She took a deep breath, trying to still her panicking heart. She felt like her entire body was quivering with a peculiar mix of fear and elation. “You are far from home, Your Grace, and in violation of the treaty of Calassa.”
“I didn’t sign that treaty; I was freezing on a mountainside at the time.” Sahand stomped a foot and, with a violent, brutish series of arm motions, cast a blazing ball of Fey energy at Myreon, forcing the mage to throw herself to the ground to dodge it. The fireball struck an ancient statue behind her, which burst into an ear-shattering explosion that obliterated a half-dozen tents nearby and set the whole area aflame. Roaring, Sahand came at her like a bull.
Myreon climbed to her feet in time to meet his charge. She put her staff up to parry what she assumed would be a physical blow, but Sahand’s fist stopped just short of her and then opened as he uttered the harsh word, “AKRKH!” A blossom of orange flame burst from the Mad Prince’s palm and struck her in the chest. She felt the air pummeled from her lungs as she was sent hurtling through space. She crashed through the burning doorway of a tent and slammed upside-down against a rack of pots and pans. She collapsed on the floor in a heap, the world a spinning, burning sea of red fire, black smoke, and white pain.
Myreon found, to her surprise, that her staff was still in her hand. Struggling to her feet, the smoke and fire stinging her eyes and choking her nostrils, she focused her attention on drawing a perfect circle on the dirt floor and then striking the exact center with the butt of her staff. The icy-cold Dweomeric blast boomed outward, extinguishing the fire and blowing what was left of the tent into the air. Breathing clean, cold air again with grateful gasps, Myreon came again to stand before Sahand.
The Mad Prince was still there, waiting for her. “Hmph. Not a quitter. I like that in a woman.”
Myreon gathered as much Dweomeric energy as she could from the cold, wintry mountain air and sent a lode-bolt at Sahand so large it left icicles on the ends of the mage’s fingers. Sahand spun himself in a quick circle and reflected the bolt back at her. She did the same, this time sending it back with enough speed that Sahand was forced to duck out of its way. Behind him the assembled masses of Delloran soldiers threw themselves to the ground in a panic. Myreon permitted herself a tight smile. “You forget that we Defenders have been trained to duel.”
“I don’t forget things, girl,” Sahand grumbled, and struck the earth with another Fey invocation that caused the ground to shake and gouts of flame to shoot toward Myreon. She braced herself and worked a Dweomeric dispel that would counter it, but the sheer power of Sahand’s casting was such that she was seared and smoking even after the spell had been dissipated.
Sahand followed that spell up with another, and another, each of them such violently powerful Fey spells that Myreon could barely shield them with Dweomeric energy, even though they were fighting on a cold winter mountain slope—ideal Dweomeric conditions. Exhausted from her efforts to dispel the spells, her breath came in ragged, gasping bursts and she had her hands on her knees. Sahand, she noted, had barely broken a sweat.
“Trained to duel, eh?” he said with a chuckle. “You, girl, are a sorry excuse for a mage. Look at you—panting like a dog, waiting, no doubt, for some kind of opening or mistake.” Behind him at a healthy distance, his men chuckled in kind. They made lewd gestures and catcalls.
Myreon threw a weak lode-bolt at Sahand, but the Mad Prince batted it away contemptuously. “That’s it? This is what they taught you in Saldor? Ha! Get over here, kneel, and beg me to spare your life.”
The jeers doubled at the prospect of Myreon kneeling. The laughter seemed to press in on her from all sides. She realized she was surrounded now—no way to get back toward the anygate. Trapped.
“You . . . really are . . . mad . . .” she said between breaths, and used her staff to pull herself to her feet. “Let . . . Reldamar . . . go . . .”
Sahand drew a knife and seized Artus by the hair, dragging him to his knees in front of her. “You want him so badly, I’ll give him to you. What part do you want first? The ear? The eye?” He let the tip of his blade waver from spot to spot on Artus’s disguised face.
“Leave him be,” Myreon growled, and did her best to cast a fireball, but she was so exhausted the spell barely made enough heat to light a candle.
Sahand gave her a cruel grin. “I don’t take orders, girlie.” He slid the blade of his knife along Artus’s face, sending a rivulet of blood running down his cheek. Artus screamed himself awake.
“Tyvian!” Myreon shouted. “Tyvian, stay calm! I’ve . . . I’ve got things under control. I’ll save you.”
Sahand’s guards leveled spears and advanced on Myreon from all sides. Sahand held his knife up so it caught the light of the burning tents. The blade was slick with blood. “I’m not a patient man, Defender. Surrender or I cut off something that won’t grow back.”
Artus’s voice blubbered between Tyvian’s swollen lips. “D-D-Don’t do it. Don’t . . . please . . .”
Myreon felt sick; he was just a boy. Her pride wasn’t worth his death. “O-Okay. Leave him be. I . . . I surrender.”
Sahand grinned, and Myreon could have sworn his teeth were pointed, like a beast’s. “Kneel, Defender.”
Myreon was flanked by two Dellorans, and she threw down her staff and knelt. “I give up.”
“Not fast enough,” Sahand sneered, and with a quick, savage motion of his knife, cut off Artus’s left earlobe. Artus screamed and fainted.
Myreon struggled to stand, “You . . .”
Sahand shook his head and laughed. “For a girl who likes to quote the Treaty of Calassa at me, you don’t know your history, do you? I’m not to be trusted.” He looked at his men and nodded.
Myreon felt the white-hot pain of a blade entering her back and the blood bubble to her lips. She then pitched forward onto the icy cobblestones and passed out.
Sahand kicked the unconscious Defender onto her back and snorted. “That’s got to be Alafarr.”
One of his men put his sword on Myreon’s breastbone and prepared to thrust. “Finish her, milord?”
Sahand thought about it—much as he liked the idea of killing the Defender here and now, there might be uses for her if she survived the knife wound . . . and uses for her if she didn’t, come to think of it. “Pick them both up and throw them in the dungeon.”
“Both, milord?” one of the men asked.
“Question an order again and you’re dead,” Sahand snapped, and added, “Clean up the camp and prepare for an attack. The Defenders know we’re here.”
CHAPTER 15
CONSCIENCE MAKES A COMEBACK
By dawn, the snow stopped but Hool had not. She would not be moved from her place of mourning and the new Defenders that arrived with the break in the storm were not inclined to try. Her howls were hoarse and pitiful, each one as filled with raw pain as the first had been. It gave a strange, tragic air to the dirty work that had to be done. Bodies were loaded onto carts, fires extinguished before they could spread, blood washed from the halls. The Defenders who had fallen in the siege were laid in the yard alongside the grieving Hool. Tyvian wondered if their surviving Defenders had done this to appropriate some of Hool’s grief for their own purposes. It was a strange thought, for him. He was having a lot of strange thoughts that morning.
His leg bandaged, Tyvian sat on the back of a cart, watching the cleanup, his wrists and ankles in shackles. He had his back to where Hool sat, her living pup still by her side, pouring her mother’s agony out on all to hear. With every howl, he felt himself wince. To his surprise, the ring had nothing to do with it.
Is it my fault Hool’s pup was killed? He found himself wondering. The answer should have been obvious—how could it have been? He had no knowledge of Sahand’s plan for them—he still didn’t have that knowledge—so he couldn’t be held responsible.
&nbs
p; Then why did he feel like this?
Another howl caused him to stiffen, and he tried to focus his attention on the designs embroidered into the shawl worn by his guard—a Defender disguised, just as the rest of the reinforcements had been, in simple clothing that wouldn’t have stuck out in the Blocks or Corpse Alley. It had worked thus far only because it was the Blocks and Corpse Alley, and no watchmen would come down here anyway unless directly bribed to do so. Hendrieux had chosen Sahand’s urban hideout well.
Tyvian found himself, bizarrely, wishing Myreon were there for him to talk to. She was a good sounding board, if nothing else. He could tell her that he was feeling empathy for a gnoll, and she would inform him that he was a lying, cheating, scheming monster who was making it all up. Somehow that would have helped pull the stitch out of his guts that had rested there ever since he saw the dirty fur pelt in Hool’s trembling hands. Somehow.
The idea of her seeking out her children was never real to me, Myreon. It was an abstraction—a foothold on her personality that allowed me to use her, just like I use you or Artus or . . . well, everybody.
Another howl, another bucket of ice water poured down Tyvian’s spine. It hardly mattered what Myreon thought anymore; she was almost certainly dead. Artus was dead, too, the poor fool. Running through an anygate and probably straight into Sahand’s camp—typical Artus. More heart than brains. To think the boy died at the hands of Banric Sahand . . .
“Dammit,” Tyvian snarled to himself. Wasn’t he going to let Hendrieux kill the boy no more than a month or so ago? Gods, that seemed a long time past. Had he become so attached to Artus? To Hool? To even Myreon?
He had to be. Why else would he be sitting here, moping over how sad Hool looked and how terrible Artus’s death had likely been and how much he actually seemed to miss bantering with Myreon. The damned ring had addled his brains. It had taken the calculating, cold, efficient man of the world he had been and made him into a . . . a . . . a what?
Tyvian leaned back and looked at the sky, wincing again at another one of Hool’s wails. He let all his plotting and scheming of the last few weeks unfold in his mind’s eye. How had he come here? How had it changed him? Was he different?
The revelations of last night came back to him with full force; he lay, half paralyzed with thought, running the scenario through his head. The ring had wound up on his finger because Eddereon wanted it there. Eddereon thought he was “worthy” of it, whatever that meant. It was Eddereon who tipped off the Defenders of Galaspin Tower to his own and Hendrieux’s spirit-engine operation—easy enough. Galaspin Tower meant Tarlyth, and Tarlyth meant two things: first, that Myreon was the Defender dispatched, and second, that Tarlyth had given this information to the Sorcerous League. That would explain how Hendrieux knew, since Sahand was known in underworld circles to be a member of the League, even if most people didn’t believe the rumors. Tarlyth informed Sahand of the Defender attack, and Sahand told Hendrieux to stay away. Being the dunce that he is, Hendrieux set Tyvian up for a bigger fall than it would have been otherwise.
Where did that leave him? Tyvian wondered. He wasn’t sure, but something else was forming in the back of his mind, along with Sahand, Tarlyth, Theliara—all members of the Sorcerous League. Sahand was in Freegate messing with something in the old ruins of Daer Trondor—probably the old power sink sitting on the Saldor/Galaspin/Freegate ley line. To do this, he needed a lot of help. He got Hendrieux to kidnap alchemists, thaumaturges, and the like; he used Theliara and her menagerie to supply him with wild animals, for some reason. Tarlyth was probably involved in keeping the Defenders off Sahand’s back while he did all this.
Enter Tyvian himself and the damned ring. Tarlyth and Theliara wanted him and the ring on his finger. What did Sahand want with that power sink, though? What was the Mad Prince’s piece in all of this? How did it fit, and why had the three members started to pit their resources against one another? What did it mean for himself, wounded on a cart, with no friends left but a devastated gnoll?
Everything suddenly clicked. It happened so quickly that it made Tyvian gasp. “Gods . . . I’ve been blind!”
Sahand was a monster. He was a colossal, horrifying tyrant who ruled his miserable, winter-locked principality with a brutality unmatched by modern rulers. Just over a quarter century ago, shortly after wresting control of Dellor by way of a bloody coup, Sahand had waited for the Duke of Galaspin and his armies to be called across the sea to defend Illin from the Kalsaaris, and then he invaded the defenseless Galaspin countryside. Villages that hadn’t surrendered were burned. Men who would not kneel were executed, often in sight of their children, and then the women were ordered raped. It was said that the Mad Prince, as he quickly became known, wrote a letter to the Duke of Galaspin, assuring him that if he or his bannermen ever set foot in their home country again, he would catapult the duke’s newborn grandchildren from the walls of the city. When the duke sent General Conrad Varner to free his suffering land, the Mad Prince did exactly as he promised. A memorial stood to the young princess to this day—an obelisk of granite, surrounded by gardens, standing six hundred yards from the walls of Galaspin. Tyvian’s face twisted in disgust just thinking about it.
Tyvian knew he was many things, but he was not Sahand. He was not the kind of person who tortured people for fun. He did not seek to master perverse sorcery. He did not starve a whole country just so he could horde gold for another war attempt. He did not hurl infants from catapults. He did not torture, murder, and skin what were, for all intents and purposes, someone’s children. He, Tyvian Reldamar, might be a criminal, but he had standards . . .
. . . which was precisely why he hadn’t been thinking clearly on this matter.
He hit the muddy ground of the courtyard at a limping, half run, half hop, his guard trailing behind. “Hey! Where do you think you’re going, mate?”
The smuggler was surprised at how angry he was, suddenly. His hands shook so badly he had to ball them into fists. He planted himself in front of Hool and pointed at her forcefully. “Snap out of it, dammit!”
Hool’s pup growled at him, its hackles raised, and stepped between Tyvian and his mother.
Tyvian ignored it and kept addressing Hool. “Are you going to sit here and weep for the rest of your life, or what?”
“Leave the beast alone, Reldamar!” The Defender who had followed him across the courtyard grabbed Tyvian by the shoulder.
Tyvian pushed him flat on his back in the mud. “Unhand me! You think I’m a monster? You think Sahand and I are the same, eh? Well we aren’t. I am not that man, and I will not be bested by him.”
The Defender stared at him, open-mouthed, and then climbed to his feet, calling for backup. “The bloody smuggler’s lost his marbles!”
Tyvian grabbed Hool by the ears and pulled her face so he could look her in the eyes. They had lost their usual, predatory luster—they were dull, like tarnished coins. “Is this it for you, then, Hool? You’re going to give up? Snap out of it!”
Tyvian could hear the mud sloshing as the guards closed in. Hool blinked, her eyes focusing on Tyvian as though he had just appeared. “Brana . . . Brana needs medicine. He is hurt.”
“Hool, in eight seconds I’m going to be dragged away by these men. After that happens, get some medicine in my flat—top shelf in the kitchen cupboard—and then head for the old ruins in the mountains. Sahand is there, Hool. He killed your pup, do you understand? He is planning on killing many, many more.”
Two men wrapped their arms through Tyvian’s armpits while a third hit him in the back of the knees. After he collapsed, they dragged him off. Hool watched, her ears alert. Tyvian smiled at her, said, “We haven’t lost yet!”
In his youth, Tyvian concluded, Master Tarlyth had probably been a mountain of muscle. He had hands like garden rakes, each finger thicker than most people’s thumbs. Tyvian wondered how a man with hands lik
e that could achieve the rank of Master in the Arcanostrum, let alone Master Defender.
Let alone while being a traitor.
“Tea, Master Reldamar?” Tarlyth asked quietly. They were sitting in a private room in Arble Keep, a flimsy card table between them. The scent of blood and ash still hung in the air, despite the shutters of the narrow window having been thrown open. The floor had splinters of broken furniture and a few bloodstains, and Tyvian thought the presence of Tarlyth’s silver tea set in the midst of all this was marvelous. It was just the kind of irony he was coming to associate with the Master Defender.
“No thank you,” he said, “I’ve no interest in what you consider to be good tea.”
“You’re in quite a lot of trouble, son. I’d expect a bit more deference.” Tarlyth considered Tyvian with his heavy lidded eyes.
Tyvian met his stare evenly. “I don’t really think I’m in half as much trouble as you pretend, actually.”
“You stand accused of murder, smuggling, and dealing in proscribed magical texts. This doesn’t seem like a lot of trouble to you?”
“It’s odd, you know, sending Myreon ‘Magus Errant’ and then you showing up personally to rescue her. I mean, the whole point of Magus Errant is so the Arcanostrum coffers don’t have to pay for the long-shot activities of its agents. Yet here you are, risking a diplomatic incident, getting your men killed in combat—not to mention committing career suicide—just so you can rescue a junior mage Defender and capture a smuggler.”
Tarlyth sat back in his rickety chair. “I don’t see why it’s any of your business what I do or why. Especially not now.”
Tyvian smirked. “What are you doing here, Tarlyth? What’s the real reason?”
“I brought you here to discuss what is about to happen to you, Reldamar, not indulge your petty inquiries.” Tarlyth frowned.
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