by Jack Conner
This was of great interest to Baleron, but he still said nothing.
Logran looked at him levelly. “And of course you’re here in Glorifel to fulfill the same function.”
Baleron didn’t deny it. “Can you drive it out of me—Rauglir?”
The sorcerer made a pained face. “I . . . will try, Baleron. But I make no promises. If indeed this Rauglir is inside you, it may well be that you and the demon are . . . entwined.”
Baleron grimaced, then laughed bitterly. “With it and my Doom both, my soul should not be lonely. If only I could just lop off my hand and be done with it! But then, I suppose, my Doom would still be there.” He groaned. “Do your Purging, Logran. Do it now.”
The Archmage shook his head. “It will take me time to prepare. We will begin on the morrow.”
Baleron noticed that Logran would not meet his gaze. The sorcerer’s eyes were wet and troubled. He knows the Purging will kill me, Baleron realized. Or if it does not that it will fail.
Strangely the prospect didn’t bother him. He almost longed for it, for the final answer to his Doom.
That icy feeling throbbed uneasily in his chest, and he smiled grimly. Yes, be afraid. On the morrow you die, my constant companion. You too, Rauglir.
He looked out at the lights of the city. “And my sword?”
The Archmage raised his eyebrows. “Your sword, alas, has been a disappointment.”
“How?”
“Well, as I was saying, I’ve taken tremendous pride in helping to steer our great nation over the years, and I had hoped, with your sword, to be able to steer it from this present brink.”
“How?”
“It knows the Dark One’s will,” said the mage. “It can sense it, interpret it, and it will not defy it. I had hoped to be able to use Rondthril, to tap into it somehow, to be able to divine his will myself and so predict his future actions, or at least be able to prepare a defense against his current ones.”
It was certainly a worthy notion, and Baleron could see why the sorcerer had been so keen to get his hands on the sword.
“But it didn’t work?”
Air hissed out of the sorcerer’s long, aristocratic nose. “Alas, its primitive sentience—if it can be called that, which I begin to doubt—is too rudimentary. It knows the Wolf’s will, can sniff it out like a dog can sniff a smell, but it can’t be made to tell me what it knows, just as a dog couldn’t describe a smell.” His face looked deadly serious in the darkness. In a low voice, he added, “It was my last hope.”
Baleron started to answer, when suddenly horns and alarm bells sounded an alert, starting at the walls and spreading inwards.
“Gods protect us all,” Logran breathed. “Ungier attacks.”
Chapter 6
Baleron felt the blood rush to his face as he watched Ungier’s hordes charge the walls. From here he could see them simply as a great, surging shadow against the darkness. Alarm bells rang throughout the city, and all able-bodied men and women, even the homeless refugees, would be rushing to what arms they could. Even children would lend aid.
Baleron could not sit idly by. Heatedly, he looked to the sorcerer. “Give me the sword,” he demanded. “Give me Rondthril.”
“There is no need. You’re safe here.”
“Yes, but I’m not staying here, am I?”
“Of course you are. You’re no longer a leader of men, Baleron. You’re a prisoner. Your Five Hundred is no more.”
Anger coursed through Baleron. He desperately wanted to join the fight, to lose himself in the violence. Also, he wanted to redeem himself somehow, to smite the wicked armies of Gilgaroth. At that moment, he felt the craving as though it were a physical need. He felt he would die unless he fought.
“I’ll bet my father isn’t staying here,” he said. “I’ll bet they’re bringing a coach for him even now, and if I’m fast I can be on it. I’m a good fighter, Logran. A good leader. They need me.”
“Baleron, I can’t condone this. You’re possessed, tainted, call it what you will—you can’t be trusted with a sword, much less Rondthril. And you certainly can’t be trusted to lead troops.”
Baleron gripped the older man’s arms and looked deeply into his eyes. “Logran,” he said urgently, “I must do this.”
Wind whistled shrilly. Horns and bells echoed throughout the city streets. Logran must have seen the madness and desperation in Baleron, and slowly he began to put it together; Baleron saw it in his eyes and the tightness of his lips.
“You want to find what Jered found,” Logran said at last.
Baleron didn’t look away.
“You want . . . death,” Logran said.
The prince ground his teeth. “I want freedom,” he hissed. “I want out the only way I can. It may damn someone I love, but it was she who told me to do it. If I live, I’ll only spread death and misery. I’m ul Ravast, Logran. I tried to deny it, I tried not to believe it, I even tried to change it. But look at me, look what I’ve become! Let me do this, Logran. You’ve always been a friend to me. Sometimes I thought of you more as a father than my own. Let me do this one last thing, and I will ask you for no more ever again.”
Logran studied him, seeming full of thought.
“You have custody of me,” Baleron pressed. “My life is in your hands. The king cannot gainsay you. It is all up to you, Logran. My friend. Please, don’t let me end my days mewling on the floor under your Purging, burnt to a crisp in an effort to do what we both know’s impossible. Let me end things my way. Give my life back to me. It will not be in my hands long.”
Tears actually clouded the sorcerer’s eyes, and he had to look away. When he spoke, his voice was thick. “Very well. You may have it. You may have your freedom.”
“And the sword! I must have the sword.”
“Have it, then.”
The sorcerer left to retrieve the weapon, and Baleron followed him inside and waited with the guards. They shifted uncomfortably, their eyes looking outside. Obviously they wanted to be away, just as he did, to join their brothers on the wall.
“Soon,” he told them. “I will lead you out myself.” His blood burned hot, eager for battle.
Presently the Archmage reemerged, bearing the resplendent length of the Fanged Blade, which shone brightly, twinkling in the lights of the room. The flames of the fireplace leapt high, crackling, reflecting brilliantly on the unholy steel.
“It certainly is a fine weapon,” Logran said, “but I feel corrupted just holding it.”
“We have always worked well together, it and I,” Baleron told him. “It’s saved my life more than once.”
Still a bit wary, the sorcerer passed the sword to the prince, who grasped it eagerly. As soon as his hand touched the handle, as soon as his fingers closed about it, he felt its darkness, its raging bloodlust . . . its power. It sang a song of death and carnage in his mind.
And, despite himself, his Doom answered.
It happened swiftly. Coldness seeped out from his chest, icy tendrils spreading throughout him.
At the same time, Rondthril began to rouse the spirit of Rauglir, whom Baleron had been managing to suppress, and the demon reared its head and answered the Fanged Blade’s song with a song of its own, a grisly wolf howl.
Logran frowned, seeing sword and master together.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “What is it?” When Baleron didn’t answer, Logran muttered, “But I can see that you’re meant for each other, you and this sword. Don’t lose it, Baleron. Yes, you can do much with it, and no other wielder can do what you can.”
Baleron paid little attention, as he was fighting his own battle. Rauglir grappled with him, and as the seconds wore on, Baleron began to panic. Rauglir struggled mightily, and the power of Rondthril was aiding him, the two dark entities working together, helping each other carry out Gilgaroth’s will, and, bolstered by Baleron’s Doom, they were winning.
An icy tendril tried to force its way into his mind. He blocked it. It shoved. He
strained against it, but it was strong. Baleron shook like a string under tension. Every muscle bulged. His veins stood out with the effort, and sweat beaded his brow.
They were going to overcome him.
Frantically, he tried to drop the sword. His fingers would not obey his call, even though they were on his right hand. Rauglir was seizing control.
“What is it?” he heard Logran ask. The sorcerer, fearful, took a step back.
Baleron felt that icy tendril slam him aside, bursting the door in his mind. He wrestled with it, struggling to force it out, but while he was engaged with his Doom Rauglir slipped through and seized full control of his body.
Baleron tried to scream out a warning. It was too late.
Helplessly, he watched through his own eyes as Rondthril sliced open the neck of the closest guard. Red blood jetted across the room.
Rauglir, wearing Baleron’s body, leapt forward and skewered the sorcerer, this time through the front. The tip of the sword entered the mage’s body from just below the ribcage and angled upwards, ripping through the lungs and tender flesh. It found the heart and drove through it, cleaving it in two.
Logran’s brown eyes went wide, then dimmed, and his body went limp in Rauglir’s embrace. He let out a final shuddering breath and was still.
The Archmage was dead.
The room trembled with his passing, and the wind roared loudly, stirring the scattered papers in the room. The flames in the fireplace leapt higher and turned blue, then green, then red, then black, before returning to normal.
Rauglir dropped the dead sorcerer and whirled about to face the guards, who were upon him in an instant. The demon was not a thing of nature, and neither was Rondthril, and together they moved Baleron’s body in ways he never could have. It leapt and spun and dodged with blinding speed.
The Fanged Blade stabbed, hacked and sliced. It jabbed one guard in the throat, another in the belly, one it gave a slash across the face to distract it while it pierced the side of another, then went back to the one with the ruined face and cut off his head.
When they were all dead, their bodies all bleeding into the carpet, Rauglir howled at the ceiling.
He knelt over the body of the sorcerer. A hand rifled through Logran’s robes and came away with a strange artifact, an elvish source of power, a gift from Elethris to Logran. It resembled a single flower made entirely of light, and it rested in a thin glass tube; Logran had carried it close to his heart.
“So pretty, so fragile,” Rauglir breathed.
He threw the glass on the floor. It shattered.
Snarling, he reached down and snatched the Flower up; it burned his fingers, but he ignored the pain.
“Oh, you’re powerful,” he breathed. “If I eat you . . . yes. Yes, I think—”
He bit off its head. Pain shot all the way through his borrowed body, and he sank to his knees, screaming. He felt the flesh of Baleron’s mouth burn and hiss. He pushed past the agony and forced himself to his feet. He swallowed the Flower’s head, the pain traveling to his belly, and flung the stem into the fire. The flames flared brightly, burning with white light, then died.
Through a grimace of pain he grinned. He knew that that cursed Flower had given Logran the ability to power the magical shields that protected the city, and now it was gone and so was the only sorcerer in Glorifel powerful enough to wield it. Rauglir’s job was complete.
Almost.
Drenched in blood, racked by pain, he carried himself onto the balcony and sniffed the smoky air. Borchstoggish war drums rolled across the land. Doom boom doom.
Below, in the courtyard, a large coach had been brought to the main stairs leading into the palace and was awaiting the king’s arrival. Rauglir knew it would bear Lord Grothgar to the city walls, where he would direct the fighting and mayhap even fight some Borchstogs himself.
Overhead, the sky rippled with strange lights and someone shouted, “The shields! The shields are failing!”
Rauglir looked up at the pretty colors and smiled. It was working! The Borchstogs were attacking right when the shields were failing: Gilgaroth’s will at work. Now Ungier could marshal the entirety of his forces and send them pouring over the walls—dragons and glarumri, as well.
Rauglir wondered if the other sorcerers could stabilize the shields in time. Now that Logran was dead, the energies he focused were removed, and Rauglir found it unlikely that any of the Archmage’s students, or anyone else for that matter, would be powerful enough to raise the shields again—at least, not in time to prevent the city from being sacked utterly—and even if they could, the shields’ strength would be paper-thin with the elvish artifact’s destruction. This night, Rauglir knew, would see the fall of Glorifel, and the doom of Havensrike.
Below, King Grothgar emerged from the palace and strode down to his waiting coach. He looked grim, but didn’t he always?
Rauglir’s smile turned hungry. He ignored the lingering pain of the Flower and quit the terrace. The Flower burned, but it would make him stronger. If he hurried, he could reach the coach in time. Perhaps he could bluff his way past the guards and the king’s skepticism to get close enough to sink Rondthril in Albrech’s hard heart, or perhaps not. Perhaps the guards would cut him down.
He hated to dispose of Baleron in this fashion. He had a more elaborate plan in mind for the prince’s demise, and he’d worked too hard at twisting the young man into near-insanity and complete disgrace to be happy with losing him now before the climax, but his duty was to Gilgaroth and that was that.
The essence of the Flower of Itherin had weakened Rauglir and Baleron’s Doom temporarily; in time Rauglir might absorb its energies and be made stronger, but for the moment he was vulnerable . . . while at the same time the Flower had strengthened Baleron.
The prince shoved that icy tendril back, slamming the door behind it.
As Rauglir walked again through Logran’s suite and passed the gaggle of dead bodies, Baleron’s spirit—watching through his eyes, seeing the torn body of Logran—stirred in anger, and that anger made him even stronger. He gained just enough control of his body in that one instant to release the fingers of his right hand, dropping Rondthril to the floor. That broke the union between the Fanged Blade and the demon. After that, it was easy.
Rauglir screamed, but to no avail. Baleron overwhelmed the demon and shoved him aside, forced his evil spirit down his left arm, down and down and down . . .
There! The demon was confined to the hand.
Baleron sank to his knees, grabbed a sword out of a dead guard‘s stiff grip, and held it high. The spirit of Rauglir squirmed, and angry growls echoed through Baleron’s mind.
“Die, you bastard!” Baleron shouted. “Just die!”
He brought the sword down on his extended left arm and cut the hand off at the wrist, right at the scar. Pain flowered inside him. He screamed. He felt the blood ooze out of him, felt the life drain from him, and he dragged himself over to the fireplace, as blood gushed everywhere; the world heaved and turned and dimmed. Cringing, he stuck his bleeding, spurting stump into the hot coals, held it there a moment, and wrenched out the blackened remains with a gasp.
Darkness came over him. For the first time in weeks, he didn’t dream of wolves chasing him through the blackness.
He awoke among the littered bodies and body parts, groggy and disoriented. He propped himself up and, noting his feet were uncomfortably hot and too close to the fire, dragged himself away from the flames.
He also noticed a burning pain in his mouth and remembered watching helplessly as Rauglir ate the Flower’s head. Ah, well. His flesh would heal. The Flower didn’t pain him now that the demon was gone. He wondered if eating it would do anything to him. To have swallowed such a thing! He’d have to be careful.
He surveyed the carnage, hardly able to believe it, staring at the body of Logran for a long time.
Logran, dead! And by my own hand! The old man really had been like a father to him. Rauglir, I hope you burn.
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How could this have happened? The magical defenses of the city had fallen. Already Ungier would have his necromancers ripping at the failing shields, and soon he’d send his Worms and glarumri and other monsters to ravage the city. Baleron knew the men could not repel them this time.
Glorifel was doomed.
And his father, proud Lord Grothgar, was heading right into the heart of the battle. He would be killed, along with everyone else, or kept alive for torture.
But . . . it did not have to be that way. Perhaps Baleron could undo some of the evil committed in his name.
He had to reach his father. Had to bear him to safety. Even if the city fell, the Enemy could not declare a complete victory if the king still lived. As long as the monarch survived and was free, he could summon the remaining free peoples of Havensrike to him, could marshal a resistance, or barter with the other countries in the fractured Union for aid.
This desperate plan began to form in the prince’s mind, and he seized on it like a drowning man to a soggy bank. No longer did he want to throw himself on the swords and spears of the Borchstogs. No longer did he want to seek a noble death in battle. He wanted—needed—to save the king. No matter how much the king resisted.
As he prepared to depart the room, some instinct made him turn. He narrowed his eyes and swore.
The hand, his wicked left hand, had gone.
A chill ran up his spine, and his eyes darted all about. Rauglir could be anywhere. Even now, creeping up on him from behind . . .
He whirled.
Nothing.
He breathed a sigh of relief. But then he heard a sound, a clattering off to his side, and spun around again. Still nothing. He growled in frustration.
“Why won’t you just die!”
He retrieved Rondthril and sheathed it so that it hung at his waist, then selected a dagger from one of the guards and strapped it about his chest; he might need another weapon should Rondthril betray him again.
Two sorcerers, who must have felt Logran’s death, entered the suite, an urgent look in their eyes. Having spied them through a doorway before they could see him, Baleron pressed himself against the wall next to the door and held his breath. He couldn’t afford to be caught, not now. He was a fugitive.