“It will have no choice,” Julaea spat. “You hear me, trees? I am Julaea, daughter of Adguros. I am the voice of the Moth-kinden here, the voice you have always obeyed.”
The forest shook its boughs at them in rage and the wind roared and bellowed, shredding the leaves above. And yet that final blow never fell.
“The forest has a heart,” she told Uctebri. “The ritual crushed them all down, those magi and their warriors. It crushed them down and twisted off a knot of itself that they are all bound to. Hold that, and this power can be commanded, and when I can command, let it hate me as much as it likes!”
With that final word she broke through, and the whole of the Darakyon seemed to go reeling away in all directions, the trees tilting crazily, thorn-studded vines lashing as if in their death throes.
Despite it all, Uctebri felt some part of himself unconvinced. It cannot be this easy. A trap, surely? Yet when Julaea practically skipped forwards, he followed.
They had found her ritual site, that much was certain. The forest had ceased trying to coil itself about them and was quite still, as though marking the memory of all those who had died for the folly committed here. The trees at rest leant outwards from a central clearing, some place where perhaps the Mantids had raised one of their rotting idols, where Moth seers had stood and funnelled all their power into a ritual to return the world to the way it had once been, back when they had mattered. And they had failed, the task beyond even their united reach. Their power had got away from them and run wild through the Darakyon, and made it what it was today. Not a one of those great and wise magicians or their Mantis servants had lived.
There was no visible centre, but any magician’s senses could find it. Julaea rushed forwards, hunting for the token that would allow her to make the Darakyon her plaything.
And stopped; turned, frowning, a single step back the way she had come, and then another. Her arms spread out as if for balance, but she was feeling out the topography of the magic, searching for the heart.
What will it be? A nut? A chalice? Uctebri was searching too: some small object of wood that would seem the work of human hands, but where was it? The Beetle Ruthan huddled close but Shonaen stalked farther and farther, still hunting shadows.
Julaea’s blank eyes were wide, impossible to tell what she was looking at. She mouthed a word: “No...”
Uctebri came to the conclusion a moment after. “It’s not here,” he said. “How can it not be here?”
The wind rustled the leaves around them. The forest was laughing at them.
“Mistress,” Ruthan called, voice trembling. She had ventured past the focus of the wood, that mocking absence. The moon shone down obligingly; the forest wanted them to know the sacrilege it had enacted on itself.
Uctebri spotted a camp, overgrown, the fire long cold. The intruders had not escaped freely, for the brambles and vines writhed amongst the ruin of tents, the splintered cages of ribs. At least one of them had lived, though; lived, and carried away the Darakyon’s heart.
“Who dared...?” Julaea hissed, coming to the Beetle’s shoulder to stare. Uctebri knew she would be naming every magician she ever knew, wondering which of them had the guile to creep in here and thwart her.
Ruthan, crouching by the ruined tents, held up some broken metal thing. Uctebri studied it a long time with his dark-adapted eyes before he could understand its purpose.
It was a crossbow, and what could be seen of the other personal effects looked Beetle-made—turned out in some faceless factory somewhere, not the work of a craftsman’s hands. Oh, perhaps these had been some magician’s servants, as Ruthan was, but Uctebri already knew it was not so. No sorcerer had come here to steal Julaea’s prize, but only the ignorant—only the Apt.
“It knew someone like you would come to command it,” he whispered. “And so it gave its heart to those who could never use it, could never even understand what they had discovered. Some Beetle-kinden has it on their mantelpiece even now, or on their desk as a paperweight.”
Julaea hissed in pure frustration. Her white gaze fixed on Ruthan. “This is you.”
The Beetle woman shrank from her. “Mistress, no!”
“Your people. Not content with driving mine into obscurity, now you steal our last scraps.”
Ruthan started, “I only served you—” but Julaea cut her off.
“I cast you out. I withhold my protection from you. You are none of mine any more.”
“No!” Ruthan reached out an imploring hand, but the moon was gone with shocking suddenness. Darkness clawed in from all around, bristling with the spiny arms of praying mantids, the hooked thorns of briars. The Darakyon swallowed Ruthan Bartrer without hesitation, one more set of bones to moulder on the forest floor.
Julaea turned her despairing gaze on Uctebri. By then he had closed the distance, and with a convulsive gesture he drove his knife hilt-deep into her side.
Her look was equal parts bafflement and outrage, no room for the pain at all. “What?”
“You’re not the only one who remembers the wrongs done to their people,” he snapped. He had the full intention of using the blade again, but he had forgotten Shonaen, and now the Mantis came leaping out of the wood with her spear levelled.
Even here in this Moth-made ruin, the Mantids still defend them. Uctebri had little magic left after testing himself against the Darakyon, so he let go the hilt and fled, as his people had always fled.
He made his magic a knife-blade to pierce the forest; not the grand siege that Julaea had brought, but a slinking escape route that wound under branch and over root, worming through the darkness as he twisted his way towards where the moon still shone. He closed the path behind him. Shonaen had to cut her own, assailed by shadows and not half the magician he was. Yet she was younger and stronger, and enraged. She gained a step at a time, as he cut desperately for the forest’s edge. Briars plucked at his sleeves, nettles burned his skin and the ground knotted beneath his feet, yet somehow he stumbled on in his headlong flight, never looking at the enemy behind until he saw the enemy before him.
The first glint of dawn was in his eyes then, and he threw up a hand to shade them, seeing too late that some of the shapes cutting across the light were men, not trees. The Wasps had come to look for their missing scouts, a line of them wading into the forest verge with levelled crossbows and threats.
Uctebri skidded to a halt, realizing they had already seen movement and would be on him in a moment. He turned to find some last shade that might endure the dawn, but Shonaen was closer behind than he thought and her spear-point lanced through his side in a shock of pain and wasted blood.
Then he was on the ground, rolling over in agony so he could see the thrust that would kill him. Shonaen stared down at him, her eyes barely focusing on him, and he wondered if she knew she was killing a flesh and blood man, and not another shadow.
The first crossbow bolt winged wide of her, but close enough to catch her notice. She saw the Wasps and shrilled at them, challenging all the armies of the Empire to single combat. Uctebri laughed, though each chuckle cost him dear.
The bolts skipped past her, and she even spun one aside with her spear-haft, but this addled creature was no Mantis Weaponsmaster from song or story. She rushed them, her darned robe catching on the thorns, and the first shot landed, buried to the fletchings in her shoulder. Another three followed, and two blasts of stingshot from the Wasps’ hands. Shonaen dropped her spear, clutching at the air as though she saw the glorious history of her people there, just out of reach. The Wasps took no chances and shot her another half-dozen times before they were sure she was dead. Thus perished the last scion of the Darakyon.
They did not find Uctebri as he lay there bleeding. The shadows were too deep.
Sometime later, after the Empire’s finest had called off the search and retreated from the Darakyon’s bounds to their camp, Uctebri saw Julaea come limping from the forest’s heart, and knew that his t
ime was up.
She shuffled over to him, leaning heavily on her staff. Its metal-shod end rammed the ground beside his face and he shuddered. She would not survive him for long, but he found that was remarkably little consolation.
“It...was a good plan,” he whispered. The forest had fallen obligingly silent.
“It still is,” she hissed around her pain. “The heart is out there. As you say, some Beetle, a paperweight or ornament. But it is there.”
“You won’t be fetching it...” His words were inviting that staff to smash his pointed teeth, but he could not keep them back.
“No.” She sighed and dropped to her knees, and her hand found the hilt of Uctebri’s dagger where it jutted from her side. “Would you?”
“If your Mantis had not finished me.” He let out a long, wheezing breath. “It was a good plan. I am not so proud that I wouldn’t have stolen it.”
“Someone should.” She leant on his chest as she dragged the dagger out, so that black spots wheeled before Uctebri’s red eyes. “There’s none but you.”
“I’m done.”
“I know your kind,” and she spat real venom about that. “You can heal. If fed.” She stared down at him with fascinated loathing. “We should have exterminated you vermin centuries ago. I should have cut your throat before using your power.”
“Yes.”
“But here we are, and someone needs to make the plan happen. Someone needs to destroy the Apt.”
Uctebri stared up at her as she raised the smeared dagger blade and contemplated it.
“For my father,” she said, and inserted it almost gently under her chin, opening her throat up with a flourish of her wrist that would have done a conjurer proud.
* * *
Uctebri was weak for days, but Julaea’s blood had been enough to replace the vigour that he had lost. The Wasp patrol was long departed by then, and the forest had recovered Shonaen’s body. Of their intrepid little band, only he survived.
We will meet again, he told the Darakyon, as it brooded and watched him. I will hold your heart in my hands. And he would need other power: relics, artifacts, the blood of magicians. He would need to inveigle himself into the counsels of the Wasps and tempt them with the impossible. Before hearing Julaea speak, he would not have believed it himself. Now her blood was in his veins and her purpose in his mind.
By dusk he was already limping away, the forest receding at his back. The sunset was red with the blood of Empire.
Black Bargain
- Wars of Light and Shadow -
Janny Wurts
Toler groaned in suffering discomfort, punched flat by a skull-busting hangover on the floor of the Riverton gaol. He had messed up plenty in his short life. But never before buried himself over his head in deep trouble a bribe failed to salvage. His downfall began smoothly enough, when the coin from a packet of smuggled goods led to boastful drink in a waterfront tavern. Some tipster’s sly word to the exciseman brought the port watch with a warrant, which pinned him under the magistrate’s thumb as a repeat offender.
No glib plea and no wrist-slap fine sprung him free this time. Not after his trademark habit of scoring a double dip take on the job turned his furious partners against him at the assize. That, and the cocky retorts that stung stiff-faced officialdom to quivering jowls and red fury saw him condemned. Ten years at a convict’s oar on the galleys would reduce his rake’s winsome smile to a broken jaw and smashed teeth. Toler huddled in the cell’s vile straw, miserable enough to heave up his guts and die in his own muck without moving.
“Skewer the magistrate’s sanctimonious arse on the Avenger’s Black Spear!” Toler scratched his scalp under the itching braid, still noisomely tarred from his sailhand’s impersonation. Ease his roiling stomach, and he might survive the hammers and tongs of his headache. Maybe even sleep off the worst before his wretched fate overtook him.
But inbound footsteps descended the stone stair. The turnkey’s shuffling, uneven tread scraped through his stuttered apologies, directed toward the no nonsense clip of the second tread, tagging behind. Strides with a snap that pierced Toler’s stupor, and raised the echo of his mother’s nattering. ‘You’re useless, Toler! Tuck-tailed as a kicked dog, and a cringing loser. Too depraved to mind your foul tongue, or go a day without drinking yourself senseless. Your worthlessness pains me worse than your sister’s, run off like a trull from an upright apprenticeship. What’ll you do when I’m gone and there’s naught but the gaoler’s roof over your head?’
The shattering clash of keys in the lock dispersed the mist of remembrance. “Toler sen Beckit?” Rusty hinges wailed as the warder swung open the studded door.
Toler rolled over and presented his back. Let the lackeys drag him out by the scruff if they wanted him upright.
“On your feet, bucko!” The grizzled turnkey thrust his lantern over Toler’s prostrate form. “Here’s your proper reckoning. Toss up on my ankles, and I’ll boot your worthless carcass into the next sunrise.”
Toler cringed from the glare. “Go suck the port magistrate’s pip.”
Quiet fell, thick enough to cut with a knife.
Toler ran on, defiant, “Or else butt hump your thumb, while I perish of boredom.”
The knockout blow never came, that should have shuttered the witch’s brew of his hangover. Instead, the nettlesome, prickling sense of a powerful presence stabbed through his thick skin. Betrayed by nerves he forgot he possessed, Toler acknowledged the turnkey’s companion.
Not the slovenly guard with the crooked nose and a crass mouthful of threats, but an ascetic, trim figure clad in autumn colors, who denounced with impartial venom, “Your mannerless tongue’s an embarrassment and a nuisance better off silenced.”
The distinctive red-and-silver tumble of hair spilled over lean shoulders, and black eyes that pierced like a stalking lynx revealed nothing less than a Fellowship Sorcerer, arrived in the flesh. Any of the Seven owned the force to intimidate. But Davien’s infamous style had once seen a high king murdered like a rat in a drainpipe to contest a philosophical point with his colleagues.
Toler opened his mouth to blurt his remark: that the power behind charter law wasted wind calling down a jail rat’s impertinence. But only a hiss escaped his squeezed throat. Both lips and tongue stayed unresponsive. Fury spiked pain through his tender head. His mute outrage met the Sorcerer’s dissecting regard, which bared the unflattering truth: of a dissipated young man with brown hair, sprawled in filth, who blunted his agile intelligence with swagger, and whose mask of cynical belligerence pitched him on a fast course to ruin.
Davien addressed Toler’s supine misery without sympathy. “I’ve sealed an official agreement to claim the terms of your sentence. You will rise and accompany me on your own, or else rot where you lie, never again to see daylight. Choose. You’ll get no second chance.”
Toler begrudgingly clambered erect. Even to his own nose, he reeked. If a Sorcerer’s omnipotence needed a light-fingered malcontent, the poisonous irony begged asking: what for? Toler accepted Davien’s overture, as much for the sordid amusement of seeing what brought the almighty Fellowship to soil their hands with his wretched lot.
Cold sober, he might have remembered the warning: no one who crossed paths with one of the Seven survived the experience unchanged.
* * *
Davien began by rejecting the niceties. Toler found himself prodded outside, then doused head to foot with a bucket dunked in the garrison horse trough. The uncivilized drenching chased off his binge sickness, rinsed his tarred hair clean, and scoured the piss from his clothes beyond what the splash of the scummed water warranted. Folly, to imagine he might slip the leash of a predator able to refigure natural order at whim. Temporarily thwarted, Toler took a seat, dripping, on the wooden bench at the breakwater where by nightfall, the strumpets hooked passing marks, and by day, the sharp-eyed old salts spotted trade ships returning through Riverton’s inlet.
None
idled there now. Sensible folk fled a Sorcerer’s interest, as Toler would have without Davien’s regard skewering him like flensed meat. In daylight, such fixated poise seemed unreal, punch cut against the harborside dazzle, with the lightermen’s oared craft diminished as toys, ferrying crew to and from the moored vessels.
Toler deflected his pithless fear into a smirk before panic emptied his bladder. He knew the ghastly rumors held truth: practitioners of the arcane arts bled innocents. For him, the deadly, unnatural terror walked abroad in the glare of noon. Better to bolt before risking the fate that befell his lost sister.
Then Davien said, “Our Fellowship opposes pursuit of black necromancy, which does in fact involve gutting victims for sacrifice. Gray Kralovir are the worst of the lot, which brings up my use for your sentence.”
Toler swallowed. Dismal odds rode his prospects. Run and die quickly, or languish under the spell-turned restraint of gagged speech.
Davien’s lean mouth twitched, perhaps from stifled laughter. “Weigh your thoughts carefully. The articulate pitch of your angst might as well be shouted to the four winds.”
Toler’s sulky rebellion congealed.
Into the staring face of his qualms, Davien at last addressed his purpose. “I need eyes in position to disclose the affairs of a dirty and dangerous cabal. Not the inept acolytes who prey on the poor, but the ancient corruption at their rotten core. The sect is hatching an intrigue in secret, shielded by an arcane talisman that’s keeping their hideous rites from reprisal. At present, they’ve seized the crisis of the Mistwraith’s invasion and the absence of crown oversight to extend their subversive influence across all five kingdoms. I aim to take their web down without quarter. Accept my proposition, and you’ll be secured in position to help break their ranks from inside.”
Toler slouched in sullen distrust, braced to lie low and seek furtive ways not to cooperate.
Evil is a Matter of Perspective: An Anthology of Antagonists Page 12
