The Kingless Land

by Ed Greenwood

  “Serpent in the Shadows!” the shocked Spellmaster hissed. “She has that much power?”

  Baron Faerod Silvertree smiled faintly and spread his hands. “Well, now, Ingryl … she is my daughter.”

  13

  Things Become Crowded

  The doors of the chamber boomed with a cold and very final sound under the firm hands of armsmen who kept their faces carefully impassive as they shut themselves out.

  “Stand just there,” Baron Faerod Silvertree told his two younger wizards, in the same gentle voice he’d used when greeting them. His eyes, however, were wintry, and Spellmaster Ingryl was standing close behind him with wands just visible poking out of both sleeves, and a cold and silent smile on his face.

  Klamantle and Markoun moved to the indicated spot in similar silence, not looking at each other, and the ruler of Silvertree put his fingertips together almost like a priest choosing gentle words of prayer.

  “I thought you wizards of passable skill when I employed you,” the baron began, his voice still silky, “and more than that: I considered you men of good judgment. That is something all too rare among mages … rarer, it seems, than I’d thought.”

  He reached for a goblet in slow elegance, sipped, and added, “You stand revealed as a pair of reckless, destructive fools—whose continued lives have become matters of consideration, not accepted certainties. Have you any idea just how many of my Sirl investments you’ve burned or blasted to dust this evening?”

  Markoun licked dry lips, and said, “Lord, I—”

  “Be still,” the baron almost whispered. “Speak not. Hear instead my orders: exhibit no shred of disloyalty, and perform no act of independence, but abide here in this room until given leave to walk elsewhere—and use every scrap of magic you have mastery over to return my daughter, the mortar of my fortress!”

  “Lord,” Markoun protested, “I want y—”

  “Did I, young fool of a mage,” the baron asked, “or did I not command your silence just now? Is my authority such a light and trifling thing to you?”

  Paling, Markoun opened his mouth and then shut it again and shook his head.

  The baron nodded slowly. “Better,” he snapped. “Yet I think it’s time for a little bald reminder. Relics belonging to all three of my most loyal mages—and vials of blood, recall you?—lie hidden around this castle in such profusion that I enjoy complete control over Ingryl, Klamantle, and Markoun. If a relic and so much as a drop of that blood touch each other, the mage from whom both were derived will forthwith experience a long, slow doom. A death of howling, convulsing agony, if my memory of another foolish wizard still serves me. Now get to work.”

  The eye watching from the carving might have judged Klamantle and Markoun both chastened and fearful as they hastened to their worktables—but if that eye had chanced to intercept either of the glances those mages threw in the direction of Spellmaster Ingryl, the judgment might well have been altered, to “murderous.”

  Sarasper. The voice in his head was back.

  The healer drew in a deep breath. Keeping watch here in the deep woods was largely a matter of still wakefulness spent listening to chirruping insects—or rather, to sudden silences in their songs. Sarasper, have you forgotten me?”

  The sharply listening singing in his head built quickly into impatience. No, Old Oak, the healer replied.

  Well and good, for there is a task.

  Sarasper smiled into the night. Of course.

  Less mockery, mortal, and more awe would become thee rather better.

  The healer spread empty hands. I am what I am. How can I serve thee?

  The sorceress Embra Silvertree lies under a curse. Remove it.

  Without guidance, Sarasper thought, I cannot even begin.

  A beginning is all you can hope to accomplish this night. Hear me and heed.

  Old Oak, command me, Sarasper responded, and then did with his hands and his energy what the pictures and whispers in his mind showed him.

  Hours passed as he labored, sweat running down his face like a spring racing over rocks. Craer and then Hawkril in turn stood watch, while still the old healer sat with his fingertips hovering over Embra’s brow. By unspoken agreement, they never wakened the sorceress to take her turn on watch.

  It seemed to Sarasper that destroying the curse, once they found the bright threads of enchantment in the dreaming mind beneath his fingers, should be a simple thing … but the voice in his mind guided him into shifting this thread and altering that one, in an endless and ever-more-complex web of rootings and twistings. Near dawn, with Hawkril listening intently to something that prowled nearby but never actually approached their hollow, the exhausted healer could not help but think that all of this tinkering with the curse was doing little more than hiding it from the one who’d cast it, burying it more deeply in Embra’s mind … and making it answer a new and different master.

  And what need would Old Oak have of a curse that made one human sorceress pay with a shred of her life for every spell she worked?

  As if that thought had been a trigger, a scene unfolded in Sarasper’s mind, of a door in a curving, crumbling stone wall. It faded into another scene, a domed circular building, long disused and partially overgrown with clinging vines, its walls matching those of the first scene. The library of the wizard Ehrluth. Seek within for the Stone.

  And then the scene seemed to recede down a long, dark tunnel, and Sarasper was falling away from it, down, down into black and waiting oblivion. …

  “Longfingers,” some men called him. “Little Lord Spider” he was to others; “that rat” he’d been to a few. But never before this night, Craer Delnbone reflected, as the strange restless, swelling feeling that had awakened him swept over him like a warm breeze, sweeping his dark armor of mockery aside for a while, had he been called “savior.”

  And by a sorceress of noble blood at that, a woman of power and such beauty that gazing on her left his mouth dry, even when she was shorn of garments, with her hair a tangle and her face pinched with pain. Ahem; that’d be better put: especially shorn of garments.

  When the rage left Hawkril, even the burly armaragor had wrapped Craer in a fierce embrace and whispered his thanks. “I almost killed her,” he quavered in the procurer’s ear. “Thank the Three you got back here in time.”

  The warrior had pulled back then, and stared at Craer with real fear in his eyes, before asking roughly, “If I’d killed her, what would we have done then?”

  The procurer had shrugged, not knowing what to answer.

  “What would you have told us to do?” Hawkril persisted, still looking stricken.

  Craer opened his mouth, shut it again without saying anything, looked around at the night mists drifting through the trees, and shook his head.

  “The mists don’t answer,” he’d told the armaragor bitterly. “They never have.”

  Surprisingly, both Embra and Sarasper had nodded at his words, as if they understood.

  Craer stared at the moon now, feeling the old dark nightmare rise within him, until it spilled over, and he was back on the reeking docks, on the day his youth was swept away forever.…

  “Aye, he gave us a few fists,” Jack-a-Blade grunted, nudging the senseless, naked man with his boot. “But he went down for all that—and not much damaged, neither. When he wakes, you’ll find he still has a jaw and his wits. A fair tally scribe, too.”

  “Reads and writes—or just counts and marks?”

  “Reads and writes. His woman does, too.”

  “What? What did they do, again?”

  “Ran a warehouse for the Star Sails,” Jack-a-Blade said, and the young boy crouched in the rafters could hear the chuckle in his voice.

  “Ah.” The slaver was not a slow man. “One that recently and mysteriously burned, eh?”

  “Now that you mention it,” Jack-a-Blade said slowly, in a broad impersonation of a surprised man, “I do believe that the couple who betrayed the Sails and burned their warehouse af
ter emptying it of several wagon-loads of valuables might just be this same Phorthas and Shierindra Delnbone.”

  “I can’t sell or use openly what a large merchant house searches for,” the bald-headed slaver said flatly. “That drives the price down.”

  “Read and write,” Jack-a-Blade murmured. “Who’d want to let them go?”

  “Letters aren’t as rare a skill as you think,” the slaver said, crossing forearms that were thicker and hairier than Jack-a-Blade’s thighs. “And they’re not all that big, or young, or fair to look upon.”

  He waved a hand at the woman, lying still in her chains. If he’d purchased her, he’d have used his boot, but there were rules. Both men knew by the way she tensed and caught her breath that she was awake, but neither would say a word if she didn’t scream or try to wriggle away. And both men judged this Shierindra Delnbone too sensible for that, even if her bared body didn’t stir the loins at first glance.

  Like her husband on the rough wooden floor beside her, she lay on her back, with the backs of her wrists chained together at her throat, under the slave hood, and her ankles manacled well apart to the drag bar. The drag pad under her shoulders wasn’t yet laced down her back to that bar, but it would be before she was moved. Both men standing over the scrawny, flatbreasted woman knew that she was going to be bought and sold, and soon; the slaver had made no move for the door, and Jack-a-Blade hadn’t suggested one.

  “Granted,” the port pirate agreed, “so I’ll only ask ten drethar. Each.”

  The slaver snorted. “Six drethar for the pair would be a little less outrageous,” he said, not quite keeping a snarl out of his voice. Crossbowmen behind sliding panels in every wall of a room earn a man a little respect—but not that much.

  Jack-a-Blade’s fingers, of the hand that was behind his back, crooked in a certain sign, and those panels slid open. Noisily. The boy in the rafters, crouched above the bright flickering of the candle-lamp, shivered soundlessly.

  The slaver didn’t bother to stiffen or turn his head. “Perhaps my judgment was hasty. Say, five drethar for the pair.”

  The port pirate acquired the very faintest of smiles, and said, “Eight drethar. Each, of course.”

  The slaver smiled more broadly and took a casual stride toward the door. “I can sail into forty ports and take my pick of the unwanted. Perhaps when these two are older and their teeth have fallen out, the price will have come down enough that I’II be able to afford them. Unless, of course, you can find someone else to take them off your hands. A word of friendly advice: don’t offer them to the Sails. They have keen noses.”

  Jack-a-Blade hadn’t risen to hold more real power than the local baron by being stupid. “Perhaps I meant to say six drethar each,” he said smoothly.

  The slaver stopped, turned slowly, and stooped to wave cheerily at the nearest open panel. “Perhaps you did,” he agreed, “and perhaps you meant to say five drethar each—but perhaps I might go back up to six if you throw in the boy.”

  “The boy?”

  The slaver nodded. “Their son. The little spider who scrambles all over the cargoes doing the tallies for them—ah, I meant ‘scrambled,’ of course.” He smiled again. “Slavers watch warehouses, you see.”

  Jack-a-Blade tossed his head in an indication of futility and growled, “No one’s seen that lad since the fire.”

  The slaver raised an eyebrow. “Oh? You don’t look up very often?”

  The port pirate frowned. “Don’t? Eh?” He spun around and stared up into the rafters—and for just one horrified moment, Jack-a-Blade and Craer Delnbone stared into each other’s eyes.

  Then the knife in the boy’s hand slashed out, shearing through the candles of the lamp hanging beside him on its chain, and in the sudden, curse-filled darkness Craer extended that knife down like a spear and followed it, pitching forward into the emptiness above Jack-a-Blade’s upturned face.

  His blade struck something solid with force enough to numb his arm right up to the shoulder, and sliced as he fell past. The port pirate cried out—a raw shriek of pain laced with a wet bubbling. Craer was already crashing to the unseen floor, gasping to find breath or a groan of his own, when the sharp cracks of many firing crossbows almost deafened him.

  The sharper cracks and splinterings of the quarrels striking walls and glancing off couldn’t entirely drown out the wet thuddings of bolts finding homes in bodies. Groans much larger and more frantic than Craer could have uttered did, however, drown out the small sound he made next.

  Everywhere men were cursing and booted feet were hurrying and stumbling and doors were crashing open—and the chain of the lamp was rattling as it fell to its full length, a few feet off the floor; someone must have pulled out its peg in hopes of getting it relit. Someone who hadn’t counted on the slavers’ men bursting into Jack-a-Blade’s warehouse with swords drawn and fury in their hearts.

  Craer heard the crash and sing of steel meeting steel, the coughs and screams and sobs of men being stabbed in the darkness, and confused flashes of light as lanterns were lit and then smashed, or doors to distant rooms opened and then smashed shut again. One flash told him no one was standing in the slaving room anymore, and that something studded with crossbow quarrels was trying to, and that the lamp chain was … there!

  He sprang forward in the dark, found its hot, grimy metal with fingers that trembled with fear, and swarmed up it in frantic haste, as men died in the darkness all around him. The rafters above could take him out into the night before he joined their ranks, if he could only…

  A boy crouched on a rooftop in the damp river mists and trembled, too drained to sob any more. Wisps of smoke still rose from the ashes of the second warehouse to burn in as many days, but the men with buckets had rubbed their backs and grunted and gone wearily off in search of ale, or at least a place to lie down in a port free of Jack-a-Blade.

  Craer looked down at where the bones of his parents must lie and whispered their names in despair. In an alleyway below, there was a sudden skirling of swords as someone disagreed with someone else about who should succeed Jack-a-Blade as the real power in this barony. The boy whom some called the Spider listened, uncaring. When life is in ruins and revenge over with and done—so sudden, and so empty—what is left?

  Too puny to stand up to anyone in a fight, too small to carry on the docks, and knowing no other life but the docks … no one would want such a boy. No one would trust such a boy, what with his scrambling along rooftops, hiding, and pranks. A thief, a worthless vagabond … an orphan. Left alone to die.

  Craer Delnbone lifted his head from the rough shakes of the roof and asked the uncaring mists fearfully, “What do I do now?”

  He waited, but the mists chose not to answer.

  “See who it is, Sarintha,” the baron said, and as her long hair brushed along his bare body on her silent way off the bed, he did something to the bedpost beside him and drew forth a wand from it. If any of the other women entwined around him in the bed in that bright dawn noticed that he’d trained it on the door—and, of necessity, squarely on Sarintha’s shapely back, as she drew on a silk robe that concealed nothing and went, as he’d bid—they said nothing.

  “The Spellmaster,” she called in the huskily musical voice that had first attracted the baron to her charms, and let the little circle of armor plate in the door fall back into place while she awaited his reply.

  Faerod Silvertree allowed one eyebrow to lift loftily before he said calmly—as if dawn visits from the most powerful of his mages occurred every morning—“Show him in, and get you speedily to the baths, all of you. No tarrying to listen, mind … unless, of course, any of you believe your beauty would be improved by the loss of your ears to a hot iron.”

  One hastily suppressed squeal was his only reply, amid a flurry of slitherings and pillow clamberings and pale bodies bobbing away across the floor furs. Sarintha was the last, rising from kneeling by the door she’d opened to close it again, then sprinting for the archway into the b
aths.

  Spellmaster Ingryl Ambelter almost turned to watch her go—almost. His shoulders quivered as he quelled the movement, and his baron almost smiled at that. Almost.

  “Yes, Ingryl?” he asked, instead, not bothering to cover himself … or the wand in his hand, resting on a pillow and aimed rock-steady at his most powerful wizard.

  A wizard who seemed weary this morning. “I’ve news I know you’ll want to hear, Lord,” Ingryl replied, “won for you through great, night-long magical striving. The Lady Embra and her three companions are at the ruins of lost Indraevyn, in the Loaurimm Forest, seeking one of the Dwaerindim. Ambitious mages from all over Aglirta, and beyond, are there, too, pursuing the same prize. The place is both a deathtrap—and a golden opportunity to seize magical greatness for Silvertree.”

  “If we gain one of the legendary Dwaer, you mean?”

  Ingryl nodded.

  “And your plan for gaining it?”

  The Spellmaster echoed the baron’s almost-smile. “I believe the Baron of Silvertree would be tactically astute to immediately order his mages Klamantle and Markoun thence, carrying touch-delivery shielding and listening spells for the Lady Embra, with their most pressing orders being to get to her and deliver those shields first, before and above all else. If they fell into battle with other explorers of ruins, thereafter, and we were to observe and guide them through my spells …”

  “The Baron of Silvertree’s beliefs concur with yours in this matter,” Faerod Silvertree told him. “When this is done, and Embra safely back in thrall or spellchains, shall I lend you, say, four of my love-chamber girls for a night?”

  The Spellmaster did look quickly over at the archway that led to the baths, this time, but his face was as carefully impassive as one of the baron’s own armsmen when he looked back at his master and replied, “That would please me, Lord. Please do.”