[Meetings 05] - Steel and Stone

by Ellen Porath - (ebook by Undead)

  Certainly, she thought when the other three were ahead of her, she wasn't still hung over from last night's binge. She'd been fighting exhaustion all day, and once she had even found herself sliding from her horse when she fell asleep in the saddle. She'd caught herself with a jerk and shaken back her curls to mask the near fall. But this new wave of queasiness, this sudden vertigo, was harder to hide. That was all she needed now, to mimic Wode's swoon after all the guff she'd given him.

  She pulled up her mount and let the other three move farther ahead. They were utterly silent, with none of the jovial horseplay that Kitiara remembered from other forays with comrades. There was only the sound of the horses' hooves, the squeak of Tanis's saddle when he leaned over to catch sight of the ettin's prints, and her own forced breathing. When they were far enough away, Kitiara leaned carefully away from the saddle and vomited into a bush at the side of the path. Then, blinking rapidly to clear her vision, she spurred Obsidian into a trot.

  Night was falling. It was as though something, watching them, had decided that it was time to pull the noose tight. They'd resheathed their swords but their hands never drifted far from the hilts.

  "Half-elf," Kitiara called. "Can you use your night-vision now?"

  "I've been trying," Tanis replied. "I see nothing but the trees. Nothing else—no small game, no birds. Nothing but the haze."

  Kitiara grunted. She twisted back in the saddle at a sudden noise behind her, unsheathing her sword with the soft sound of metal against tanned leather. "Half-elf," she repeated. "Look back."

  Tanis and Caven followed her directive. Caven swore. "The path," Tanis murmured.

  "Gone!" Caven added needlessly.

  Wode moaned. It was true. The trees had closed behind them like a phalanx of soldiers. Both men drew their swords. Wode clutched his knife nervously.

  At that moment, afternoon turned to night in the space of an eyeblink. One moment they could see each other and the tormented trees, and the next, all they could see was pitch blackness.

  Wode's voice quavered out of the dark. "Uncle Caven?"

  "Right here." Mackid had not budged, Kitiara could tell.

  "At least we can hear each other." It was Tanis's voice.

  "We're not alone," Kitiara said suddenly.

  The air began to glow, and Kitiara saw the faces of her companions in the reflected light. The glowing light coalesced into a pair of eyeballs. Just below the eyes, two skeletal hands formed, edged with green flame. "Tanis," Kit repeated. Her mouth was dry, but her hand was steady.

  "I see it, Kit." Tanis dismounted, moving slowly toward her.

  "What is it?" Caven asked.

  Kitiara answered. "A wichtlin."

  "What's that?"

  Tanis looked at Kitiara. She'd donned her helm. Although Obsidian was shifting restlessly, nearly at the point of panic, Kitiara sat straight and tall on the mare. She held the reins with one hand and gripped her sword with the other. Her face was pale, but flashes of pink lurked just below the surface, high on her cheekbones. Kitiara was in her element now, Tanis knew.

  The fire-limned wichtlin made no motion toward the swordswoman, but its gaze never wavered from her. Hers was as steady.

  "Wichtlins," Tanis whispered to Caven, "are elven undead."

  "By the gods!" Caven exclaimed. "And it's just the eyes and hands, no more? How do we fight it?"

  "There's more there—the rest of the decayed skeleton," Tanis said. "Be thankful you can't see it." Wode's teeth were chattering.

  "And it used to be Qualinesti?"

  "Silvanesti," Tanis corrected. "Some Silvanesti elves who follow the path of evil during life are claimed by Chemosh when they die."

  "The lord of the undead!"

  "And they become wichtlins."

  Caven took a moment to absorb that. "What do these wichtlins do?" he asked at last.

  As Caven spoke, the creature began to move. It edged closer to Kitiara, who calmly backed Obsidian an equal distance away. Kitiara answered Caven's query. "A wichtlin wanders the world searching for souls to claim for Chemosh. It can kill with its touch." She moved Obsidian back another pace.

  "Will swords kill it?"

  "We'll just see," she answered softly. Even as she spoke, she struck with a lightning-fast movement. Her weapon flashed through the air, slashing between the creature's hands and its eyes. Obsidian whinnied and leaped back from the trail. The wichtlin, unharmed, swooped toward Kitiara, who continued to flail at it with her sword. "Half-elf!" she cried. "By the gods, tell me how I can kill it!"

  Tanis felt horror clutch at him as the wichtlin feinted again and again at Kitiara Uth Matar, driving her farther off the trail and farther from her companions. "Magic, I've heard," he called. "Only magic."

  "I have no magic, but it'll be a strong beast that can withstand this!" Caven shouted. He spurred Maleficent forward. The giant horse reared, then charged toward the wichtlin, pebbles spraying behind the huge animal's hooves.

  The evil creature vanished just before the horse and rider reached it.

  Confused, Caven pulled up the stallion and wheeled about on the trail. "Where—?"

  "Caven! Behind you!" It was Kitiara.

  Caven turned to find himself inches from the wichtlin. Its left hand, green flame visible at each joint of a digit, reached out toward him. "Caven!" Kitiara shouted again. "Don't let it—"

  But it was too late. The creature grazed Caven's arm, and the soldier froze, a look of dawning terror etched on his bearded face.

  As soon as the paralysis felled Caven, the wichtlin seemed to lose interest in its victim. It turned toward Tanis, who held his sword ready even though it was clear now that the weapon was as useless as a feather against this monster. The wichtlin fastened its unblinking gaze on the half-elf, moved nearer, and attacked. In moments, Tanis, too, stood immobile. Wode tried to flee, but the being vanished, only to appear directly before the squire, who, with his nag, ran into the creature and froze instantly.

  That left Kitiara alone against the wichtlin. She pulled her dagger and prepared to vault from Obsidian, who now stood hock-deep in a tangle of ground-hugging plants.

  Then the horse screamed, and Kitiara halted her dismount, twisting in midair, only one foot in a stirrup, as she looked down.

  Skeletal hands, dozens of them, were reaching up through the plants, up through the ground. They held the struggling mare, who continued to whinny with fright until Kitiara thought she'd go mad. Her gaze darted around. The wichtlin bore down slowly upon her. The skeletal hands reached out to grab her if she fell from Obsidian's back. The mare gave a shudder, a paroxysm of death, and Kitiara kept her seat only by dropping the dagger and holding on to the dying mare with both hands.

  Then a voice sliced through the night. "Idiandin melisi don! Idiandin melisi don! Dispel!"

  Kitiara fell into the waiting hands.

  But they vanished as her body crashed into the damp soil next to her horse. The swordswoman lay still for a moment, casting about her for the wichtlin. It, too, was gone. "Obsidian!" She sat up slowly, reached out a hand, and stroked the animal's lifeless shoulder. As she caressed her longtime animal companion, the horse turned to dust beneath her fingers. A moment later, even that last trace of Obsidian evaporated. Kit leaped to her feet, spied her dagger in the weeds, and retrieved it/Slowly she circled, ready for anything that challenged her. Where was the possessor of the voice? The words shouted were undeniably magical, but was the one who shouted them her savior or a new attacker?

  She heard nothing. Caven and Maleficent, arrested in midstride, stood like a statue in a village square. Wode and his nag were likewise frozen in a tangled mimicry of Caven's stance. Tanis, on foot, had been caught in the middle of a lunge, his sword pointing straight toward . . . nothing. Dauntless stood stolidly near the half-elf. To all appearances, the horse was the only other living thing within view. There was no sign of whatever had uttered that cry of magic in the night.

  Chapter 10

  Janusz,
the Mage

  Janusz took a deep breath to halt his tremors as he leaned away from his scrying bowl. Kitiara's face faded from the surface of the water.

  She'd be safe for a time; he'd seen to that. The groping hands had returned to their owners in the Abyss. The wichtlin was now crawling harmlessly along the bottom of Ice Mountain Bay. It would have to search some time to find living souls to claim in those frigid depths.

  The explosion of magic that allowed the mage to both scry and speak left his ears ringing and his hands trembling. For a moment, he feared he might faint. But it had been necessary. The mage had come within a heartbeat of losing Kitiara Uth Matar.

  And Kitiara Uth-Matar was the only person who could tell him where the nine ice jewels were.

  He had only two of the ice jewels, one of which the ettin carried, and he thanked Morgion for the luck that had prompted him to hold back two of the eleven purple gemstones in the encampment at the Meir's castle.

  Janusz eyed the iridescent jewel that lay atop an alabaster pedestal on the table. The purple crystal, the size of a small egg, glowed as if it contained all the knowledge of Krynn burning within it. The doltish gnome who'd sold him the jewels had launched into a tiresome litany of the stones' history. The mage had ignored much of the creature's prattling, but one thing lingered in Janusz's memory—that the gnome believed the jewels had hailed ultimately from the Ice-reach. Staring into the amethyst-colored orb now, the mage didn't doubt that its glittering coldness had been formed in the snowy reaches. That was why he'd persuaded the Valdane to flee to the southernmost point of Ansalon. They'd come to the Icereach in search of more jewels. And under the spell of the ice jewel, the Valdane's dream had expanded, grown from a yen to overrun a neighboring fiefdom to a hunger to command the entire world.

  Janusz forced himself to look away from the stone, but the movement seared his eyes. The jewel held his gaze like a spell. The mage had commanded dozens of ettin slaves to search ceaselessly for the spot that just might offer up more ice jewels—because, he told the Valdane, the jewels could hold the secret to the Valdane's ultimate power over all of Ansalon. In truth, Janusz hoped that the charismatic stones would do far more for the mage himself than for the Valdane—that, in short, they would show Janusz how to dispel the bloodlink that bound him to the ruler's will. But that would occur, if ever, only far in the future, after exhausting years of study, he knew.

  The mage quaked inwardly at the risk he was taking in letting Res-Lacua carry one of the precious artifacts, but it was necessary if Janusz were to use the stones to teleport the ettin and Kitiara to the Icereach. That was one mystery of the stones that the mage, through months of study, had been able to discover. Handled correctly and cautiously, the stones allowed him to teleport objects, both living and nonliving, from the site of one jewel to the whereabouts of another.

  When Kitiara arrived at the top of Fever Mountain in Darken Wood, the mage would use the ettin's ice jewel to bring them both to the ice warren. Then, he vowed, he would interrogate her himself and discover the hiding place of the other nine precious stones.

  Janusz forced himself upright, rolled back the sleeves of his robe, and glanced at the entrance to his chamber. The mage sat atop a stool. Obviously made from the same magical ice from which the mage had fashioned the ice warren, the stool was festooned with a brocaded version of the canvas that protected the walls and floor. Off to the right, a curl of steam rose from a ceramic beaker set over a flame. Dozens of stoppered containers littered the worktable.

  A window broke the monotony of the room's walls. The opening showed a panorama of the Ice-reach. Snow swirled around an outcropping of ice. Janusz glanced at the window and swore. He muttered an incantation, traced a figure in the air, and the scene in the window shifted to one showing a castle, flying black and purple pennants at every spire. Golden sunlight poured over the scene, and the mage's face looked wistful for a moment.

  The walls of Janusz's Icereach quarters, of course, were of solid ice. But the door was equally solid oak, banded with iron, teleported by the ice jewel to this accursed frozen wasteland months ago.

  "Not that time matters in this place," Janusz muttered. "Forsaken by the gods. A fraction of a year, a fraction of a lifetime. What's the difference?"

  There were no seasons now, no shy blooming as of a spring maiden after winter's crone had eased her dying clutch upon the land. He smiled at his fanciful-ness. Habits died hard. He'd been a romantic soul long ago.

  Once time had mattered. Once he'd felt himself bloom with the seasons, had felt his heart expand and thaw with the warming of the soil and the unfolding of new leaves. His romanticism may have been laughable, given the grayness of his hair and the wrinkles that creased his cheeks from nose to mouth. But he'd known true love—he'd known Dreena—and the world had seemed young and new.

  "Pah!" he muttered, and pushed the useless past from his mind. "My heart is as frozen as the Icereach."

  The walls, floor, and ceiling, were solid slabs of ice, slicked to a mirrorlike smoothness. Much of the icy surface was covered with thin canvas to protect the warren's occupants from sticking to the ice in the same way that warm flesh adheres to frigid metal on an especially cold day.

  "An especially cold day," he repeated now. Janusz laughed soundlessly. "There are no days here that don't fit that description."

  There was no fuel for a real fire, nor was there a fireplace. A fireplace of ice? No, and magical blazes drained too much of his strength. It took nearly all his power these days to keep track of Kitiara and Res-Lacua, a continent to the north. Even now, he'd had to expend still more energy to give Res-Lacua the power to speak in Common rather than in the orcish gibberish the ettins used. The beast might need to speak to Kitiara in order to lure her to Fever Mountain.

  Janusz swore an oath to Morgion and crashed a fist against the frozen tabletop, sending the water slopping over the edge of the scrying bowl and cascading down the front of his robe.

  He cursed again and dabbed at the black wool with a linen cloth. Once he'd aspired to the white robes of good magic. But now there were only snow and ice and evil in Janusz's life. Even now, within the ice warren, winds insinuated themselves through chink and crack to swirl around his wool-enshrouded ankles. The castle should have been warmer. After all, he'd supervised the building, overseen the crews of thick-backed and thicker-headed ettins. They'd performed the labor that his magic couldn't manage.

  Janusz's robe, double-woven of the rarest wool, served him ill as a barrier against the needle-sharp winds of this cursed land. Everything in the room was bluish, bathed in the light that gleamed from Janusz's magical ice. There was no need for lanterns; the walls themselves lit the castle. But the mage longed for a warm lamp with orange-yellow flame. He longed for Kern.

  These days he had only his memories to keep him warm. The banality of that thought, as well as its futility, brought a grim smile to his lips, for he did have something else to warm him—his hunger for revenge. He'd had plenty of time to devise ingenious methods of torturing Kitiara.

  Suddenly the oak door shuddered beneath a great blow and crashed open. "Janusz!"

  The mage leaped up. His mortar and pestle tipped, rolled, and dropped with a clatter, spilling half-ground herbs over the table and floor. His shock quickly passed. The Valdane often thundered into a room like a god of war. Janusz tried to pull together a semblance of dignity before the tall man who came to a halt before him. "By the god Morgion, Valdane," the mage said laconically, "what demon keeps you warm?"

  The leader still dressed as he had in the warmest months back in Kern—black hose, white gathered shirt of watered silk, sleeveless purple doublet with gold braid, purple cape, black steel-tipped boots with steel rivets in the soles. The fashionable outfit, Janusz knew, had played well with the ladies back in Kern. Today, however, the Valdane's eyes were bloodshot against the carrot-orange of his lashes, brows, and hair. His complexion was nearly bloodless; the sun-enhanced freckles that had given him such a
ludicrously boyish cast in Kern had faded in the long nights of the Icereach. His eyes, while still blue in the brightest light of what passed for spring here, now tended more toward gray.

  "Hatred keeps me warm, mage," the Valdane replied. "That, and my plans for my future."

  The Valdane, who never seemed to be cold, also seemed never to sleep. Often late at night, as Janusz pored over his spellbooks and replenished his spell components, he heard the leader's metal-soled tread in the ice-girded hallway outside the mage's quarters.

  The mage uprighted the mortar, swept spilled powder into his hand, and returned it to the bowl. "You sought me for a reason, Valdane? Or merely to chat?" he asked mildly.

  A flutter of the man's eyelashes suggested the ruler wasn't fooled by Janusz's nonchalance. "When will you bring Kitiara here?" he demanded.

  The mage sighed. "I've told you that. As soon as the ettin can lure her to the top of the mountain."

  "You can see her by scrying. Use your accursed jewel to bring her here now."

  "She must be near the other ice jewel for the teleportation to work," said the mage. "Even then it is dangerous. How often must I explain this?"

  "And if the ettin fails?"

  "He won't."

  "Kitiara has the morals of an alley cat. You say she's picked up another lover? What if this new lover and the old one together are able to slay the ettin?"

  Janusz didn't lower his gaze. "I have faith in the ettin."

  "I believe you are losing control, mage."

  Janusz felt blood rush to his face. "My powers are considerable, Valdane, but they, like all magical powers, have their limits." He spat out each word. "Spells weaken me physically, as with all mages. And also as with all mages, I lose a spell from my mind when I use it, and I must study it again. That takes me late into each night." He gestured toward a shelf of parchment-leaved books with deep blue leather covers. "You ordered that I transport hundreds of ettins and minotaurs to the Icereach—which, of course, required me also to create living quarters for them. I must maintain and enlarge this warren, provide what little heat I can spare to keep it warm, and do my best to control the ettins, minotaurs, and thanoi."