Authors: John Dahlgren
Sagaria (58 page)
“Precisely.” It was Samzing who spoke again, stepping down from the platform. He stared at Fariam. “This assistant of yours has a lot of explaining to do,” he said, his tones ringing with contempt. “Better we go to the Shadow World late than walk straight into treachery and betrayal – straight into the arms of death.”
“There’s an easy way to discover the truth,” said Renada. Eyes narrow, she was looking at Deicher as if for the first time, and not liking what she saw.
Her words jolted Fariam out of his indecision.
“Yes, of course. Come here, Flip.”
The Grand Master reached out his hand, palm-down, as Flip approached. “Don’t be frightened. I’m just going to read your mind to find out what you saw and heard. You might have misinterpreted something perfectly innoce—”
Out of the corner of his eye, Flip saw Deicher tensing. The black-robe wasn’t going to wait for Fariam to discover the truth.
Sir Tombin saw it too. He’d climbed down from the platform to stand beside Samzing, but now he turned and made a leap back toward it.
Too late!
Deicher had seized Perima by the scruff of the neck and had his other arm around Sagandran’s chest.
“Stay back!” he yelled.
Sir Tombin seemed to run straight into an invisible wall. The Frogly Knight staggered, clutching his forehead.
Snowmane reared up onto his hind legs and struck out at Deicher, but his hooves encountered the same unseen barrier. Losing his balance and twisting away, the horse teetered on the platform’s edge before crashing to the floor. Hooves flailing, he struggled to rise.
Renada’s hands were a blur. Concentrating her full attention on Deicher, she was muttering a swift stream of spells, none of which seemed to be having any effect. Shano, on the far side of the platform, was doing the same thing, to little avail.
“There’s no point in that,” said Samzing sadly. “No point at all.”
Fariam nodded in unhappy agreement. “The traitor has cast one of the forbidden ensorcelments.” His voice betrayed his gloom and weariness. “This one draws on the same energies that bond the three worlds, and is as powerful as they are. Even if we could somehow disrupt it, we’d risk causing even greater damage to the balance between the worlds than Arkanamon could. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Nothing?” said Sir Tombin disbelievingly.
It was Samzing who answered him. “Nothing at all. Even the magic of Qarnapheeran has its limitations.”
Deicher gave a cackle of triumph.
Fariam turned to face him. “Why have you done this to us, Deicher?”
He was met by a sneer. “You believe you’re so powerful, you doddering old fool, but beside my true master you’re just a feather in the wind. I’ve been laboring beside you on the puny magics of the Elemental Orders for all these years, and you’ve failed to acknowledge the level of my skills, constantly preferring others over me. Look at that pathetic bitch beside you.” Adjusting his grip on both Sagandran and Perima, Deicher glared balefully at Renada, who was looking even older and more hunched than the Grand Master. “Her powers are piteous beside mine, yet you pay more heed to her counsel than to any other.
“Well,” said Deicher squaring his shoulders, “the time has come for all that to change. For the past year or more, I have been working on behalf of Arkanamon, and you’ve been so far gone in your dotage that you’ve failed to notice the shift in my allegiances. He recognizes my true worth. He will reward me far beyond your wildest imaginings when I deliver this brat into his hands. When I return, as I
most assuredly shall will, you will be kneeling in the dust before me, groveling in the dirt, imploring me to have mercy and take you as my slaves.”
“This is madness,” cried Samzing. There hung about him a sudden imperial magnificence that no one had seen before. “There is still time to turn yourself back from this fatal course, Deicher. There is no such thing as a just reward in the Shadow World. Arkanamon will use you as his tool and then, when you have lost your usefulness, he’ll toss you aside to whatever fate awaits you. Don’t be such a fool as to think otherwise.”
“The die is cast, you spent old wreck of a third-rate trickster,” hissed Deicher. “My master defeated you all those years ago, and now it’s my turn to do the same.”
“Just listen to me, will you?” said Samzing.
“Why should I do so?”
“Because I’m telling the truth.”
“No, that’s not what you’re doing. You’re just trying to delay me until the portal closes. Then you think you can sunder my spell and destroy me.”
Again, he gave that maniacal caterwaul of mockery.
“At least leave the girl behind,” protested Samzing. “Your master has no purpose for her.”
“Ah, but I have,” said Deicher promptly. “She’s my hostage. I’ve seen the way she and the brat look at each other. He’ll dare not try to thwart me if her life is at risk. But enough of this.”
He began to walk backward toward the portal, which was beginning to flash more fervently again. Sir Tombin redoubled his efforts to break through the shielding spell, attacking it with the great golden sword, Xaraxeer. The magicians just watched his futile efforts forlornly, and Flip and Memo could do nothing more than follow their example.
“Help us!” screamed Sagandran, clawing at the arm that held him.
Perima kicked viciously behind her, taking Deicher on the shin.
The burly magician’s face went white and he staggered. As he did so, the folds of his white robe shifted, and now it was plain for all to see that the cloth was indeed black.
“I’ll kill you for that, you little minx,” snarled Deicher. Then he added, more calmly, “but not until your sniveling boyfriend is dead.”
As Flip and the others gaped helplessly, the black-robed wizard took one more step backward and was lost in the incandescent blue sheen of the portal.
Taking Sagandran and Perima with him.
pale moon floated in the dark, tide-torn ocean of a tormented sky. Its wan illumination was reflected in dirty, tarnished silver from a twisted branch here and sharp edges of broken rock there, and it seemed to bring more darkness than light to everything it touched. To Sagandran, tripping over a clawlike root and cursing uselessly, the world appeared to be made entirely of different shades of black. Blackest of all were the gale-swept robes of Deicher as the traitor led Sagandran and Perima, roped by their necks to his hand. The landscape around them was felt more than seen, except where the fitful moonlight brushed it. Brightest of anything, paradoxically, was Perima’s dark face whenever Sagandran could trust his footing long enough to spare a sidelong glance. He was conscious that his face was blotched by tears of rage, frustration, fear and pain. In contrast, hers seemed almost placid, almost as if she were finding their travails more interesting than terrifying. She walked with a truculent grace he found impossible to emulate. Her eyes shone.
His head bent, he struggled on in the biting wind. It brought a chill to him that seemed to cut right to his bones.
Sagandran had no clear memory of their arrival in this place. One moment they had been struggling to free themselves from Deicher’s grasp, the faces of their friends looking on like horror-struck masks. The next, they were lying winded on a sloping bed of flint-angled rocks, trying to clear their heads. They had traversed no glowing maze of tunnels, as Sagandran had when he travelled from the Earthworld to Sagaria. There had just been an abrupt, disorienting transition. No wonder the ancient mages of the Elemental Orders had chosen to seal up the portal. There was nothing here any mortal could wish to find.
Any mortal but Arkanamon and his craven henchmen.
Before Sagandran and Perima had properly recovered their wits, their captor had produced from somewhere two long coils of thin, black rope. He’d tied their hands tightly behind their backs, then looped the ropes up to tie another
knot at their necks. The rope seemed to have some low sentience of its own; it bit savagely into their flesh even when it seemed loosely tied. If they ever made a move that might be construed as an escape attempt, it immediately tightened, causing such excruciating pain that it might have been a circlet of sharp, venomous serpent fangs.
“Where are you taking us?” demanded Perima during a brief lull in the wind’s howl.
“To Arkanamon,” Deicher replied over his shoulder.
It was a question she’d asked before, and he always gave the same, uninformative answer.
“You’ll wish you hadn’t.”
“Oh yes?” He snickered. This had happened before too.
“You’ll be sorry when our friends find their way here.”
Deicher guffawed in a well-practiced way. “Oh, I am shaking with fear!”
“You can laugh now, but—”
This time the wizard stopped. It happened so suddenly that Perima and Sagandran almost ran into the back of him. He turned and as the wind rose to a crescendo and whipped at his greasy hair, he bent down and leaned forward until his nose was only an inch or two from the girl’s.
“You want to be very careful about upsetting me with your tiresome menaces, brat,” he snarled evenly. “Your friends will never find you. You’re doomed to die anyway, but if you irritate me any further, your death shall be one of greater agony than you can imagine. The anguish can start now, if you like. I know spells that could make every cell in your body feel like it was on fire.”
He let the threat hang. For a moment they stood motionless, glaring defiantly into each other’s eyes. Then, with a snort of disgust, the wizard turned away and resumed his onward march.
It was only now that Sagandran could find his voice.
“You leave her alone!” he yelled at Deicher’s back. Even as he spoke the words, he realized how pathetic he sounded.
Deicher’s answer was to tighten his grip on the rope, giving it a sadistic little jerk so that they both yowled in pain.
On they stumbled. Although Sagandran could see very little, the creakings and groanings in the wind all around him built up an image in his mind of a murky and desolate forest, with denuded trees stretching out their thin and deformed branches toward him like skeletal arms. Their roots seemed to lash out at his feet, endeavoring to trip him whenever they could. Every now and then, punctuating the din of the wind, there came the unearthly scream of an unknown creature either going in for the kill or being killed. Sagandran
shuddered at the thought of what might happen if one of those savage predators caught sight of their little party and seized upon it as its next prey.
It was difficult to keep track of time as they trudged onward, but slowly the noises of the forest grew quieter, and Sagandran sensed they’d moved out into open countryside. The going underfoot became easier too, even though the ground over which Deicher was leading them was sloping gently upward. Sagandran guessed they were on a beaten-earth road of some kind. The heavens began to lighten a little, as if somewhere beyond a thick layer of thunderclouds a reluctant sun was shining. Yet this could not be true, for the moon was clearly visible as it drifted toward the horizon through a starless sky. He wondered if the sun’s rays were struggling to penetrate the cloud but only half-succeeding, making it glow with this strange, pale opalescent gray.
After a further hour or two, by Sagandran’s confused reckoning, the light had grown strong enough that he could see that at least some of his guesses were correct. Deicher was leading them (by now, half-dragging them) along a road of clay. There were ravine walls in the same drab color to either side of them, and beyond those were what might have been called fields, had there been anything growing in them. He wondered what the people of the Shadow World did for food. Now that the barrier between this realm and Sagaria had been breached, they could raid and forage, of course, but before? It was yet another conundrum to be put at the back of his mind for answering later, if ever. Like the sun behind the sky.
Although there were no landmarks to distinguish one stretch of this dreary road from the next, Deicher seemed to recognize something, for he gave a little start of acknowledgement and began walking more rapidly, as if a destination had at last come into view. Even though Sagandran’s legs were just about dead beneath him, he and Perima had no choice but to somehow stir themselves to greater speed in order to keep up with their captor.
At last, there was something different up ahead: a cluster of strange, irregular shapes the nature of which Sagandran could not determine at first. Standing stones? More trees?
As Deicher pulled his two prisoners closer, the shapes resolved themselves into a group of starved-looking men trudging along with painful slowness, their bodies gaunt, their clothing just a motley collection of filthy, colorless rags. Each of them bore a huge bundle of bone-like firewood on his back.
There was something strange about these people, Sagandran thought. If you looked at them from the side of your vision they were easy enough to see, but if you looked straight at them, they seemed somehow blurred around the edges. He jerked his head. It was just a fancy. He’d been on the go a long time. His eyes must be tired.
As the wizard and his two roped hostages approached, one of the figures glanced back and saw them. He must have spoken to the others, for they all wearily came to a halt and waited for the newcomers to catch up.
Sagandran braced himself for an attack of some kind. He almost welcomed the prospect. Anything, even sudden death, would be better than more of this sorry plodding through a landscape of gray monotony, with the rope always biting at his wrists and neck. He glanced at Perima, but her gaze was fixed straight ahead, the same half-smile of confidence tweaking her lips.
As Deicher drew abreast of the silently waiting figures, one of them reached out a woefully thin hand.
“Please, good sir, could you spare a—”
“Shut up, scum.”
“—a coin or two for some food? Our families are starving.”
“Then you should have known better than to have families. Get out of my way.”
Deicher’s stride did not lessen in speed. He might have been batting away overattentive flies.
“But, sir, if you could hear the little ones wail.”
“I would put them out of their misery, which is what I strongly suggest you do.” Deicher laughed. “It’d give you something to fill your kitchen pots with, wouldn’t it?”
The begging man’s hand trembled with repressed fury and his face warped in grief, but he somehow kept hold of his temper.
“Enough of them have died already, good sir, and we have been sore tempted, but—”
Deicher, still walking so that the beggar had to limp sideways to keep beside him, sneered. “If you cannot help yourselves, why should you expect other people to help you?”
“We did not bring this blight upon ourselves, sir,” the man pleaded. Both of his eyes were cloudy with cataracts. It was a wonder he still had any vision left.
Suddenly Sagandran understood.
The Shadow World has not always been like this
. The realization exploded in his mind like a lightning bolt. Before the ascendancy of Arkanamon, or perhaps of Cleonthes before him, the Shadow World might have been no paradise – there wasn’t any way Sagandran could tell – but it hadn’t been the bleak, barren, lifeless, sun-forsaken realm he could see around him now. This was what evil and corruption did to a world, any world. It could happen to Sagaria and the Earthworld as easily and swiftly as it had to the Shadow World.
The thought spurred his aching legs to new resolve. Why had he been
concentrating so much on his own woes? The task ahead of him was simply stated, even if near-impossible to achieve. He must somehow escape from Deicher, destroying him if necessary, and saving Perima if he could. There was much more after that, of course, but, unless he overcame the immediate challenge, the rest was irrelevant.
Focus on what’s in front of you, Sagandran, you ninny
, he thought with a savagery that was, in part, self-contempt but, in larger part, a sort of exultant determination, a sense of anticipated triumph.
I can do this, even though I don’t yet know how
.
At last, Deicher’s pace was slowing a little, as if he’d come to the conclusion thathe wouldn’t be able to shake off the importunings of the starved wood-gatherers. “Back off, you filthy pigs.” He spat in the nearest beggar’s outstretched palm.
The man flinched. Nonetheless, he kept his voice even. “But, good sir—”
“Can you not see these robes of mine? Do you not know what they mean?”
“No, only that they’re fine warm robes to keep off the wind. Our wives and children could do with such robes as yours, good sir.” Something of a glint was coming to the man’s milky gaze. Sagandran wondered if perhaps he and his fellows were readier to resort to violence than they seemed.
“He’ll give you nothing.” The unexpected voice was Perima’s. Everyone started, turning to stare at her. “He’s not enough of a human being to know how to give,” she continued, oblivious to the attention. “He’s the lowliest beast inhabiting the cesspit, but he’s built himself up with his delusions of grandeur until he thinks he’s something great and mighty. He’s the lord of slugs and leeches. You’re better than he is; you shouldn’t be wasting your breath on him. Leave him be before he wipes his slime on you.”
The frail beggar’s eyes narrowed, then slowly he nodded, ceasing his sidelong gait.
“And do not follow us,” Deicher shouted as if he’d scored some victory, “or I will cast a plague upon you. Yes, you and all your ‘little ones’ too.”
“Thank you,” said the beggar to Perima as she drew away from him in Deicher’s wake. “Thank you for what you’ve said. If ever you need some friends, when things are better, if ever they do grow better …”
His voice faded behind them.
They finally came to a slow, half-hearted bend in the road.
As they rounded it, Deicher spoke again. “Quite the she-cat, aren’t you?” His tone was almost conversational, but both Perima and Sagandran recognized the danger lurking there.