. Now, wealth meant very little, less than it had even when he was seeking his own death. The sparkling jewels were mere trinkets, the enchanted blades...were very nice, and regardless of his possession he would attempt to lift one before they departed. If they departed. This thought set off another ream of black musings, and Jacobson paced more ferociously, his face sweating behind the mask. The big man hated the smell of his own sweat, thought it bovine and base. Silently he cursed at Kelrob for wafting off and hogging the tub.
At length, after he tired of brooding, Jacobson went to the sideboard and perused the vintages. Unstoppering several bottles, he took long whiffs of each, seeking any kind of sensory input to drown out the foreign consciousness slowly taking root in his mind. Tamrel was there, as sure as a sewer had rats, clamoring about and cataloging the cesspits and clogged runoffs of his psyche. The mask prickled and burned against his face, though sometimes it went deathly cold, and at other times radiated a faint, almost pleasant heat. At these times Jacobson could almost forget it was there, until he reached up to scratch at his nose or tug at his whiskers. Now, inhaling the scent of various wines, he felt a slight easing of Tamrel’s presence, felt himself step more ardently into the captaincy of his own brain and brawn. The thought of drinking, however, was dead boring, a sad fact that made Jacobson wonder if he was deathly ill on top of everything else. Alcohol had been his one surcease for the past year, and habitual imbibing had featured strongly even in his most fiery and idealistic days. But wine, wine, wine...a cold ale was what he wanted, and was probably the one sinful pleasure not available beneath Az-whatever-his-name-was’s roof. The rich generally disdained ale, considering it a crude drink of the wheat-worshiping primitives who dwelt beyond their precious city walls. They drank wine, or mead, or any of a host of fermented fruit-juices or nectars or exotic tree barks, eschewing the simple, elegant taste of fermented grain; fools, the lot of them.
Jacobson restoppered the wines and sniffed disdainfully in their general direction, remembering that Kelrob had said something about a repast laid out in the solar. There was always the off-chance that a flagon of brew was nestled somewhere amid the inedible provender of lizard tongues and parrot’s eyeballs; with a grunt Jacobson went off on the quest, his throat contracted with yearning.
He passed through the arched doorway, and following the spill of unwholesome sunlight quickly found his way to the solar. The chamber was a small half-sphere of leaded glass that protruded from the leviathan body of the house, allowing in sunlight at all times of day. This was an unfortunate aspect at present, as the siege-dome burning overhead tinted the air the color of moldering cheese. Jacobson was no stranger to martial magic, and had always wondered why the hallowed Isdori hadn’t fiddled their protective magics into a slightly less nauseating shade, say soft lavender purple or the green of fresh-sprung leaves. But, alas, he was not among the echelons of the wise...though he could ask Kelrob about it later, when the lad’s poor mind was a little less plagued. Jacobson’s brow furrowed in sympathy as he thought of the young twitchy magister, whose innocent eyes had become increasingly clouded since their first meeting. The world was a black, wicked place, no doubt about it; but somehow the lad seemed to have avoided the conditioning of his class, the pollutions of his teachers, and the general plague of stupidity that, in Jacobson’s opinion, was so fatally catching among the human race. Kelrob was strangely innocent, strangely other, a being out of place and time. His eyes flickered with dreams in a way that Jacobson remembered, and the big man bowed his head, mourning the river of blood that had drowned his childhood.
There was food in the solar, and an abundance of wines, some golden, some crimson, some a pale green hue that hinted at infusion of wormwood. Jacobson spurned them all. Similarly he spurned the food, which proved itself slightly more palatable than he’d suspected, though the pickling light of the siege-dome made the plates of finely-sliced beef and fragrant bread look as if they were encrusted with a dank, mephitic fungus. There was no ale, not even a jug of true spirits, and Jacobson heaved a frustrated sigh, his tongue practically writhing with desire. He paced around the solar like a caged beast before exiting back into the hallway, his mind desiring the one satisfaction it could dependably glean: books. Kelrob had intimated a library, and Jacobson ached to see it. He’d never had more than a few books in his possession, never seen a true library, though he had often imagined them. Looking down the hallway, Jacobson saw the sealed doo
r of the bathing chamber, wisps of fragrant steam sliding beneath it to dance and dissipate in the narrow passage. Beyond, at the end of the hall, loomed a large door hewn to resemble a pair of arching oak trees, their carven boughs intermeshed and twining. Jacobson’s tired heart quickened, his thirsty tongue stilled, and he slipped down the passage and pushed open the door, which glided ajar on immaculately oiled hinges.
Scott J Couturier - [The Magistricide 01] Page 21
