by Janny Wurts
Jaric felt the hair prickle at the nape of his neck. Demons would attack the mind before they closed with the perils of steel, and against telepathic compulsion none but Taen Dreamweaver could offer any protection. Urgently he shouted to the Kielmark, 'My Lord, stand clear.'
The sovereign of Cliffhaven turned a deaf ear. Since the demons could not be provoked into rushing him, he advanced instead upon the stair.
'No!' Jaric's warning echoed the length of the corridor. The wards of his sword point flared red, available for instantaneous defence, yet all of his Vaerish training availed nothing; he could not strike with a friend blocking him from the enemy. Left no other alternative, he cursed the Kielmark's belligerence and started forward himself.
The Thienz attacked.
One instant the Kielmark filled his lungs to bellow as he charged. The next, the Thienz invaded his mind in force and damped the fury of his assault. His great sword clanged down, the edge shearing sparks against the granite stair. His hands lost their power to grip and his body to move. As if in slow motion, Jaric saw the Kielmark's stride falter. His knees buckled. Then, snarling, the Thienz of Shadowfane fell upon him.
Running now, Jaric levelled his own sword. He loosed his mastery, and fire stabbed forth, a needle of killing force that seared the air as it passed. The nearest of the Pirate Lord's attackers flared up in a flash of flame. It recoiled and rolled over and over down the stair while its companion squalled in reaction to its pain. Jaric leaped over its dying struggles. Other demons whirled at his approach. Gimlet eyes flashed in the ward light. Frog-wide mouths gaped open and exposed wicked, back-curving fangs glistening with drops of black venom; Jaric felt the sting of Thienz hatred, still more dangerous than poison, permeate his thoughts. Already the demons centred upon his mind. In a second, he would share the Kielmark's fate, as the enemy grappled his awareness with the insane compulsion to collapse the protection of his wards.
Failure was certain. Braced against hope to resist, Jaric squinted through the glare of his sorceries. Past the struggling knot of Thienz, he strove to locate the Kielmark. Not a glimpse of clothing met his search. Through wheeling shadows and the close-packed bodies of enemies, he saw no trace of a living human.
Despair sparked an anger that knew no limit. Jaric raised his sword. He would incinerate Thienz to white ashes. Yet before he could act, a bull bellow emerged from the thick of the fray. The attacking demons heaved up, and a glistening red line cleaved their midst. A gilled head rolled and bounced down the stair, followed immediately by the flopping corpse of its owner. Another body tumbled, nearly severed in half, and then another, cleaved through shoulder and neck. Jaric heard a sailor's blasphemy. Then the struggling Thienz parted like knot-work before the stroke of the Kielmark's sword.
Jaric jumped also to avoid that singing edge. No enemy lunged to strike him. Surprise momentarily left the demons without any wits to act. Perhaps the Firelord's sorcery had distracted their concentration enough to create an opening; or maybe their victim's will had never been entirely subdued. Taen Dreamweaver had found the Kielmark's mind a chaos of unbiddable madness when he indulged in his killing rages. For the Thienz, the mistake proved fatal. The sword cut left, right, and left again, leaving a wake of carnage. In retaliation for the companies destroyed with Corley's brigantine, Moonless, the Kielmark was bent on slaughter. Even as the demons realized their quarry could not be managed, half their number lay fallen, bloody and dying.
The ringleader squealed in panic. It and its fellows spun to quit the stair, but Jaric blocked their retreat. From both directions, the Thienz charged headlong into a wall of living flame. Their screams deafened thought as they burned. Smoke choked the corridor, foul with the reek of charred flesh. The Firelord bent coughing over the hot white metal of his sword.
The flames died swiftly. Jaric straightened, blinking stinging eyes. Through the smoke-dimmed glimmer of his wards he saw his companion cast about for more enemies. Nothing stirred in the passage but the twitching of a dozen butchered corpses; the Kielmark's teeth flashed in a grin of satisfaction. He raised his huge sword. pinched the blade in the crook of his elbow, and drew the steel clean on his shirt sleeve.
'Damned toads.' He kicked a smoking corpse from underfoot, then moved to rejoin Jaric.
The irrepressible swagger in his stride touched off overwhelming relief. The Firelord resisted a weak-kneed impulse to sit down. As his companion reached his side, he said, 'You're a madman.' His hands shook as he damped the wards, then rammed his own sword home in its scabbard. 'No good would be gained if you got yourself killed.'
The Kielmark's smile died like a doused candle. 'The stinking reptiles are dead, aren't they?'
Speechless, Jaric wiped his palms. Quite wisely he chose not to belabour the point that every Thienz cousin within mind-reach would shortly descend upon Shadowfane's dungeons, maddened as a stirred swarm of wasps. Rather than precipitate trouble, he touched the Kielmark's wrist and indicated the nearest of the iron-barred doors that opened on both sides of the passage.
The Kielmark balked with a sound of contempt. 'You mean to hole us up in a prison cell? That's bad strategy, sorcerer. Where do you think you'll steer us next when the head jailer shows up with the key?'
Jaric never paused, but pressed his hands to the iron face of the door lock. 'I'll tunnel through rock, if I must. Have you a better suggestion?' He frowned. His fingers flared blue; there followed a click, then the grate of a tumbler turning.
The Kielmark set his shoulder to wood studded and reinforced with strips of corroded steel. 'None. Unless your spell-working could conjure me a flask of spirits?'
'Spirits?' Jaric shook his head in astonishment; and the Kielmark heaved. The hinges groaned and gave with a pattering of rust flakes. The panel swung inward, tearing through dusty nets of cobwebs. Jaric sneezed violently. He peered into the darkness beyond, then distastefully crossed the threshold. 'You always go drinking after battles, is that it?'
The Kielmark raised his brows. Drily he said, 'This time I intended the stuff for medicine.'
Jaric paused, aware by earth-sense that a stairway lay ahead. It wound upward, doubled, and let onto a pillared gallery where fetters dangled over mouldering heaps of bones. The Firelord's blood ran cold, not only for the human wretches who had died of Shadowfane's unnamed tortures. As his companion's laconic phrase fully registered, he said, 'You didn't get yourself Thienz-bitten, did you?'
'No. Just clawed and stuck like a lady's pincushion.' The Kielmark pulled the door to and paused. A minute passed while both of them listened. Sounds of running feet echoed through the grille from the corridor they had just left. Already more demons came hunting.
Jaric spun around without comment. He slipped past his companion and set hands to wood, steel, and the rust-marked stone of the lintel. Faint haloes traced his form as he engaged Earthmastery and sealed the doorway.
'We still might get visitors from the rear,' observed the Kielmark.
'We shouldn't.' Jaric batted cobwebs from his hair. 'I've checked. This stairway leads to a cul-de-sac.'
Blank-faced, the Lord of Cliffhaven sheathed his great sword. 'I see.' He blotted at a cut on his jaw. 'From the fireside, and straight into the soup. We're fair put to swimming now.'
Earthmastery could carve a retreat, create a passageway to any place in Shadowfane's dungeons that Jaric might choose. Yet no time remained to discuss options. A gabble arose in the corridor, most likely in lament for the slaughtered Thienz. Seconds later, illumination speared through the crack beneath the door, cast by a lantern shuttered with scarlet glass. Evidently more than Thienz came hunting. Seldom did they carry lights; with their poor eyesight, they relied more on scent to find their way.
The Kielmark held motionless by instinct, the breath stopped in his throat. Jaric waited, sweating, until the light spun away and faded. Even then he held his mind blank and prayed his companion had insight enough to do the same. The demons of Shadowfane held advantage over human trackers; the
y could locate a man by his thoughts.
Minutes passed. No further disturbance arose beyond the door. Jaric touched the Kielmark's shoulder, sticky with blood that might as easily be an enemy's as discharge from an open wound. Forced by priority to defer his concern, the Firelord delivered the gentlest of tugs and started forward. Silent, wary of every movement, the fugitives retreated toward the stair. Earth-sense guided Jaric's steps; he led the Kielmark as he would the blind, picking the easiest path and directing the man's feet by touch. All the while he kept his awareness tuned on the corridor beyond the sealed door, where the faintest vibrations through stone warned that a sentry still paced. One sound, a single chance blunder in the dark, and pursuit would be upon them.
For the Kielmark, who owned no sorcerer's awareness, the ascent of the stair seemed interminable. The landings switched back, or turned in convolutions without pattern; no logic dictated the distances in between. At the top, Jaric had to tap his companion twice, to assure that no further levels remained.
At least now they might have light without risk of discovery. Jaric conjured fire and set it adrift to reveal their surroundings. They stood in a gallery. Pillars carved in the shapes of malformed animals supported a ceiling cut from the natural rock of the cavern. The walls were undressed stone, strangely in contrast to floors checkered with squares of polished agate.
'Looks like a Telshire whorehouse,' observed the Kielmark. But the rusted sets of fetters robbed his remark of humour. Affixed by chains heavy enough to moor ships, each pair dangled from rings pinned immovably to the pillars. Heaped beneath lay pathetic clutters of human remains, most bearing marks of abuse. 'Funny place to keep captives, I say.'
The dead victims of demons had not been disturbed by rats, nor had beetles nested among the half-rotted remnants of clothing. For no reason the Firelord could name, the absence of natural scavengers made his flesh creep. He ended his survey only when doubly assured that the gallery contained no exits, or so much as a spyhole in the wall.
Jaric chose not to voice apprehension, but faced his companion, and with steady eyes assessed the wounds inflicted by the Thienz. The Kielmark's linen shirt lay in shreds, stiffened and dark with blood. Between the rents were long, shallow gashes that had barely begun to clot. Gauntlets had protected his forearms; his boots and leggings had suffered scars, but the flesh beneath was unharmed.
'No bites,' Jaric concluded, relieved the damage had not been worse. 'You're lucky.' Once he had suffered from Thienz venom. The experience was a horror he wished he could forget.
The Kielmark shrugged somewhat stiffly and changed the subject. 'Luck won't recover the advantage. What did you have in mind?'
Jaric looked down, and noticed that somewhere through the ascent of the stair he had bloodied his own knuckles. The scrape was minor; but it stung with a fierceness out of all proportion to reality just when his attention was needed for planning. The Firelord drew a forced breath. 'First let me set safeguards.'
He had none of Taen's ability to shield the mind directly from attack. But as Earthmaster he could fashion illusion, cloak their living presence with the ponderous essence of stone, or the still dark of soil without life. Carefully Jaric wrought wards, that demons who hunted human thoughts might sense only the empty deeps, and pass onward without pause for investigation.
Once the defences about the gallery were stabilized, Jaric and the Kielmark attended the unfortunates who had died of demon cruelty. In wordless accord, they burned the bones, and whatever pathetic rags remained to differentiate between individuals, not because the gallery lacked warmth or light, but to restore some dignity to the dead. The smoke of the pyre stung their eyes and made them cough, but neither one offered complaint. They rinsed their mouths from the water flask in the pack, but drank sparingly, for the chamber had no amenities. After that, both sorcerer and Kielmark chose to rest before moving on. Now the demon pursuit would be hottest. Later, when Shadowfane's sentries were weary, and the hunters forced to extend their search over a wider area, the chance of stealing forth unseen might be improved.
There followed an interval in which Jaric tried to sleep, but suffered miserably from nightmares. Not far from him, the Kielmark sat with his back to a corbel, methodically heating his dagger in the mage-fire left burning for light. To prevent infection, he pressed the hot steel to one wound at a time, and in the process acquired a frown that even Corley would not have challenged. If his hand trembled by the time he finished, throughout his doctoring he had uttered no word except an imprecation against sorcerers who achieved mastery without learning to conjure spirits. 'Nicer by far on the nerves. and a swallow or two goes a helluva long way toward knocking the edge off the pain.'
Jaric made no reply. Having been rebuffed at dagger point earlier when he offered to cleanse the wounds with Firemastery, he pretended to doze with closed eyes. The Kielmark charred his blade clean in the fire, then spat on the steel until it cooled enough to sheath. Too uncomfortable to lie down, the sovereign Lord of Cliffhaven eventually slept where he sat, his head tipped back against stone, and his knuckles loose on his sword hilt.
* * *
The next time Jaric checked with his earth-sense, the sun had arisen over the fells. Winds made brisk by autumn frost moaned around the spires of Shadowfane, sharply in contrast to the air within the gallery, which hung still as a sealed tomb. The Firelord ignored the hunger that cramped his belly. He struggled to contain the deeper longing left by a certain Dreamweaver whose path took her leagues to the south. Love for Taen could do nothing but make him ache, with demons quartering every cranny of the dungeons for the humans who had invaded their stronghold. Earth-sense could occasionally discern the pattern of the search, here by the slap of webbed feet as a party of scouting Thienz turned a corner, and there by the boom of a grate grounding against bedrock.
The demons persisted with a thoroughness that was both alien and frightening. Unable to know how readily his awareness might be traced through the stone that he probed, Jaric used sorcery with caution. He explored only caverns and stairs that seemed empty, while, with laborious precision, the Kielmark used ash to map his findings on a square of linen shirt garnered at need from their pack.
Their makeshift floor plan of the dungeons stood barely half-complete when Jaric encountered what he sought, a cell with living prisoners whose limbs were chained to rock. Though unable to divine awareness, as Taen did, his mastery could differentiate subtleties with great detail. Steel set to use as fetters absorbed the warmth of the body, and the stone floor immediately beneath sang with the queer, crystalline resonance of Sathid in the process of bonding.
'I've found them,' Jaric announced. He opened his eyes, to a look from the Kielmark that made his flesh prickle. The man sat coiled, a hairsbreadth removed from unbiddable violence. Gently the Firelord tapped the map. 'Here. The children stolen by Shadowfane's compact have been closed in a cell by this vent shaft.' He paused and carefully added, 'There appear to be six of them. I fear we're too late for rescue.'
'We can end their misery, then.' Single-mindedly impatient, the Kielmark consulted his chart. 'And we can be sure no others suffer the same abuse, but we have to get there first. Can you guess where demons might store the Llondelei Sathid?'
Jaric forced speech. The fetters sensed through his mastery had been fashioned for wrists that were heart-breakingly small. 'On the level below the cell confining the children, there's a double-sealed door that appears to secure an apothecary. I sensed shelves of wood, and rows of things stored in stoppered glass; drugs, mostly, and minerals. But among them I found a rack woven out of vines that never grew in Keithland's soil, with sealed containers inside. That's where I'd look for the Sathid.'
The Kielmark nodded. As he folded his charcoal chart, his blue eyes flicked up to meet Jaric's. 'Can you get us there?'
'I'll have to.' The Firelord dusted ash from his fingers and rose swiftly. Trouble was imminent. The dull sense of pain beginning at the back of his head was not the effect
of fatigue. Shadowfane's demons had discovered the sealed cell. As they sounded the chambers beyond for intruders, the touch of their probe against his wards caused an ache that mounted with each passing minute.
'We have visitors.' Jaric motioned the Kielmark to his feet, then strode across the gallery and placed his palms against the far wall. 'Set your hands on my shoulders,' he instructed. 'Whatever happens, keep them there. If you lose your grip, you'll end up entombed in solid rock.'
Kielmark complied without visible hesitation. 'Better thank Kor for the fact I don't get jumpy in tunnels.' Yet this once his bluster hid bravado. When he took hold of the Firelord, his fingers bit deeply into fabric, and his breathing went shallow and fast.
Whether the Lord of Pirates' unease stemmed from the confinement about to be imposed by earth sorcery, or the fact that, with both hands occupied, he could carry no unsheathed sword, Jaric dared not ask. Compelled by a rising sense of urgency, he engaged his mastery at once.
The air around him seemed to shimmer. Light struck the stone wall with a flash like reflection off mirror glass. The Kielmark squinted against the glare, and felt Jaric move under his hands.
He stepped forward, braced instinctively for a collision that never came. Though his senses insisted that he walked into solid rock, no barrier obstructed his body. Pirate King and Firelord moved unimpeded into a gap fashioned spontaneously by sorcery. A blister of air moved with them, charged with dry heat like storm winds swept across desert.
The Kielmark stole a look back. Behind, the gallery had vanished, replaced by a stone face that showed neither flaw nor fissure. Veins of quartz and the flash of mica flowed together at his heels, as if at each stride the sorcerer who led him traversed through matter in the midst of a moving bubble. The effort required to achieve such a wonder belied understanding.
Newly aware of the sweat that dampened the shirt beneath his grip, the Kielmark looked nervously upon the sorcerer responsible. 'You know where you're going?'