The Iron Ring

by Auston Habershaw

  Artus struggled to find the words. “How did you find me?”

  “I followed you, stupid. I was going to leave you alone, but you aren’t so smart.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Artus nodded, gradually realizing what his chat with Hendrieux had done. Reldamar—­he’d told Hendrieux about Reldamar. “Oh gods, Hool! Hendrieux!”

  Hool dropped Ketch’s limp body. “Where?”

  Artus looked around, the world spinning. “I . . . I don’t know. They went somewhere.”

  Hool put her nose to the ground, took a few exploratory sniffs, and shot out of the alley like a racehorse. Trying to keep himself steady, Artus followed after her, slipping and flopping down the gloomy street. He heard her roar from another alley and got to the mouth of the place in time to see Hool seize the other thug by the nose-­guard of his helmet and throw him face-­first into a stone wall.

  The helmet took most of the blow, but it bought Hool the time necessary to snatch a dagger from the thug’s belt. By the time the man had spun back around and drawn his sword, Hool pounced yet again, nimbly knocking aside his blade and knocking him flat on his back. The knife was at his throat, and Hool was growling loud enough to make the cobblestones rattle.

  The big man’s formerly gruff voice was cracking like a boy of Artus’s age. “Great Hann save me! Oh gods, don’t!”

  Hool’s teeth seemed to glow in the dim light. “WHERE ARE THEY!”

  The thug was paralyzed in the gnoll’s gaze. “I dunno! I dunno! We only go by the door!”

  Hool’s eyes blazed. She stood slowly, hoisting the man up against the wall until his feet dangled a full six inches off the ground. “TELL ME NOW!”

  “I don’t know! I swear I don’t know!”

  Hool shook him so hard his head looked likely to snap off. “YOU WILL TELL ME NOW OR I TEAR OFF YOUR HEAD!”

  “Let him go, Hool!” Artus ran to the gnoll’s side and pushed her, but she didn’t budge.

  Hool glared at him. “You will shut up! I am busy now.”

  “What happened to Hendrieux?” Artus asked. The alley was a dead end, save for a single door. That door stood open, but beyond it was simply a brick wall—­a door to nowhere.

  Hool slammed the thug against the wall. Artus heard bones crack. “Filthy magic! Filthy cheater magic! Tell me how it works!”

  “I don’t know!” the man squealed. “They don’t tell us!”

  Hool’s voice was made ragged by the rumble of her growls. “If you know nothing, I will kill you now.”

  “Ple—­” The man didn’t finish his last sentence before Hool’s jaws snapped closed around his neck, crushing it with a spurt of blood. She threw the body on the ground like a pile of rags, where it twitched for a few seconds before falling still.

  Artus threw up in the gutter. When he finished, Hool was sitting on her haunches, looking at him with her glowing copper eyes. “You should not drink poison,” she announced. Blood stained the fur around her lips.

  “What happened?” Artus asked, his stomach still tumbling.

  “Hendroo and an old man went through that magic door. He left this stupid man to fight me, but he was too slow and I killed him.” She looked at the body and then back at Artus. “You were here for that part.”

  Making certain not to look at the dead thug, Artus went over to inspect the door. He was no wizard and knew virtually nothing about sorcery, but part of his still ale-­soaked brain hoped maybe there was some sign of magic writing or some such to show how the door worked. There was none. It was just an old door—­probably a former side or back door to some building. When the building had been renovated or rebuilt, the masons had likely bricked up the door from within, but never bothered removing it entirely. Beyond its architectural oddity, nothing else seemed unusual about it. “I wonder what happened,” Artus mused aloud.

  Hool shrugged. “It is late. Let’s find a barn to sleep in. Tyvian Reldamar will solve this wizard-­puzzle in the morning.”

  Artus pointed to the dead body. “We can’t just leave him here!”

  Hool cocked her head to one side. “I am not hungry.”

  Artus shuddered. “I can’t believe you would eat him.”

  The gnoll prodded the body with her foot. “He is too big to eat myself. Enough meat for three days.”

  “You’re disgusting.” Artus folded his arms over his queasy belly and left the alley.

  Hool followed him a moment or two later. “Do you want a sword?” she asked.

  Artus shook his head. “First you kill them, then you rob them?”

  Hool blinked slowly. “Dead ­people don’t need swords.” She spoke as though speaking to a child.

  “I know that.”

  “You are stubborn and dumb,” Hool said finally, tossing the dead man’s sword back in the alley.

  Artus sighed. “Hey . . . thanks.”

  Hool fixed him with her hard copper eyes and nodded slowly. “We are a pack, no matter what Reldamar says. He is stubborn and dumb, too.”

  A cold rain began to fall, quickly soaking Artus to the bone, so he was shivering as they wandered the streets at night. The water beaded on Hool’s thick fur, but she didn’t flinch from it as she loped along at the boy’s side. She seemed comfortable and happier than she had been since Artus had known her. That, along with the image of her breaking that Delloran’s back in the street, playing over and over in his mind, made him shiver even more.

  Arkald the Strange, Necromancer of Talthmoor, ran for his life. Behind him, his mossy old tower burned with a supernatural flame. Within, all his books, all his ritual ingredients, all his creations—­his entire career—­died a final death that not even he could reverse. Part of him wanted to go back, to throw himself in the fire, to die with his work. It would have been more fitting that way. Arkald, though, had never been a brave man.

  The ground was a mixture of mud and slush, the provenance of a week’s worth of sleet and rain. Arkald’s sandals could scarcely find purchase. He kept falling, slipping, tumbling down hillsides in the dark of the night. His breath came in ragged gasps; he was so cold he could scarcely breathe. Fear was the only thing to keep him going. It seemed as though a blazing spike of terror was nestled in the center of his back somewhere, radiating out to all his limbs and pushing them to frantic activity. Sweet Hann, he had to get away!

  Arkald knew who was coming for him. He didn’t know how he had been found, but he knew who had done the finding. He wished to every god he knew that he was wrong, but he just wasn’t that lucky.

  He chanced a glance behind him. He’d made it perhaps a quarter mile from his tower, and there, in the blazing phosphorous-­white light, he saw the silhouette of a man built like a rampart—­tall, broad, and blunt. There was a glint of silver at his shoulders and on his brow—­armor and a simple iron circlet. The sight filled the necromancer’s gut with a new wave of terror.

  Arkald felt the sorcerous energies that made up the world shudder just before the ground exploded beneath his feet. The heat and force of the blast was absorbed by the wards he had placed on his cloak, but no sorcerous ward would defend him from being tossed ten feet in the air and landing with a crunch against a rock. Arkald screamed into the night sky; his hip was broken. He rolled in the mud, trying to draw the Lumen into a spell that might knit his bones back together, if only temporarily. The ley did not favor him, though. The Lumen was found in places of light and life and happiness; the muddy winter hillside in the middle of the night was a place of darkness, death, and terror.

  Channeling the Ether, the Lumen’s opposite, was significantly easier, and so Arkald was able to cast a deathbolt at his pursuer despite his frozen fingers and pain-­wracked body. The arc of green lightning that erupted from his fingers, though, was casually batted aside by the broad man in the iron circlet. Arkald tried again and again, each time pouring more of his fear and hatred into the
spell to enhance it, but each time the man countered it with wards and dispels of his own. Arkald’s attacks didn’t even force him to break stride.

  As though mocking his weakness, the man channeled the Fey—­the energy of heat and chaos—­to cause a ring of fire to leap up around the prone, shivering body of the necromancer. There would be no escape now. Despite cold creating a favorable ley, Arkald was too weak to channel a countering energy, the Dweomer. A miscast or mistake in the spell could be catastrophic—­it could freeze him dead or kill his ability to feel. Instead, Arkald curled up into as much of a shivering ball as his screaming hip would allow and waited for the man in the circlet—­the Mad Prince, Banric Sahand—­to arrive.

  Sahand calmly stepped through the ring of fire, the flames parting for his armored bulk like waves against the prow of a battleship. He towered over the wretched form of Arkald, his dagger eyes practically digging furrows in the necromancer’s pale cheeks. “Well well, Arkald, it’s been a long time.” Sahand’s voice was heavy and rough, like a shirt of mail dropped on a stone floor.

  Arkald couldn’t meet the Mad Prince’s gaze. When he spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “How could you know? I was so careful . . . so careful . . .”

  Sahand crouched, his mail jingling softly. “I have been working on this project for over ten years, Arkald. I’ve had you and the rest of the League eating out of my hand all this time, and you thought I’d grown complacent, is that it? That I would forget about my nosy little friend, Arkald, and all his very useful talents?”

  Arkald felt tears welling in his eyes. He’d expected rage from the Mad Prince, he’d expected a quick and violent end. He found himself, instead, facing the cold, passionless glare of a man who did things not from impulse, but from somewhere deeper, darker, and infinitely more terrible. “Puh-­Please don’t kill me. I didn’t tell anyone. I swear it!”

  Sahand slapped him in the face. It stung but it didn’t hurt. “Stop that. Is this the necromancer who terrorized the village of Alwood into paying him tribute? Isn’t this the man who summoned the spirits of Varner’s dead scouts to come and spy on me? Surely such a man isn’t going to weep in the mud like a child? Surely you don’t intend to grovel.”

  Arkald was weeping now. He couldn’t stop—­the pain, the cold, the terror were too much for him. “My tower! My work! You’ve destroyed me, Sahand! You’ve already destroyed me!”

  Sahand flipped Arkald onto his back so that he could stare into his eyes. “Arkald, I would think a necromancer, of all ­people, would have a more optimistic appraisal of their own ability to rise from the ashes, as it were. Besides, let’s be honest—­the Defenders would have found your little tower eventually anyway. Being a sorcerous criminal doesn’t mix well with a fixed address; we don’t all have private armies to defend us, now do we?”

  “But I don’t even know what you’re really doing!” Arkald said, clutching at Sahand’s loglike forearms. “What could I tell anyone? That you’re not working on Rhadnost’s Elixir? No one would even believe me! Tapping the Daer Trondor sink is an impossible task—­it’s like trying to move a glacier with your hands! Why would you put in all the effort if not for the Elixir? What else could you possibly be doing? If I told, I’d look like a fool!”

  Sahand nodded. “Very good try, Arkald—­­people don’t tend to believe you, do they? Arkald the Strange, the fellow who animates dead squirrels and communes with restless spirits so he has someone to talk to—­who would believe him? Why, killing you would be a pointless act, as you are so despised.”

  Arkald grinned and nodded vigorously. “Yes! Yes, just so, Your Grace! No one in the League listens to me! I’m a nobody! A fool!”

  Sahand leaned in close to Arkald so that the necromancer could feel hot breath on his icy cheeks. Arkald could now see through the cracks in Sahand’s calm, calculating facade. Behind it there was nothing but rage—­pure, hateful, white-­hot rage. “If I wanted you dead, Arkald, I would have killed you already.”

  Arkald’s breath caught in his throat. Dare he hope? “But my tower, my work . . .”

  “A waste of your time, Arkald, and a liability to your continued existence—­Defenders, remember? No, Arkald, I’ve just done you a favor.”

  Arkald’s whole body quivered. He could scarcely breathe.

  “You work for me, now. I’ll build you a whole new tower in Dellor where you can juggle corpses to your heart’s content.” The Mad Prince smiled like a panther. “I’ll even supply the bodies.”

  Arkald was trembling now, so forcefully he could scarcely speak. He still wanted to run, to flee into the dark and the cold and never come back. “What’s the . . . the catch?”

  Sahand reached into a sleeve and produced a scrap of fabric stained with blood. “I have somebody I need you to find. Somebody too curious for their own good.”

  “A League member? I can’t do that. I’ll be censured!”

  Sahand pushed Arkald back into the mud and then slammed the heel of his boot into Arkald’s broken hip. The world went white with pain for an instant. The necromancer realized he was shrieking before he actually heard himself. Sahand laughed down at him, as powerful and inviolate as a god. “Arkald, what makes you think you have any choice?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LONG NIGHT

  Tyvian didn’t sleep. He lay in his heated bed, between silk sheets, down-­stuffed comforters to his chin, feather pillows all around, and didn’t sleep one wink. The very idea that he should have slept better in a smelly tent on the hard ground was enraging. He lay on his back, staring up at the darkness of his room, his arms crossed, and stubbornly waited for fatigue to take him. It would not.

  It was all the ring’s fault, of course. It continued to throb quietly throughout the night, and Tyvian cursed it yet again for ruining the triumph that was to be his first night home. He had planned it out in his head along the road. With every miserable indignity he suffered in the snow-­dusted wilderness between Galaspin and Freegate, he had forestalled his rage by plotting this very evening. He was to arrive home, bathe, dress well, eat pheasant, gloat over Alafarr, and then sleep like a babe in his comfortable bed, his every need and want fulfilled. Then, in the morning, he saw himself kicking in the door of whatever rat’s nest Hendrieux had inhabited, feeding him to the gnoll, and whistling all the way to lunch at Callaix’s on Angler Street. He even knew the table he would sit at.

  Now it was all ruined. He hadn’t enjoyed his bath. Gloating over Alafarr had been almost a complete failure. He couldn’t sleep! In the morning, that meant glassy eyes with dark rings under them and a groggy feeling that would persist all day unless he drank astronomical quantities of karfan, which would then stain his teeth. That meant, Tyvian thought, when he stood over Hendrieux’s bloodied body and smiled, the last thing the wretched Akrallian thug would remember would be how badly his teeth looked in comparison to the white shirt and coat he intended to wear.

  “Dammit all!” he swore aloud, and assaulted a pillow with his fists. It did not satisfy him.

  Rolling out of bed, Tyvian pulled on a silk robe and ordered a specter to bring a feylamp. With the light floating just behind his left shoulder, he padded through his darkened flat toward the kitchen. The rain continued its steady assault upon the skylights and long windows outside, filling the halls with the steady sound of water pattering on glass. He remembered then that he had intended to replace the glass with mageglass from the earnings the deal with the “Marquis du Rameaux” would have brought, since they muffled sound better and were unbreakable. He had even lined up a conjurer who could do the work. Of course, once Hendrieux had betrayed him and the “Marquis” turned out to be Alafarr, all possibility of acquiring mageglass windows vanished. Tyvian knew he would be forced to endure the sound of rain or the noise of the city for the foreseeable future. He cursed again.

  In the medicine chest in Tyvian’s kitchen was a ten-­hour sleeping draught of
which he had only used two hours. He had purchased it from an alchemist recommended to him by Carlo diCarlo and knew it worked very well, as did a pair of customs officials in Eretheria who together had accounted for those two missing hours. He had only to find it, take it back to his room, down it in one gulp, and he’d be sleeping like the dead until mid-­morning. He would have sent a specter to retrieve the draught, but he had forbidden his servants from accessing the medicine chest, ever since the little busybodies had reorganized the whole thing by weight and he had nearly died trying to find a simple bloodpatch elixir.

  In the kitchen the marble tiles were frigid under Tyvian’s bare feet, and he shivered as a cold, wet draft blew up his robe. Frowning at the temperature, he manipulated the rune lock and opened the medicine chest. Finding the sleeping draught where it belonged—­under S—­he stuffed it into his robe’s pocket.

  Another cold breeze blew past his ankles. Where was the draft coming from? It wasn’t like his specters to leave a window open in a rainstorm, nor was it likely they would forget to close the chimney flue after cooking. There was, however, a third possibility. He took a step forward, found the floor slick with frigid water and saw, at the extent of the lamplight, a specter-­driven towel wiping up the mess. That settled it.

  Snatching a cleaver from the kitchen table, Tyvian threw the hood over the feylamp, blocking out the light. Feeling with his toes, he tracked the trail of rainwater back to a broken window in his study, whose shutters a third specter had already closed to keep out any additional rain. Moving silently, Tyvian eased them open and peered out into the dim night. There, affixed on a ledge a foot beneath his windowsill, was an iron grappling hook.

  Somebody had invaded his home.

  The question of who and why they were here was of immediate importance. Whoever had come in had been here for a matter of minutes, and the flat, though large, was not so large that the invader or invaders would be denied their objective for long. Thieves would be looking for valuables, and they wouldn’t have had to go any farther than the study for those—­solid gold candlesticks, a spirit clock, and one hidden desk drawer that had a bag full of fifty gold marks—­yet nothing was disturbed. If not thieves, that left two options: rescuers for Alafarr or assassins for him.