“Too, he’s
shown he can come up with new tactics, and ideas like that demon ship. He could
very well have some way of bridging that grand foss out there or cracking our
walls, or bringing Freegate down around us. How long could we last if he sent
plague against us?”
Now Katya was
on her feet, hands gripping her knives, perfect face contorted with hatred. “No
one asked you to come to us. If you are caitiff, go then. Mayhap it’s not too
late to throw in your lot with your stepbrother.”
He shook his
head. “I never said we have no hope, or that there’s no chance for us to hold
fast. But we cannot think in the terms we’ve been used to. We cannot wait them
out and assume they won’t be able to come at us in some unforeseen fashion.”
Reacher pursed
his lips. “Where, then, does that leave us?”
Springbuck ran
a hand over his sparse beard and chose his words carefully. “We have some
things which hold good promise. Our enemies
are
a long way from home,
and as yet regard the bridgeway as the only entrance to and egress from
Freegate. Van Duyn and Gil MacDonald might have an idea of a way to alter
matters in our favor. And, we have the deCourteneys, who may prove to be the
most important asset of all.” Gabrielle smiled at this; Andre watched without
comment.
“Lastly, most
of the drive of Earthfast rests in one man right now, Yardiff Bey. It is to
nourish his hungers and glorify his masters that battle has been joined. If we
can conceive of a way of striking at him, we will have a chance to cut the head
from the monster.”
The meeting
turned to further haggling and hypothesizing, but they were all on a more
productive track now. The Prince was satisfied that he’d brought their thinking
closer to the demands of reality without robbing them of hope. As the council
began to break up, he made to speak again to Gil, but stopped when he saw that
the outlander had grown pale and was sweating, his breathing labored.
“You must
rest,” Springbuck said. “You accomplish nothing with this.”
Gil smiled
wanly, and a droll reply was on his lips when he winced, as a wave of dizziness
overcame him. It was Hightower who caught him as he slumped to the floor, and
Katya who bawled for the house physician. He was taken to a guest chamber
nearby and examined. The doctor, finishing his probings and scrutinies, shook
his head.
“I can find
nothing wrong,” he confessed; then he amended, “or rather, I can’t find the
cause of whatever strange malady this young man suffers from.”
By this time
Gil was drifting into and out of consciousness and hallucinating. Andre came to
his bedside and leaned his ear close, listening to the fevered ramblings. He
said, “My sister and I would like to be alone with this man; I think this is no
natural affliction, or any illness conceived in this world. It is work for us.”
The rest left
and the wizard and his sister took up stations on either side of the bed. They
made mystic passes with their hands, chanting, and soon an evil entity crackled
there, contained by their wills but impervious to them otherwise.
“A working of
Yardiff Bey, no doubt of it,” Andre said when they’d rejoined their comrades.
Gabrielle nodded silently to Springbuck.
“He’s drawing
Gil’s essence, his soul, from his body. We could only catch a few particulars
on the periphery of the spell, but I think that the leeching will be fulfilled
at the passing of midnight. Bey is in some high place, bending all his
concentration to the task. He evidently considers Gil of importance and finds
him more vulnerable to sorcerous attack than any of us who belong here on this
plane. Gil’s soul is estranged from its home world to begin with, and that
makes things much easier for Bey. And, too, there is this profound depression,
blighting Gil’s resistances.”
“Well, the
lad’s been a great help,” Hightower sighed. “But if that spell-cooker thinks
this will quail us, he’s wrong. Ah, it’s a shame the boy must die with no
chance. Is there nothing we can do?”
Andre shrugged.
“Of that, what shall I say? We’ve had no time to study matters. Yet Yardiff Bey
has turned every power at his command to this labor. He’s locked in a pull so
mighty on Gil’s soul that I doubt if I can counteract it, even if Gabrielle and
I join our fullest efforts.”
Springbuck was
thinking furiously, suppressing a violent urge to strike out with his hands, to
channel his emotion into blows. This was nothing that could be met with a
frontal onslaught, he chided himself. The way of the Kareteka wasn’t for this
situation. What did that leave? The Gentle Way, perhaps. Take advantage of your
opponent’s strength somehow.
If you’re
pushed, give way. If you’re pulled…
Inspiration
burst into his head and he let out a shout. The others stared at him and he
tried to explain to them, ordering details in his mind as he went along.
“If Yardiff
Bey’s exerting force on Gil, pulling him as it were, can we not use this?
Suppose Andre and Gabrielle, instead of trying to counter Bey or resist him,
add their power to his? We already know they can move people and objects
between places. What if they used Bey as a terminus? We could break the
incantation and maybe even slay him.”
Their mouths
opened in surprise, all but that of Gabrielle, who was thinking this through calmly.
“It might mean the end of the war in a single blow,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure
it can be done. I’ve never experienced so intense a line of energy as this one
from Bey to Gil. Andre and I can metamorph it, add to it until it becomes like
the bridgeway outside the city.”
Her brother
snorted. “It will be nearly as easy as saddling an avalanche, but not so safe
by half.”
But his sister
was serene. “We will do it, dear brother, because we must for the sake of a
friend, mustn’t we? Now, don’t be so downcast; when has my power failed us?”
She seemed a very rampart of reassurance to overtop them all, granting them
confidence from her own ample stores.
The Snow
Leopardess was smiling, but her eyes were slitted and there was death glee in
them. “How many of us can you take?” she purred.
Andre was
clucking his tongue in thought. “I don’t know. Bey must be in his sanctum at
Earthfast, the high place in which we saw him. Springbuck, how big is that
outsized pentacle of his there?”
“Earthfast! But
that’s it then; Strongblade and Bey together and unready at Court. We could
slay both at a single turn! I only saw the pentacle once, with my father, so
far back that I can scarce remember. But at the time it seemed big enough for a
game of chase-ball.”
Andre was
calculating more rapidly than he liked, a careful and methodical practitioner
by nature. But he dismissed caution now; it must be all or nothing at a single
cast.
“To allow for
some error, let us say a dozen, including myself, and the gods help us if the
pentacle prove too small!”
If any of them
doubted Springbuck’s abilities as a commander, they had their misgivings
assuaged by his quick decisiveness in the next minutes and hours. He organized
the proposed raid without falter.
Andre and
Gabrielle were deeply engrossed in their own private conversation, bustling
away to consult charts and tomes of their own. The main problem was in
excluding unneeded volunteers and putting together an optimal group.
The Prince
would lead, and of course Gil must come. Van Duyn, with rifle and pistol, would
be of great value, as would Reacher. Andre, rather than his sister, was the
obvious one to accompany the spell, as he put it.
Springbuck
hedged very little. He knew that a direct staircase connected Bey’s sanctum to
the throne room, the only entrance to it aside from the main portals.
His two major
worries were the archers at the sides of the throne room and the giant ogre
guards on the royal dais. With these in mind he included Kisst-Haa and bade
Dunstan find him the four best archers in Freegate. Hightower must come, too,
if for no other reason than that he was one of their best fighters, but also
because he’d earned the right to help avenge his son’s death in the halls of
his enemies. They’d take Ferrian, acting Champion of the Horseblooded, too, and
Dunstan.
He reviewed the
list in his mind: twelve. To give himself a margin of safety, if that word
could conceivably be used, he decided to take only three bowmen rather than
four, since Kisst-Haa occupied the space of at least two men.
They assembled
in a large room into which Gil had been brought on a litter. His sword and
knife had been strapped to him, his carbine put at his side. The Prince noted
that Dunstan had selected the archers diplomatically. One was a prowler, one a
Wild Rider and one a member of Reacher’s own guard.
Ferrian was
quiet, but Reacher took him aside for a moment and spoke to him briefly. Then
the two clasped each other’s forearm in a fierce grip, the grip, Springbuck
thought, of friendship reborn.
Andre and
Gabrielle had drawn a huge pentacle, circumscribing it with obscure and
powerful runes, many of them the runes of Shardishku-Salamá and of Yardiff Bey.
They crowded
into the center of it, ranged around Gil’s litter. Van Duyn shifted his
ammunition belt, noticed that his hands trembled, and smiled encouragingly to
the only onlooker, Katya. Kisst-Haa, who’d had the situation carefully
explained to him, endeavored to keep statue-still so as not to jostle anyone
inadvertently.
As the
deCourteneys began to chant the spell to interdict that of Yardiff Bey and warp
it to their own purposes, Springbuck had a moment of surprise that the Snow
Leopardess hadn’t raised any objection at being excluded, on her brother’s
insistence, from the raiding party.
As the chanting
grew louder, though, he saw her countenance fill with that hunting light, and
as Andre moved to his place within the pentacle for the final segment of the
cantrip, the Prince felt his grasp on reality slipping. Katya, with a
triumphant yell, bounded into the defined area of the pentacle and crowded at
her brother’s side.
She mussed his
hair playfully. “Didst think you could keep your big sister from this? Am I not
a Doomfarer, too?”
Springbuck
dimly heard the King reply, “I wish that you had not come, but the choice is
made. Look to your knives now, and ’ware the foeman.”
Victory is
a thing of the will.
FERDINAND FOCH
ALONE in his aerie, the Hand of
Shardishku-Salamá perspired and concentrated on completing the incantation he’d
implemented to ensnare Gil MacDonald’s soul and fetch it to him. There were
many agencies to call upon, many oaths to invoke and yield, the utmost care and
attention to be exercised. None of these were beyond his competencies, though;
wasn’t he the greatest thaumaturge in the world, aside from his masters?
As the spell
reached fruition, Yardiff Bey felt interference, and his supernatural servants
complained of a counterspell of great efficacy being laid against them. He
attempted to ken what had generated the opposing magic, or whom, but couldn’t;
he was unable to divert his concentration from completion of his risky work.
Yet even as he spoke its concluding words, he was aware of terrible wrongness.
The lamentations of his demonic slave brought him to the jarring knowledge
that, for the first time in his memory, his magics had been subverted.
A suffused glow
of blue appeared in the center of his pentacle. Before he could cast a
negation, a sulfurous cloud roiled and vanished. There stood in its place an
armed company, among them his worst enemies, poised and ready to slay.
He didn’t gawk
or try to repair the irreparable. His thought was of escape, saving redress for
this insulting intrusion for another time. But the raiders were between him and
the door leading to the roof and
Cloud Ruler.
With a hand motion he
caused the opening of the door behind him, leading to the lower stairwell, then
turned and plunged down the steps.
Reacher was
first to react, for Yardiff Bey had signaled the door to shut after he’d gotten
through it. The King sprang to intervene between door and frame, to strain and
arrest the closure, but only succeeded in slowing it. In a moment Hightower was
with him, and together they stopped the door, managing to keep it open a few
hands’ width. But this was gap enough for Kisst-Haa, stumping up after them, to
wedge clawed hands in and pull the portal irresistibly wider, opening it again.
Gil knew that
same feeling that comes with healthy awakening from a fever dream. Now that the
energies seeking to drain him had been abated, life swelled in him. One side of
his mind was coming out of the all-encompassing sorrow of Duskwind’s death,
braving to deal with it subjectively. His brain had known it, but somehow now,
in this bizarre turn of events, his skin and heart and loins learned.
He’d held her
hand at the last, feeling the remarkable warmth of her ebb slowly until the
brown-gold fingers were cold. It came back now, that feeling, an emphatic
declaration of her departure. He accepted it with a species of welcome; it was
some excruciating sacrament that passed him, vengeful, into a state of unholy
grace. He took up his carbine and a grim smile touched his lips.
Springbuck
leaped through the reopened door, Bar in one hand and his knife in the other.
“We must move apace,” he called, and with that was in hot pursuit of the
vanished magician.
Though they’d
lost mere seconds, the Prince did not overtake the sorcerer. At the bottom of
the stairs the arras covering the lower portal had been ripped away. As
Springbuck charged into the brightly lit room, the general furor was eloquent
word that Bey had passed this way and given the alarm.