“Lord,” the Seer said, before the squirrel could respond, “I am the Seer. I know you, no matter what form you might take or what creature you might speak through. You know that.”
The squirrel blinked, then turned and fled; it was a crow on a nearby branch that squawked, “Fine, then. Have it as you please. You still shouldn’t be here.”
“It is you who should not be here, Lord. We are doing our duty, weighing your deeds, and it is not your place to interfere.”
The crow fluffed its wings and shook its head, and then a second crow spoke. “You’re wandering in wild country. You might be killed—and if you die, then my own magic is lessened.”
“If that is your concern, Lord, then you need merely see to it that we do not die. You are the Wizard Lord; surely, you have the power to see us safely to Stoneslope.”
Another squirrel answered, “But I don’t want you to go to Stone-slope. It’s not safe there, either.”
“Nonetheless, we must go.”
“You won’t like it,” the second crow warned.
“That may be.”
“The ler here don’t like you.”
“We have done nothing to harm them. We have not seized control of their creatures as you have. We wish only to pass quickly through their realm.”
The remaining leaves above their heads rustled at that; a murmur ran through the forest, and several birds and chipmunks stirred from their staring. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees.
Nothing spoke.
The sky began to darken; Breaker looked up through the trees at gathering clouds. “I think we had best move on,” he said. His hand slid down to the pouch that held his talisman, reassuring him that it was securely in place.
The Seer glanced at him, then turned her attention back to the two crows.
“I think we should go now,” Breaker said, as the leaves stirred anew. “There’s . . . the weather is strange. As if a storm were coming, even though it’s daylight.” As he spoke he noticed that the woodland’s inhabitants, the birds and lizards and squirrels, were starting to slip away, taking cover wherever they could.
“He may . . .” the Scholar began.
Then there was a great fluttering of wings, a scampering of claws; Swordsman and Scholar both ducked as birds flew close overhead. The congregation of wildlife scattered in all directions, and wind whipped at the upper branches.
“He’s gone,” the Seer said, turning. Then she paused. “Mostly, at least . . .”
“We need to go,” Breaker bellowed at her over the rising gale. “We need to go now!”
“He won’t harm us,” the Seer said. “He wouldn’t dare . . .”
“But the ler might!”
“He won’t let . . .” Then she stopped in midsentence, looking around, as tree limbs began to creak.
Breaker grabbed her arm and tugged. “Come on!” he shouted. Shouting had suddenly become a necessity if one wished to be heard.
Slowly, as if confused, the Seer came, the Scholar close behind, and the three of them trudged on toward Stoneslope. They had taken no more than a dozen steps when the storm broke, and cold rain pelted at them from a sky that had been blue and white just a few moments before.
Breaker staggered in astonishment as the first drops struck his back. He had felt rain before, when he slipped out of the house late at night, but now it was day. It did not rain in the daytime in Barokan.
But that was because the Wizard Lord, who controlled the weather, did not allow it.
And obviously, right now the Wizard Lord was not playing by the established rules. After his initial shock, Breaker pressed on. Daylight rain or no, they had to reach Stoneslope.
The rain was heavy and soaking, but they ignored it as they half-walked, half-ran through the woods, in the direction of Stoneslope. The Seer was no longer pointing out the old guide’s trail, but Breaker really didn’t think it mattered anymore. The local ler knew they were there, certainly, and he could only hope that there was no local equivalent of the Mad Oak on the path they were taking—and such a menace could well have arisen in a formerly harmless spot in the five years since the path was abandoned, in any case, so the fact that they might have left the old path might not even matter.
Breaker prayed silently to the ler, telling them he was only doing what was required of him, that he was Chosen and doing his duty, and hoped that would be enough to protect him as he charged ahead through leaves and brush.
But then the Seer pulled at his arm, redirecting him. Breaker was unsure whether she was still following the old route or simply aiming them more directly toward Stoneslope, but he did his best to obey her and follow her lead.
The rain quickly became so heavy that they could see only a few feet, heavier than Breaker had ever seen even in the darkest spring night, heavier than he had known was possible, but that was not a real problem; the Seer was following something other than ordinary vision, and Breaker and the Scholar were following her.
They hurried on through the wilderness for hours, slipping on dead leaves or uneven stones, branches slapping at them, the rain beating down and the wind roaring, but there were no more talking animals, no more blatant manifestations of magic other than the unnatural weather. Breaker could not be sure, given the torrents soaking him, but he thought the hostile feel of their surroundings had lessened, despite the storm—perhaps the local ler had heard their conversation with the Wizard Lord and decided to tolerate them, as the less arrogant of the intruding factions.
And then at last they emerged from the forest into . . . not fields, as Breaker had expected, but younger forest. The great old trees were absent, but hundreds of saplings had sprung up on every side.
And the ler changed, from the vague inhuman hostility of the wilderness to screaming terror and agony. Breaker had never before experienced anything even remotely like it; he bent double at the initial shock as his shin brushed past an overgrown boundary stone, then fell to his knees, clapping his hands to his ears.
It did no good; the screams were not audible, but spiritual.
“Oh, my soul!” he gasped. “What is it? What happened here?”
“I don’t know,” the Seer said, and Breaker saw that she had remained on her feet, but was staggering. Lore had reacted in a more logical fashion—he had stepped back across the boundary, back out into the wilderness.
“We have to go on,” the Seer said, her gaze fixed on something ahead that Breaker could not see.
“Yes,” Breaker agreed. “In a moment.” He tried to straighten up, and on his second try regained his feet. He closed his right hand on the hilt of his sword, and jammed his left into the pouch that held his silver talisman and closed his fingers around the sharp-edged shape.
That helped; the psychic battering of the town’s ler weakened, as if a curtain had dropped around him.
Behind him the Scholar took a deep breath, and advanced again across the boundary. Together, the three of them pressed on, across what might once have been tilled fields but were now a tangle of shrubs and brambles.
And as if their persistence had broken the Wizard Lord’s resolve the rain slackened at last, and ahead of them Breaker could see looming black shapes, the walls and roofs of the village of Stoneslope.
The structures did indeed look black; even when the rain subsided to a faint drizzle and the clouds thinned from black to gray, even as he stumbled nearer, Breaker still saw only vague black shapes.
And then at last he was close enough to see clearly in the dim light of the overcast afternoon, and he saw that the buildings really were black—or at least, what remained of them was blackened with soot and smoke. Shadows flitted among them—apparently the local ler had taken on some of the characteristics of smoke, and retained them.
Breaker staggered to a stop, and stared at the charred ruins. Not a single structure was intact, not a single roof whole; walls were broken, doorways shattered, and the greasy black smoke stains covered everything.
“What ha
ppened?” he asked again.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” the Seer said, slogging ahead through the flooded remains of what had once evidently been someone’s garden.
“Is anyone here?” the Scholar shouted, in a passable imitation of the Galbek dialect.
“Hello!” Breaker boomed, cupping his hands to his mouth. “Can anyone hear me?”
“There’s no one alive,” the Seer said, pushing aside the bit of charcoal that still hung from one bent hinge in the doorway to the nearest house. “No one human, anyway. Not for miles. Just the three of us, and one of the Wizard Lord’s creatures, watching us.”
“But the village . . .” Breaker looked around, at the overgrown fields and the burned-out remains of the town. It appeared to have been almost as big as Mad Oak, covering the entire hillside for which it was named and a fair bit of the neighboring valley; that meant it had been home to dozens, or hundreds, of people, perhaps as many as half a thousand. “Where did they all go?”
“Nowhere,” the Scholar said, stooping and pushing aside a charred beam. He held up half a skull. “They’re all still here. That’s what you feel suffering. Those screaming ler are the souls of the dead.”
“All of them? They can’t be!” He looked around, and was horrified to see lumps that looked very much like more half-rotted bones scattered and half-buried here and there.
“I wish you were right,” the Seer said from inside the ruin. “This is what I saw, though. This is where I felt those deaths.”
“But . . . you don’t mean the Wizard Lord did this, do you? He can’t have! It must have been rogue wizards—and then he killed them . . .”
“Swordsman,” the Scholar said gently, “rogue wizards are the one thing we know he did not kill here.”
Breaker stared at the Scholar, trying to absorb this. He knew it was true if what the Seer and Scholar had told him was true, but how could he really be sure? All he had was their word; the whole story of the Scholar only remembering the truth seemed so convenient, like something out of an old story . . .
But then, he was living in the realm of stories, of heroes and villains—he was the Swordsman, one of the Chosen. He was a hero—and someone here was unquestionably a villain.
But it didn’t have to be the Wizard Lord; what if it was the Seer? The Scholar didn’t even need to be in on the plot; perhaps he didn’t remember the rogue wizard explanation because she had never told it to him, not because it was a lie.
Or wait—it could even be an honest mistake. Maybe she thought she had told him, but she never had; perhaps she had told someone else and confused that unknown listener with the Scholar. She wasn’t a young woman, and Breaker knew that older people sometimes had trouble remembering things accurately. Maybe there was no villain.
But there was a destroyed village strewn with human skulls, ler that reeked of horrors they had experienced, and the Wizard Lord had tried to prevent them from coming here.
Or something had; did he really know it was the Wizard Lord who had spoken through the squirrels and crows? He glanced back at the rain-blackened forest.
“We need to be sure,” he said. “You’re telling me that the Wizard Lord slaughtered an entire village, and that would mean he’s become a new Dark Lord. If he has, I have to kill him. I want to be absolutely certain of the truth before I kill anyone.”
“Of course,” the Scholar agreed. “And it may even be that he had a legitimate reason to do this—though it’s hard to imagine what it might be—but you can’t seriously doubt that something very wrong happened here, and that the Wizard Lord was involved.”
“I can tell that much, yes,” Breaker admitted. He could feel the souls of the dead—and now that he had been told, he could not deny that that was what he sensed—shrieking in lingering pain and fear, and he could feel it spike in intensity when the Wizard Lord was mentioned.
And beneath the fear and pain, he could feel hatred, and a desperate need for something—though he was not entirely sure yet what it might be. To tell him something? For him to understand something, or do something?
He could not be sure.
The Seer reappeared in the doorway, holding something in her hand. “It’s very hard to imagine anything that would justify this,” she said. She raised her hand, and Breaker saw that she held another skull—a tiny one.
A baby’s.
“There’s half a cradle in there,” she said, gesturing. “This was in it.” Then she looked up suddenly. “He’s watching us.”
Breaker turned to follow her gaze and saw a crow flying toward them; he had no way of telling whether it was one of the crows they had seen before, but it easily could have been.
The three of them stood in the muddy dooryard, waiting silently, as the bird came to them and landed atop a broken beam.
“Tell us what happened, Lord,” the Seer said. “Did you do this? How did it happen, and why? Tell us what these people did to deserve this. And tell us the truth—Lore won’t remember anything else, and we’ll know if you’ve lied to us.”
The Scholar started to open his mouth, then stopped; Breaker guessed he had been about to explain that he didn’t necessarily forget lies, but thought better of undermining his companion’s argument. Instead he said, “This was your home village, wasn’t it?”
“I was born here,” the crow croaked. It shook itself, then gestured awkwardly with one wing, trying to point. “In that house over there,” it said, indicating a pile of blackened stones at the foot of the hill. “My mother died of me; my father died when I was eight.”
“And you destroyed your childhood home? Slaughtered your friends and neighbors?” the Seer demanded. Breaker could feel the angry ler pressing toward her, urging her to speak.
“I had no friends!” the bird croaked. “They hated me, all of them. I was small and weak and ugly, and I had killed my mother—they hated me. They called me Stinker, and Pigface, and Killer—I didn’t even have a real calling name once my father died, not for years, just insults. They threw mud at me, and chased me through the stubble until my ankles ran with blood, and beat me when they caught me, and I swore by all the ler that when the time came I would return their cruelty tenfold. I ran away to become a wizard when I was fifteen, and never came back—until five years ago, when I honored my childhood vow.”
“This infant never taunted or tormented you,” the Seer said, holding up the tiny skull.
“Her father did!” the crow exclaimed. “Or at any rate, her mother’s husband; I would not be surprised to learn someone else had sired the whore’s brat.”
Breaker’s blood ran cold at that. “Then you know who this was?” the Seer said. “You killed them deliberately?”
“Of course I knew who it was! I sent my spies and watched them for more than a year before I brought my vengeance upon them; I had to plan, to prepare. I knew that people like you, you Chosen, might not approve, might not understand that I needed to do this for the sake of justice, and so I wanted to ensure that the outside world would never know what I did here. I killed the guides, father and daughter and grandson, to cut Stoneslope’s ties to the rest of Barokan, to the decent part of the world, so that I could do as I pleased to the filth that lived here, and I made sure I knew who every soul in the village was, so that I could be certain none escaped my wrath.”
Breaker, already strained by the oppressive ler, went numb with horror as he listened to this speech; he wished he could convince himself that it was merely a nightmare, and certainly the talking crow seemed dreamlike, but his rain-drenched clothes and the mud beneath his feet were much too real to be so conveniently dismissed. He stared silently at the bird.
“And did everyone in Stoneslope deserve to die, then?” the Scholar asked. “Were there none who had taken your side, or even stayed aloof, when you were a child here?”
“None!” the crow squawked. “None, none!”
“You had no family here?” the Seer asked.
“I told you, my parents were
dead!”
“But who took you in after your father’s death? What of the town’s priesthood, and the ler? Didn’t they defend you, as one of their own?”
“Does it matter? They’re all dead, five years dead. And I had sworn, by the ler, that I would take revenge. I had no choice.”
“You hadn’t sworn revenge on everyone, had you?”
“Yes! I had! Those who didn’t torture me allowed it to continue!”
“How . . .” Breaker’s voice came out almost as much a croak as the crow’s; he swallowed, and tried again. “How did you do it?” he asked.
The crow cocked its head. “You don’t want to know,” it said. “I’m the Wizard Lord, master of wind and fire and steel—do you really want the details?”
“I think we would like to know whether you deliberately tormented any of them, or whether you made their deaths as quick and easy as you could,” the Scholar said. “As a matter of record, you understand.”
“I struck them down with a plague first,” the crow replied. “So they could not flee. When all were in their beds and many dying I sent fires to cleanse, and storm winds to whip the flames, then rain to douse the flames and cool the ashes. Then I came myself, not in this crow or any other such puppet, but in my own flesh, with some of my creatures, to make sure the job was done. I chopped the heads off anyone who appeared intact enough that a spark of life might possibly have remained, and then I left them here to rot. I did not taunt or torture anyone; I would not stoop to that level. I was ridding Barokan of a blight, not taking pleasure in anyone’s suffering.”
Breaker thought he could hear a note of satisfaction in these words, even spoken in the crow’s unnatural squawking voice.
For a moment no one replied; then the crow asked, “And will you call me mad or evil now, and seek to slay me?”
“I don’t know,” the Seer said, before the others could speak. “We will need time to consider the matter, and we should confer with the rest of the Chosen. We are three out of eight, less than half the total—it is not our place to make the decision.”
The Wizard Lord Page 18