Thick as Thieves (17 page)

Flemgu smiled, awakening a fresh blossoming of blood on his lip. He never could resist a pretty, begging boy. He reached out and pressed his fingers under Madd’s jaw, turning his face to examine his features. Lust burned anew in his eyes.

“Not so proud now, are you, Maddog?”

“No, Master. I—”

Flemgu walked to a table where a casket of deathstone bound with iron waited. Madd’s heart sank as he watched the baron reach within and lift a split stone filled with crystals. The crystals bracketed a blue-green oval. The egg’s surface shimmered with delicately traced scales of gold.

“Looking for this?”

Madd laughed bitterly. At least he’d succeeded at being distracting. And he’d guessed the baron would have the basilisk egg with him. “You bastard.”

“And you still have a mouth I can’t help wanting, though it spouts spells and filth.” Flemgu set the crystal and its precious burden down again. “Well, you can use that pretty mouth to suck me one last time and taste what you did to my cock, you worthless cumhole. Maybe you’ll even make it hard enough for me to fuck you. On your knees—” Flemgu yanked at his trouser flap.

A loud bark of laughter interrupted him. “You should be more respectful of my property, Baron, unless you are thinking to put aside our agreement.”

Flemgu snarled and hurried to restore his trousers. Madd cursed the soldiers who hauled on his arms, pulling him back upright from where he’d sunk to his knees. He knew that voice, and it sank fangs into his heart. Oh hells… he’d done it all wrong. He was a rat in a trap. And now he faced the cat.

Usdan, Grand Wizard of Gurgh, brought darkness into any room. The hooded black robe of a necromancer concealed all but his face, the lower part of which was defined by a neatly forked beard. The beard added menace to the cold glee at the corners of Usdan’s sensual lips. His heavily lidded eyes, though, were the flat color of dried blood.

“Well, now. This witch is worse for wear, I think… but pretty still.” The necromancer had a voice like iron chains, capable of binding creatures foul and fair alike. He traced Madd’s lips with a fingertip so cold it chilled teeth. “Do you remember me, witch?”

How could he forget? Madd battled the bile that rose to his throat. Oh gods, no… not again…. He had barely survived his last frolic with the Grand Wizard and his fiends. He hadn’t told Vorgell the half of it, what wizards did to witchkin. His body might be alive at the end of it, but he’d lose his mind. Already fear twisted his gut.

“Master, please! Don’t give me to him!” Madd turned back to Flemgu, willing to beg, not even minding now that the collar spoke for him. “I love you, you know I—”

Despair drove like steel into his heart as the baron simply curled his lip and turned away. “I know you would kill me in my sleep if you could. That’s not why I took you, Maddog. I wanted a sweet, loving slave capable of turning magic into pleasure. What I got was a troublesome, unmanageable dog. The damn collar you wear cost me a prince’s ransom, and it ceases to work the moment you’re out of my sight! I want nothing more now than to be rid of you!” A string of yellow discharge dripped from Flemgu’s right eye and he dabbed at it impatiently. “I promised you to the Grand Wizard to pay off my debt for your theft of his mandolin and the loss of the unicorn it would have summoned.”

The mandolin? The baron hadn’t told Usdan about the unicorn… or Vorgell. Of course not. He still hoped to capture the barbarian himself.

Flemgu smirked. “Oh, and you should know I gave him my wife in exchange for cures to all the disgusting afflictions you wrought upon me! You brought this fate on yourself. You can be the wizard’s whore now, if he’ll have you. Or maybe he will simply give you to his fellow wizards and their fiends.”

Now it was Usdan who grabbed Madd by the arms and yanked him away from the soldiers. They unhanded him as if only too happy to give him over. Hard fingers dug into his skin and pulled him into a tight embrace. Before Madd could do more than whimper, Usdan’s beard tickled his chin and the man’s mouth descended. Usdan bit at his lips until they yielded. Pain ripped through his neck as though it were a decapitating blade, the collar protesting the kiss.

The wizard laughed and swallowed Madd’s scream. With a throaty growl he pursued the sound down his victim’s throat. He continued the kiss until Madd could scream no more, his mind too filled with pain for him to even stand or command his body.

“So sweet, Maddog,” Usdan murmured. Even the wizard’s breath was cold. “I remember only too well how our bodies fit together. I’m going to like our new arrangement.”

Only then did Usdan let go.

Madd hit the floor with his left elbow taking the force of the fall. Lights danced and spun before his eyes while the burning garrote of the collar around his neck ebbed. It felt like an angry, living thing… coiling, writhing, hissing against his flesh. He blinked, praying his blood and nerves would soon obey him again. But it was already too late.

Usdan’s deep voice had begun to chant. While Madd looked on through eyes filmed with horror, gray shapes coalesced from the very air of the room and swirled into terrible being. The first fiend to appear, scaly and red-eyed, human only in that it stood upon two legs, had three grasping fingers on each fiery hand. The other creature filled the room with vast leathery wings and barbed spines, its face a mass of writhing tendrils.

Usdan’s fiends had arrived.

Chapter 13

A
T
THE
appearance of the hell-spawned creatures, swords rang from their scabbards and Baron Flemgu’s soldiers joined him in scrambling for the chamber door. There was only one way out of the five-sided room, and they tripped over each other to get there.

“Wizard, what the hells are those things?” Flemgu demanded. His boils stood out more vividly against his pasty skin as he gazed upon the uncoiling abominations. “Get them out of my castle!”

Madd gasped for air. The sulfurous emanations from the creatures burned his eyes and nose and all but robbed him of breath. The bonds on his wrists bit deep as he struggled. Gods, no… not again.

“My fiends, of course. They’ve been here before. You weren’t in the room. But Maddog was there, on his knees with proof of my pleasure leaking from his every hole.” With a flare of his silk robe, the Grand Wizard stalked around his captive. Madd tracked the velvet tread of slippers on the wood-plank floor. Ironwood. Dead wood. Drained of all magic. The wizard chucked the end of his bone wand beneath Madd’s chin, tilting his face up. The bone gleamed with arcane menace as terrible as that in the wizard’s burning gaze. “We had such fun that night. You remember your brothers, don’t you, Maddog?”

“His
brothers
?” Flemgu’s voice rose. He pondered the fiends for a moment. Apparently satisfied that they were being controlled, he took a step forward. “
Those
things?”

“Maddog’s mother was a lovely little witch. Her womb gave the world one pretty son—and two powerful spirits of darkness.” Gloating softened the corners of Usdan’s bearded lips. “All it took was magic and… we don’t give away our secrets, do we, thief?”

Madd twisted away from the wizard and his wand, lurching toward Flemgu and hoping for reprieve. With his hands tied behind him, he couldn’t fight back at all. And these monsters weren’t his brothers… they’d been pulled from his mother’s unwilling flesh. Fiends were crimes against the world, created not from life but death itself. Women were killed just so they could give birth to fiends with their last breath. And wizards had taken her… Usdan had. What wizards did to his kind should have horrified any creature with a soul, but all he saw written on Flemgu’s ruined face was fascination. He would find no pity there.

The fiends circled closer. Eyes like burning holes followed his frantic movements. Venom from the mouth of one of the fiends dripped in fat globules onto his ankle, burning the skin. He yelled out and kicked at the thing, to the laughter of Flemgu and the soldiers.

Usdan caressed the yellowed bone of his wand and the fiends softly chittered, curling their hideous necks until they faced their master. “My beauties,” the wizard murmured. “Tenderly now. Your brother’s still new to our loving ways. I mean to take him back to the Guild Keep, where his pretty looks will make him a favorite and provide you with many feasts. For the moment, just taste him, to mark him as yours.”

The winged fiend’s tendrils snaked over his naked buttocks and thighs. Madd rolled on the floor, seeking escape as needles of pain lanced between his ass cheeks and stung his legs. The creature meant to pry him open and Madd fought back with all his strength. Tendrils caressed and pricked his skin, and the fiend’s mockery of a voice gurgled with hideous discovery.

Aw, hells… he was as good as dead. His body still contained the surfeit of magic he’d siphoned off Vorgell, the ass-happy barbarian. Once the fiends detected the trove, the feeding would become a frenzy. In this chamber, with an allophane band binding his skull, Madd had no way to spend magic at all. He couldn’t work so much as a healing spell. To get at the magic, the fiends would rip him apart, and even Usdan and his bone wand wouldn’t be able to control them.

“Call them off!” he cried, though that was good for nothing. Usdan was entirely too pleased with himself. And Madd couldn’t bring himself to tell the bastard about Vorgell, about why this was happening. If he did, they’d just find Vorgell and his torture would be worse.

He kicked and screamed, but there was no escape. Not from this. Ghostly limbs laid hold of his legs and coiled like a noose around his neck. The collar choked him with pain as the invasion began. Wings fanned overhead, tendrils tightening around his limbs as the second fiend’s rotting maw descended toward his throat, intent on sinking ghostly teeth into his flesh.

“Gods!” Flemgu exclaimed. The soldiers in the room cursed and made signs against evil as the emblems on the silver walls blazed then linked with icy power.

Usdan must have noticed something was wrong, because he waved his wand and shouted at the fiends to stop… but of course they wouldn’t.

Madd screamed again as they ripped the life wells of his body open.

C
HILL
had set deep into Vorgell’s bones by the time he and Reannry emerged from the secret stair leading up into the tower. The witch woman knew the way well and treaded the steps surely, though she did not warn Vorgell at every turn, and he still bumped his head on low beams and stumbled over uneven risers. Reannry knew where to duck and which corners to turn. Along the way she pointed out one passage she said would take them to the kitchens where there were hiding places to be had, and another passage that would lead them to the stables. None, however, led to the wizard’s chamber.

The closest they could get would be the baron’s weapons room.

“It will work to our advantage,” she said as she reached up in the faint green witch light and pressed along a lintel for the trigger to release the mechanism. “The room will be empty. The castle soldiers bear their own weapons. These belong to the baron and are used only for ceremonies.”

Vorgell scowled and prayed it was so, because he had no more patience to spare. If soldiers waited within, he would simply have to find a way to kill them quickly. That would not be too difficult in a room filled with weapons. He trusted Reannry only because she had explained her knowledge of the castle: she was a child of the former mistress, though not of the man whose family had held the castle before Gillja’s marriage to the baron.

The wooden panel snicked open, letting in slivers of light, then moved silently to their right along some hidden track. He stepped over a floorboard and followed Reannry into a gloomy stone room with walls almost concealed by shields and racks of weapons. Many of the shields looked ancient and blazed with images of the gilded winged beast he had seen on the door.

“Ours is one of three noble families with hidden witchkin blood,” Reannry said. She kept her voice low. “We guard that secret carefully. None know, not even the Seat of the King. Most of all, we’ve kept it from the Wizards’ Guild.”

“Madd has no love for wizards,” he recalled. No more love than he had for shamans. He looked around. Seeing a spiked mace of commanding size upon one of the racks, he lifted the thing free. Good. A striking weapon would make the kind of statement he needed.

“Wizards have sent us into hiding.” Reannry chose a pair of throwing daggers from a table in the center of the room and tucked the glinting blades into her belt. “They use the wombs of witch women to breed their fiends into this world, and then harvest our bones to make their wands. Our men they rape and torment to feed their monsters. Fiends must consume magic to remain in this world.”

Vorgell hefted the mace in his right hand, and with the left, he picked up a fine, sturdy sword. Wizards were mortal, and even magic, he reasoned, would yield to well-swung weapons.

“So you say Madd is being held on this floor?”

Reannry nodded. They both froze as a bone-chilling scream came from somewhere near.