Michael A. Stackpole

by A Hero Born

  On he raced, acting in full accord with what I had commanded. His long strides carried us the length of the outer-courtyard, scattering laggard Black Shadows. 1 laughed defiantly at them, then my laughter died in my throat.

  The horse’s speed increased.

  The distance to the edge of the plateau shrunk.

  I pulled back on his mane. “Whoa, stop!”

  Neighing defiantly, my mount left me no doubt as to who was the master in our relationship. At once magnificent and terrifying, the Emerald Horse galloped off the edge of the plateau and carried me away with him into the night.

  I

  realized we were actually flying when I no longer heard hoofbeats. The Emerald Horse kept galloping, but with each motion we rose higher and higher, as if he was running on air. I clung to his back and gently tried to steer him with pressure from my knees. He responded, and we slowly turned back around in a lazy spiral that took us up above First Stop Mansion.

  The fireball that had killed Roarke had started the whole south wing burning. In its light I could see long shadows cast by Bfiarasfiadi warriors gathered around the fountain, and 1 took heart that I could see damned few of them. Another fire had started burning in the north tower, and scattered around it as if they were embers were the flaming Bfiarasfiadi bodies Nagrendra’s magick had destroyed.

  His loss—while no more tragic than Aleix’s or Xoayya’s deaths—was a great blow to our mission.

  With Taci being our only remaining magick user, and she only being able to bring one other person with her to Castel Payne, we stood little or no chance of even getting to see Fialchar. Given that she is locked away in the Gorecrag stronghold, there is no way we can even contemplate trying to reach Castel Payne until dawn.

  Then it occurred to me where 1 truly was. I squeezed my knees together and gently tugged back on the Emerald Horse’s mane. “Up there, boy, take me to Castel Payne.”

  The horse’s nostrils flared, then his front hooves reached forward as if we were climbing a hill. Up we went on a steep angle. The Emerald Horse’s hooves sparked off the very summit of Gorecrag, then he leaped up into the void, and we sailed up to the castle floating in the air.

  As he carried me toward it, 1 almost ordered him to turn away. It was completely stupid for me to try to face Fialchar alone. I had always counted on being part of the group that visited him, but 1 always saw Kit or Roarke taking the bit in his mouth and dealing with Lord Disaster.

  “But they’re not here, so that’s no longer an option.” The idea of facing Fialchar terrified me, but less so than the idea of the Black Shadows resurrecting their dead. If the stories of my father and Fialchar having reached a truce to let my father destroy the Bharashadi were true— and I believed they were—then approaching him to continue that alliance of convenience was certainly the way to enlist his aid in stopping Packkiller.

  We landed inside the ruins of the siege wall, and I slid from the Emerald Horse’s back before the jeweled castle. My legs nearly collapsed when they touched the ground, and the evil I had sensed earlier pummeled me. I felt nauseous, but 1 refused to vomit. I leaned against the Emerald Horse as 1 steadied myself, then patted him affectionately on the neck. “Wait for me, please.”

  The horse tossed his head once, then locked himself into a statue that was the very picture of equine pride and arrogance. Despite where I was, i had to laugh, in the broad facet that made up his shoulder 1 saw my reflection. I flaked off some of the dried blood from where my face mask.had been ripped away earlier, then homed my sword in its scabbard and mounted the steps to Fialchar’s lair.

  I had no idea what to expect. Though many bards loved to sing of the time when Jhesti the Lost Prince fulfilled his vow to pluck a hair from Lord Disaster’s beard, they never described Castel Payne beyond the basics. Yes, they told how it floated in the air and sparkled like a jewel, but everyone knew that. Somehow I think that even if they made something up about the interior, they could not make it as horrid as I found it.

  The castle itself reminded me in many ways of the Imperial Palace. The two buildings had been laid out with utterly different floor plans, but both showed the incredibly high degree of craftsmanship only available to those who could afford to hire the best. In many ways Castel Payne exceeded the palace in beauty because it had been fitted together from massive crystalline blocks, and light flashed from flaws in the stones. Those flaws created pictures locked away and only available to a viewer standing at one place at one time.

  On the other hand, the nature of those pictures were what made Castel Payne obscene. Walking through the first corridor, I saw thousands of faces shrieking in terror. The jewels revealed their hearts to be graphic scenes of torture and abominations and crimes I could not have begun to imagine. What made them even worse was that I knew in my heart that each scene 1 saw was not just the depraved imagining of some lunatic artist, but a faithful representation of something that had actually happened.

  1 reached my first intersection and realized 1 hadn’t a clue as to where to go or how to find Fialchar. I started across the intersection to continue in the first corridor and immediately felt a great sense of relief. I knew, then, that given the way my flesh crawled in this place, I had made the wrong choice. I turned and walked deeper into the castle despite a voice in the back of my mind screaming that I was a fool.

  I shook my head. 1/ the quest was supposed to be easy, they would not have given it to someone who is supposed to be a hero.

  The Grand Hallway into which 1 stepped had no equal in anything I had seen in the Imperial Palace. The arches above me soared so high that the light sparking from the jewel’s flaws appeared to be stars. The hallway’s far end seemed a day’s journey away, yet the sidewalls pressed me uncomfortably closely. 1 could not reach out and touch them, but they still felt as if they were inching together to crush me between them.

  As I walked forward—with each step sublimating the desire to run screaming from this place—I decided this place had to be Fialchar’s monument to himself. Throughout I saw trophies so grotesque they could have made a vulture vomit. One statue, for example, showed a naked Aelven lass caught running happily through a field. The artistry necessary to capture the love of life in her eyes had no equal to my knowledge. The statue displayed her virginal innocence, and I felt the same tightening in my chest that 1 remembered from when 1 learned Marija had gone out with Nob’s grandson.

  The statue would have been perfection itself except for the artist’s choice of medium. He had rendered the work in meat—a fact hidden from view except when I came close enough to scare away the flies blanketing it. The pungently sour stench of rotting flesh, on the other hand, was unmistakable and inescapable.

  Even more chilling were the huge, single block carvings of people set in the walls between the pillars. They had been carved from unnaturally large chunks of a milky, translucent stone. 1 thought at first it was opal, thereby to mock the Ward Walls. 1 realized that idea came because bleeding up from beneath the stony flesh of the carven figures I saw colors reflective of their skin, hair, and clothing. The statues reached out into the air with hands outstretched as if pleading with me to free them. One looked as if caught in mid-leap, and i could have sworn another shifted position as 1 approached it.

  I knew distractions would make it harder for me to force myself onward. I focused on the darkened doorway at the far end of the hall and marched on toward it. As I drew closer it became more and more difficult to move. I felt as if I were caught in a blizzard, fighting both thigh-high snowdrifts and a hammering head wind. 1 gritted my teeth and pushed on, determined that I would not fail after having come so far.

  Finally, in the arched doorway, the pressure against me stopped, i felt a moment’s respite in the oppressive sensation of dread and even experienced some elation at having come so far. Then, suddenly, the overwhelming evil hit me again. I do not believe it returned with any more potency than before, but in contrast to my fleeting moment of happiness, it threaten
ed to suck me down into oblivion.

  I reached out and touched the jeweled wall. From its cool solidity I drew strength and straightened up. 1 have come too far to be sent running now. I let my anger power me. 1 adjusted my breastplate and prepared to draw my sword.

  I stepped into Fialchar’s inner sanctum.

  A thin patina of dust covered everything in the dimly lit room. Double rows of pillars held up a circular gallery. All around the walls of the main floor and the gallery I saw shelves with an incredible number of tomes on them. Some, in sets with like bindings, stood at attention and occupied whole shelves, while other, older books, leaned across gaps onto their neighbors. Some outsize volumes lay flat on a shelf with smaller books piled on top until the shelf itself began to bow under the weight.

  Between the pillars i saw a number of small tables with all the things I would have expected to see in the libraries of the finest Imperial households. To my left I saw a chess game very near the end. Beyond it a set of crystal goblets and decanters both showed signs of the wine they had once contained having evaporated, caking them with brown residue. On the right I saw a sideboard with what, beneath the mold, might have been a round of cheese and a loaf of bread. Fuzzy, desiccated grapes sat on another tray that might have been silver had the tarnish been scrubbed away. Beyond that, books lay open on other desks, and a quill pen lay on a half-filled page.

  All of these things I saw, but they dwindled to insignificance in comparison with the central feature of the domed room. A massive crystal ball, polished to perfection, hung suspended by invisible forces barely a foot above floor level. Directly beneath it I saw a hole in the floor that I had no doubt extended all the way through to the open air below. Surrounding it a hollow golden disc rested on eight gold pillars four feet tall. The pillars clutched the floor with dragon’s talons, and arcane symbols twisted through a bizarre dance on the disc itself.

  In the crystal globe I saw shifting scenes of Chaos. Rainbow cyclones whirled across the landscape, leaving disruption and altered terrain in their wake. Somewhere a black lake bubbled and burned, yet I saw huge stone ships sailing through it with impunity. Strange creatures, the like of which I had never heard of, stalked through jungles, and somewhere else two tribes of Chademons battled in the middle of a raging lightning storm.

  Beyond it, staring into it, Fialchar leaned on the golden disc. I could see the hunch of his shoulders and top of his head outside the sphere’s horizon. The sleeves of his robe hid his hands, but I took the twitching cloth to be a sign of his concentration on the sphere’s visions. That was why he paid me no attention, and probably why I had gotten that far.

  1 swallowed my heart back down from my throat and clasped my hands behind my back. In my deepest voice I broke the silence. “I am Lachlan, son of Cardew. 1 am come on a mission for his Imperial Majesty, Thetys V. He has charged me with the duty of . .”

  Fialchar looked up, his black-emptiness stare skewering my brain, la a second I felt fear, then incredible agony, as if I had been torn into a million million pieces. Hellfire cauterized each of the shreds, then something else jammed us back together again. I felt myself falling, then landed on a strangely soft, squishy stone.

  I found myself in a small room completely constructed out of the milky stone i had seen in the Grand Hallway. 1 pushed down with my right hand and found the stone gave beneath the pressure. It resisted me somewhat, but flowed away from my fingers as if it were some sort of molten pillow. It did not quite feel like living flesh, except in that it was warm, but came close enough to make me uncomfortable.

  All but instantly I realized I had been trapped inside one of the blocks in the walls of the Grand Hallway. I shifted my shoulders to ease the residual aches of having been banished to this prison. “If that is how much it hurts to be teleported, no wonder Fialchar was so rude at the ball.”

  I laughed at my own joke and took a little pleasure in hearing it echoed mutely by the prison walls. I looked toward the front of the little box and saw a clear view of the Grand Hallway. Scrambling to my feet, and steadying myself against the shifting of the floor, I walked forward. 1 reached out with my right hand and, even though I saw nothing, I could feel the same sort of resistance that I got with the walls or floor.

  Having seen, from the outside, the inability of various people to break through the wall, I drew my sword. I pressed the edge against the transparent panel and tried to shave away a thin layer. The blade skittered off the surface with no damage to it or the wall.

  Shifting the weapon around, I tried to stab it into the clear panel. It met resistance, and the edge appeared not to cut the invisible barrier. I felt the wall pushing back against me and realized that 1 would be unable to maintain my pressure on it for very long. Dropping to one knee, I tilted the sword down and jammed the pommel into the floor. Trapping the blade between the floor and the wall, I let my prison push my sword against the clear wall.

  Uncertain what to expect, but rather pleased with my effort, I tucked myself back in the corner of my prison. If the pressure proved too much, I knew it was possible my sword would shatter and spray the small room with metal fragments. Drawing myself up into a ball, 1 kept my right hand across the top of my knees and hunkered down so my armor protected my face.

  Looking out between my thumb and forefinger, I could see no real change in my sword’s position, but I did notice that the Grand Hallway seemed to be lightening. As sunlight poured down its length, 1 saw shadows shift faster than they should have. It occurred to me that Fialchar’s prisons probably operated as slow zones, preserving the lives of his captives.

  This did nothing to make me feel better, especially when I remembered some of the torture scenes immortalized in the castle’s building blocks. Still, Fialchar had imprisoned me when he could have killed me, which meant he would be dealing with me eventually. Absent any means of escape, all I could do was wait.

  Wait, as Roarke was waiting. The image of my friend being consumed by a fireball slammed into me. Part of me wondered if his death had been any easier than that of Nagrendra or Xoayya. I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like to be pulverized as the top of the tower contracted so violently. With any luck, or if the gods had any mercy, they all died so quickly they had no idea what was happening.

  It struck me that could have been the case with Nagrendra and Roarke, but for Xoayya the situation had to be different Had a vision of her future come to her a second or two before the stones ground her bones and flesh into paste? Or had she seen nothing and realized, as the red-gold tendrils snaked their way around the tower, that she had no future at all?

  I snorted angrily, remembering all the times she told me that whatever happened to her was fate, fate for which I was not responsible. With a laugh and a comment she had absolved me of any complicity in her death, but that was easy to do. She was dead, and 1 survived. if not for me, she never would have been in a position to be killed the way she was. It might have been her destiny to die in Chaos, but I was left certain that she didn’t have to die.

  I wondered how things would have been different if Geoff had gone to Herakopolis, or if even Dalt had made the trip. Would they have let Xoayya come along? Would they have allowed her to be in the tower? How many of my slain companions would still be alive had someone else been making decisions?

  As my thoughts took me further down into a dark spiral, piling up errors and compounding guilt, I realized 1 was finding I had failed in a test that had no right answers. As much as I could imagine my brothers doing different things, some of them with better results, I also had to acknowledge that other errors could have had more dire consequences. My frustration was not with what 1 had done or failed to do, but with my inability to control every little factor in the world. 1 wanted everything to be perfect and go my way, but 1 also knew that was impossible.

  I needed to escape that black cloud of self-recrimination, so I forced myself to think about something else. As I had long ago learned to do, I cleared my mind and vi
sualized a chessboard. 1 arranged the pieces in their proper places. 1 remembered Geoff’s demand that I at least look at the board when 1 played him, and that brought a smile to my face. I slowly started to work my way through that last game with my brother, correcting his mistakes to make it last longer.

  1 found concentrating difficult and thought it might have been some enchantment placed on the prisons to prevent magickers from spelling their way out again. I closed my eyes, forced myself to focus, and even recited the rhyme that had saved me from Fialchar at the ball, but it had no effect. Then I realized that what was giving me trouble was that the last game I had with Nob kept bleeding over into the game with Geoff.

  As I let those two games meld together 1 found myself returning to a board configuration I knew I had never played to, but I had seen before. I shook my head as I remembered where I had seen it. In Lord Disaster’s library! It’s a wonder you have gotten this far, Locke.

  That game, I decided, was boring. The Imperial player, who, according to the position of the movestone had the next move, would win. All he had to do was advance his Empress two squares forward and he had Fialchar in checkmate. 1 felt fairly certain the game that had gotten the board to that point had been spectacular, but now the game only awaited the coup de grace to finish it. Were I playing Chaos, I would have resigned.

  A sudden blast of heat from the front of my prison brought my head up and opened my eyes. A blue glow suffused with red lightning oozed over the transparent panel. The energy in it crackled, and I felt a tingle run through me. The square panel began to dissolve as if being nibbled away at all edges. Abruptly it shrank to a circle, a red-gold sheen coated it, then compressed it into a pinpoint sphere which vanished in a burst of white light.

  I blinked my eyes in the aftermath of the flash and heard my sword clatter to the ground. I saw someone standing there in half profile, then rubbed at my eyes. “Roarke? You’re dead!”