Noonshade

by James Barclay

  But now, with the day fast waning, Tessaya, whose tour of the reinforced stockade Darrick had built had been completed some time ago, was worried. And another circuit of the garrison town had done nothing to alleviate that worry.

  By his calculations, Styliann should have been with him by now. Indeed, should have been so an hour before. And the men he had sent in to meet and replace Riasu's guard had not returned as they had been instructed to if the meet was missed.

  Admittedly, there were a number of good reasons for any delay. A horse throwing a shoe, lack of organisation at the western end, a longer than expected rest break, his guards deciding to press on through the pass rather than report, Styliann causing difficulties with regard to march conditions, Styliann ensuring the deal he thought he had with Tessaya was watertight, Styliann making extra demands late in the day. Styliann.

  Tessaya stopped walking and sat on a flat rock looking south over Understone. The setting sun washed a beautiful pale red light over the town, firing the light cloud cover with anger and shooting its beams to the earth. From his right, the softened sound of hammer and saw drifted on the light breeze. Below and to his left, the door to one of the prison barracks opened and a line of bowed and defeated easterners trudged away for evening exercise, flanked by axe-carrying guards.

  Listening to the breeze, he could pick out the sound of voices from all corners of the town, talking, ordering, arguing. In three days the stockade, which already controlled the main east—west trail, would encircle Understone. Then he could begin work on the pass defences, so far neglected.

  The small town had sprawled like oil over water in the wake of the Wesmen's occupation. Gazing across the shallow dip in which Understone's original buildings lay, Tessaya was greeted by the grey canvas that covered every inch of the gentle southward slope and the plateau to which it led. Standards from a dozen tribes and a hundred minor noble families stood proud above the massed semicircles of tents, each standing around a firepit.

  For himself, he had chosen lodging in the inn with his advisors, including Arnoan whom he wished to keep a close eye on. Few of his family were in Understone. His sons fought with Senedai in the north. His brothers were long since dead at the hands of Xetesk's mages.

  He scowled and stood up, straightening his jacket. Styliann. He strode briskly to the western end of the town.

  “I need a scout,” he demanded of the duty watch Captain.

  “My Lord.” The brown-bearded Captain hollered a name, the sound booming from the nearby buildings. A man came running from a working party digging a channel for a set of stakes outside the stockade. “Kessarin, my Lord.”

  Tessaya nodded and turned to the athletically built Wesman who wore pale brown leggings, a shirt and lightweight boots and carried a small single-bladed axe in his belt. He was young and clean-cut, a product of a lesser noble village, no doubt.

  “Can you run?” asked Tessaya.

  “Yes, my Lord.” Kessarin nodded vigorously, fear of Tessaya overcome by his eagerness to please.

  “Then go into the pass. Take a hooded lantern but use it sparingly. I need you to find the fools I sent in this afternoon. Do not make contact with anyone. Report directly back to me on your return.”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  “Go now.” Tessaya looked toward the black maw of the pass blending into the deepening shadows. He was loath to stand against Styliann and his dread force but dawn's first light would force his hand. Kessarin needed to return quickly and the thought that he might not scared Tessaya more than it should.

  Styliann, with his close guard around him, relaxed and formed the mana shape for a Communion he would either enjoy immensely or curse forever. The shape, narrow and twisted like a plaited deep blue rope, spiralled away through the rock of the Blackthorne Mountains, seeking one particular mind in Xetesk, a mind which, while suddenly powerful, would be unable to resist Styliann's casting pressure.

  The Communion bridged the divide to Xetesk in an instant, a little smile playing around Styliann's lips as the spell drifted over the resting minds of hundreds of mages inside the College. They appeared like small ripples in an otherwise still pond, a map of minds that, with care, the skilled and knowledgeable could read.

  Styliann searched the random thoughts of sleep for one who would be active, spiking the ripples like splashes from falling rain. He was not hard to find. A man whose rise to power had been respectably swift, his opportunity grasped with both hands on the back of a spectacular spell success and, critically, the absence of the incumbent Lord of the Mount.

  Styliann admired the courage of the man but he hated the humiliation and was enraged by the weakness of his own circle. When his rightful position was regained, he would need answers to a great many questions.

  The Communion arrowed in, jerking the slumbering mage to a sudden and intensely uncomfortable wakefulness. A token resistance was broken almost immediately.

  “My apologies for the lateness of the hour. My Lord.” Styliann's mind-voice was laden with bile.

  “St-Styliann?” gasped the befuddled mage.

  “Yes, Dystran, Styliann. And close enough to sweep away your poorly formed shield. You should train harder in self-preservation. It might come in useful.” Styliann had never been forced to take a Communion against his will.

  “Where are you?” Dystran was fully awake now.

  Styliann could feel the anxiety and imagined him fighting to sit upright to look about him, though the Communion held him prone.

  “No need to WardLock your doors,” said Styliann, voice mocking. “Not yet.”

  “What do you want?” asked the new Lord of the Mount.

  “Apart from the obvious? A little assistance to ensure our inevitable meeting is more amicable than it is likely to be at present.”

  “You're coming back?”

  “Xetesk is my home,” Styliann said sharply, comforted by the knowledge that Dystran and his team had given little thought to the possible consequences of their usurpation.

  There was a pause. Styliann could feel Dystran's thoughts roiling in his uneasy mind. How he must wish his advisers could help him now.

  “What is it you want?” he asked again.

  “Muscle,” said Styliann. “A lot of muscle. To leave Xetesk immediately and head south toward Understone. I will meet them en route.”

  “You're talking about Protectors?” Dystran's thought was disbelieving.

  “Naturally,” replied Styliann. “Calling the Protector army is a right of the Lord of the Mount.”

  “But you are not the Lord of the Mount,” Dystran's mind-voice sneered. “I am.”

  Styliann chuckled. At least the man had some backbone if no conception of what he had done. Following his success with the DimensionConnect, he had been correctly made a Master. But his ill-advised leap to ultimate power would suit no one but his advisers who were no doubt using him as a stalking horse to gauge College mood and opinion. It was a shame that he couldn't see it but then they never did. Styliann's stalking horse hadn't.

  “But you will grant me the Protector army nonetheless,” said Styliann, his tone full of certainty. “Perhaps then we can sort out the Mount sensibly when I return.”

  “And if I don't grant them, perhaps you will not return. Then the situation will have sorted itself out.”

  “Fool.” Styliann spiked the thought, feeling Dystran's mind recoil. “Do you really think that I have remained Lord for so long just to let an upstart mage like you take my Tower?” He breathed deep to calm himself. There was something he needed to know. “You have been studying the texts of the Stewardship, no doubt?”

  “When there has been time,” said Dystran.

  “Yes. The pressures are great, are they not?”

  Dystran relaxed, Styliann could feel it. “Yes. I hope we can discuss them in a civilised manner.”

  “Hmm.” Styliann paused. “You have rescinded the Act of Giving and appropriated it yourself, I trust?” he asked.

  �
�The Act of…No, that text is not known to me.”

  “Ah.” Styliann felt a surge of pleasure and triumph. “And nor, apparently, to your ill-chosen advisers. But let me assure you that you will all feel its effects.” Styliann terminated the Communion abruptly, shaking off the momentary disorientation.

  Not rescinding the Act of Giving was an unsurprising error. Normally, there was no living former Lord from whom to remove the Act and the discovery of its power could be discovered at leisure. Normally.

  Styliann smiled and tuned his mind to summon the entire Protector army as was, unfortunately for Dystran, still his right.

  Kessarin was a proud man. Selected by his Captain and trusted by his Lord with a task of importance and secrecy. One that would end with a report direct to Tessaya himself.

  He ran into the pass with enough oil in the small lantern for a good four hours. The wick was trimmed low and the shutter was clipped across to hide all but the merest chink of light and allow sufficient ventilation. Using the failing light of the sun which shone directly along his path, he moved quickly into the first section of the pass which angled very slightly downward.

  His padded leather shoes made little sound, his small axe was strapped hard to his back and his hands were free to trace the outline of the pass, areas of which he could navigate by touch alone—as any good Paleon scout could. Silence was paramount. Lord Tessaya wanted the guard found without their knowing it, and that was exactly what he would do.

  Kessarin smirked as he imagined the march, if it could be termed such, of the guard dispatched into the pass five hours previously. Obviously, there had been some delay in the Xeteskian reaching them but they should have been closing in on the western end of the pass by now, if not actually sitting with Riasu.

  Kessarin somehow doubted they had travelled that far. Under the leadership of the disagreeable Pelassar, he expected to find them no further than half an hour in, at their stated meeting point. This was despite very specific instructions to move into the centre of the pass if it proved necessary. In choosing Pelassar to lead the relief guard, Tessaya had made, in Kessarin's estimation, his only mistake so far. Hardly a grave error and Kessarin would be only too pleased to report back on Pelassar's slovenly conduct and see him whipped or strung. Either would do fine.

  Pelassar was nowhere in evidence at the point where Kessarin had expected him and his thirty men to be. The scout had anticipated hearing the sounds of bone dice clacking off the stone floor, of rough laughter echoing down the pass, and the glow of lanterns and torches illuminating the way unnecessarily for a hundred yards or more.

  But there had been no need to slow his pace or cloak his lantern. Surprisingly, Pelassar had moved on. The scout raised his eyebrows and did the same.

  Kessarin was a fit man and his pace ate up the pass. At a roughly estimated hour in, his caution slowed him to a fast walk. His lantern, hooded all the way, was pared to a thin strip of light which he shone either at the ground directly in front of him or the wall either side, never directly ahead.

  His breathing was controlled and his ears tuned to hear the merest sound but all he picked up was the dripping of water somewhere far away. On it went for perhaps another half an hour, the silence supreme, the light nowhere and no sign at all of Pelassar and his men. It was then that he smelt the blood. Not a strong scent but there all the same, drifting on the breath of a breeze that meandered along the pass.

  Kessarin stopped immediately, lantern slide pushed all the way across, darkness complete. He pressed himself against the left-hand wall, thinking. This was an area he knew little of, particularly with no light. He had a vague memory of an opening out to both sides and above but, in truth, couldn't be sure. He was skilled in the feel of the rock at either end but, in the middle, his knowledge was slight. There hadn't been time.

  He listened closely. Still no sound of Pelassar and his men. No echo of footsteps along the rock walls, no change in the air told of imminent meeting and, straining his eyes along with his ears, no light pushed at the blackness. Just that faint taste of blood. There one breath, gone the next.

  Kessarin was, by nature, a calm individual but the silence and the dark were moving in on him. Sounds he knew could not be there whispered in his ear. The cry of a child, the lowing of cattle. All distant, the tricks the mountains above played. He shook his head and forced himself to focus. He had two choices.

  He could either report back the silence and the hint of blood in the air or he could move on, knowing Tessaya would be growing impatient, and find out whether his fears were justified.

  Actually, it was quite simple. To find favour, he had to go on and hope that Tessaya's anger would subside as he heard Kessarin's report. He looked again into the darkness. Here, deep in the pass, no natural light would ever penetrate. He couldn't even see the wall with his nose touching it. Here, even the slightest chink of light would push back the blackness like a beacon fire. Up ahead then, he could be sure, there was no one.

  He moved back the slot of the hooded lantern, aware that the limited air within the glass would soon be gone if he didn't expose an airhole. The sound was loud in the silence, like pushing open a rusted iron door. Kessarin allowed himself a smile.

  With his left hand brushing the wall, he moved forward again, carefully, the light down and to his right, illuminating a slight incline in the passageway. A couple of paces further on, he stepped in a patch of stickiness that slicked across the floor.

  He stopped to look, knowing it was blood, and then they simply melted out of the darkness ahead, a pale light gently illuminating their nightmare masks. One grabbed his neck with astonishing swiftness. He dropped the lantern, which shattered on the hard stone floor. He tried to speak but no sound came, his arms thrashing uselessly, his eyes staring wildly, taking in the sea of blank faces which parted to let through a tall man with black hair. Behind him floated a glowing sphere. The face came close.

  “Very good,” he said. “You almost had us believing you weren't there. Almost. Now, you are alone, I take it?”

  Kessarin, terrified, managed to nod his head, jaw against the gauntlet of the silent masked man.

  “As I thought.” His head turned away. “Is it full dark outside?”

  Another nod.

  “Good. Cil, we have work.”

  The hand around Kessarin's throat tightened and all his dreams of glory fled into the darkness from which he would never return.

  The only question that remained was the reception at Understone but the captured scout removed some of the uncertainty. Styliann considered that Tessaya would want to wait for the scout's report before deciding how heavily to arm his defence. At this stage, Tessaya still had no genuine cause to believe that the Lord of the Mount's nonappearance was anything other than irritating delay.

  Styliann and his Protectors moved quickly, the LightGlobe faint but significant, providing light enough to see a few paces all round. That, combined with the innate sense of the enthralled warriors, was quite enough. In less than two hours, they were approaching the eastern end of the pass. Stopping perhaps four hundred yards from the entrance and hidden by a series of outcrops and shallow bends, Styliann assigned his LightGlobe to Cil, dismounted and cast a CloakedWalk on himself. He could have selected a Protector as the spell's target but the nuances of the Cloak made its retention far more difficult than a LightGlobe or ShadowWings.

  “Stay here,” he ordered. “They will not see me.” Styliann disappeared from their view, his hand trailing the left-hand wall, a dull luminescence taking the totality from the darkness. He walked briskly, his eyes adjusting to the increasing light that filtered along the passage. It was, he guessed, around four hours from dawn. Night was full outside but, in comparison to the black of the pass, the sky was bright. Inside it was chill and damp and Styliann was glad of his cloak.

  There were no obvious signs of buildup at the entrance to the pass but a guard of eight or so sat around a fire just outside. Styliann pitied them. The Xeteskian s
torm would see them to their graves before they knew it had broken.

  He continued walking slowly forward, coming to within a dozen paces of the guards where he crouched behind a slide of rock caused by the spell his own mages, organised by Dystran, had cast to massacre so many Wesmen. The scent of death would remain in the pass forever.

  None of the guard was facing into the pass, which Styliann found a little strange. Overconfidence caused carelessness. He looked beyond them to what he could see of Understone itself. Darrick's defences had been considerably strengthened and watchtowers sprang from eight places that Styliann could count. His view was partially obscured by the slope down to the base of the gates Tessaya had constructed but the glow of further fires told of more guards outside the town.

  Understone was quiet. The Wesmen slept while above the sky was clear and the air was still and cool. He wouldn't get a better opportunity. Styliann, again cloaked by magic, slipped back to join the Protectors.

  Understone's night was uneasy. Tessaya stalked the quiet streets, for once unsure of himself. Kessarin was among the best, the duty Captain had assured him of this. He would find the guard and report back but, if he had to travel the entire pass, he would not return until early morning, shortly before dawn.

  But the situation was patently wrong. How could the delay be so great that Styliann still had not appeared? And if this was so, why had no word been sent? Never indecisive, Tessaya found himself torn. His senses screamed at him to wake every man and destroy the cursed mage the moment he appeared in the east. But his tactical brain begged him to play it softly and patiently. To wait for Styliann's arrival and greet him with open arms. Let him place himself exactly where Tessaya wanted him.

  The Lord of the Paleon Tribes looked to the sky for inspiration but found none. The air was still, silent and cool. He had come to a standstill close to the inn but resisted the urge to seek Arnoan's advice. Besides, he knew what the old Shaman would say. “Bring the mage to me. Let me work my magic on him.” But of course he had no magic. Only chants and potions, bones and books. Styliann could destroy him with a wave of the hand.