Iron and Blood

by Auston Habershaw

  The grumbling rose to angry outbursts, more threats, and a series of detailed descriptions of the kinds of curses one or another sorcerer might inflict upon him. This time the Chairman didn’t intercede. He was watching Tyvian with his one good eye—­it was of the clearest blue, and for a moment Tyvian thought he recognized it. He had more important things to do, though, than unravel the secret membership of the Sorcerous League.

  He shouted over the gallery’s jeers. “Sahand knew this about you all! He knew it and he played you, like the idiots you all are. Sahand doesn’t need to live forever because, unlike the rest of you, he plans on achieving his goals now, while he is still alive. He tells you a plausible story—­just plausible enough that your magic well here doesn’t give him away—­and all of you fill in the blanks for him, delighted to have somebody with some courage finally doing something to help the League. Eternal life for everybody, right? As the fellow up the back said, who wouldn’t want it?”

  The jeers fell silent again. Sorcerers were looking at their feet, some were shaking their heads. Others had their fists bunched up in their robes, fury contorting their faces to the point of nearly cracking through their Shrouds. “So what is he doing?” someone asked.

  “Well, I can’t say for certain.” Tyvian cocked an eye at the Well, but it didn’t glimmer. He immediately realized how easy it would have been for Sahand to half-­truth himself into League support. “Also, seeing how all of you pitched in to transport Sahand and a small army of his soldiers in secret up in the mountains in the midst of an ancient fortress, it would be a rather suicidal prospect to go and ask. Take my friend here.” Tyvian jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the glowering Tarlyth. “He’s been suspicious of Sahand for some time now.”

  All eyes now turned to Tarlyth. The Chairman stroked his beard. “Really? And why didn’t our Esteemed Colleague from Galaspin inform us of these suspicions?”

  “Easy.” Tyvian smirked at Tarlyth and gave him a wink. “He was probably planning on double-­crossing all of you, too. He is a Master Defender, after all.”

  Everyone looked at the Well. It remained still, calm, and black as night. Tyvian marveled at what a rotten lie detector it was.

  “Reldamaaaar!” Tarlyth screamed like a wild animal and thrust his hands toward the smuggler in a sorcerous gesture too subtle for Tyvian to follow. He felt a heavy, hot wind hit him in the chest and then he was sailing through the air, green fire all around him. A death-­bolt? Maybe, but not focused enough to kill, since he wound up smashing into a collected group of black-­robed wizards like a catapult stone, dizzy and smoldering, but not altogether fried.

  The Black Hall erupted into sheer havoc a split second later. Most of the assembled fled, making for the thirteen exits like theatergoers fleeing a fire. They pushed, shoved, trampled one another underfoot; some of them used enchantments to leap through the air, climb along the ceiling, and one woman actually turned herself into a bat and tried flying. She didn’t seem very good at it, though, as she kept slamming into the wall.

  The rest of the gallery—­perhaps a mere tenth of those assembled—­devoted their attention to destroying Tarlyth. He was alone at the bottom of the hall—­the officers had vanished in puffs of smoke, apparently—­and was beset on all sides by a half-­dozen black-­robed wizards. The ley in the Black Hall was exclusively Etheric, to the point where other energies were almost impossible to channel, and so as Tyvian got his bearings, the combatants struggled with their magecraft to the point where there was more shouting and gesturing than actual invocations flying around.

  Tarlyth, though, was Arcanostrum trained and a Master to boot. His spells did not fail—­death-­bolts struck down two of the assailants in bursts of green fire before the others could erect wards to shield themselves. When their spells finally took effect, Tarlyth showed his prowess once more. Black, thorny vines that burst from the floor to envelop him were dispelled into black smoke with ease; tiny imps conjured to poison him were banished with a single word; their own death-­bolts were blocked with wards that blazed with power.

  Tyvian steadied himself, getting to his feet as the last of the fleeing sorcerers pushed past him. Now what? His mind still spun in his head, unable to focus—­there had been another part of this plan but he couldn’t remember what.

  Even for a Master Defender, though, four against one were long odds. Tarlyth missed with a spell, enabling one enemy to step through a shadow, only to emerge from another shadow behind the Master. Tarlyth turned, but was slashed with a jagged dagger across the chest and then struck in the back with a bolt of darkest purple energy, which caused him to scream in pain and fall to his knees.

  Then Tyvian remembered. The last part of the plan was save Tarlyth.

  He looked down at his chains, still clamped around wrists and ankles, and focused his attention on the ring. “C’mon, you little bastard. Now is the time.” He pulled—­nothing. The chains held.

  He looked up to see the four remaining sorcerers closing in on the prone Tarlyth, snickering to themselves. Tyvian looked back at the ring. “Don’t you want me to save him?” Then there it was again—­that twitching, anxious feeling in his ring hand, just like in the Hanim’s dungeon. Tyvian grabbed hold of the chains and pulled for all his worth.

  They shattered off his wrists and ankles as though made of glass.

  He hit the first sorcerer in the back of the head with the wadded-­up remains of his chains, and the fellow dropped in a heap. The other three looked up, shocked.

  One of them managed, “But you’re . . .” before Tyvian broke his nose with a haymaker swing. The other two hastily prepared spells to stop him, but Tyvian was swinging the chain again, causing them both to hold their arms up to protect their faces. He hissed to Tarlyth, “Can you stand?”

  Tarlyth got to all fours. “Y-­Yes . . .”

  Tyvian threw the chain at the two and kicked a third sorcerer in the face as he was trying to rise. “Then c’mon—­let’s get out of here before your cronies grow spines and come back for you.”

  Tarlyth glared at him through bloodshot eyes. “Why should I go anywhere with you?”

  Tyvian had him under the arms and was guiding him as fast as possible toward the closest exit. “Because I’m your only ticket out of this mess.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To stop Sahand and save the world,” Tyvian answered, and pushed Tarlyth out of the Black Hall.

  CHAPTER 18

  FARMBOY’S LUCK

  Artus was shivering. He had laid his cloak over Myreon, who was still breathing, though the tiny wisps of white vapor coming from her blue lips grew smaller and smaller with every passing moment. Several times Artus considered taking back his cloak, but on every occasion he stopped himself. If he took it away, Myreon might die, and he didn’t want her to die. He didn’t want anybody to die.

  Sahand had said he’d be back in an hour, but it felt a lot longer than that already. With no windows there was no way to really tell, and Artus knew that when your mind was racing—­as his most certainly was—­a few minutes could seem an eternity. He passed the time staring at the floor or ceiling, beating his hands and feet together to keep warm, and doing everything possible to not look at the haggard ruin of Hendrieux’s body, still hanging on the wall.

  When Sahand gets back, that’s gonna be you, a little voice in Artus’s head kept repeating. He shouted it down with various assurances—­he’d think of something, Myreon would wake up, Tyvian would save him, and so on—­but none of them were very convincing. The jig was up—­Artus of Jondas Crossing, on the verge of fourteen years of age, was going to die forgotten and alone in some dark, icy prison while impersonating a criminal mastermind.

  He laughed aloud, his voice echoing softly through the dungeon tunnels. Who would have thought the youngest son of a Northron farmer would have wound up here? If he ever made it back home (which he wouldn’t, but st
ill), he would be the most interesting man in the province. He could hear the old men at the Broken Wagon chatting to each other on the clapboard deck in the middle of a heavy, humid summer day. Young Artus, Marta’s boy, done come back over the mountains from the West—­escaped Sahand’s dungeon, they say, and has beasts and mages for company. Smart as a whip, that lad—­shame about the family.

  Artus’s empty stomach twisted and growled; he felt like it was mocking him. Who was he kidding? Escape Sahand’s dungeons? He was dead and gone, and there was no point in saying otherwise, even to himself. He was done for—­Tyvian had finally ditched him, selling him up the river for the smuggler’s own gain, just like he always did. He shoulda turned down that ten marks on the streets of Ayventry, all those weeks ago. He probably would be sleeping under the stairs inside some smoky bar, picking the pockets of drunk patrons and dodging the constables. He wouldn’t have been happy, but he would be warm and most certainly in less danger. “Kroth take that, Reldamar,” he muttered.

  The dungeon gate rumbled open and Artus pushed himself into the back corner of his cell. A Delloran soldier wearing a crude eye patch and rusty black mail stomped around the corner and peered into the gloom with his good eye until he spotted Artus. “ ’Ere, you—­His Grace says to feed ye, so here it be. Come over and take it or I’ll just pour it on the ground.” The Delloran held up a wooden bowl with something wet and brown inside.

  Artus pulled himself to his feet, his legs stiff with cold and bruises, and hobbled closer. The Delloran withdrew the bowl. “Listen ’ere—­His Grace told me you was a tricky one, so no funny stuff, hear?”

  Artus held up his hands. “Okay.”

  When Artus came to the iron grating, the one-­eyed guard held out the bowl and Artus took it, but realized quickly that it wouldn’t fit through the bars without turning it sideways and pouring out the gruel. The guard chuckled at him. “Now who’s tricky, eh?”

  Artus scowled at the man, wondering, and not for the first time, from what horrible pool of bullies Sahand drew his men. The guard, still chuckling to himself, turned and left. When Artus heard the dungeon gate rumble closed again, he got down on his knees and saw if he couldn’t pour the gruel into his mouth through the bars. His tongue could reach the edge of the bowl, but only if he pressed his face against the ice-­cold bars so that they burned his skin. Sighing, he considered pouring the gruel on the ground in protest. A fairly significant debate arose between his rumbling stomach and his freezing hands. Somehow, he reflected, his situation had gotten worse.

  “Tyvian wouldn’t be stuck down here, I bet,” Artus grumbled. “If it was him gone through the magic door, I bet he’d escape somehow—­just as easy as if he had always been expecting it, because he was expecting it and—­ Kroth take it!” In the middle of his tirade, Artus realized that one of his fingers had frozen to the bowl as the gruel was starting to harden.

  Something occurred to him at that moment—­something that made him hold his breath for fear of somehow forgetting it or losing the thought before it had fully formed. He remembered one particularly cold winter when he was little, going in the barn with Marik and Conrad. All the cider jars had cracked because Marik had filled them too full and left the stoppers in, and Ma was angry. Artus remembered being surprised that water could do that—­break jars—­but Ma had just shaken her head. Ice is bigger than water, Arty. If you keep water in too tight and it freezes, the ice will find a way out, even if it means cracking the jar.

  Artus looked over at the rusty old padlock holding his cell door closed. Would it . . . could it work? He’d need a stopper, though . . . Sahand! Sahand had spit the stopper of that bottle of Black Cloud out on the floor. Where was it? There!

  His hands trembling with cold and excitement, he broke the ice layer forming over the gruel and slowly passed it from hand to hand until he had moved the bowl along the grating to where the padlock rested. It was a fat, heavy piece of iron, crudely made with a gaping keyhole the size of his thumb—­perfect. As carefully as he could, he held the padlock level with one hand while, with the other, he poured the watery gruel into the lock until it was overflowing. He then dropped the bowl of gruel and, with a foot stuck through the grating by the floor, he kicked the stopper over to himself. He then stuffed it into the keyhole so it filled the entire space. He knew that wouldn’t be enough, though, so he tore off strips of his frilly shirt and tied them around the lock and stopper, holding it as tightly closed as he could manage. When this was done, he backed up, his fingers numb and his body throbbing with pain. He only had to wait.

  And wait.

  And wait.

  And wait.

  And wait . . .

  Clink.

  Artus’s head shot up—­had he nodded off asleep? No—­yes—­it didn’t matter. Had he really heard what he thought he heard? Gingerly, he crawled over to the padlock. He could see frozen gruel spilling out of every little fissure in the old, heavy lock. The stopper was still in place, though, and when he tugged on the lock, he discovered that it wasn’t as firmly attached as before. Not quite broken, but one of the pins holding the lock together had come loose. Wrapping his numb fingers around the iron lock, he yanked as hard as he could, putting every ounce of his adolescent frame into it. His bruised muscles and exhausted body screamed in protest, but he ignored them and kept on yanking, screaming as he did so. Finally, on the fifth or sixth pull, the padlock broke open. He was free of his cell.

  “Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes! I did it! I did it!” Artus whooped, but then stopped himself—­he wasn’t out of the dungeon yet. There was also Myreon to think about—­the mage, incredibly, was still breathing.

  Leave her. Artus heard Tyvian’s voice clearly in his mind. He knew it was exactly what the smuggler would say, and he’d be right. There was no way he could drag Myreon—­a grown woman, and a tall one, too—­out of this dungeon, even if the doors were all open and the guards were waving him out. If he wanted to survive, he’d have to abandon the mage to her fate. It was the sensible thing to do.

  It wasn’t the right thing, though. Artus could hear Tyvian chuckling at his foolishness, but there it was—­it wouldn’t be right to leave Myreon. He couldn’t really say why that mattered so much, but it did. Doing right, as Ma always said, don’t mean doing easy. Myreon was coming with him, or they were both staying. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as Tyvian was, sure, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He was who he was.

  He would have to be smart, though, if he was going to survive the next few hours. “So, what would Tyvian do?” he said aloud.

  As far as he could tell, Tyvian’s great talent lay in predicting what other ­people would do in response to the things he did. Artus had watched him, time and time again, flawlessly predict other ­people’s actions simply by judging their character and wants and all that. So, to be like Tyvian, all he needed to do was figure out what the other guys were going to do and then plan accordingly. So, how would that help him now?

  “If I were one of them ugly Delloran jerks, what would I do if I found I had escaped?” Artus asked himself. The immediate answer was, Put him back in the cell with a swift kick. Pretty obvious and it didn’t get him anywhere. Thinking a bit more, he expanded the possibilities. He found himself addressing the barely alive Myreon. “Okay, so what if, for argument’s sake, I got us to escape out of the dungeon totally—­like, them guards come down here and find the cell empty, right? What do they do then?”

  Artus grunted—­they’d probably throw a fit. Sahand didn’t seem like the most understanding boss, and if the guards let who they thought was Tyvian Reldamar escape from the dungeon, Sahand would probably put a knife in them. So, they’d try and find him and Myreon as fast as possible, probably sound the alarm, and there’d be guards all over the place in minutes. Even supposing, then, that he were able to open the dungeon gate (which he doubted), he’d be caught again as soon as the guards saw he was gone, si
nce he and Myreon weren’t going anywhere quickly.

  “But wait a second!” Artus exclaimed. “I’m not Tyvian Reldamar! They don’t know who I am at all, do they? If I can get out of here and break the spell, then . . . well . . . then they won’t know who they’re looking for. They wouldn’t find me!”

  Breaking the spell, though, wasn’t going to be easy. For starters, Artus didn’t really know where one got a hold of “concentrated Lumenal energy,” and he only had the vaguest of ideas what Lumenal energy was—­“white magic” was all he could think of, even though he knew that wasn’t entirely accurate. He thought back to the road to Freegate and how Tyvian had wanted them to walk in sevens and stay in the bright sunlight and so on to encourage a “Lumenal ley,” but he didn’t think that would be enough to cut it. Still, he had to try—­it was his only chance.

  Rolling Myreon onto his cloak, Artus dragged the half-­dead mage out of the cell, and rather than go up to the gate, opted instead to go deeper into the shadows of the dungeon, until he was confident the both of them were concealed in the darkness of the lower cells. Crouching in the dark, he prayed to Saint Handras for luck and Saint Ezeliar for bravery, and waited to see if his trick would work.

  He only had to wait a few minutes before the gate rumbled open and a pair of guards came to his cell. Their reaction was immediate and extreme. “Gods, Matek, the bastard’s gone!”

  “I told you he was tricky! I told you!”

  “Shut up and find him!”

  One of them started toward where Artus was hiding, and he held his breath as his heart began to leap and jolt in his chest. The guard hadn’t gone more than a few steps before the other one called to him. “Where you going?”