The stout human twisted an ornate ring on his finger nervously. “What I said yesterday was what I saw. I wasn’t certain how to interpret it. It was so vivid and frightening. And I certainly had no notion that the forces at work were beyond even your power to stop.”
Tenaciously, Delbridge plowed forward. “If only I had full mastery over my power! I’m sure that I could bring tremendous good—”
“That is quite enough,” interrupted Balcombe. His fiery gaze put the lid on anything further Delbridge might have said. Balcombe clasped his hands behind his back and paced across the width of the cell. All the while his gaze fixed Delbridge in place until every bit of confidence that the ersatz mage had built up for himself had eroded.
After ten or twelve traversals of the cell, Balcombe stopped and stood, facing Delbridge directly. The prisoner noted with some alarm that Balcombe was awfully close to the bracelet, where it lay concealed in the moldy straw.
“I believe that some of your story is true,” Balcombe began. “Not most of it, not even a third of it, but some. For example, I believe you can sense bits of the near future. I also believe that you have difficulty understanding what you experience.
“The rest of your story … no, I don’t believe any of that. For example, I don’t believe it is a natural ability you’ve always had. If that were true, you should be good at it by now. I also don’t believe you have ever used it to benefit anyone but yourself.
“So let’s try again and see if we can get a little closer to the truth. Tell me exactly what you ‘saw’ in this vision you had. In particular, do you have any notion who was behind the squire’s disappearance?”
This line of questioning was much more to Delbridge’s liking. He considered, for the first time in his life, that perhaps telling the truth was the best thing he could do. Unfortunately, he was afraid the answers would disappoint Balcombe.
“The first time I knew anything about this was when I was standing before you yesterday.” Delbridge’s voice wavered, unaccustomed to speaking the truth. “I stood there, completely blank. I had nothing prepared to say. I was counting on the moment, hoping I would be inspired. I just wasn’t ready for what came.”
Balcombe had paid close attention throughout Delbridge’s account. Now he stepped back, as if affronted. “That’s it? There is nothing more: no names, no faces, no motives?”
“No, sir,” Delbridge apologized.
“That’s not much.”
Balcombe stood near the doorway, pondering Delbridge’s story. The light from the wand made his pale flesh look gray and unearthly. For a moment, Delbridge felt as if he were in the presence of death. He quickly shook off the notion, reminding himself that this man was his only hope, though an incredibly thin hope, for redemption.
At last Balcombe spoke, the gaze of his one eye, cold and unblinking, fixed on the mage. “If I take this story to Lord Curston, he will not be convinced. While it has some feel of truth, there is nothing to back it up. It is far easier for a man of Curston’s disposition to believe you were privy to an evil conspiracy than that some benevolent magical force visited you for no particular reason.”
The mage’s tone shifted slightly during this speech. He was no longer the inquisitor or prosecutor. Instead he began sounding like a confidant, a counselor. He resumed his pacing. “Lord Curston is a Knight of Solamnia. His faith is in the power of his sword. He understands and believes in things he can touch, things he can defeat with his sword. Things he cannot touch, like the ability to foresee the future, he will not trust for long. He may not believe such a story at all.
“If there is any more to your ability, I recommend that you tell me now, because if I tell Lord Curston what you have told me and he does not believe it, he will pass sentence immediately.”
Balcombe turned so that he faced the cell door, his back to Delbridge. “I’m sure the sentence will be hanging.”
Delbridge considered his options. He vaguely remembered once hearing an old soldier in a tavern telling everyone gathered round that the threat of imminent death sharpened his wits remarkably—that was how he’d managed to survive so long. Delbridge himself had experienced that on occasion. Now his head was a muddled mess. He shook it violently, hoping to clear away the fog. Still he had trouble concentrating.
Sweat beaded on his forehead. It trickled into his eyes and stung, making him blink. His thoughts wandered, then settled on the bracelet. It was the source of his trouble. If he got rid of it, would his problems go away, too?
“Would Lord Curston believe my story if he could see some proof? Touch something tangible? I have proof. You could show it to him.”
Balcombe turned to face Delbridge again, his eyebrow arched. “What sort of proof?”
“A magical device,” blurted Delbridge, “a copper bracelet. I don’t know where it came from. I got it from a tinker only two days ago … or was it three?”
“Where is this bracelet?” Balcombe probed. “Have you still got it?”
A shaky hand pointed to the corner where Delbridge had flung the copper band. Balcombe snatched the illuminating wand from the wall and eagerly stepped to the corner. He kicked aside the limp, blackened straw until a glint caught his eye. Slowly he bent and picked up the bracelet. The precious stones caught light from Balcombe’s wand and reflected it into hundreds of points that danced along the rough walls.
Balcombe examined it closely but did not put it on. Still dangling it from his fingers, he turned to Delbridge. “If this device is what you say, I believe there is some chance Lord Curston will relent in his prosecution against you. I will speak to him in your defense.”
Having concluded his business, Balcombe rapped on the cell door with his light wand. It swung open heavily on protesting hinges. As the mage stepped out, darkness fell across the room and the door shut with a bang.
* * * * *
The clack of a door bolt and screeching hinges awakened Delbridge. He recoiled like a snake from the bright torchlight streaming in through the doorway, shielding his eyes against the far wall of his cell. As he came fully awake, he remembered where he was.
Turning slowly, still shading his eyes with his hand, he squinted at the opening. Someone stood there, backlit by a flaring torch. Delbridge saw the outline of a peaked helmet and a spear held upright.
“Come on, now, you’ve business with Lord Curston.” The voice was rough and tinged with sarcasm.
Delbridge shrank away to cower in the corner. “What is it? Has he sent for me? Am I to be released?”
“It’s not my job to answer questions. Don’t make me drag you out of here.”
A second shape stepped into the light. “All right, To-seph, wait in the hall,” it spoke softly. Then louder, “You, prisoner, on your feet. It’s time to see Lord Curston.”
“Have I been pardoned? Where is Balcombe?”
The guards both ignored his question. Slowly Delbridge rose from his knees and stepped tentatively toward the door. By now his eyes were adjusting to the torchlight. In the hall he saw three more soldiers, besides the one in his cell, all apparently waiting to escort him to Lord Curston. He stumbled slightly as he crossed the threshold.
As Delbridge stepped into the hall, the soldiers closed around him. They walked without speaking down long hallways beneath the castle, past closed doors and open archways. Finally they ascended a winding flight of stone steps and passed through a wooden door.
Expecting to emerge in an inner chamber, Delbridge was stunned to see that he was outside in the castle courtyard. The sky was pink and cold, streaked with thin, angry black clouds. The courtyard was shrouded in gray, the rising sun still hidden behind massive, fortified walls.
Delbridge looked all around in panic. He saw no sign of either Curston or the mage, Balcombe. The courtyard was divided, half being occupied with merchants’ and craftsmen’s stalls, the other half reserved for the castle’s military use. Delbridge and his escort passed between a barracks building and the commercial area, and he c
ould see they were headed toward a large, open court. As they rounded the corner, Delbridge’s knees buckled.
A gallows was just beginning to catch the morning sun.
Two soldiers grabbed his sinking arms and propped him up, half aiding, half dragging him forward. Delbridge’s eyes were tightly closed; his feet flailed uselessly at the ground.
The troop stopped in front of a line of men-at-arms, all standing at attention. Behind them were arrayed a hundred or more citizens from the town, and beyond them, within sight but out of hearing of the gallows—to the right of the castle gate—Lord Curston sat astride a powerful chestnut gelding. The elderly knight was splendid in his Solamnic armor, his helmet slung across the saddle pommel. Alongside Curston and slightly behind him was Balcombe, mounted on a black mare.
In an even voice, the sergeant-at-arms declared, “Omardicar the Omnipotent, you stand before this court accused of conspiracy, abduction, and sorcerous evil. You have pled innocence of these charges. Do you wish to change that plea now, in the presence of His Lordship, Sir Curston of Tantallon?”
Delbridge forced his eyes open. Although welling tears clouded his vision, he could see the knight in the distance on his horse, watching, his face haggard and grim. Delbridge’s jaw moved up and down, but no sound came out. After several moments, he croaked rather than spoke the only words he could manage: “I am innocent.”
The sergeant’s eyes were cold and merciless as he looked down on the condemned man. He said in a clear voice: “Then Lord Curston finds you guilty.”
He looked at the soldiers before him. “Guards, do your duty.”
The crowd from the town cheered. Delbridge struggled against the arms that held him and cried out to the distant mage, “Balcombe! You promised to help me!” but the cheering throng drowned out his words to even those near him.
Delbridge’s legs failed him completely as he was dragged to the gibbet and hauled up a ladder. As the noose was fitted over his head, he twisted to face Balcombe again. His voice was thick with fear as he screamed one final time, “The bracelet! What about the bracelet?”
Delbridge’s last memory in life, before soldiers jerked the ladder away, was Balcombe, smiling and stroking his goatee, the morning sun glinting coppery and cold from his wrist.
Chapter 11
Meeting at Last
“Are you sure your spells are working right?” asked Tasslehoff, squinting against the sunlight that streamed over Selana’s shoulders. Sitting cross-legged, he looked back down to study his game of “Exes and Ohs” in the dirt. “I mean, we’ve asked all over town and at the castle, and no one has heard of this Delbridge guy.” Using his finger, the kender traced the third “X” in a line, then drew through it once again, declaring himself the winner of the solitary game.
“I know my bracelet is somewhere inside this keep,” Selana said stubbornly, standing above him, her arms folded across the torn and filthy front of her dark blue robe. Her face, beneath the loosely tied light-blue scarf, was scratched and tinged red from exposure to sun.
“My first spell indicated that Delbridge was going to Tantallon, and the one I just cast reveals indisputably that the bracelet is here.” The sea elf’s blue-green eyes took in the vast, rectangular keep made of foot-square blocks of gray, ribbed granite.
Seated on a stone watering trough, Tanis leaned back against the cold wall of the small pump house in the central courtyard and swung one leg indolently over the other. Dipping a cupped hand into the trough, he splashed his sweat- and grime-covered face with cool water and dried it on his sleeve. He closed his eyes and held his face up to the warmth of the late-afternoon sun.
Next to him on the ground, back against the wall, the old dwarf snored softly into his tipped hat. As he frequently reminded his half-elf friend, he was not as young as he used to be; even though his mind could not recall the night spent under the satyrs’ charm spell, doing gods knew what, his body surely remembered. Flint’s barrel-shaped body shuddered at the aches and pains.
Things had been a bit more strained between the small group in the eight or so hours since they had awakened among the wreckage of the satyr camp. If possible, the encounter had made the sea elf more headstrong and willful, more driven to retrieve her bracelet and return to the sea, than before.
Most humbling of all, the satyrs had taken nearly everything of value from everyone but Tas. The kender had been almost insulted that they’d overlooked his alabaster ink stopper and the tiny, engraved portrait of his parents, and they’d not taken even a single one of his maps. The sorry quartet barely had enough coinage left between them to purchase one serving of bubble and squeak, and none of them liked that bland cabbage-and-potato dish anyway.
“Well?”
Startled, Tanis popped one eye open. “Well, what?”
“Shouldn’t someone go ask if this Delbridge person is in there?”
Tanis laughed. “It’s not an alehouse, Selana,” he said. “It’s the home of the most influential person in this village, to which we are strangers. Perhaps our thief is his guest. You can’t just march up and say ‘hand over the chubby cheat in the green jacket.’ ”
“Why not?” asked Tas.
Only half-asleep and listening, Flint laughed himself awake.
“I’m not some little fool from the sea, Tanis Half-Elven,” said Selana, glaring the dwarf into uncomfortable silence. “I’ll simply tell them the truth, that I’ve come a long way to find a thief who stole a valuable bracelet of mine, and that I believe he is somewhere in the keep. Curston is a Knight of Solamnia, surely an honorable man. He’ll listen with an open mind.”
Tanis nodded, surprised to find that he agreed.
Tas jumped to his feet. “I’ll come with you, Selana,” he offered, having grown bored with winning “Exes and Ohs.” Flint yanked him back to the ground.
“I don’t like sending her to the door alone,” he said, shaking his shaggy salt-and-pepper head, “but knowing the knighthood’s distrust of anything not human, she’ll have trouble enough without a kender, dwarf, or half-elf at her side. Cinch up your scarf, at least,” he advised Selana, giving her hand a fatherly pat.
The sea elf frowned at the necessity, but nonetheless artfully rewrapped her dirty silk scarf about her head. She rehearsed a few lines as she passed through the arched portico and stepped up to the carved door. Taking the brass knocker ring firmly in hand, she slammed it again and again into the metal plate on the stout door.
Suddenly a wrinkled old face popped around the edge of the door, sporting an odd combination of ratty gray and corn-yellow hair. His eyes, slightly milked over with early cataracts, were red-rimmed. Momentarily startled by the sea elf’s unexpected countenance, he wedged himself between the massive door and the jam. Selana could see a black band around the thin biceps of his right arm.
“Excuse me, sir,” she began as sweetly as she could manage. “My name is Selana, and I’m looking for a human named Delbridge Fid—”
“Never heard of him. Go away.” The stoop-shouldered old servant moved to unwedge himself.
“Wait!” Selana cried. “It’s very important that I find him, and I have good reason to believe he’s in the keep. Perhaps I could speak with Lord Curston?” She batted her eyelids sweetly.
“Don’t try that stuff on me, young lady,” the old man said gruffly. “His Lordship isn’t seeing anyone. Now, go away.”
Selana placed her hand through the door and held onto the jam. “Perhaps he would make one small exception.”
The man shook his head sadly, the bite seemingly knocked from him. “Not for Takhisis herself, I’m afraid. Young Rostrevor is missing, kidnapped two nights ago from his bedchamber, right under his father’s nose. The keep is in a state, and I have strict orders not to disturb Lord Curston.”
The servant looked newly agitated. “I’m a sad old man who’s revealed more than he should. Leave us to our grief.”
Selana shook her head mutely. “I’m—sorry, I didn’t know,” she mana
ged to mumble at last, stumbling backward down the steps. Meeting her companions’ questioning glances, the sea elf quickly relayed the news.
“A bit of bad luck and timing on our part,” said Tanis.
“Is it?” Flint cut in quickly, scratching his beard in thought. “An opportunistic swindler arrives in town, the knight’s son is kidnapped, and now there’s no trace of either of them, but the bracelet is somewhere inside the keep. Coincidence?”
“Are you saying that you think the bumbling bard Gaesil described to us kidnapped the knight’s son for some strange reason, then, for some equally unfathomable cause, left the bracelet behind?” Tanis asked, incredulous.
The dwarf ignored his friend’s skepticism, tapping his whiskered chin. “I’m saying I have a hunch that unusual events traveling in pairs may be related, that’s all.”
Tanis frowned in dismay; the dwarf’s hunches were often on the mark. If the bracelet was somehow tied up in the young man’s disappearance, this whole escapade was going to be a lot more complicated than just finding Delbridge and shaking him down for the stolen jewelry.
“Well,” said Selana, “we aren’t going to find the bracelet out here in the courtyard.”
“There’s another sure thing,” pointed out Tas, looking at the closed wooden door. “We aren’t going to be invited in to look for it.”
“If you’re thinking about sneaking in,” said Flint, “we’ll have to wait for cover of darkness.”
“That’s what everyone thinks,” began Tasslehoff, shaking his finger, “but I’ve had different experiences. I know you won’t believe this, but several times during my travels I’ve looked up and found myself someplace other than where I’d thought I was. I’m thinking mostly about this magical ring that teleported me to the lair of some giants, but those were special circumstances.
“Anyway,” he continued, dismissing the ring story with a wave of his fine-boned hand, “the funny thing is, if you look like you belong somewhere, people tend to think you do. Belong there, that is.”
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