I couldn’t fight them all at once, so I fled that place, my adversary’s laughter burning in my ears. I slammed the gates shut behind me and braced them as heavily as I could, to slow the pursuit. I opened my eyes to look around the doorless, windowless cell in which I was trapped. I stared at the right angle joins of the walls, floor, and ceiling. I could not escape my own Legion, of course. The Jigsaw Man had subverted enough of my own forces to hale me down from within. So I had to take the initiative.
Acting rather than reacting would be a pleasant change.
Studying the angles that pent me, a desperate plan came to mind. And yet, in its desperation it could solve more than one problem. It could lead me out of the vault, as well as cleanse the Legion of taint, but the cost would be high. I would lose my Tindalan insurance and a significant portion of my Legion.
Still, it would be better than losing my life.
I searched my pockets frantically for a marker of some kind. I found none. I shattered Corvinus’s spirit trap against the stone table. I used a sharp crystalline shard to draw blood from my left hand. With my blood I inscribed a small circle. I used exquisite care, for though the size of the circle did not matter, the smallest flaw would render it useless.
I put my hand in the circle, triggered the curving runes that covered my arms and upper body—runes I had never planned to use—and poured the Tindalan swarm into the circle. I pulled my arm and hand out hastily as they rose before me, a tightly meshed formation of sharp angles, barely visible to the eye. My senses were so clouded by that time that I could perceive hardly more than that, though with the Tindalans that was perhaps more blessing than curse. The Tindalans’s spiritual appearance had never been recommended for the faint of heart.
They spoke to me in one voice and many. “We are freed too early. You still live.”
“I bring a new bargain.”
“Dangerous. What if we choose not to accept?”
“Then I call on what power I have left to remove every angle from this place,” I said flatly. “I will die in any event, but I can choose the manner of my going. In the process I will leave you trapped here for eternity. Once the Legion is gone, what will feed you?”
The swarm paused. “What do you offer?”
“I offer the lives of my rebel Captains, their hosts, and the one who corrupted them. I offer freedom after the task is done.”
“And what do you ask?”
I closed my eyes. “Take me and all of mine from this place. Bring us to the Crossroads at Dulchen Fen.”
They hesitated, conferring, weighing options. The peripheral psychic static from their conference buzzed against the walls of my mind like raging hornets. Then they spoke. “Done. Free us of this circle.”
I broke the circle with my thumb. Howling, they descended on me. They swept me up into their midst and carried me with them as they drove down toward the fastness of my spirit. A tide of wild, voracious power swept me along. In that place the sharp, angular clash of hellish forms hungry for prey took on a solidity like transparent crystal, pieces of their bodies catching the light with the flowing clarity of wet glass. Jagged tongues flicked against needle teeth with a sound reminiscent of crackling ice. Clawed feet rose and fell against the rock with the light, unforgiving patter of frozen rain. They led me on, all purpose and power and appetite. I followed along, hunting amidst my hounds. They took the scouts first, the small impatient ones swarming over the closed gates I had barricaded behind me when I fled. Those scouts were devoured so swiftly that most never had a chance to cry out. It would not be the end of them, I knew; Tindalans digest with a very deliberate lack of speed.
We burst through the gates. The most powerful and the most intelligent rebels fled when I led the Tindalans into the new wilderness of my spirit. We hunted down through the inner courses of my soul, tearing the darkness asunder with the sickly, eldritch light of Tindalan rage. The small ones ran before us until they were caught and consumed. A larger group swept into view. I saw Shadow’s wings stretching up into the darkness. I picked Bane out of the group as well, his silver eyes flaring as he saw my hunt riding down upon them. Bane and Shadow put their backs together, surrounding themselves with the remnants of their hosts. Bane lifted one pale hand in grim salute as I rode the hunt closer.
The Tindalans hardly paused as the swarm swept over my rebel Captains. Nothing remained when we passed.
We found my adversary, still wearing his jigsaw form, in the heart of my fortress. He waited for me. The frozen forces of the loyal Captains and hosts surrounded him. (It almost surprised me to find the White Wolf still frozen, still loyal.) The Tindalans picked their way through the statues with the delicacy of an avalanche and threw themselves on him. The Jigsaw Man fought well, better than I would have guessed, throwing Tindalans back, hurling them to the flagstones of the keep. But each fallen hound rose again, endless, boundless hunger driving them back to the attack. I did not hang back from the battle. I struck past and through the Tindalan storm repeatedly, hamstringing my enemy spiritually, smashing his armor and breaking his weapons as the swarm overran his defenses and took him down.
We paused there. I felt the satisfaction of the swarm, the momentary satisfaction of a hunger that grew with each conquest. I heard another crackling grow as stone figures twisted to life, the power of the Jigsaw Man falling with him. The Tindalans turned to regard me. I returned their regard. I felt Bright Angel stepping up to my right shoulder, Blade stepping to my left, and the White Wolf coming round to stand before me. My remaining Captains marshaled their hosts as the bindings of the adversary dropped away. Those hosts gathered to stand with them, giving the reduced Legion a solid sense of power that gave even the Tindalans pause.
They had a cohesion the rebels lacked. In their rebellion, in their pursuit of individual freedom, the rebels had fragmented enough to be easy meat for the swarm. The unified loyalists presented a different kind of game altogether.
Then the Tindalans swept forward and through us. I felt the curious, exquisitely painful, and entirely wrong sensation of being turned inside out. I opened my eyes, looked up into the sunshine, and heard the wind murmuring around me. In the distance a great cairn, overgrown now with grass, marked the dead of an ancient battle. In a few more centuries, it would be nothing more than a hill, slumping to join the texture of the landscape around it.
I stood in the center of the empty Crossroad at Dulchen Fen, said to be the site of the first battle between Faerie and Men, a place avoided by all. I felt the freedom of the Ways calling to me. Within, the Legion settled into watchful silence. I would have to be careful. I had been considerably weakened by the loss of nearly half my Legion and the insurance of my Tindalan swarm was gone.
And yet I had faced down Fetch and beaten him. I had destroyed the Faerie power that had been poisoning my soul. I had recovered important information. More than the things Corvinus had left for me to find, the fact that he had left them told me that he had been prepared for something to happen to him. And the fact that he had called on me was undoubtedly the reason that someone had it out for me. Not so much because his enemies had known that he had prepared something for me, but because they had been confident that he would do something that involved me. And, of course, Bane indicated that the Jigsaw Man had known something of my future course, strengthening the Faerie tie. If the Jigsaw Man hadn’t lied to Bane, and if Bane hadn’t lied to me.
I called to my remaining Captains, including the White Wolf. I felt a restlessness in them I hadn’t felt before. “Did he try to turn you?” I asked.
“Yes.” Blade looked me in the eye as he answered. The others refused to meet my gaze.
“Did he tell you anything?”
“He said that to save yourself, you would devour us all,” the White Wolf said. “Better to fight for our freedom now and throw our lot in with him, than to be sacrifices to your doomed attempt to survive.”
“You didn’t believe him?”
“You were a better ch
oice,” Bright Angel said softly.
I thought of Sapienta and her animosity toward Corvinus. I winced. I let the contact fall away and sent my Captains back to the fortress of my spirit. What pride could I have for such an accolade? I reminded myself that sorcery is about domination, not love. The reminder left a bad taste in my mouth. I was better than the Jigsaw Man, at least. Wasn’t I?
My thoughts turned again toward Sapienta. I hoped that she had escaped Fetch’s attack, but I feared that she had not. I thought of the bitterness she had held toward her former master, the bitterness of a favored slave, and I winced again.
Understand that I knew slavery of old. I had grown to manhood in the Hellene city-states, in a culture that took slavery for granted. Slaves were property. Who wasted time considering the feelings of slaves? Slavery was a better alternative than death. The natural order of things dictated that the victor should benefit from his victory, and that the vanquished should serve the victor’s purposes.
Why didn’t I feel much like a victor at that moment?
I had fought hard and I had won past battles, as well as this most recent. I had my spoils to show for those efforts. But the bright sheen of victory had been tarnished. I had less confidence in my Legion than I’d had in a long time. I saw weaknesses there I had never seen before. Cracks under the Legion’s façade had been exploited once, nearly killing me. What other vulnerabilities lay hidden in the heart of my forces?
I had not accomplished all that I might have. I did not have Corvinus’s message to go along with the items I had retrieved from his lab. Instead, I had a recovery suit and a rock, and I needed to talk to someone who could tell me something about what I had found. I thought I knew just the person who might be able to make sense out of something as obscure as a heart of stone without the corrupting influence of ambition or greed for Corvinus’s possible research. The time to follow up would be as soon as possible, while the opposition was reeling from what had surely been an unexpected defeat.
If they weren’t reeling, then I was really in trouble.
CHAPTER XVIII
I TOOK my time, though I had things I needed to do. I had thought of Dulchen Fen for a number of reasons. Isolation and lack of inhabitants I ranked as perhaps chief among them. The Fae opposition should count me as dead, though the Whitesnake bounty would still be in effect. I didn’t want to risk that advantage through early exposure and identification. I needed to muddy the waters further and shake the hunters off my trail.
At the same time, there were places in Dulchen Fen that could heal wounds not physical. I knew of a place where perhaps I could recover some of the strength that the Jigsaw Man had ripped from me, a place where I could heal injuries still fresh from the recent struggles and regain my focus.
I roused myself and wandered off the road, detouring around the massive cairn. I climbed up the gentle slope, the long grasses whispering around my legs. I drank the fresh and untainted breath of the trees as I walked. There on the rising slopes of the winding hills, the trees grew thickly. No underbrush rose to choke the clear spaces between the trunks. Only the long grasses danced under the spreading boughs.
Down in the deceptively thick and deep grass of the narrow valleys that ran between the hills, the dead lay sleeping. Human and Fae lay mixed there, as together in death as they had been opposed in life. An unwary traveler, thinking to rest himself on that inviting turf, would find himself quickly mired in a bog of endless depth, sucked down to lie forever in the arms of the dead.
Above, the trees veiled their faces in long streamers of leaves, fleeing the terrible burden of memory. Light faded in the dusky colors of the leaves, and under the canopy of Dulchen Fen’s forest lords even memory faded into the thick rolls of deep green moss that covered the earth.
I walked further into the wood, stooping occasionally to gather seeds fresh from the trees. I needed those seeds for a bargaining chip. They could buy me some aid; buy me some time. And I needed all the time and aid I could get.
By the time I had a handful of seeds packed away in a coat pocket, I came to a small meadow. The grasses there lay in the embrace of the gentle murmuring of the leaves and the wind. As I had walked through the wood, I had caught occasional glimpses of ghostly white flashes. That dimly glimpsed shape could have belonged to a deer, though it stood larger than any deer I had ever seen. It could have been a horse, though it moved soundlessly, like a ghost. Bright glints of light glittered from the length of horn jutting straight out from her head. That pure presence paralleled my course. I smiled, pleased to see her waiting for me. Dulchen Fen had become a place where memories fell away. The keeper of that place could ease the burden of memory without consuming the self. She could treat those wounds that remained when the scars on the flesh faded. All she asked for this service was trust.
I laid my tired body down in that place, alongside a thick trunk bearing the marks of a single ivory horn more precious than silver or gold, and sought sleep.
In that place the darkness of recent memory rose within my soul, clothed in nightmares. As the darkness came upon me, it lost power, swallowed by the deep peace of the forest and the flowing, white strength of the forest’s keeper, impaled and carried away by the keeper’s bright horn. No poison could survive that touch, not even a poison of the spirit. I slept a long and peaceful sleep, untroubled by dreams, cleansed of taint. And when I rose from my slumber, I found the circular impressions of dainty hooves in the grass all around where I had slept. Refreshed as I had not been for some time, my mind relieved of rage and hate and fear and other personal demons, I followed the slope back down and out of the trees, and set my feet upon the crossroads.
I needed information. I already had someone in mind.
Chimereon lived not too far from my place, though farther out from the city and deeper in the wilds. My most significant fear would have been Fetch waiting for me in ambush, but after recent events, I would never have a more favorable opportunity to slip in and out of Chimereon’s abode undetected. I had to keep the Fae off balance, keep them thinking that I slept with the dead, or at least unsure whether I walked free among the living. They had to believe that I still lay safely sealed in my early tomb. I never would have risked Chimereon’s place before the struggle in the cave because it lay too close to my own abode. The Fae would be watching for me there. In the aftermath of my recent encounter, the risk of detection had dropped considerably. And I needed all the information I could get.
I took a slow, methodical approach, following paths through the wild Ways that threaded between towering forest giants wound about with thick, furry vines. The colors brightened, flowers opening petals of crimson and orange and yellow, the greens shading toward emerald. A muttering, chittering, rustling susurrus grew in the closing space between the trees. Faceted eyes sparkled like crystal in the shafts of sunlight, flicking to the cover of shadow as the bright blur of feathered wings swept through the columns of light in predatory arcs.
I eased my pace. If I were to encounter any watchers, it would be on the borders of Chimereon’s territory. Blade moved restlessly within me. I turned my head to stare directly into the slit, considering eyes of a great cat. I touched its spirit lightly, blunting hungry desire. It wrinkled its lips over its long teeth, fanning its whiskers, and chuffed disgust. It turned and slid noiselessly into the brush, a sinuous curl of dappled fur, a moving shadow, and then nothing the eye could see.
That surprised me. I had expected to work harder to deflect its intent. Generally, cats were not so reasonable.
I took my slow, easy time, walking gentle Ways to keep my traces as minimal as possible, and so heard the sibilants of soft conversation before I happened upon the speakers. I eased to a stop, listening. I worked my way forward and listened again, repeating the process until I had a clear idea of the speakers’ location. I worked my way cautiously around the bole of a great tree until I caught sight of a flash of movement, then crouched behind a leafy burst of vine which had the admirable combin
ation of cover and visibility to serve as a hunting blind. I spotted two men quickly. I looked for but didn’t see signs of any others. As I watched the two men, both relaxing against the weathered flank of a boulder, I hoped the vine I had chosen as a screen didn’t possess any propensities to secrete unpleasant toxins.
Both of the men wore robes covered with dark sinuous patterns which blended well in the half-light under the trees. Both carried stubby long arms with wide bores. I couldn’t identify the make from the distance, but weapons like that fit into an unpleasant range of possibilities. I couldn’t see their faces, but knew from the robes that they would have snakelike characteristics: possibly scales, fangs, reptilian pupils, flattened noses, or some other bodymod granted to reflect devotion and status within the cult. Given the darkness of their robes, I pegged them for low-level members of the Whitesnakes. Their presence on a back Way into Chimereon’s abode indicated either a penurious reluctance to pay out on a bounty for prey they might take themselves, or a dedication to my termination above and beyond all reason.
Granted, cults and reason have never gone together.
A small device crouched between them on spidery legs. I could see the light glow of a screen facing them. A sudden chill swept over me. They had a monitor. My precautions in using the Way had paid off, or they were baiting me while a squad of heavies trotted eagerly toward me from some other post.
As I considered the risk of sliding out of there, keeping a low profile and hoping for the best, an itch grew between my shoulder blades. I turned slowly, examining my back trail. Nothing moved in the undergrowth, save the dance of leaves and wind, birds and insects. I froze, glanced casually upward, and spent a long moment listening to my heart thunder in my ears as I returned the interested gaze of a recumbent feline peering down from a broad branch over my head.
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