“For example,” he said in an exaggerated tone, “have there been any additional attacks on the library since we left?”
“One,” Chantmer said. “It didn’t get anywhere. I don’t think Jasmeen is still in the palace, and Zartosht has stayed cautious since Memnet’s visit. The library is stronger than it has been since the night of the first big attack. We’ve been hard at work, and the defenses continue to strengthen apace. It would take years to regain what was destroyed, of course, but we have a start.”
“We only need to hold long enough to empty the library,” Markal said. “If the library still stands after the dark wizard is defeated, we’ll return the books and rebuild the defenses.”
“And what about the night market?” Jethro said.
“All quiet since the fire, the massacre,” Chantmer said. “Since the master attacked the runes, the enemy has it well defended, so it’s hard to be sure what is going on there. In any event, no fire salamanders have burst out of the ground.”
Markal remembered the terrible burn through the heart of the Sacred Forest. The work of the fiery monsters. “Not yet, anyway.”
“Not yet,” Chantmer agreed. “When they do, may the Brothers preserve the people of Syrmarria.”
His face darkened, and Markal wondered if he was remembering that terrible struggle in the night market. Jethro had shared a bit of the horrors during the journey from the garden. Seeing the pain on Chantmer’s face softened Markal a little; his companion in the order could be an arrogant fool, but he was not incapable of compassion.
“The enemy is watching the palace gates,” Chantmer said a few minutes later as they climbed the palace hill. “The pair of you are altogether too visible—we’ll need to expend all of our collective power just to get inside.”
Ten minutes later, blood drained, wreathed in shadow on top of shadow, they brought their cart through the palace gates and entered the heart of the enemy’s palace.
Chapter Thirteen
Nathaliey hung in a gibbet on the edge of a wooden pole. A two-hundred-foot gorge yawned directly below the iron cage, with a churning mountain brook at the bottom, and craggy rocks threatening to dash her bones to pieces should she somehow manage to get it open. A soaring snow-crowned peak rose on the opposite side of the gorge.
Three days had passed since arriving at the mountain fortress, and nearly a week since the enemy had captured her at the bluff over the river. After so long without food, and with only a drop of water given her between doses of the poisonous yellow elixir, her stomach felt like a stone, and her tongue was thick, dry, and swollen.
When she slept, she dreamed of wights with dead, sloughing skin. She could see them now even when she was awake, any time she closed her eyes for a few seconds, and so she kept them open as much as possible.
She’d thought at first to study the enemy, making the most of her captivity to learn about the castle and its defenders. But when she looked back to the castle, a slender watchtower blocked the view of all but a narrow strip of the wall walk and a handful of guards armed with heavy crossbows, whose attention always turned skyward. Sometimes, when griffins swooped in too low, additional soldiers took shelter behind the battlements until the creatures and their riders flew off again.
This morning, Nathaliey awakened from an ugly nightmare to find the sun bright in the sky. Her head ached, and the sunlight was like a spike to the forehead. She groaned and closed her eyes, and a vision of a wight appeared.
It was a dead woman, her eyes milky white and her lips rotted away to show a horrible grin. The woman stared, and Nathaliey gave a frightened start, her eyes flying open. She’d been looking at her own face.
Her movement set the gibbet rocking on the edge of the pole, and the creak of metal bars made an eerie noise in the still morning air. The movement sent her stomach churning, and the last thing she wanted was another bout of the dry heaves, so she gripped the bars and remained as motionless as possible until it subsided.
But the rocking didn’t stop, and belatedly she realized that they were hauling her in. Vashti stood on the wall walk behind her, his sleeves pulled back from bony forearms, watching intently as a pair of soldiers hauled the pole around until it was no longer over the gorge. A second dark acolyte—a woman the others called Jasmeen —stood next to Vashti with a clear bottle of the hateful yellow liquid. She had a clay flask in the other.
Vashti snapped his fingers, and a soldier unlocked the cage and dragged Nathaliey out. Her legs buckled, and the soldier held her up. The dark acolytes studied her.
“Is she ready?” Jasmeen asked.
“Not yet,” Vashti said. “One more elixir, I should think. Perhaps two. Then she will change.”
“The master grows impatient. Why is she still resisting?”
“He will have her soul in the end,” Vashti said, “and she’ll be all the stronger for having resisted. I have a treat for you,” he told Nathaliey. “Someday you will pull water from the air, much as what you eat will come from the pain of those who feed your power. As you grow in strength, you will learn to consume their torment and agony.”
“You look starved,” Nathaliey said, her voice dry and scratchy. “If that’s how you stay fed, then neither of you is much of a sorcerer.”
The woman passed the elixir of thrall to her companion, uncorked the larger flask, and held it to Nathaliey’s lips. Nathaliey balked.
“It’s only water,” Jasmeen said. “We can’t have you dying of thirst.”
Nathaliey was still suspicious, but the smell of water was too enticing. She took a tentative sip and tasted nothing amiss. Only clean mountain water. She intended to stop there, knowing that too much on an empty stomach would make her sick, but the woman didn’t pull the flask away, and Nathaliey’s thirst was too great to resist. She kept drinking until it was drained.
Her stomach immediately began to clench, but the doses of elixir had taught her stomach not to reject liquids, and though she shortly felt violently ill, the water didn’t come back up. She was still struggling against the pain in her belly when Vashti grabbed her face and forced the elixir to her lips.
Nathaliey’s struggles had grown weaker with every attempt to force her to drink the bitter viscous liquid, and this time the dark acolyte got most of it in her mouth. She tried to spit it out, but her mouth, tongue, and throat conspired against her and gulped it down as readily as it had the water. She bent over double, now trying to force it up, but her stomach kept its grip on both the water and the elixir, and she didn’t vomit.
Vashti looked smug. “Good, good.”
“I grow tired of waiting,” Jasmeen said.
“Only a question of time. Get her back in the cage.”
They were pushing her into the gibbet when a soldier gave a warning shout from the tower, and the soldiers dropped her and grabbed for their crossbows. An eagle-like scream sounded overhead. Nathaliey looked up to see a griffin fly over the walls, a woman on its back.
The soldier who’d cried the warning got off a shot. The griffin shifted slightly mid-flight, and the bolt zipped harmlessly past its wing. Men were still scrambling for position, turning the crossbow cranequins to arm them, when the griffin and its rider wheeled about and flew directly at the wall. It pulled up short with powerful, wind-churning flaps of its wings, and the rider leaned over and studied them with narrowed eyes.
She was a young woman with dark hair and pale skin and the haughty look of a proud warrior. A silver chain was woven through her hair, with an emerald-green stone that sat on the woman’s brow. Her sword was sheathed, and both hands remained at the reins.
The soldiers were on their knees, furiously working at arming their crossbows, but the two dark acolytes remained in place, lifted their hands, and began chanting an incantation. Nathaliey stood next to them, leaning against the wall where the soldiers had tossed her after abandoning their attempts to force her back into the gibbet. Her stomach was still heaving violently, but nobody was paying her any attention.<
br />
Nathaliey had no love for the griffin riders, not after months of harassment both before and after joining the Blackshields. But at the moment, this rider was the enemy of the dark acolytes. She threw herself at Jasmeen and Vashti as shadows gathered around their hands, ready to be hurled at the griffin rider.
Nathaliey’s hopes were modest—disrupt their sorcery and let the rider escape—but as she crashed into them, they went flailing and struck the battlements overlooking the gorge. Vashti was out of balance, and Nathaliey got her shoulder under him and heaved up in an attempt to flip him over the top and send him to his death.
One of the soldiers, still on his knees next to her, seized Nathaliey’s ankle and dragged her backward. Jasmeen grabbed Vashti’s arm and pulled him away from the precipice.
More bolts snapped out from the small castle and its towers, but the griffin was wheeling away with a cry. The rider cast a final, disdainful look over her shoulder, and then griffin and rider soared down the gorge and out of range.
The dark acolytes and the soldiers threw Nathaliey into the gibbet, slammed it closed, and snapped down the heavy padlock. Moments later, she was dangling over the precipice as the elixir of thrall worked its sorcery.
#
By nightfall, she could see the wights whether her eyes were open or closed. When closed, she seemed to be walking through a wasteland of ruins and dark stinking mists. And the spirits of the dead were everywhere. When her eyes opened, wights crowded the edge of her vision, always there, lurking, until she turned toward them and they vanished.
“An elixir of thrall,” she whispered. “I am becoming the dark wizard’s slave.”
Vashti was right. It was only a question of time. For now, she maintained her will, wavering as it was, but for how much longer? The wights would be everywhere soon, and starvation and thirst and waking nightmares would bring her to her knees. And then the elixir would turn her.
Meanwhile, she was physically stronger because of the water, and began to wonder if she could raise a whisper of magic. She reached through the bars and touched the lock, curious about the strength of its wards. It was icy cold to the touch, which was a bad sign. Deeply ensorcelled. She had one chance, and even if she somehow managed to break the lock, she’d then be forced to shimmy across the pole to the wall walk, get past the guards, escape from the castle, and avoid pursuit, all while half-starved and drained of power.
Meanwhile, as the blue-black of dusk gave way to a star-studded night sky, her sharp ears picked up the sound of horses on the highway outside the castle. Two riders, she thought. They pounded up to the gates, which rose with the creak of chains to admit them. A few minutes later, some larger number left the castle and went riding into the night.
And shortly after that she heard soldiers on the wall walk opposite her gibbet, talking louder than was prudent. She stayed very still in her cage.
“I always said we should’ve built up ’fore we pushed them barbarians too hard,” the first man said. “Now we’re gonna pay for it.”
A second man grunted his response.
“Pasha Kerem—he’s a greedy striver,” the first man continued. “Tried to win favor with the king, and I’ll bet he loses his head for it, assuming he gets out of Estmor alive.”
Now the second man spoke up. “I’d keep that opinion to yourself unless you want to lose your own head. Kerem’s one of the king’s favorites, a cousin or something. He’ll be looking for someone to blame, and you don’t want to be that someone.”
“Kerem’s no Malik. That man was a brute, but he knew how to win his battles. Malik sacked Nasphur and forced Siraf to surrender without a fight. That’s the kind of pasha we need.”
“Malik is dead, though. Kerem is who we got.”
“I heard it, but I don’t believe it,” the first man said stubbornly. “Who could’ve killed Malik in a fair fight? No one I ever seen. Maybe a ravager captain. That one-armed brute fights like a demon, and they said the woman who ran ’em before was even worse.”
These two seemed to have missed a good deal of the story as second and then third hand information reached them in the mountain passes, including the fact that the same paladin who’d killed Pasha Malik had later become captain of the marauders. The soldiers could wander out of earshot at any time, and Nathaliey was growing impatient for useful information.
“The barbarians got themselves a proper army now,” the first man said. He was the talker of the pair, it seemed. “They got Castle Estmor surrounded, and the cellars are flooded. It’s gonna fall.”
“Estmor will be back in our hands soon enough. Twenty thousand men are on the march.”
“Meanwhile, that puts us on the front line, don’t it? I figure that’s why them barbarian scouts was spotted. They ain’t coming up the highway for any other reason than they figure to drive us out. Where’s the king, anyway? Why don’t he come up with his sorcery and put an end to this once and for all?”
“You know the answer to that.”
“So he’s got himself a feud. I say leave off with them wizards until we got the war won. Unless maybe the king don’t want to do the fighting himself.”
“Shut your hole,” the second man growled. “You’ll get us both killed if you keep spouting off.”
“Yeah, sorry.” He sounded more cautious. “Come on, it’s almost end of our watch. I wanna know if they catch those scouts or not. It’s a pair of holy warriors—won’t be easy.”
They moved out of earshot, and Nathaliey leaned back in her cage. The wights had retreated while she was listening, but now their blue light crowded the edge of her vision. It took effort to concentrate on the matter at hand.
She was surprised to hear that Wolfram had mounted a second assault on Castle Estmor after the first, sneak attack had failed. She’d heard rumors of the Eriscoban kingdoms gathering armies, and they must have finally brought forces to the front sufficient to seize the land around Estmor and lay siege. Was Captain Hamid trapped inside? She didn’t think so, as the soldiers would have mentioned it. He’d probably ridden ahead of the advancing enemy and escaped with the bulk of his marauders.
Wolfram must be confident of his position if he’d sent scouts to spy on the enemy’s strength in the mountains. Or maybe, she thought, he was looking for her.
That gave her an idea. Attacking the sorcery-bound lock wouldn’t work, and she didn’t have enough strength to mount a magical assault on the dark acolytes or they’d have never left her hands unbound, but there was one spell she knew she could manage. One she’d perfected through regular practice while accompanying Markal and Wolfram through the mountains. But in her weakened state she needed all of her concentration.
There was no room in the cage to sit and meditate, and so she remained standing. The instant she closed her eyes she came face-to-face with a rotting, leering version of herself. Standing next to her wight were two other ghostly spirits, Stephan and Alyssa, acolytes from the garden. Her eyes flew open, and the wights moved to the edge of her vision.
I am a wizard of the Crimson Path. Visions of sorcery cannot harm me.
She steadied her breathing, closed her eyes, and ignored the apparitions. A trickle of power came to the surface. She spoke the incantation before it drained away.
A seeker appeared in the air above the gibbet. Hovering overhead, it flickered around the edges, a thin tentative thing that would vanish the instant she relaxed control. She had no time to tighten her grip, however; if she didn’t push it away from her quickly, a dark acolyte or a marauder might spot it and figure out what she was up to.
She sent the seeker over the gorge, then above the castle, clinging to a rocky promontory, before she pushed it over the king’s highway and followed it down from the pass. The king’s highway sliced into the hillside, where thousands of tons of rock and debris had been hacked away by an army of slaves.
The seeker soon came upon the riders from the castle, some fifteen cloaked figures. Hamid was at their head, his remaining hand on t
he reins, Soultrup strapped over his shoulder. That answered one question. The rest of the marauders clustered near him, their horses moving at a good pace.
Nathaliey didn’t linger, afraid the sorcery embedded in their cloaks would alert them to her presence, but sent the seeker ahead. There, not a half mile in front of the marauders, she found a pair of riders. She dropped the seeker closer and saw that it was Wolfram and Marissa.
Under other circumstances, Nathaliey would have been pleased to discover the pair; her intention was to let the seeker go visible and hope they would recognize it as her handiwork. A signal, of sorts, that she was still alive, and a plea, hopefully understood, to attempt a rescue. But her former companions were in danger, and that thought left her mind.
Wolfram and Marissa were riding away from the castle, down toward what she supposed was a paladin encampment, but they were moving slowly in the darkness, and Hamid’s marauders would soon overtake them. They must not have realized that their scouting expedition had been detected.
Nathaliey dropped the seeker in front of them and relaxed her control. It flickered with a dim light, suddenly visible on the road as a glowing mass, with a brighter green light in the center like a giant eye. The paladins yanked on their reins to bring their horses to an abrupt halt and stared.
“By the Brothers, don’t stop,” she said. “Ride away from here! Go!”
Suddenly cognizant that she’d spoken aloud and there might be listeners on the wall, she choked off her words and kept her pleas silent. They still had time to escape, but only if they made a quick move.
Nathaliey pushed the seeker up the road a few paces and jiggled it back and forth, trying to draw a visible line behind the paladins to indicate danger to their rear. Then she moved the seeker below them, in the direction they were already traveling, and shot it ahead like a stone from a catapult before coming to a halt.
Speed. Hurry!
Or at least, that’s what she was trying to say. They didn’t seem to understand why she was flailing about with the seeker, but instead started moving again at the same cautious pace. They approached a deep cut in the mountainside, where Toth’s engineers had gouged through solid rock, leaving a twenty-foot-wide, canyon-like opening. It would be a terrible place to be trapped and forced to fight against a superior foe.
The Emerald Crown (The Red Sword Trilogy Book 3) Page 12