Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  "So the Emperor enjoys the antics of these creatures?" Conn said with interest.

  "He does," Shaiknam replied. He smiled down at Aubri; the gryphon gasped, as the ice of horror and the chill of pure fear swept over him. "I hope you can learn some new tricks, beast," he said sweetly. "Other than 'playing dead.' 'Dance,' for instance, or better yet, 'beg.' Make certain to learn 'beg.' The longer you entertain the Emperor, the longer you will live. Or so I'm told."

  Urtho flung a plate across the room; it shattered against the wall but did nothing to help relieve his feelings. "Gods!" he cried. The cadre of hertasi and human messengers ignored him. There were no messenger-birds in camp anymore; Urtho had not wanted to leave these smallest and most helpless of his creatures behind even by accident. They had been the first through the Gate, to go with k'Leshya and the gryphons.

  Urtho paced the side of the map table, issuing orders as fast as hertasi and humans could take them, doing his best not to seize handfuls of hair and start yanking them out by the roots. What in the name of all the gods had happened? How had Ma'ar's men gotten past the defensive line? Why hadn't anyone noticed until they'd already taken the Pass of Korbast and had set up a Gate to bring more troops in?

  Never mind, it's happened, now deal with it! This was his worst nightmare come true; the Tower still full of things he hadn't gotten out yet, the traps not yet set, and the enemy pouring down into the plain, behind his own lines. Already the Sixth and the Third had been cut off from the rest and from retreat; they would have to fend for themselves. Judeth was bringing the Fifth in, but no one knew for certain about the rest. They have mages, they can Gate here. They can even Gate straight to their evacuation sites. They'll be all right. I have to believe that.

  He sent the last of his messengers off on their errands with orders to send the Healers and other support personnel to their Gates, and forced himself to stop pacing. He clutched the edge of the table and stared down at it, as if staring at it fiercely enough would make the situation reverse itself.

  "Sir!" A hertasi scrambled in the door, all out of breath. "The mage Conn Levas is here from the Sixth!"

  He started and turned toward the door, just as Conn Levas pushed his way past the lizard. He looked as if he had personally fought his way through all of Ma'ar's troopers to reach the Tower; his robes were filthy, torn, and bloodstained, his hair matted down to his head with sweat.

  "Go." Urtho told the breathless hertasi. "Find me Skan and bring him here. I'll need him in a moment."

  The hertasi let the door swing shut behind Conn Levas as Urtho took three steps toward the mercenary mage. "What happened?" he cried, eager only to hear what had gone wrong.

  Too late, he saw Conn's hand move, saw an empty bag in it, and felt the stinging of a hundred thousand tiny needles in his face and hands, in every bit of flesh left exposed by his clothing. He brushed at his face frantically, while Conn Levas laughed.

  "That won't help," the mercenary said very softly as Urtho tried to cry out for help and realized that he couldn't do more than whisper. "Miranda thorns, Urtho. Very potent. Quite impossible to magic away. A little invention of my new employer; I believe you might have seen their effects, once or twice. Mages never do consider that someone might attack them physically."

  Urtho's knees crumpled beneath him; he managed to stagger back enough that he landed in the chair behind him before his legs gave out altogether. His entire body tingled, burned, twitched uncontrollably. His lips moved, but nothing emerged. Strange swirls of light and color invaded his vision; the furniture stretched and warped. Conn's head floated about a foot above his body as the mercenary mage approached, and the head looked down at him malevolently.

  "It's a poison, of course," the head said, each word emerging from his mouth in flowing script, and encapsulated inside a brightly-colored bubble. "You should enjoy the effects. I knew that all the defenses of the Tower are keyed to you, of course, as well as the node beneath it, and I knew that if I slew you outright, I would die before I had a chance to escape. I expect Shaiknam knew that, too, and was counting on not needing to fulfill his part of the bargain. But you'll live long enough for me to get clear, and he'll just have to keep his word, hmm?"

  Urtho's chest nearly burst with the need to howl in anguish, but all that he could manage was a pathetic whimper. Conn Levas' head floated around the room for a moment, then suddenly produced a new body as the old one faded away. A large, furry body, of an eye-searing pink. Urtho shuddered as the fur turned into spines, like those of a hedgehog. Then Conn shook his body, and all those spines shot forward, piercing Urtho's limbs with excruciating pain. The furniture grew tentacles, and the walls opened up into pulsing starscapes.

  "I see you can't answer," the mercenary said silkily. "No matter."

  He turned to go—that is, his head turned. His body remained the way it had been, and began walking backward toward the door. With every step he took, bleeding wounds appeared in the floor, and it felt to Urtho as if the wounds were to his flesh. He whimpered again, and Conn's head turned back.

  "Oh, one more thing," the mage said casually. "In case you might have worried about that little misborn gryphon you named so charmingly. Kechara. I offered her a nice bit of rabbit and she followed me out to the Emperor's new lines. I decided to make certain that Shaiknam would keep his word, by ensuring that the Emperor knows my name, and what he owes to me. She's my gift to Ma'ar to pave the way for my new rank and position. I expect to be a Duke at the very least."

  Kechara! Oh, GODS! His anguish translated into more whimpers, and streams of blood began to flow from his open hands. Conn laughed and turned to open the door, which warped and deformed as he touched it, becoming a blood clot lodged in an open wound. The walls throbbed in time with Conn's laughter.

  But the door opened before Conn, and there was someone out there—

  Skan hurried after the frantic hertasi, talons clicking on the stone of the floor. "Aubri missing, the Sixth gone silent, why did you leave that lying bastard alone with Urtho?" Vikteren scolded the little lizard, as they ran toward the Strategy Room.

  "He told me to get you!" the hertasi wailed, caught in a dilemma between what he had been ordered to do and what Vikteren thought he should have done. "I couldn't get you and stay there at the same time!"

  "Leave it, Vikteren," Skan snapped. "It's done—let's just hope that—"

  The young mage sprinted for the door and shoved it open in the surprised face of Conn Levas. The mercenary mage recovered quickly from his surprise, and backed up a pace when Skan loomed up behind Vikteren.

  From his greater height, Skan could see right past Conn, and spotted Urtho, clearly in terrible pain, collapsed into a chair in the corner. Conn followed his glance, paled, and began babbling.

  "Urtho—" he said. "He said he wasn't feeling well. The strain—"

  But Skan's hearing was better than a human's, and the word Urtho was forcing through spittle-frothed lips was "—poison—"

  Skan's vision clouded with the red of rage; he saw Conn's hands move, and he didn't hesitate. The Black Gryphon lashed out with an open talon, and caught the mage across the throat, tearing it out in a spray of blood. His second blow, the backhanded return of the talon-strike, flung the mercenary's body across the room to slam against the table with the wet crack of a snapping spine.

  There the body of Conn Levas lay atop the tiny space of land that was still theirs, blood pumping down onto the map, flooding the representation of the Tower and the plain around it with sticky scarlet.

  Vikteren had headed straight for Urtho, as Skan stalked in through the doorway with every feather and hair erect in battle-anger. "Poison," the young mage said shortly, his face flushed and his voice tight with grief. "Miranda-thorns, very rare, no antidote. The bastard probably had enough in his pockets to hit us both, too; that's what he was reaching for when you got him."

  The hertasi gasped and scrambled off, presumably to fetch help.

  Skan only heard and heeded
one thing. "No antidote?" he roared, so that Urtho whimpered and Vikteren winced. "What do you mean, no antidote!"

  "Skan, I can't change the facts," Vikteren shouted back. "There's no antidote! It's something Ma'ar created as an assassination-tool, and we haven't seen more than three victims since the war started! All we can do is buy him some time and counteract some of the effects."

  "Do it," Skan snapped, spreading out his bloodstained claws over the body of his creator and friend, invoking every tiny bit of magery he had. He opened himself to Urtho, found the places in his mind that the miranda had muddled, bringing hallucinations and pain, and joined with Vikteren to help Urtho straighten the mental paths and banish those symptoms.

  He fought with every bit of his grief and rage, every atom of energy. And still, it was not enough. He saw for himself that Vikteren was right. The poison replicated itself within Urtho's body, spreading like some evil, sentient disease, and with every passing moment it destroyed a little more of Urtho's life-force, corroding it away inexorably.

  At last, his mage-energies exhausted, he dropped his outstretched claw and opened the eyes he did not realize he had closed.

  Vikteren supported Urtho in his chair, and the face that looked up at Skan was sane again. "The evacuation—" Urtho whispered harshly. "Get me—Healers. I have to hold on—"

  Vikteren looked up into Skan's puzzled face. "I think he's keyed some kind of destructive spells into himself—if he leaves the Tower, the place is going to go unstable. And if you thought what happened with that Gate at Jerlag Pass was impressive—"

  The young mage left the rest unsaid. Leaves the Tower, or dies, he means. And there must be two dozen permanent Gates here, not to mention the Tower itself and everything still in it. The destructive potential staggered him. Anyone still here would be obliterated by the result, pulverized to dust—

  The noise of running feet from the hallway made him turn sharply, ready to attack again, but these were friends. The hertasi had returned with Tamsin and three more senior Healers, who squeezed through the door as one. Not Cinnabar. He must have sent her through the Gate while he could.

  "We know," Tamsin said shortly, taking Vikteren's place at Urtho's side. "We'll buy him all the time we can."

  Skan did not move out of the way. The Healers shoved past him, ignoring him as if he had been an inconveniently placed piece of furniture.

  He started to say something, but Vikteren motioned to him to remain silent. Tears trickled down the mage's face, and his shoulders shook, but he didn't produce so much as a stifled sob to distract the Healers from their work.

  Skan himself shook from beak to talons with the effort of repressing a keen of grief. He closed his eyes and clamped his beak shut, flexing his talons into the wood of the floor, feeling it splinter beneath them, and wishing he could kill Conn Levas a hundred more times.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder, startling him, making him jump. His eyes snapped open and focused on Tamsin's face, not more than a finger away from his beak.

  "We've done all anyone can," the Healer said, in a voice gone flat and dull with sorrow and exhaustion. "He needs to tell you something."

  The four Healers staggered out the door, holding each other in pairs and not once looking back. Vikteren still stood beside Urtho's chair, tears falling steadily down his cheeks and dropping onto the breast of his tunic.

  "Get all the gryphons you can find," one of the Healers told the hertasi who waited, trembling, beside the door. "He's going to try to get everything open that he can before the end, and he wants them to take all they can carry."

  The hertasi looked up at the Healer for a moment, too grief-stricken to reply. The man spoke again. "Knowledge will always be the best weapon against tyrants," he choked out. "Urtho said that." And at that the hertasi ran to carry out the orders.

  "Skan—there's a weapon." Urtho's voice was the merest whisper, but his words were clear enough. "Never meant to use it, but—now, Ma'ar is coming. Help me—weapons room."

  Vikteren helped him to his feet and got under one shoulder, while Skan supported him on the other side. They both knew where the weapons room was, and that it was locked, to be unsealed by Urtho's presence alone. They carried him across the Strategy Room and to the door across the hallway; Urtho had no more strength than a newborn kitten. He fell against the door to the weapons room to open it, and directed them both to a box on a stand in the far corner of the room.

  "It's—like the box I gave Zhaneel. But bigger. Got one on the Tower roof. Dissolves the bonds—of spells. Take it to Ma'ar when you can, trigger it. Same thing that happened at Jerlag." Urtho did not look at Skan; the gryphon had the feeling that perhaps he couldn't bear to. "Made it for gryphons. Stick your talons—in the holes. All at once."

  Skan saw then that what he had taken for decorative perforations in the side were actually holes made to fit a gryphon's talons, in a pattern of two on each side to fit the two-forward, two back-curved talons of the foreclaws.

  "You have—a count of a hundred—to get away," Urtho finished. "Better have—a Gate handy. And closed fast."

  The Mage of Silence tried to smile, and coughed instead. "Go!" he whispered fiercely, when the coughing fit was over. "Go. Get Ma'ar later. Survive now."

  Skan lifted the box from its stand, and saw that it had a carry-strap meant to go around the neck. He pulled the strap over his head, awkwardly, and turned back to the Mage.

  Urtho's eyes were clouded with pain, and his lips formed the word, "Go."

  Beak clamped down on the death-keen, Skan backed out of the room. But before he left, he saw Vikteren helping Urtho to the next door to be unlocked.

  And the first of the combat-gryphons arrived, to carry away what he could.

  Knowledge will always be the best weapon against tyrants. Unable to hold it back any longer, Skan fled down the hallway and into the sunset, his death-keen echoing through the Tower as he ran.

  Winterhart flung books and packages through the Gate whenever there wasn't someone actually traversing it, from the pile that formed as the gryphons brought them to her, her arms and back one long pulled muscle. There would be some time after Urtho succumbed before everything went dangerously unstable. They should all have time to get out.

  All but Urtho....

  Her eyes stung with tears, but she would mourn him later, when they were all, temporarily at least, safe.

  Somewhere on the other side of this Gate was another Trondi'irn, pitching packages through the Gate to k'Leshya. The farther away this dangerous knowledge went, the better off they would all be. She did not bother to think about how they would continue this war, or even if they would be able to regroup. The important thing now was simply to escape, to live, and to worry about the rest later.

  Other gryphons, too exhausted to be of any use, staggered up to and through the Gate while she paused in her labor. Humans and hertasi, tervardi and kyree and dyheli also presented themselves for passage, burdened with everything they could carry. There were fewer of them now than there had been; as combatants staggered in from the field, they grabbed what they could and headed for their evacuation-Gates, and by now virtually everyone who could make it back, had.

  That left only the few faithful, like her and Amberdrake, who would stay until the bitter end to help save as much as they could from the wreckage.

  She still did not know why Urtho was reportedly dying, although she trusted the news. It could not have been something simple like heart failure, or the Healers would be able to save him. Had Ma'ar somehow penetrated their defenses with a mage-attack?

  Another pair of exhausted gryphons and a pack of mud-stained kyree staggered up to the Gate, and she stopped long enough to let them pass. But before she could pick up another package from the pile, someone else appeared, a human this time. But he headed for her, and not the Gate, and it took her a moment to recognize Amberdrake.

  His face was absolutely blank with shock, and he was as pale as snow. She leapt for him as he stum
bled and started to fall, catching him and holding him upright.

  "What—" she began.

  "I just saw Skan," he replied dully. "I just said good-bye to him."

  Something in the way he phrased that made her freeze. Good-bye? As in—permanently?

  "We have to get Zhaneel out of here, now, to k'Leshya," he continued numbly. "We can't let her find out Skan is gone, or she'll try to follow him. Urtho gave him a weapon, and told him to use it to stop Ma'ar. Skan is determined that Urtho meant him to do it now."

  Winterhart realized that she was clutching her hand in her hair at the side of her head only when it began to hurt. She let go slowly. "Couldn't you stop him?" she cried involuntarily.

  "I tried. He wouldn't listen." Amberdrake stared at her, eyes blank and blind. "He told me that Shaiknam, Garber, and Conn Levas went over to the enemy."

  A cold ring of terror constricted her throat, cutting off her gasp. "But—"

  "He said he caught Conn Levas right after he'd poisoned Urtho with miranda-thorns, and he tore the traitor's throat out. By then it was too late; there was nothing they could do for Urtho but buy him time." She sensed his pain as if it were her own—if she wanted to mourn for Urtho, he would have ten times the grief to deal with—and ten times that for Skan.

  "I'll—wait, there she is." Zhaneel came hurrying up with a bundle of books in her beak and another clutched to her chest, running on three legs with her wings spread to help her balance.

  Winterhart grabbed the edge of her wing before she could put her burden down. "Zhaneel!" she cried, "I need someone on the k'Leshya side to make certain all this is carried as far away from the Gate as possible. We don't know how unstable these things are—"

  Zhaneel nodded and darted through the Gate without waiting for further explanation. "You go after her," Winterhart ordered. "I'll follow you as soon as I get the last of this stuff across."