Master of Whitestorm (32 page)

Korendir returned a taciturn shake of his head. His hand strayed an unfriendly inch closer to his sword hilt, and taking the hint, the merchant edged away. “Must have a message that won’t wait,” he remarked to the master at the helm.

The boatman spat into the wake. “That one don’t carry dispatches. An’ storms from the east hold off for no man’s comfort.”

His gloomy assessment proved true. The sky opened up as the barge reached the landing; icy, whipping torrents chased across the dock as the crew warped the craft to the bollards. The mercenary minded the storm not at all, though water trickled down his neck and wrists and soaked him instantly to the skin. Guards hunched in discomfort on the battlements would be less than watchful, and folk would not linger in the streets. Korendir’s second arrival at Tir Amindel would be noticed not at all, which suited his purpose. He paid his fare and left the barge, the boom of shod hooves as his stallion crossed the pier mingled with thunder from the sky.

Korendir mounted and rode beneath the filigree that framed the north keep arch. Spires that had patterned the sunlight with such elegance now sang harmonic intervals as the wind played across them, shifting pitch when caught by an occasional gust from the north. Water cascaded into downspouts and spewed from the mouths of gargoyles. The streams crossed and re-crossed, caught into arcs by gravity and genius for as long as the downpour might linger. Tir Amindel under cloudburst surpassed the renowned court of fountains engineered for the King of Faen Hallir. Fighting the rein astride his restive stallion, the mercenary sworn to destroy the city’s banespell found urgency impossible.

Since Majaxin had set his crystal in the deepest chamber of the duke’s palace, an official would have to be bribed or coerced to reveal the way to the lower dungeons. Korendir carried gold and weapons in readiness for either expedient.

He passed through a tunnel between two warehouses. Deafened by rain and the clang of steel-shod hooves, Korendir almost missed the child.

A flare of lightning revealed her, crouched with her arms around her knees. Wet hair clung in tangles to raggedly clothed shoulders. Though shivering from the cold, her body remained convulsed in a fit of hysterical laughter. She was scarcely nine years of age.

Without a second’s thought, Korendir reined in the gray. He dismounted, slipped off his cloak, and tucked it around the shaking child. “Are you lost?”

The girl raised tearless eyes. “No.”

As his vision adjusted to the gloom, Korendir saw she was a street child, most likely a pickpocket and a market thief; but her hunger and her suffering were no less real for that. He pressed a gold piece into her fingers and promised her another if she could tell him of an unguarded access to the duke’s palace.

The child flipped the weight of the gold, jammed it down the cuff of her filthy shift, and returned a description of a grating beneath the west wing archway. The iron was rusted, and with a bit of effort the palace cellars might be entered from there.

The cloak had begun to warm her; the girl’s limbs shivered less wretchedly, and a little color flushed her cheeks. Korendir straightened up and flicked the reins over the gray’s crested neck. “Watch my horse till I return,” he said kindly. “I promise you then that I’ll find us a tavern with a fire that sells hot soup.”

The girl accepted with eagerness. That her enthusiasm might not be honest caused Korendir little concern. The stallion was the gift of an enchantress; by nature such things tended to look after themselves. Mostly, he wished to keep the child occupied lest she become tempted to sell knowledge of his intent to the duke’s men-at-arms before his entry to the cellars was accomplished.

* * *

From a lamplit alcove in her tower, Ithariel of the White Circle watched Korendir’s progress through a seeing crystal in a polished oval frame. Her hair was caught back with pins like stars, and her eyes were still raw from weeping. She noted Korendir’s fixed frown as he ducked beyond sight of a merchant who braved the storm on an errand. The fact that the mercenary achieved that scowl inside the city walls was significant.

A comment of Orame’s had first led her to suspect that the Master of Whitestorm’s rare coloring arose from an inheritance of enchanter’s blood. But since the man believed himself to be mortal, Majaxin’s curse found no foothold. As the audience with the duke had established, Korendir’s unschooled powers did not hear the siren spells that made Tir Amindel ruinous to the mageborn.

Korendir was half-bred, Ithariel had presumed, until a moment forgotten from childhood had shown the truth. Now, her conscience ached for an action unforgivably wrong. Knowing, she had sent him through Tir Amindel’s gates a second time, into peril more dire than he possibly understood. She had witnessed the hidden proof within his past: the nameless mercenary from Whitestorm descended from a line as pure as her own.

He was White Circle, and legitimate, and if his talents were presently smothered behind ignorance, his immunity to Tir Amindel’s geas would be lost in the instant he moved against the crystal. The wards engendered in the tallix that ruled the Sixth Bane would recognize his birth, and exact immediate retribution.

A mortal would die in simple agony. Korendir, untrained, would call down upon himself the wrath of a condemned wizard’s vengeance. The nature of his torment could not be guessed, but in all Aerith, he was perhaps the only being who owned enough resilience to cope. He alone stood a chance to unmake a prison that otherwise might endure throughout eternity.

Ithariel cupped her scrying crystal closer as the swordsman moved through the rain and took cover beneath the archway described by the beggar child. Flesh would not forget the gentleness of his touch; branded in mind and memory was the understanding that had backed his resolve as he accepted her burden of care.

The words spoken then still haunted.
Lady, be at peace. If a man can break Majaxin’s crystal, the feat will be done by sundown on the day I pass the gates.

But quietude had gone before the hoofbeats of the stallion had faded from the glen. Too late, in distressing regret, Ithariel of the White Circle wondered if the value of the man by himself did not outweigh final end to her father’s atrocities.

* * *

While the step of a sentry passed beyond sight of his niche, Korendir knelt before a grille-covered window set into the palace foundation. Improper drainage had rusted the bottom palings nearly through. Korendir unfastened his swordbelt. He hung the straps from his shoulder, lowered himself into the aperture opposite the fitting, and with his back braced and his fingers clenched to the weapon across his chest, kicked the damaged iron with both feet. Flakes of corroded metal pattered downward into darkness; a second blow broke the grate through, and a slither and a twist of black-clad shoulders saw Korendir through the gap.

He hung by his hands from the sill and tried to assess his surroundings. The air was dusty and still; the storm-silvered light from the archway proved too weak to illuminate the depth of the space beneath dangling feet. The step of an approaching guardsman cancelled any chance to experiment by dropping pebbles.

Korendir could only escape by letting go. As his stomach turned with the plunge, he hoped the cellar underneath did not house an armory, with a racked sheaf of javelins waiting upright to impale him.

Korendir’s fall ended with a slam and a grunt on a pyramid of stored barrels. The stack parted with a grinding, throaty boom as wine tuns cascaded to either side. Jostled like a twist of cloth in a log jam, Korendir was delivered to the floor, while the duke’s casks of claret, brandy, and table wines rolled on to wreak havoc. Stores of fine spirits were milled to slivers. The crack and splinter of wood, and an unending tinkle of glass, heralded destruction until the bass rumble of the last rolling tun thudded to a tangle of snapped staves.

Korendir shouldered clear of an unbroached cask. He stood upright, reproached on all quarters by the gurgle and drip of spilled wealth. Unwilling to see how the racket set loose by rolling barrels would be received by the sentry above the grate, he refastened his baldric, then set out through darkness to find the door.

The air smelled of spirits and dust. Glass slivers grated beneath Korendir’s boots. Smashed shelves made incautious movement unwise. After several false starts and minutes of blind fumbling, the mercenary located a portal. He considered searching the wreckage for a nail to pick the lock, when a flicker of illumination through the keyhole warned him back.

Someone with a lantern paused in the corridor outside.

Korendir grinned in the darkness. Soldier or steward, someone had arrived to check the disturbance in the wine stores.

Metal clanked and the door opened. The wedge-shaped flare from the lantern picked out a burst barrel, sparkles of shattered glass, and split shelving marinated everywhere with spirits.

“Neth’s everlasting martyrs!” swore the arrival, a steward who stalked across the threshold with the raddled gait of a shore bird.

A sentry followed on his heels, redolent of sweat and soaked wool surcoat, and armed with a rain-wet halberd.

Korendir timed his rush. He struck with the butt of his knife and the sentry buckled, incapacitated. The mercenary caught the man’s polearm before its dropped blade clanged warning against the lintel.

The steward flung backward, too late to avoid the studded haft of the halberd that hammered the backs of his knees. He collapsed, his cry of surprise cut off as hands caught him and a chilly line of steel constricted his larynx. Too terrified to swallow, he gagged and shrank against his assailant to escape the kiss of the knife.

Korendir spun his catch out of the corridor and yanked him back to his feet.

“I suppose you’re the man proclaimed renegade by the duke,” the steward gasped. Although the lantern trembled in his grasp, he had not lost his wits and dropped it. He cleared his throat. “However much you threaten, I cannot help you escape. My lord has halberdiers flanking every door and window in the palace. They know your description. If you kill me, you’ll die. If you release me, you’ll be equally dead. Give some thought to the subtleties, for my sake, desperate sir, and I promise I won’t tell where I saw you for an hour.”

Korendir held his blade to the servant’s sweating flesh. “If the sentry I knocked down told his captain where he went, an hour of grace is no bargain.”

“He mistook you for a thief,” shrilled the steward. “A misfortune, now that you’ve killed him. His captain will call for a search.”

Korendir shoved his knuckles into his captive’s windpipe. “Shutter the lantern and be quiet.”

The sentry regrettably was not dead; only stunned, and if he did not drown himself by inhaling spilled wine, he would waken in time and raise the garrison. As the servant groped and the lantern went dark, Korendir searched the man’s livery. He removed the one penknife he found, shoved the fallen halberdier aside, and maneuvered his victim into the corridor. “Lock up,” he instructed curtly. “Then guide me down to the dungeon.”

The steward fumbled to sort keys and in the process burned his knuckles on the lantern. Korendir smothered his cry with ruthless fingers. Unable to move, even to lick his seared skin, the servant’s plaintive nature got the better of him. He whined the instant he recovered liberty enough to breathe. “Neth, man, why the dungeons? There are rats down there, and not a cranny that’ll do for escape.”

Korendir’s blade jerked and nicked flesh.

The proper key was procured with a jangle, and the steward moaned, “Go left.”

With his captive locked in the crook of his elbow, the mercenary marked footprints in claret the length of the duke’s lower service corridor.

He moved soundlessly, which disappointed the steward, who hoped a disturbance might call down a rescue. Korendir cracked the lantern only to make certain his charge did not guide him in false circles. At last, after descent of a spiral stair, the pair arrived in the deserted passage that joined the inquisitor’s torture chamber with the cells reserved for condemned prisoners. There the air hung dank, stale with the odors of urine and moldy straw.

Encouraged that he had not yet been murdered, the steward twisted against his pinioned neck. “I’ve served in good faith,” he pointed out.

Korendir said nothing. Aware of a throb of heat in the jewel beneath his shirt, he had already surmised that truth. His knife hand lifted and moved. The servant found himself released as the mercenary took the lantern from him and gently slipped back the shutters.

Flamelight revealed a five-sided nook with only one doorway. The walls were bare granite. But a looping figure carved in the floor held a great, cloudy crystal set flush at the center. Its heart glistened like scarlet veined fire as a thousand underlying facets caught the light.

“Your reason for coming here puzzles me,” the steward confessed. “This is the traitor’s cell. A man held for any length of time in this place loses his sanity. Though that point is likely a moot one, in your case.”

Korendir volunteered nothing. The pattern indeed had a presence, one that was creepingly unpleasant. As he stared at the spell-shot tallix, he felt as if insects too tiny to see clawed for entry through the pores of his skin. Absorbed, even thoughtful, the mercenary set down the lantern.

In
the moment while he seemed preoccupied, his erstwhile captive seized advantage. The steward fled through the doorway, spun, and in ungainly haste jerked a grille from a slot to one side. The steel rattled closed. A bar clanged down and trapped Korendir within.

The duke’s servant heaved a sigh of overwheening relief, then asked, “What possessed you to ask for the traitor’s cell? My lord will see you screaming before you die.”

XVIII

TRIAL AND JUDGEMENT

IF THE
spoken threat of torture left an impression on Korendir’s awareness, he showed no reaction. Neither did the prospect of captivity appear to trouble him. The tallix within the traitor’s cell absorbed him totally as he exchanged the knife in his hand for another, uglier blade, all pitted and stained with age. Left curious by his detachment, the wine steward lingered in the corridor.

Korendir shifted grip on his dagger, then knelt at the pattern’s center. Ruddy light touched his face; not caused by lantern flame, but by some refracted brilliance cast back from the crystal beneath. Magic lurked there, a coiling malevolence that flurried the mind with doubt. With tentative care, the mercenary touched his steel to the axis of Tir Amindel’s wardstone. A tingle of energy surged up his arm. Hair prickled at his nape, and the protective pendant from Ithariel heated on its chain until contact with the stone burned flesh. Korendir repressed a shudder. Each passing moment undermined his will with a reluctance that radiated through the tallix itself. He knew he must smash the crystal instantly, else forfeit the attempt.

Again he set his knife to the jewel’s starred eye. He held the weapon upright without flinching; then, oblivious to his onlooker’s curiosity, Korendir raised the lantern. He hammered the weighted base downward toward the dagger held poised against the tallix.

The motion engaged every latent defense Majaxin had enspelled in the stone.

Ithariel’s protection failed to compensate; ward energies burst and her sliver of tallix heated like a meteor and shattered. Splinters raked Korendir’s neck and chest, then spun like flying sparks across the cell. The steward at the doorway gasped and flung back, and lost his moment to flee.

The lamp struck. Impact against the dagger haft jarred bone and muscle and nerve to the junction of Korendir’s shoulder. A snap whined on the air; the great tallix which enspelled Tir Amindel split like a fissure in ice. Sorcerous ruby light rinsed the traitor’s cell, then flickered out. For an instant the crystal’s crazed facets turned depthless and black. Then the lantern snuffed out. The stone glimmered, woke to redoubled power with a sultry flare of orange. Up from its faulted surface boiled a cloud of caustic smoke. Enveloped by a shining mist that burned and painfully blinded, Korendir of Whitestorm cried out.

The surge of Majaxin’s spellwork sheared through his flesh and recognized his hand as the one that had sundered the tallix. His vision cleared. Surrounded by a whirlpool nexus of sorcery, he looked, and saw his fist still clenched to the knife he had only one instant in the past set point-first against the crystal in the floor. Now, most horribly, the tallix had redirected the weapon’s original thrust.

Korendir’s fingers glistened with new blood. Although, beyond question, he remained in the cell, the impossible confronted him: his blade was sunk to the hilt in the eye of the little beggar girl charged to watch over his horse.

His recoil yanked the steel clear. Revulsion overset his control and brought up the contents of his stomach. He staggered upright, miserably retching, and the spark-shot cloud of magecraft moved with him. His thoughts reeled with agony. The knife he would rather have sheathed in his own flesh; except now its spell-worked edge was a melted lump with no trace left of temper. Korendir cast the steel away. Struck to the heart by remorse, he fought through the sparkle of sorceries toward the corridor.

The grillwork had blasted away from the door; riven metal embraced the dripping remains of the steward. Korendir stumbled. Bent double by a second bout of nausea, he fled into the corridor beyond. The orange smoke streamed after him, vengeance-bent as a swarm of hornets. Destruction followed in its wake.

Cracks ripped up the stonework, and pillars groaned and canted.

Korendir ran while the ceiling crumbled. He did not move to save himself, though chips of masonry silted his hair, and the floor under his boots heaved and buckled. Columns crashed around him and archways toppled at his heels, but his eyes remained blind to peril. Lost to all memory but the blood-wet corpse of a child, and his hand on the knife that had butchered her, he forced his legs to bear weight. To the limit of his strength, he sprinted, whipped onward by revulsion that dismembered thought and condemned him past forgiveness as the killer Haldeth had reviled.

The staircase wound upward in jumbled disarray. Between the landing and a fallen riser was a wadded rag that once had been a sentry. Korendir leaped over the remains. Buffeted beyond reason by the writhing mist that hunted him, he scaled the piled masonry on hands and feet like a beast.

He kept no count of which turnings he missed or took; by reflex and instinct, he gained the upper levels only to lurch onward, to slip over blood-smeared bodies that littered his path at each stride. Members of the duke’s household perished before his eyes, here a servant pulped between buckled floor beams, and there an aged noble who stumbled through masonry that bounced and rolled like devil’s dice and dashed in his balding head. Korendir ran past unscathed, while the bane unleashed from Tir Amindel’s tallix remorselessly pursued.

He escaped the palace through a gap in tumbled walls. The courtyard beyond was a graveyard of jumbled stone. The dead, the dying, and the mangled by now were too numerous to count. The squall had not abated. Rain sheeted down in torrents, rinsed streaks across shattered paving, and spilled into red-tinged puddles. Korendir heaved air into a chest too tight for breath. His body spasmed with dry heaves. The force aroused when he broke the tallix was not abating, but levelling Tir Amindel stone by carven stone; his fault, the suffering, and his burden, the shattered lives and hopes and dreams. His act magnified the malice of Majaxin and left nothing. The inhabitants of the city were smashed haplessly as pebbles before tide in a posthumous passion of spite. He, who should have been first to die, was the only soul left untouched.

Korendir remembered nothing of his purpose. He forgot Ithariel’s tears, and the pitiless beauty that had lured generations of enchanters to entrapment. The centuries they had suffered within spell-wrought walls held less meaning than the wind-driven spatter of rainfall. Korendir fled and wished for oblivion. Lashed by the storm, goaded on by orange sparks, he split his knuckles scrabbling over walls; like a harried dog, he tore his way across rose gardens, shouldered through locked doors, and kicked down wicket gates. In time, his mindless run carried him to the archway where he had earlier taken shelter. His horse waited still, reins pinned by a tumble of broken marble. Crumpled nearby lay the cloak he had left to comfort the street child; one of the corners streamed red. The face it half covered lay tipped at the sky; one eye was open to the rain, and the other inhumanly savaged by the blade of a spell-turned knife.

Korendir succumbed again to sickness. Bile stung his throat and his breath labored. The spasms brought no relief; his stomach had emptied long since. He fumbled like an old man, grasped the gray’s saddle with wet fingers. The stallion sidled, then stood with its ears flicking backward and forward in unease as its rider found the stirrup. Korendir pulled himself astride. Hunched over with cramps, he jerked the dirk from his wrist sheath, leaned forward, and slashed both reins at the bit rings.

The stallion surged in recovered freedom. He flung into a half-rear, while Korendir jabbed heels into streaming flanks and howled in mindless pain.

The horse from High Kelair bolted through streets transformed by catastrophe. Through screaming crowds and chaos he galloped, his eyes white rings of terror, and the breath from his distended nostrils flaring in snorts of condensation. Muscles coiled like whip-leather in shoulder and haunch and gaskin; legs cabled with tendon folded and straightened, driving a powerful stride. The horse poured its heart into running, over cobbles and flagstones and polished marble courtyards that rang with the clatter of its flight.

But the sorceries of the dead wizard gave chase with a tenacity more constant than flesh. The shining, unnatural mist streamed after Korendir like the wraith of a thing damned.

The mercenary clung to the stallion’s back. He made no effort to guide or choose direction, but rode with closed eyes and tucked head, hands locked in the whipping golden mane. No surcease existed to block sound. The grinding crash of stonework flanked the stallion’s course. Spired towers toppled and fell, accompanied by screams from men and women and children, battered down in the course of their escape. The revenge of Majaxin spared no life and no edifice the walls of his city had encompassed.

Except for a racing gray stallion and a rider too tortured to care.

The horse cleared the tangle of the east wall portal with a jump that would have lamed a common mount. As his hooves touched ground, cracks like forked lightning jagged across the gate turrets. Weakened granite thundered down and swallowed a mother and grandmother who struggled with a bundle of wailing babies.

The stallion flattened its ears in a spurt of fear-charged rage. He galloped while stonework tumbled and rolled an avalanche of rubble at his heels; but the rider never moved. His mind was lost to thought, and his flesh knew only pain. The ruin of Tir Amindel might fall behind, yet Korendir still heard the shrieks of its murdered inhabitants. Their screams blended with other screams from his past until his skin felt needled by knife cuts, as if each cry from massacred thousands held physical power to torment.

The stallion lengthened stride as his burden shivered and flinched. All nerves and jangled panic, he swerved off the road. The nimbus of orange trailed after, a banner of crackling sparks. Majaxin’s sorceries did not disperse as the horse gouged a track through the meadows beside Kelharrou Lake and crashed through the thorn brakes beyond. The scrub that surrounded tilled fields gave way at length to unbroken forest.

Thick growth compelled the horse to slacken pace. Branches raked furrows in his lathered coat, and the crack of hooves on dry ground became deadened in drifts of old leaves.

Korendir slumped with his cheek against the stallion’s neck, limp wrists crossed on the crest; his feet slipped clear of the stirrups, and the irons clanked against his ankles in rhythm with the animal’s stride. He made no effort to ease his brave mount. Neither did he concede to his own needs. Harrowed past self-preservation, he recognized no hunger or thirst, but only wretchedness and a gut-tearing chain of horrors set off by a beggar child’s death.

The gray picked a path through moss-scabbed trees, and the orange smoke closed like an aureole around the rider’s head.

Korendir shot straight with a cry that sheared echoes through the trees. He belted his heels against the stallion’s sides. The animal lunged with a violence that nearly unseated him and iron-rimmed hooves left a swath of lacerated stems as the pair sprang again into flight.

Time passed unheeded. The rain ceased and the sky cleared. Sunset glowed briefly through the forest’s mantle of leaves. Then dusk faded into gloom, and the sorcerous mist bronzed the bark of the passing trees. The stud lapsed back to a walk. He plowed on through a white water ford as if knowing where he wished to go.

Through the night, the sorcery leached Korendir’s strength with horrors that damned, and wrapped all his nerve ends in fire. Over and over he saw his blade strike through a beggar child’s eye. He felt the spurt of hot fluids and the jarring scrape of bone and the shudder that racked her small body as the steel cleaved on, through skull and butter-soft brain. Consciousness became defined by suffering for which the mind held no release.

Dawn lightened the haze to silver; the air rang with bird song and the reddish rays of first sunlight dappled the boughs overhead. Korendir did not rouse. Slumped with glazed eyes in his saddle, he did not stir when the stallion shouldered through a last stand of saplings and carried him into a glen beside a lake. A tower arose by the shoreline, in lines and style reminiscent of Tir Amindel’s fallen grace, but on a scale less grand, and without the adornment of marble and stained glass.

An aged man mantled in power awaited on the sand before the portal. He wore dyed boots and a cloak of ocean gray, and his brows were gathered in a frown. He made no move; but as though called in by a beacon, the gray quickened its exhausted stride and halted quivering before him.

Enfolded yet in an angry glimmer of orange, Korendir sprawled face downward across the tangled mane of his mount. His eyes were sightless and wide, and his fingers were locked against his teeth in the effort to contain an unending need to scream.

The old man caught the stallion’s bridle. His autocratic touch reflected small affinity for beasts, yet the gray settled as if it knew him; its terrible trembling eased as fingers gentled by spells stroked the muzzle between lather-rimmed nostrils. They continued up the hard neck, then explored with critical care down shoulder and flank, and each mud-splashed, sweat-marked leg. The tendons were cool, which surprised the elderly wizard. He straightened from his examination and fixed his piqued gaze on the horse.