Steel and Stone (18 page)

She heard nothing. Caven and Maleficent, arrested in midstride, stood like a statue in a village square. Wode and his nag were likewise frozen in a tangled mimicry of Caven’s stance. Tanis, on foot, had been caught in the middle of a lunge, his sword pointing straight toward … nothing. Dauntless stood stolidly near the half-elf. To all appearances, the horse was the only other living thing within view. There was no sign of whatever had uttered that cry of magic in the night.

Chapter 10
Janusz, the Mage

J
ANUSZ TOOK A DEEP BREATH TO HALT HIS TREMORS
as he leaned away from his scrying bowl. Kitiara’s face faded from the surface of the water.

She’d be safe for a time; he’d seen to that. The groping hands had returned to their owners in the Abyss. The wichtlin was now crawling harmlessly along the bottom of Ice Mountain Bay. It would have to search some time to find living souls to claim in those frigid depths.

The explosion of magic that allowed the mage to both scry and speak left his ears ringing and his hands trembling. For a moment, he feared he might faint. But it had been necessary. The mage had come within
a heartbeat of losing Kitiara Uth Matar.

And Kitiara Uth-Matar was the only person who could tell him where the nine ice jewels were.

He had only two of the ice jewels, one of which the ettin carried, and he thanked Morgion for the luck that had prompted him to hold back two of the eleven purple gemstones in the encampment at the Meir’s castle.

Janusz eyed the iridescent jewel that lay atop an alabaster pedestal on the table. The purple crystal, the size of a small egg, glowed as if it contained all the knowledge of Krynn burning within it. The doltish gnome who’d sold him the jewels had launched into a tiresome litany of the stones’ history. The mage had ignored much of the creature’s prattling, but one thing lingered in Janusz’s memory—that the gnome believed the jewels had hailed ultimately from the Icereach. Staring into the amethyst-colored orb now, the mage didn’t doubt that its glittering coldness had been formed in the snowy reaches. That was why he’d persuaded the Valdane to flee to the southernmost point of Ansalon. They’d come to the Icereach in search of more jewels. And under the spell of the ice jewel, the Valdane’s dream had expanded, grown from a yen to overrun a neighboring fiefdom to a hunger to command the entire world.

Janusz forced himself to look away from the stone, but the movement seared his eyes. The jewel held his gaze like a spell. The mage had commanded dozens of ettin slaves to search ceaselessly for the spot that just might offer up more ice jewels—because, he told the Valdane, the jewels could hold the secret to the Valdane’s ultimate power over all of Ansalon. In truth, Janusz hoped that the charismatic stones would do far more for the mage himself than for the
Valdane—that, in short, they would show Janusz how to dispel the bloodlink that bound him to the ruler’s will. But that would occur, if ever, only far in the future, after exhausting years of study, he knew.

The mage quaked inwardly at the risk he was taking in letting Res-Lacua carry one of the precious artifacts, but it was necessary if Janusz were to use the stones to teleport the ettin and Kitiara to the Icereach. That was one mystery of the stones that the mage, through months of study, had been able to discover. Handled correctly and cautiously, the stones allowed him to teleport objects, both living and nonliving, from the site of one jewel to the whereabouts of another.

When Kitiara arrived at the top of Fever Mountain in Darken Wood, the mage would use the ettin’s ice jewel to bring them both to the ice warren. Then, he vowed, he would interrogate her himself and discover the hiding place of the other nine precious stones.

Janusz forced himself upright, rolled back the sleeves of his robe, and glanced at the entrance to his chamber. The mage sat atop a stool. Obviously made from the same magical ice from which the mage had fashioned the ice warren, the stool was festooned with a brocaded version of the canvas that protected the walls and floor. Off to the right, a curl of steam rose from a ceramic beaker set over a flame. Dozens of stoppered containers littered the worktable.

A window broke the monotony of the room’s walls. The opening showed a panorama of the Icereach. Snow swirled around an outcropping of ice. Janusz glanced at the window and swore. He muttered an incantation, traced a figure in the air, and the scene in the window shifted to one showing a castle, flying black and purple pennants at every spire. Golden
sunlight poured over the scene, and the mage’s face looked wistful for a moment.

The walls of Janusz’s Icereach quarters, of course, were of solid ice. But the door was equally solid oak, banded with iron, teleported by the ice jewel to this accursed frozen wasteland months ago.

“Not that time matters in this place,” Janusz muttered. “Forsaken by the gods. A fraction of a year, a fraction of a lifetime. What’s the difference?”

There were no seasons now, no shy blooming as of a spring maiden after winter’s crone had eased her dying clutch upon the land. He smiled at his fancifulness. Habits died hard. He’d been a romantic soul long ago.

Once time had mattered. Once he’d felt himself bloom with the seasons, had felt his heart expand and thaw with the warming of the soil and the unfolding of new leaves. His romanticism may have been laughable, given the grayness of his hair and the wrinkles that creased his cheeks from nose to mouth. But he’d known true love—he’d known Dreena—and the world had seemed young and new.

“Pah!” he muttered, and pushed the useless past from his mind. “My heart is as frozen as the Icereach.”

The walls, floor, and ceiling, were solid slabs of ice, slicked to a mirrorlike smoothness. Much of the icy surface was covered with thin canvas to protect the warren’s occupants from sticking to the ice in the same way that warm flesh adheres to frigid metal on an especially cold day.

“An especially cold day,” he repeated now. Janusz laughed soundlessly. “There are no days here that don’t fit that description.”

There was no fuel for a real fire, nor was there a fireplace. A fireplace of ice? No, and magical blazes
drained too much of his strength. It took nearly all his power these days to keep track of Kitiara and Res-Lacua, a continent to the north. Even now, he’d had to expend still more energy to give Res-Lacua the power to speak in Common rather than in the orcish gibberish the ettins used. The beast might need to speak to Kitiara in order to lure her to Fever Mountain.

Janusz swore an oath to Morgion and crashed a fist against the frozen tabletop, sending the water slopping over the edge of the scrying bowl and cascading down the front of his robe.

He cursed again and dabbed at the black wool with a linen cloth. Once he’d aspired to the white robes of good magic. But now there were only snow and ice and evil in Janusz’s life. Even now, within the ice warren, winds insinuated themselves through chink and crack to swirl around his wool-enshrouded ankles. The castle should have been warmer. After all, he’d supervised the building, overseen the crews of thick-backed and thicker-headed ettins. They’d performed the labor that his magic couldn’t manage.

Janusz’s robe, double-woven of the rarest wool, served him ill as a barrier against the needle-sharp winds of this cursed land. Everything in the room was bluish, bathed in the light that gleamed from Janusz’s magical ice. There was no need for lanterns; the walls themselves lit the castle. But the mage longed for a warm lamp with orange-yellow flame. He longed for Kern.

These days he had only his memories to keep him warm. The banality of that thought, as well as its futility, brought a grim smile to his lips, for he did have something else to warm him—his hunger for revenge. He’d had plenty of time to devise ingenious methods of torturing Kitiara.

Suddenly the oak door shuddered beneath a great blow and crashed open. “Janusz!”

The mage leaped up. His mortar and pestle tipped, rolled, and dropped with a clatter, spilling half-ground herbs over the table and floor. His shock quickly passed. The Valdane often thundered into a room like a god of war. Janusz tried to pull together a semblance of dignity before the tall man who came to a halt before him. “By the god Morgion, Valdane,” the mage said laconically, “what demon keeps you warm?”

The leader still dressed as he had in the warmest months back in Kern—black hose, white gathered shirt of watered silk, sleeveless purple doublet with gold braid, purple cape, black steel-tipped boots with steel rivets in the soles. The fashionable outfit, Janusz knew, had played well with the ladies back in Kern. Today, however, the Valdane’s eyes were bloodshot against the carrot-orange of his lashes, brows, and hair. His complexion was nearly bloodless; the sun-enhanced freckles that had given him such a ludicrously boyish cast in Kern had faded in the long nights of the Icereach. His eyes, while still blue in the brightest light of what passed for spring here, now tended more toward gray.

“Hatred keeps me warm, mage,” the Valdane replied. “That, and my plans for my future.”

The Valdane, who never seemed to be cold, also seemed never to sleep. Often late at night, as Janusz pored over his spellbooks and replenished his spell components, he heard the leader’s metal-soled tread in the ice-girded hallway outside the mage’s quarters.

The mage uprighted the mortar, swept spilled powder into his hand, and returned it to the bowl. “You sought me for a reason, Valdane? Or merely to chat?” he asked mildly.

A flutter of the man’s eyelashes suggested the ruler wasn’t fooled by Janusz’s nonchalance. “When will you bring Kitiara here?” he demanded.

The mage sighed. “I’ve told you that. As soon as the ettin can lure her to the top of the mountain.”

“You can see her by scrying. Use your accursed jewel to bring her here now.”

“She must be near the other ice jewel for the teleportation to work,” said the mage. “Even then it is dangerous. How often must I explain this?”

“And if the ettin fails?”

“He won’t.”

“Kitiara has the morals of an alley cat. You say she’s picked up another lover? What if this new lover and the old one together are able to slay the ettin?”

Janusz didn’t lower his gaze. “I have faith in the ettin.”

“I believe you are losing control, mage.”

Janusz felt blood rush to his face. “My powers are considerable, Valdane, but they, like all magical powers, have their limits.” He spat out each word. “Spells weaken me physically, as with all mages. And also as with all mages, I lose a spell from my mind when I use it, and I must study it again. That takes me late into each night.” He gestured toward a shelf of parchment-leaved books with deep blue leather covers. “You ordered that I transport hundreds of ettins and minotaurs to the Icereach—which, of course, required me also to create living quarters for them. I must maintain and enlarge this warren, provide what little heat I can spare to keep it warm, and do my best to control the ettins, minotaurs, and thanoi.”

“The walrus men,” the ruler said, “are native to the Icereach. The thanoi sleep out in the open, so you didn’t have to provide them shelter.”

“It’s little relief. I must scry the ettin and Kitiara, expending vast bursts of energy to communicate with Res-Lacua over the vast distances. You’re taxing the limits of my powers already, Valdane, and there’s not a mage on Krynn who could serve you better.”

“Certainly none with better motivation,” the Valdane murmured.

Unheeding, Janusz went on. “I must produce or teleport the food and supplies we need. I must scry for you, oversee the mercenaries and slaves, and do countless other tasks. I must do all this on but three hours of sleep each night.”

The Valdane leaned against a brocade-covered stool, twin to the one the mage occupied. He waited until the mage’s outburst had burned itself out. “Yet think of the prize that awaits, Janusz. The man who has the ice jewels and knows their secret can rule Krynn. Think of the armies that could be teleported around Ansalon! The tactical advantage!” He licked his lips with a red tongue, and Janusz averted his eyes in revulsion.