The Black Robe (The Sword and the Spell) (43 page)

The child was different. She had clambered into his lap and hugged him tightly with her little thin arms before settling down to chatter about those things which interest small children in half formed words, giggles and smiles, and when she finished chattering, he  marched her toys up and down the room as he always did and she laughed until she fell asleep.

He hadn’t called for her nurse though, as he usually did, but had let her sleep, curled in his lap, a warm bundle who, for a short time each day was his. She had been named as the daughter of a lord, but he knew she wasn’t. He’d said nothing of course, it was better to have a lord claim you as your father, than live with the title of bastard, but he knew and her mother knew, and one day she would know too. He hoped she would forgive him for the birthright he’d stolen from her.

When the nurse came fussing, clucking at the disruption to her routine and muttering that it wasn’t right to leave the child alone with the old man, he’d let her take the child. He would have liked to kiss the child goodbye, but that would have required him to command the nurse to stay, and the lump in his throat would not permit that. So instead he closed his eyes against the tears and waited for his servant to come to attend to him. He’d cursed the man more times than there were numbers to count, but if it hadn’t been for his care, this day would have come much sooner. If it hadn’t been for his friend, he would have escaped this prison long ago.

The man opened his eyes and looked around the room and knew that it was only a prison because he had made it so. His friend had made the chair in which he sat and had fixed wheels to it so that he could be taken outside, and there was a carriage with a ramp so he could go anywhere he wished. The Primera had even had a suite of rooms close to her own prepared for him, but he’d turned them all down. He preferred his solitude and time to think, time to prepare. Apart from that the room contained old friends; the two old chairs which nobody but the Primera ever sat in, the book case with their precious books and scrolls which were never opened and the weiswald table with its scars and Shrezbere stains and a history which went back before he was born.

No, it wasn’t his servant’s fault that he was still here, although he told him often enough that it was. The truth of the matter was, he was afraid. He’d been afraid for most of his life, but that was nothing compared to his fear now. Then he only faced death, now he faced damnation and an eternity of torture in hellden’s halls.

What he’d done and the thing he still had to do would damn him forever to an eternity of darkness and torment away from the Goddess’s light and gentle touch, but he could no more turn his back on what was to come than he could stand up and walk away from his chair. Federa could never have meant it to end this way; somewhere he must have taken a wrong turning. Perhaps if he could find where he had erred he could beg the Goddess’s forgiveness and she might give him one last blessing before he faced his punishment. He closed his eyes again and tried to remember his awakening.

The shadows on the surface of the globe disappeared and Jonderill took a step back, shaking his head to dispel the images. He didn’t know who the man was but he felt strangely sorry for him and hoped that things turned out better for him than he thought they would. The thought of the black robe being so alone made him think about how it must have been for Maladran alone in his tower and came to the conclusion that seeing inside Maladran’s rooms should wait for another day.

Instead he went back down the stairs and made his way to the kitchens and the rooms where Garrin had lived. These too were just as they had been when he was here last. The rotting meat was still on the table, left from when Maladran had taken his loyal servants from their duties to be part of his twisted demon magic. The jug of milk, separated and green, still stood next to the mixing bowl waiting to be used. The only thing which seemed to be missing were the wide windows overlooking the stable yard.

For all of that the place was still full of the good memories of the two old servants caring for him and giving him more love than he had ever known before or since. Memories came back to him, of Garrin showing him how to plait a lead rein for the new pony Maladran had given him, and his wife baking biscuits just for him in the shape of forest animals. Once he’d asked her to bake him one in the shape of a dragon; it was probably the only time she had ever refused him anything.

He’d had four summers of happy childhood in this place before Sarrat had him dragged away to become a slave. If he’d trusted Maladran, as he should have done, he could have escaped Alewinder and made it back to the tower, but he hadn’t. He had believed in his betrayal and had lived with the consequences. Perhaps if he’d been Garrin’s son and not the child of a long dead magician, his life would have been better and he would have been a different person. He gave a deep sigh and turned away; it did no good dwelling on such things.

Time must have moved on whilst he was thinking about the past and he suspected that Rothers would be anxious about him. He went back through the living room and opened the outer door without bothering to look at the castings on the door. Rothers was there, as he guessed he would be, but the man was as pale as wheat flour and visibly shaking. His shoulders were hunched in a stance that Jonderill remembered well and his wide eyes were fixed on the bronze door.

He looked at the door and instantly understood why his friend looked so sick. The castings had changed from showing the worst moments of his childhood to images of Rothers as a young man and his time as Tallison’s prisoner. Rothers had rarely talked of his life before he came to serve Borman,  but the carvings showed his preference for young men and boys in vivid detail. That though only took up a small part of the door. The rest was full of images of his captivity; all the abuse, degradation and humiliation he had suffered. Jonderill turned his head away in disgust, not at Rothers but at what Tallison and his brutish guards had done to him. He stepped close to his friend, put his arm around his shoulders and led him inside using his magic to slam the door behind them.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Completion

Jonderill turned the final page of the journal and read the last few lines written in the bold, forward-slanting script he’d become so used to. Maladran must have written the last entry on the night he and Perguine had broken into the tower, as his words described his preparations to call on demon magic. It was no wonder that the tower had been so well guarded since then; the journal was more valuable and more dangerous than any other artefact in the six kingdoms. There were no further entries in the journal to detail what the outcome had been of Maladran’s preparations. That wasn’t needed of course; he knew what had happened to Maladran and the others who had reluctantly been part of his forbidden experiments. They had paid a terrible price for the magician’s search for the secrets of demon magic but, there again, so had Maladran.

He closed the journal and let it fall gently onto the table at his side. As he looked around the room which had become so familiar to him, he wondered if the knowledge he now possessed would turn him into another Maladran. If Sarrat walked through the door now would the king mistake him for his black robe? It was a possibility. He had Maladran’s height and build and in the four moon cycles he’d been in the tower his hair had grown long enough to touch his shoulders.

Then there was his familiarity with the work room at the top of the tower. As a boy he’d only been into the room once; on the day he had produced elemental fire for the first time. He remembered how excited he’d been, and how he’d broken the strict rule not to enter the workroom in his eagerness to tell Maladran that he could use magic. Now he knew every book and scroll, every cupboard and drawer, even the mechanism which opened the dome where he had watched the moon grow full and fade away to nothing four times over.

In truth the tower had become his home. He slept in Maladran’s bed, ate his meals at Maladran’s dining table and spent his hours in his work room learning the things that Maladran had once known. What’s more he even had a servant who lived in the rooms off the kitchen and cared for him. Yes, Sarrat might have mistaken him for Maladran, but he would have been wrong.

Once he stood up Sarrat would have noticed that his hair was tied back by a leather thong, and that his eyes were the colour of sea ice and not so dark that they were almost black. He would notice other differences too. This magician had no hands but wore soft leather pads at his wrists, and the torc which should have been around his neck was missing, still on the table where he had left it four moon cycles ago. Most noticeable of all would have been the robe which was still the same mottled grey colour it had been on the day he’d entered the tower and first walked into this room.

He might have resembled Maladran, but he was still Jonderill and despite everything he had learned, or perhaps because of it, he intended to stay that way. In a way he was like the stars he watched each night through the open dome. They were all stars and looked almost alike but each one was different, following a different pathway through the trackless sky. Some people said that the stars could tell the future, but he didn’t believe in that any more than he believed that kings cared for the people. If his life had been different he would have liked to have spent his life studying the stars and their movements, and perhaps have written a learned journal that could be read by others. However, things were as they were, so he stood and pressed the mechanism which closed the dome for the last time.

His magic came to him easier now, not as quickly as when he’d held the torc but faster than he’d ever thought possible. For all that he still had the feeling that his magic was somehow confined or held back, but if what he planned to do next went well, then his full potential would be released and all the knowledge he’d gained would be his to use. If he could just pull it all together and manipulate it in the right way, then he was certain the demon magic would make him whole again.

He left the work room knowing that it would lock behind him and went down the stairs, passed the store room and then further down passed the room where he’d slept as a boy. The temptation to stop and take a last look at where he’d been happy in his innocence was strong, but it did no good to dwell on childhood memories, so he continued down the stairs and turned right at the bottom. The kitchen door was ajar, as he knew it would be, and he could hear Rothers singing to himself from the bottom step of the stairs. It was one of the songs Rothers had heard during a visit to Tarmin and they had both laughed at its wicked wit when Rothers had sung it for him on his return from the city.

It made him smile even now and he paused for a moment whilst Rothers finished the last verse before moving into the kitchen. Four moon cycles of good food, the freedom to come and go as he pleased and living under a solid roof, even if parts of the roof scared him, had given Rothers a level of confidence he’d never possessed before. He was going to need every bit of that confidence if they were going to succeed at what they had planned. Rothers looked up and smiled, discarding the knife and the piece of wood he had been carving.

“Is everything ready?”

“Yes, Lord.” Rothers stopped abruptly as Jonderill frowned at him. He did try to remember that as Borman’s cousin, he outranked Jonderill, but it was very difficult to play the lord to the man who had given him a new life. “Sorry, I meant yes, magician. How about you? Are you ready for this or do you need longer?”

Jonderill shook his head. “No, I have learned everything that I can from books and scrolls and Maladran’s journal. The last secrets, the ones which will restore my robe and set my magic free are all held in the rooms beneath this tower. If I am ever to be whole again I must unlock those secrets.” Rothers nodded and slid from the stool on which he had been sitting. He looked determined but Jonderill needed to ask the question again in case his friend had changed his mind. “Are you sure you still want to accompany me?”

Rothers hesitated for a moment. “No, I would rather stay here or better still be sitting in an inn in Tarmin with a pot girl on my knee and my hand around her warm breast, but you cannot do this alone.” He eased his sword in its scabbard. “And if things go wrong it’s better that it ends quickly at the hand of a friend rather than slowly at the hands of those who don’t care.”

Jonderill nodded grimly. “So be it my friend.”

He turned and walked the length of the passageway hearing Rothers’ firm footfall behind him. The door at the far end looked like any other door, plain wood with a metal handle and a lock made for a large key. The key was in his pocket, but he knew that the lock and key were there for show only. Maladran hadn’t needed such devices to open the door and neither did he, but he stopped in any case, searching within himself to make certain that this is what he wanted to do.

He wondered if Maladran had hesitated on the last time he’d stepped through the doorway or whether his decision to call on demon magic, which would change him forever, had already been made. Knowing Maladran he would have meticulously thought through the consequences of immersing himself in the forbidden power, but he could surely never have imagined that the demon magic would have consumed him so entirely.

His reasons for entering the chambers beneath the tower were different from those of Maladran; he wasn’t seeking power for its own sake, but just enough to restore things to how they should be. He didn’t want the power so he could be master of the six kingdoms, but just enough so that he could be whole again and wear his white robe. In that there was a kind of rightness about what he was doing, and all he had to do was focus on that and ignore the temptation to take more of what the demon magic could offer than was needed. It was why he’d left the torc on the table by the door. He was sure that if he took that with him to the lowest cavern his resistance to the allure of the forbidden magic would be overwhelmed.