Authors: Christopher Rowley
“What errand could possibly make one want to enter Ingbok’s citadel?” he wondered aloud.
She smiled again but did not reply for a moment. When she spoke she looked away over the ruins.
“This is bear country,” she said. “But even the big brown bears dislike this place. We won’t have to worry about any wandering bruins.”
The lady seemed to take his concern very lightly. Kesepton was moved to anger.
So there was nothing to fear, was there? Then why did the eyes of the younger Grey Sister betray such anxiety?
And with a furtive glance at the girl he felt another painful tug at his heart. What was going on? This girl was dangerously beautiful! So well born, so lovely, and yet serving in this most dangerous duty alongside a Great Witch. It seemed unnatural somehow.
Clearly she was not like most of the young women in her social class. And now he felt ashamed of his own cowardice. He was a battle-hardened veteran of five years service in the legion, and he was not willing to go into Dugguth, and yet she was.
But when he caught her eye, he saw how unsure she was and indeed how terrified. The dead city of Dugguth was no place to enter lightly, for truly was it said that the legends of Mach Ingbok had been written in blood and horror.
Lessis was looking at him again; he dragged his eyes away from the girl. The witch was so keen, so perceptive. Did she already know of his infatuation? How could he possibly hide such a thing?
And the terrible thought plucked at him again. What if the witch trailed this girl before him to gain his acceptance of her orders? It was such an easy thing for them to do, to rule a young officer through his passion for a girl. Such officers were frequently in the field for months at a time and denied the company of women. How easy to arouse one and turn his head and thereby gain his allegiance.
Perhaps that was exactly why the witch had the girl as her assistant. Men could not help but want to love this girl; she was fully in the ripeness of young womanhood and irresistibly pretty. By force of will he wrenched his gaze away from the girl and kept it there.
He shivered. What had the woman done to him?
“Farewell, Captain,” said the witch with a slight amusement in her voice. “We’ll see you at breakfast, I expect.” Lessis turned her pony towards the ruins. The girl went with her.
He watched them go and thought how sweet it would be to be alone with that Lagdalen of Marneri for an hour or two. Just to walk under the stars, or the sun, or the moon, or any damn thing. To talk and sing and maybe even make love.
It was dangerous to feel such things on campaign, far beyond the frontier, but it was impossible to stop them while he watched her departing back, with her hair blowing in the wind.
Then they were out of sight in a gulley. A trooper was standing watch; he knew he had to get back to the men, but he stayed until he saw them climb the far side of the empty moat and pass through the shattered gate, atop which once upon a time heads had rotted by the thousand.
When he reached camp and dismounted he managed to grab some hot polenta and pickles at the fire and then withdrew with Weald to consider the situation. Weald had a full list now of dead, wounded and the remaining effectives.
They sat together and went over it. It was a terrible conversation. There were barely forty men left fit to fight in his whole command. Back at Ossur Galan they’d buried twelve more men and burnt the body of another dragon.
The wounded included big Vander, the other leather-back, and several troopers from Yortch’s command who’d fought their own fight under the trees with the enemy’s cavalry and barely held their own.
Kesepton’s first command had become a catastrophe. Already he was sure in his heart that they would never give him another. There was a growing emptiness there, which combined with his lovesickness for the girl was unsettling, even nerve-racking.
And so Hollein Kesepton struggled to keep control of himself. This situation could make shreds of his authority with the men—a calm front was essential. By the goddess, this was not a situation he would have sought after in a million years!
But while an anxious Hollein Kesepton went over the situation with Weald, the two Sisters in grey strode softly through the ruins of the once mighty city.
Moonlight struck harsh shadows off ruined walls and shattered spires. These truncated towers and tumbled stones were infected with evil remembrances. In this place malice had known no restriction, power no check, and cruelty no rein.
Almost silently they stole down the dead avenues, passing smashed statuary that lay where it had been thrown by the victorious armies of Argonath, nearly two centuries before. They paused before an arch, left standing by the conquerors to emphasize the collapse of the rest. A monument to the mad mentality of the Demon Lord, this arch consisted of two tetraclusters of pillars, wrapped in carved serpents, that supported the upper part on which the terrible visage of Mach Ingbok glowered down with triumphant glee. A goblin mask, the human shape distorted by the passions of greed and lust and unbridled power into a crazed caricature with bulging eyes and loose-lipped mouth.
The figures in grey stood and gazed upon this face for a few moments. In the moonlight its harsh features were rendered even colder and less sympathetic than were those upon which it was modeled. Once it had glowered down upon captives as they were driven beneath it to the slaughters and tortures of the dungeons beyond. Now it glowered in futility at dust and moonbeams.
Lessis gave a sigh after a while and they passed on, leaving the great Master of Dugguth to stare down forever at the ruin of his ambitions.
At length they entered a tumbledown structure of collapsed galleries and roofless rooms. Outside it, resting on the pedestal from which it had been broken, were the ruins of a symbol of horror, a blank stone sphere from which a fanged mouth projected like an open eye.
The younger of the two produced a small lantern and twisted the mechanism to light it. Immediately shadows chased away down a long gallery at the center of the structure. In places the roof had fallen in, but for the most part the floor was still level and flat. They moved down this wide corridor and came to a broad set of stairs that descended to a deep place where the unholy had once been worshiped.
Here they found a smashed altar stone, flung down beside a circular pit, like an obscene baptismal built on a heroic scale. In the pit a darkness twitched softly.
On this altar many young people had ended their lives in shrieking horror; the whole place still screamed on the psychic plane. Lessis was forced to blunt her awareness on the higher planes to dull it.
The lantern was held over the pit. Beneath was a void, a nothingness, and in that void there was a liquid shifting of surfaces. This was the siphon of a dead Thingweight, that horror which had once been celebrated here with ritualized feedings on human victims before crowds of fanatical worshipers.
The older woman pulled back her cowl and then pulled from her cloak a spoon with a heavy handle and a deep cup. She pulled on the handle and it telescoped out until it was four feet in length. She tested it carefully for strength and then removed a small bottle that she unstoppered and set on the brink of the pool of nothingness.
She knelt beside the lip of the pit and composed herself. Lagdalen held the lamp high and closed her eyes.
Lessis muttered a long incantation and made a number of passes over the spoon set on the stone before her.
Then she pulled up one sleeve, took up the spoon, leaned over the edge of the pit and plunged the spoon deep into the central spot, where the glims and glitters spun in the nothingness.
The center of the pit became more active, thrashing and tumbling as the spoon was thrust into the roiling murk.
The spoon shuddered and shivered in the woman’s hand, but she moved it vigorously for a while before withdrawing it. A moment later she poured a small amount of a black dust into the little bottle. Twice more she repeated this act and then stoppered the bottle tightly and sealed it.
She collapsed the long spoon, replaced it within her cloak and put the bottle in an interior pocket. The two women turned and padded quietly away into the night. Darkness returned, but the glistening center of the pit shuddered and shook for a long time before growing still.
Outside the ruins, the trooper posted by Kesepton was suddenly joined by three men on horseback.
Trooper Same was surprised to see Sergeant Duxe riding beside Subadar Yortch, along with a third rider, Trooper Harkness.
“Same,” said Yortch as he pulled up, “you can stand down. Get some food while it’s still going.”
Same didn’t question any further; he kicked his horse into a canter and rode down to the glittering camprest he could see on the lower slope of the ridge.
Yortch, Duxe and Harkness exchanged a long look.
“No turning back now,” said Yortch. He showed the gleam of a cavalry dirk in the moonlight.
Harkness grinned back. He was ready whenever the Subadar was. Liepol Duxe was not so happy, however.
“I still don’t like it. If anything goes wrong, we’re finished.”
“Damnit Marneri, stop letting these women control you!” Yortch was impatient. The men of Marneri were like puppets sometimes. “Look you, if we don’t kill them they are sure to get us killed. Don’t fool yourself, man. None of us are going to make it back from where they’re taking us.”
“We don’t have to do this. We could arrest them, or drive them away.”
“Ach, they’d have you around their little fingers in no time. See how the hag uses the young wench to distract the captain? That’s how they work their wiles, damn them.”
“We Talion men, we don’t listen to the damn witches anymore,” said Trooper Harkness, emboldened by the Subadar’s intensity.
Duxe could not shake his dislike of the plot, but he could think of no alternative. They had to get rid of the witch Lessis. The captain was under a spell of some kind; he obeyed the witch’s orders without the slightest protest. As a result they’d taken seventy percent casualties and been destroyed as a military unit. There was almost nobody left; Duxe had twenty men still able to fight. Back at that accursed elf trap in the rocks they’d left twelve more bodies. The men were on the edge of mutiny.
And now Liepol Duxe was on the verge of committing murder. Harkness showed a gleam of teeth as he elaborated on his boldness and ventured a thought that had been close to his heart for days.
“I say we take our pleasures with the little one first.”
Duxe turned on him with a venomous look.
“You try that and my blade will be in your heart before you touch the girl!”
Harkness scowled. “Come on, why waste that? She’s the only good thing on this damned wild goose chase. I have dreamed of taking her for days. If we plan to kill her then we should take those pleasures with her first.”
Duxe would not hear of it.
Yortch broke in. “Trooper, this is a military operation. You will keep your damned lecherous thoughts to yourself. We kill them, that’s all, and we make sure their bodies are never found and then we get back to the camp before dawn. That’s the job, and that’s all we will do. Understand?”
But Harkness saw a glint in Yortch’s eye and divined the Subadar’s real intent. What if they disposed of Duxe as well? And then had their pleasure with the little wench? Duxe was already a pain to deal with—if they got rid of him then they would be the only witnesses to the deed.
“Yes, Subadar,” muttered Harkness. Duxe relaxed a trifle.
Trust old Yortch not to miss a thing, thought Harkness. And then Harkness felt a little shiver in his spine. Of course, the subadar would want to go first. And while he was occupied upon the wench, Harkness would be free to kill him from behind. One thrust would do it.
And then, well, since the story would have to be that they were surprised by imps, Harkness and the girl would just disappear. Up into these mountains somewhere—and who knows? The girl might last him quite a while before he killed her and returned to civilization, claiming to have escaped from the clutches of the enemy. No one would have lived to tell tales on Harkness, and he would have had the best of the situation.
He grinned to himself at the thought. How rich! What a perfect end to Subadar Yortch!
“Look, it’s simple,” growled Yortch to Duxe. “You heard her, she plans to make us follow her across the Gan. Then it’ll be Chazendar and the White Bones, there’s no end to it. She’s out to kill all of us.”
Casting around in desperation for some excuse, Duxe grumbled, “Anyway, I don’t see why we have to go into that hellhole.”
Liepol Duxe normally had little truck with witchcraft and was largely unimpressed by what he’d seen. But this was Dugguth, and even he was afraid of what it stood for.
Yortch grew impatient. “None of us wants to go in there, but we have to. Anyway, nothing lives there, and the demon has been dead two hundred years. It can’t hurt us.”
“So you say.”
Duxe noted that Harkness had sobered up considerably now that he understood where they were going. Damn Talionese were so ready to stoop to rape and killing; he hated having to work with them. Duxe shivered. He hated the whole thing, but there was no other way. Not with Kesepton completely bewitched.
The moonlight glittered on the dead city. He could feel something cold and inhuman in those stone hulks. A horrible place where he would be drawn into committing an infamy, something that would damn him forever. He wished he could find the courage to say no to the damned subadar, but it seemed he was in too deep to back out now. He shivered and nudged his mount forward.
The same moonlight that fell upon the ruins of the dead city also illuminated a pathway through the pine forest on the mountain above. Down this path came a weary dragon that hummed a happy tune despite considerable fatigue. Occasionally it paused to slash away some restricting vegetation; the path was generally used by smaller animals than dragons.
The tune that it hummed was an odd one to human ears, but it concerned a race between aerial dragons and the bets that were placed on one of them, which had great odds against it, and how those bets were recouped by the heroic efforts of the underdog dragon which won the race even though it broke a wing in the last flap.