The Ryel Saga: A Tale of Love and Magic

by Carolyn Kephart

  "I used her reverently, my lord brother," Ryel said. "She lies among the Highest arrayed in robes of gold, looking as if she only slept, and would waken at a word."

  "She will waken. She will." The Red Essern returned to his sea-watch, his profile brooding. Many waves rose and broke upon the castle-walls, perhaps a score. The salt spray wet Michael's face and made his lips twitch, but he chewed them into quiet. "She will return to me. The Master has given His word."

  "Dagar's word is trash," Ryel replied. "She's gone, Michael. Sacrificed to a daimon's whim."

  The Red Essern pressed his bleeding palms to his empty eyes. "Shut up."

  But Ryel persisted. "Was it not enough? Enough that Dagar used you as its instrument and deprived you even of the means to mourn, so that your trapped agony seethes like venom? Enough that you threw away not only your own life to Dagar, but her life as well?"

  Michael pushed away from the window, blinking his blood-ringed eyes. "Shut your mouth for once, bastard." Furiously he pushed away from the window, blinking his blood-ringed eyes, fixing them on Ryel's. "I'll tell you a thing you don't know, gypsy. You recall when my Master had his fun with the Sovrena Diara? That was my idea. I suggested it to Dagar, for His pleasure—and you saw how much He delighted in it."

  Ryel swallowed dryness. "Diara's suffering was because of you? But why? How could you?"

  Michael gritted his teeth in a sneer. "I'd had glimpses of the girl, here and there in the city. Blazing with jewels like an idol, and smiling—always smiling. It was clear to see that she'd never known pain in her life. Once when she was about to enter the temple of Demetropa, she passed by me. Passed so close that I could hear the rustle of her silk, smell her perfume—that rich scent the Dranthene use. This scent."

  Before Ryel could stop him, Michael wrenched Priamnor's carnelian flask from his jacket pocket, flung it down, ground it to fragments beneath his heel. "And I could tell that I offended the air around her, for I was the only unwashed in all that city; and as she looked around to discover what it was that reeked so foul, our eyes met, hers and mine; and she gazed upon me so pityingly that I loathed her from that instant, and sought every way I could thereafter to do her harm."

  Ryel again felt that strange sensation of too many emotions mingling to flatness. "You twisted thing. But I'm done with fighting you."

  "You mean you don't want to see me dead?"

  "I'm past that."

  Michael only laughed at him. "Think of your own precious life, for you've little time left to enjoy it. Follow me. And if you think to escape—"

  "I don't. Lead on."

  Through the castle's ruined halls the red wysard led Ryel, coming at last to a little room illuminated only by a single small window through which the declining sun threw the last of its rays. Rigidly facing the dying light with hollow eyes and yellow grin stood the corpse that Dagar had chosen for its temporary dwelling.

  "As soon as the sun sets, the Master will return," Michael said. "You have not long, Edris' bastard."

  Ryel ignored the insult yet again. "How great your gifts were, brother. How fair a place you might have made this World, had you not been warped from birth by suffering, and then so grossly beguiled."

  Michael kept his eyes on what was left of the light as if eager to see it gone, and made no answer.

  Ryel continued, ever quietly. "I healed your brother Yvain of the same sickness that torments you—but only by taking that sickness upon myself. I understand what you had to endure."

  It seemed that Michael's cruel empty eyes softened, if ever so little. "Yvain," he murmured. But in the next moment he was stone again. "Aren't you everyone's savior, though."

  Ryel ignored the sarcasm. He felt tears rising in his eyes, tears that could have birth at long last and flow free; but he blinked them away. "I learned from that suffering. I know the desperation engendered by unremitting pain."

  "I've hugged that pain, Markulit," Michael said, his voice harsh as rust. "It has made me great."

  Ryel took a step nearer his adversary. "You could have been far greater."

  Michael moved away. "You waste your time, half-blood. And your time's all but done. Look." With abrupt savagery he thrust his fist through the blurred little window, smashing the glass. On the horizon the sun balanced between sea and sky as if upon a razor-fine wire that would sever it like a fruit.

  In an instant Ryel was at Michael's side. "You're cut. Let me—"

  "Keep away, damn you!" Breaking off a long dagger-sliver of the shattered glass, Michael slashed out with it, tearing Ryel across his outstretched palm. The Markulit wysard stared from the bleeding gash to its inflictor, too numb for pain. And in that same insensate interval he realized the chance that was his, and laughed for the joy of it.

  "Steel to steel you wanted," he said. "And you got it. My turn, now."

  He caught Michael's hand in his own, driving the broken glass into his enemy's flesh, clutching wound against wound, blood to blood. In appalled comprehension Michael struggled with all the strength of his body and his Art. But Ryel held fast, willing away his pain as he caught Michael around the shoulders with his other arm, clinching hard.

  "My strength was nothing next to yours, brother. You could have broken me like a reed, once. But not now, and never again."

  Their joined hands slipped and clung in mingled blood, and the long lancet of glass squeezed out of their wet grip and smashed against the stones of the floor. The Red Essern fought with all his force, digging his nails into Ryel's open flesh, cursing and invoking the Art of Elecambron, but Ryel willed away the pain, and intoned through his teeth the same spell that had banished Roskerrek's blood-daimon. And by the spell's end Michael had ceased his struggling, and was still.

  In the last of the light Ryel let go. Slowly Michael lifted his head. He was pale even to the lips, but his eyes were now clear gray, freed of their Overreaching emptiness—and blank with revelation.

  "Ryel." His voice was a broken whisper. "So this was your strength. The greatness of it …"

  "We share that strength, now."

  The red wysard's lips bitterly cramped. "You mean my blood taints yours."

  "Nothing of yours can harm me, my lord brother." And Ryel felt his pulse quicken all the more with the vital force of Lord Aubrel, Builder of Markul, purged of its daimon-poison and made one with his being. With a word of Mastery he closed up Michael's wound and his own, then turned his gaze to the immobile corpse. "Let's end this."

  "Yes. Let's." The Red Essern wiped his gore-smeared hand on his sleeve. In the ebbing light his face glowed with warm new humanity, vivid and wondering. "I've never felt this way before. Never this alive, or this clean." He gave a self-scorning inward laugh. "I dislike thinking myself a fool. But I was nothing else." His gray eyes darted to the upright corpse. "I'll put an end to Dagar myself. I learned the words to destroy him, not long ago—he was stupid enough to tell them to me."

  Ryel was suddenly and urgently aware of the drowning sun, the stirring corpse. "Say them, and be quick."

  The red wysard began the spell, but at his first words the sun slipped under the waves. With a strangled cry he dropped to his knees, then fell to his side unconscious.

  Ryel flung himself next to Michael, seeking a pulse at the wrist, the throat; found nothing. Instantly he began a spell, but never finished it. The words dried up in his throat as another voice, dry and dead, cackled in mockery.

  "Not fast enough, young blood."

  Swaying in the darkness Dagar stood embodied, draped in draggled grave-clothes and cadaverous flesh. "Such a moving scene—the bad brother and the good reconciled at last. But I couldn't have that, young blood. Surely you understand."

  Ryel gripped Michael's wrist, uselessly seeking any trace of pulse, any warmth; and with that death he felt his own Art slip from him, drunk up by the night. "Give him back, grave-robber."

  "Let him lie, and rot," Dagar said. "It's you I want."

  Instantly Ryel said the words that would s
end Michael's rai into the Void and keep his body from corruption, but Dagar only laughed.

  "Say whatever you like, young blood. But you have no power. It's over."

  It can't end like this, Ryel thought, too bitterly thwarted to feel any fear. Not with everything left undone. Not with Michael dead, and Edris lost.

  The air closed in around him, stifling and hot. Ryel choked, striving for breath as Dagar shuffled nearer.

  "Let go of that carrion."

  Ryel pulled Michael closer. "Get away from him!"

  Dagar's withered mummy swayed and toppled, smashing to reeking half-fleshed fragments of dry bone and yellow fang. In that moment Michael stirred in Ryel's arms, opening his eyes—empty black eyes.

  "Well, young blood. Here we are at last," Dagar's voice crooned, issuing from the mouth of the Red Essern. Now the breath was no longer ineffably sweet, but fetid beyond enduring. Ryel tried with all his strength to push away, but in vain.

  "One kiss, young blood," Dagar cooed, drawing the wysard down. "And then we'll kiss many another, you and I—all sorts of white girls and sun-browned boys. Kiss, and bite." His grip—not that of impotent claws now, but of fingers overmasteringly muscled—slid to Ryel's neck. "But first I'll enjoy myself awhile in this tall warrior's body. Feel what you've done to me, beauty."

  Ryel felt it, stiff and vicious against his groin. Out of Michael's mouth Dagar giggled and whined.

  "I'll have you, sweet eyes. All of you. But a kiss, first." His foul mouth drove down upon Ryel's, sucking the last breath from his body.

  But suddenly Dagar jerked away with a rending shriek, arching and clawing, spitting obscene rage as he violently released Ryel and turned around. It was then that the wysard saw the dagger-hilt buried to the hilt between Dagar's shoulder-blades, and a veiled stranger who had materialized seemingly from the roiling air, and who must have dealt the blow.

  Above the concealing folds of a Shrivrani headcloth, eyes hard as iron met Ryel's.

  "I've bought you time, sorcerer. Use it."

  That harsh command slackened Ryel's pain, and lit his memory. It seemed as if the stranger's voice awakened another self, one immeasurably strong. Leaping to his feet, the wysard shouted out more words from the silver book, words that would banish Dagar back to the Void. At each word Dagar writhed and screamed until the black-clad body cramped in a final throe, and was still.

  Ryel stood over the immobile human husk of Michael's being, too spent to do anything more than draw breath. He fixed his eyes upon the dagger embedded in the body's back, then remembered how it got there, and looked round for his savior, lifting his voice as much as he could.

  "Where are you? Who did this?"

  But no answer came, and Ryel had no time to consider the origin of his deliverance. He could feel danger in the walls, swelling and throbbing like a heart about to burst.

  "I won't leave you," he said to Michael. "We'll get out of this together." Gently he drew the weapon from the Red Essern's body. But when the wysard tried to lift his Art-brother to carry him out, he found himself powerless even to stand upright. And he realized, with sickening despair, that he had been deprived of his powers since the sun's disappearance, and had never gotten them back. That Dagar had escaped him and was still free, and that Michael was irrevocably dead, and he himself doomed. As he bowed under the burden of those terrible truths, the silver spell-book slid from an inner pocket of Michael's jacket, hitting the floor with a mocking little chime.

  "This can't be all I was meant for," the wysard whispered as he sank down at Michael's side. "This can't be the last. I wanted to grow old."

  He had very much wanted to live to the age of thirty. He had wanted to look again into the sea-colored eyes of Diara Dranthene. To kiss his mother's hands again, and talk in the dawn with his sister. To urge Jinn to a breathless gallop over the steppes of Risma. To lie in the sun with Priam. To hear Edris call him whelp, brat, fool.

  "It can't be over." But he knew it was. With unsteady fingers he smoothed the dead face's agonized lines, shut the staring lead-gray eyes, untangled the scarlet skeins of hair. As a final gesture he bent down and touched his cheek to Michael's in the warrior's way, feeling its coldness match his own, and then pressed a kiss on the pulseless temple in the Steppes way of men who shared blood. Using up the last of his strength he lay down next to his Art-brother, and with dazed bemusement observed that all around him stones were falling, walls toppling, flames shooting bloodily upward.

  "Over," he murmured a last time, sheltering his face against the dead man's shoulder, closing his smarting eyes against the thickening smoke. "Damn."

  Chapter Seventeen

  "There is life after death."

  He said it aloud, to convince himself further of the truth. The afterlife was very pleasant if a little chilly, and smelled of salt air. Moreover, it had a loud ocean, and at least one other person.

  "Life, he calls it," this individual said, neither distinctly nor cordially. "Easily pleased, ain't you."

  Ryel propped himself on an unsteady elbow. Apparently fires were permitted in the afterlife, for his uncivil companion had built a small one, very smoky. Farther off a great one blazed on a clifftop.

  The wysard remembered, then. He rolled over on his back, shutting his eyes. "Michael."

  "Who's that?" the stranger asked in a voice all croak and gravel.

  "My brother," Ryel replied tightly. "Burning up, there on the crag."

  "Brother?" The stranger gurgled a laugh. "A pretty close one, from what I saw."

  Ryel's memory crawled like revulsed flesh. "What were you doing in the castle?"

  "Looking for somethin' to steal. You and your red-headed friend seem to have gotten there ahead of me."

  Ryel bristled. "We didn't come to rob."

  "Well, I did." The thief turned his attention to a heap of objects at his side. "And I got away with a good haul. A couple of swords, and a whole bag full of drugs and gold and what all. Nice drugs, from the looks of them." He held up an object that glinted whitely in the firelight. "And then there's this here little silver book—"

  Overjoyed and enraged Ryel lunged forward. "That's mine." As swiftly as he might he rounded the fire and grabbed first the book, then his sword, then seized his journeybag's shoulder-strap.

  But the disobliging brigand held on tight to that part of his booty. "You owe me," he growled. "Wasn't it I what dragged you out of a burnin' hell?"

  The wysard in the interval of tug and pull assessed his adversary. It was hard to ascertain his height, for he sat cloaked and crouching in the sand, and impossible to judge his face, veiled as it was in that dirty headcloth. His eyes' color seemed a bloodshot gray-green by the firelight, ringed with livid bruises, and his hands gripped the journeybag like grim death.

  "I don't want nothin' but the drugs," he said.

  Ryel held fast. "You've had far too many already, from the looks of you."

  "You owe me." With a grunted curse the robber wrested the bag from Ryel, and rummaged in its depths. Finding the lacquer case, he broke it open, brutally careless.

  "Now this here looks promisin'," he croaked, holding one of the phials up to the light of the blazing castle.

  "Leave it alone. It's pure essence of celorn."

  But Ryel's urgency only caused the thief to uncork the little bottle at once, and slip it under his veil. The wysard lunged forward to halt the suicide, but the brigand shoved him away even as he drank.

  "You fool, you'll die of that!" Ryel cried.

  "No such luck," the bandit muttered, withdrawing the phial and thrusting it into his shirt. "That was good stuff, sorcerer. I was cravin' it sore."

  "You outright fool," the wysard breathed. "How much did you drink?"

  The stranger coughed thickly. "A drop or two. Enough to kill at least a couple of my demons, this night."

  "Who are you?"

  "Make it worth my while and I'll tell you."

  Furiously the wysard replied. "Didn't you just steal enough
celorn to beggar a Sovran, and stun a hundred men?"

  "It's good for starters," the stranger shrugged. "Got any xantal?"

  "You're out of your mind." The wysard could smell the drug's rankness past the foul breath that issued from behind the veil, and see its effect on those ugly yellow-green eyes, uglier now with the near-invisibility of the pupils. "I don't understand how you're still alive, much less conscious."

  The stranger's ugly eyes fixed blearily on the fire. "I'm tough, magician. Tougher'n I wish I was, lots o' times."

  Ryel hazarded a breathless guess. "Do you know of a man named Guyon Desrenaud?"

  The brigand never blinked, but seemed to deliberate awhile. When he spoke his gargled voice held indifference and scorn. "Huh. Starklander. A drunk and a whore-chaser. Friend of yours, is he?"

  Ryel persisted. "Do you know where he is?"

  "He's dead, that's where he is," the robber answered. "He's been a long time dead."

  The wysard felt the blood ebb out of his heart. "How did he die?"

  The stranger's gum-rimmed eyes assessed Ryel equivocally. "What's it to you, sorcerer?"

  "Why do you call me that?"

  A gurgled laugh in reply. "You couldn't be nothin' else, judgin' by what I saw up there." And he gestured toward the clifftop. "Any nitwit watching you up there could tell that you aren't no stranger to gramarye."

  "Gramarye?"

  "A good ol' Northern term for what you think you're so good at. Magic."

  Ryel had never liked that word. "You're no stranger to gramarye yourself."

  "I've picked up a bit here and there. Nothin' as fancy as yours."

  "Tell me about Desrenaud."

  "Give me a reason, magus."

  "It means much. More than you can know. Tell me."

  The brigand coughed awhile before replying, to Ryel's extreme impatience. "He died poisoned, warlock. This place was the death of him. Don't mourn the fool—he was glad when it came."

  Ryel would not believe it. He persisted. "Lord Guyon once loved a lady of Almancar, I hear. Belphira Deva they called her."