by Curtis, Greg
“But how did you survive the battle Master Geron?” And more importantly why had he then gone to work for the temple? That made no sense when everyone else had been running.
“Through my magic of course.” The wizard humphed at him as if it should be obvious. But it wasn't obvious. More than that though Harl was convinced it was a lie. It wasn't simply that it didn't make sense; there was also something in his eyes. It was in the way they wouldn't hold his that raised his suspicions. Harl suddenly felt the need to challenge him on it.
“I was there with sword in hand when Rickarial fell. And he was a far more powerful wizard than you.”
“He was a fool. And far too proud.”
Geron looked away, apparently unimpressed with the conversation. And the moment he did Harl knew the truth. The dark thought that had been edging around in the back of his mind. It hit him like a charging bull and nearly laid him low. Geron was lying. Lying badly. And lying about far more than just his magic. The wizard hadn't got away at all. He hadn't fought. Because he'd had something to do with the attack. It was the only explanation that made any sense.
This was one of those responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of his people. The loss of his home. The fall of the city. And for the death of his family.
The hatred Harl knew in that moment was beyond anything he had ever experienced. The fury rose in him like a tide. But with it came a strangely clear head. He knew there were answers he needed to get. He also knew how to get them. Though it took every scrap of self control he had, he would not give in to his anger. Not yet. But maybe soon.
“You look cold Master Geron. Allow me to get you a warmer coat as you tell me of any others that might have survived that dark day.”
The others stared at him suddenly, as if he'd said something completely crazed. But they didn't understand and he paid them no mind as he went to the back room where he stored his wares. It was supposed to be a bedchamber but it wasn't. It had become a storeroom as he simply didn't have anywhere else to put his things. One day he planned on selling them for coin. As crowded as it was he didn't need to light a candle to find what he was looking for. He knew it even in the darkness. He knew its feel in his hands. The thick padded linen and the chain underneath.
A few moments later he returned with the coat in hand, and offered to help the wizard into it. And after a moment's persuasion the others let him untie the cord binding the wizard's wrists as he did so. The cord wasn't really what was holding him. The tea was. Without his magic Geron was vulnerable to anyone with a sword. But then as Harl fastened the clasps holding the front of the coat together the others quickly retied his wrists behind him. They weren't taking any chances. Meanwhile Geron just stood there while he was attended to and no doubt assumed it was all simply what he was due as a powerful wizard. He didn't even think to wonder that the coat could stretch to cover his girth. He was an arrogant fool. But then the two things often went together in Harl's experience.
“Now Geron we should talk.” Harl returned to his seat at the table and tried to keep from smiling as he knew what was coming. Geron naturally enough had no idea.
“Why?” The wizard was suddenly annoyed because the pretence of respect had gone from Harl's words. And he would choose to be uncooperative because of it. But his choices didn't matter any more.
“Because of the coat you just stupidly allowed yourself to be dressed in.”
Harl felt no need to ease into things. Not when the trap had been sprung and he was in its teeth. Of course that just made everyone stare at him suspiciously. The wizard most of all as he suddenly realised he might have done something stupid. He didn't yet know how stupid. But as he suddenly started to struggle – or tried to struggle given that his hands were still bound behind him and he was still weakened by the tea – he surely had to guess that it was too late.
“Wizard?” Nyma looked worried. She had a place for her prisoner to go to, and he assumed she intended for her prisoner to be alive when he got there.
“I'm just going to ask your prisoner a few questions Tree Mother and provided he answers them truthfully everything will be just fine.” Of course if he didn't that was another matter.
“What have you done? What is this?” Geron didn't seem so pleased by the thought. In fact he'd gone a little pale.
“The bonds of truth of course.”
Geron paled a little when he heard that. Then he paled some more. He knew what the garment was, and he knew what it would do to him. Then he foolishly tried to deny it.
“No! That's not possible! There are no more of them!” But even as he said it the coat suddenly tightened a little bit, straightening him up and proving the lie of his words. He knew there were more of them. The torture devices had been highly prized by certain people with a liking for inquisition. It would have been unlikely that someone wouldn't have picked one up. Of course Harl had crafted this particular one, purely as an experiment to see if he could craft the overlapping chain just right and master the complex spells. But Geron didn't have to know that.
“Really? Would you care to say that again? It wouldn't be that you're lying would it?”
“I'm not lying!”
Instantly the coat tightened and Geron screamed. Not in pain yet, just fear. But he was getting the idea. There was no way out of the coat save Harl. The others were starting to understand as well and they were staring nervously at Geron and at him, their eyes darting from one to the other as they tried to work out what to do. To remain calm and listen as he interrogated the prisoner? Or to stop things before the man died? Harl ignored them.
“That's good to know because otherwise you're going to be very thin by the time this is over.” Though in truth that could be a good thing. The lying wizard could use a little thinning down in Harl's view.
“Now let's start with Lion's Crest. You were in the city when it was attacked?”
“No!” The wizard denied it desperately and then screamed again as the coat tightened and rethought his words.
“Yes!” The wizard yelled out the truth. That was enough for the coat to loosen a little. But not as much as it had tightened. It would never loosen that much. Just enough to give the prisoner hope that if he told the truth he would survive. There was a reason the bonds of truth was such a favoured tool of the inquisitor.
“And you fled from the city?”
“Yes!” A heartbeat later Geron screamed and recanted his lie.
“No!” Meanwhile the others were looking on, still nervous but not interrupting. They understood that they were about to learn something. Perhaps something important. And for that reason they were holding back. He wasn't sure that they had ever heard of the bonds of truth before, but they were starting to understand what it could do.
“So you stayed in the city. Did you hide?”
“No.” This time Geron didn't try to lie. He knew what would happen if he did. What the spell and the coat would do to him.
“You didn't run or hide then. Did you fight?” Harl already knew the answer. He could see it in the wizard's frightened face. He could feel it in the rage that was building in his own veins. Boiling behind his eyes.
“No.”
“So. You didn't run, you didn't hide and you didn't fight. Did you have an arrangement with the attackers?”
“No!” But a heartbeat later Geron screamed. The coat had tightened again and it was starting to bind. Soon bones would start being crushed and breathing would become agony. “Yes.”
Harl took a deep breath to steady his nerves. It was the answer he had expected, but it was never the answer he would have wanted to hear. Not from a wizard. Not even from this one.
“You know that my family were in the city when it fell. My friends as well. My family business. And it was my home. And they're all gone now. You killed them.”
“No!” But of course he screamed in pain the instant the lie left his mouth. “Yes! A little. I didn't know but I helped.” The wizard was babbling hysterically all of a sud
den and the coat wasn't tightening.
It would have been so easy to kill him then. To simply pick up his sword from the wall it was now leaning against and behead him. But Harl knew he couldn't. Not yet. There was more he had to know. That they all had to know. He took a few more deep breaths to calm himself.
“Who did you have your arrangement with?”
“Tyriole!” Geron screamed it out as fast as he knew how. He had no thought of lying any more. He knew the painful death that was approaching him.
“So Tyriole was involved in the attack?”
“Yes.”
Harl wished he hadn't said that. He wished that the coat would have tightened when he did. Anything to say that the old wizard wasn't involved. But he knew he had been. He had seemed like such a kindly old man. A touch proud and always overdressed but kindly. And he had been a respected wizard. He was a member of the Circle after all.
“And who else?”
“The Circle.”
Harl's mouth dropped when he heard Geron say that. In all his life he would never have expected to hear such a thing. The Circle of Magic consisted of the proudest of wizards. The most advanced of their number. It was their governing body in the Kingdom of the Lion. The head of their guild. When a wizard set up business in the kingdom it was the Circle which gave their approval. When an apprentice needed to be taken under someone's wing, it was the Circle that arranged it. And when a wizard stepped out of line it was the Circle that judged them. To be a member of the Circle was the highest honour a wizard of Lion's Crest or any other town in the Kingdom of the Lion could ask for. And the Kingdom of the Lion was recognised for the strength of its wizards. It was said that an apprentice in the Kingdom of the Lion was the equal of a master anywhere else. Harl had secretly dreamed that one day he would have been asked to join the Circle. Maybe in fifty or sixty years when he'd properly mastered his craft.
“All of them?” It was barely a whisper that came out of Harl's mouth.
“Most. The rest were killed.”
It was strange how easily the wizard could say that. As if it meant nothing. But it didn't mean nothing. Not to Harl. Not to anyone. It meant everything. It took him a moment to collect himself. To retain control of his tongue. And to stop clenching his fists in fury.
“So all that remain of the Circle are part of this?”
“Except Dina. She escaped and no one has been able to find her. But she's the only one. I think.”
“Dina Windstrider,” Harl told the others what he knew of her. It was something he could do while he tried to make sense of what he had been told.
“Lady Elan of Elan Fortress, a sky mage. She is wed to Lord Elan. She controlled much of the weather of Lion's Spine, and was regarded as one of the most powerful of the Circle.” And though he didn't say it, she had been one of the toughest of instructors around. In the Circle she oversaw the instruction of apprentices, seeing to it that no matter who their master was they all mastered their basics. He had been before her eighteen times and not once in all those years had he ever left feeling that he had done well. The best he had ever done seemed to be to pass. But his own master had said that that was all that any ever did with her and he had been happy.
He wasn't surprised that she had escaped the fall of Lion's Crest though. She had two advantages over everyone else. The first was that Elan Fortress was seven or eight leagues from the city of Lion's Crest. It was also on a steep hill leading up to the mountain range that was the Lion's Spine. She would have had ample warning before the beast army approached. The second of course was that she could fly, lifting herself up on a column of spinning air.
“If the Circle did all this, how did they conquer the temple? How did they usurp Artemis' authority in her own house?”
The satyr asked the question and in that moment dispelled any idea Harl might have that he was just a simple soldier. He had a clear mind and a sharp grasp of the problem. Because he was right. In the end that was exactly what had happened. And no wizard could ever go against the divine. Not even a Circle wizard. They simply didn't have the power.
“I can't –.” But a moment later Geron screamed and instantly rethought his answer as to what he could and couldn't tell them.
“They made a deal with Xin!”
Harl gasped. So did the others. They all knew who Xin was. The demon king. The one that lorded it over Tartarus, the deepest and darkest realm within Hades. Pluto might be the god with dominion over all of Hades and the dead, but he was an absentee lord. Xin was the foreman who carried out all his orders and actually ran the realm. The one that styled himself a prince. The one with the power.
And they all knew that for a demon his power was immense. Too powerful for any wizard to be fool enough to bargain with. Those who involved themselves in deals with demons used lessor demons and only for specific purposes. They limited their contact strictly. Unless of course they wanted to end up consumed body and soul by one.
But Xin wasn't just the oldest and most powerful of the demons; he was their leader. Their king. If anyone had the power to displace a goddess from her own temple, he did – with the Circle's help. And maybe he also had the power to build a beast army. But the question still remained – who would be stupid enough to deal with Xin? It was like a mouse making a deal with a cat. A hungry cat. He asked.
“They all did. Twelve of the Circle made the deal as one. It was the only way they could hold the bargain.”
Twelve of the eighteen. A dozen of the most powerful wizards in the Kingdom of the Lion. It could work. Maybe. The deal could hold for a while. But when it broke things would go very badly wrong for them. And even if it held they would be very unlikely to get what they asked for. Demons lied. Surely they would have know that. So why would they do something so stupid?
Then a thought occurred to Harl and he rose and went across to where Geron stood and tugged at his sleeve. Sure enough on his wrists he saw the markings of a demon. A sight that shocked him more than he could even understand. He showed the others the markings as well. A wizard had accepted a demon's marks? That was madness. Harl returned to his seat slowly as he tried to make sense of what was never sensible. It took him a few moments to think of the questions he still needed to ask.
“What did they get out of it? And what did they offer?”
“The six great answers. They asked for them and were given them.”
“No!”
Harl denied him instantly. Not just out of shock for their ambition, but because he knew it couldn't be. Had they been given the six great answers they would be gods by now. And there were no new gods as far as he knew. The priests would have known. The world would have changed somehow. But Geron claimed it once more and the coat did not tighten.
“The six great answers are the answers to the six most important mysteries there are for a wizard.” Harl told the others what he knew of them. “The solutions to puzzles that have been considered for thousands of years. They are the six most powerful magics that have ever been dreamed of. Magics that if they even exist are thought impossible to attain by mortal means.”
Unfortunately Harl knew little more of them than what he'd said, which was precious little. The six great answers were more legends and myths than anything else. Things that some few held truly existed but which most believed were nothing more than alehouse gossip.
“They are the answers to the mysteries of immortality, including the healing from all wounds, sickness and poisons. Foresight so that the future is known and yet can be changed. Invulnerability so that no weapon, no spell can ever harm someone. Transport across the realms, so that a wizard may safely travel to any place in any realm and return. Even to the realms of the dead. Knowledge of every spell and every wisdom known or able to be known. And last but not least ascension, so that one may even become a god.”
“But there were problems?” Harl returned his attention to Geron. He already knew there would have been problems. Anyone would have known the same. Anyone it seemed save th
e twelve of the Circle. They after all were the ones who had chosen to make a deal with a demon. And not just any demon but the king of demons. He would honour his bargains to the exact letter of the agreement and yet still turn them into a lie. As they said, the only truth of a demon was that he lied.
“Yes.”
Geron suddenly looked away, but Harl doubted it was out of guilt. Shame maybe, but not guilt.
“Go on.”
“The price was supposed to be a cull of one in ten. But it became nine in ten.” The instant he said it Harl wanted to kill the wizard there and then. Not just for what he had done. Not even for how he could say something so unutterably stupid. But for how he could talk about so many deaths as if they were nothing. These were people who had been “culled”. Loved ones, friends and family. His family. How could the man not understand that? It was so hard not to simply sit there and scream at him. Or else to bury his head in his hands and weep. His family had died because of a deal that the Circle had made which they hadn't even understood. But for a stupid mistake that even a village idiot would know better than to make, all those people might have lived.