Thunk… thunk… I knocked the slow-moving lance aside, then struck the rear flank of the white horse.
Hssssttt…
Holding the staff in my left hand, I grabbed the reins and yanked Gairloch to a halt. Like a snuffed candle, the other white apparitions had vanished, leaving only the knight and horse-which, as I watched, sagged into a heap on the road, dwindling in size until only a pile of copper armor remained; that, and a long wooden lance with a still-sharpened tip.
The dead zone remained, and I could sense nothing, except with my eyes. Nor could I hear anything, no bird calls, no whistle of the wind, not the slightest of insect chirps or whines.
“Come on… let’s get moving.”
Gairloch didn’t object as we rode into the narrow space. My eyes flicked from one smooth wall to the other, from the smooth stone in front of me to the cliff edges above, to the sky over that. All it would take would be one large falling rock-there was nowhere to go.
Then, again, if Antonin blocked the road, he would only have to unblock it, and who but an idiot would challenge the ghost horde?
I looked back and shivered. Slowly, a mist was building around the copper armor.
“Let’s keep moving.”
A lot of energy had been used to set up that defense, and all I had done was to bypass it; not even contain it, just get through it.
Once the high rock walls dropped away on each side, so did my inability to sense what I might not see. Gairloch had carried me nearly a kay further into the Westhorns.
Again, I glanced back, but the knight was out of sight. So was the white horde. But they were waiting, mindlessly, for the next travelers.
The beauty of the defense was that what happened didn’t matter. Some people died. Some escaped, but the deaths and the tales of those who did escape added to Antonin’s strength and people’s desire to keep as far away from the haunted road as possible. With war between Gallos and Kyphros, who was about to send enough talent and force to clean up an unused wizards’ road?
Yeee-ahh…
The vulcrow’s ugly call reminded me to stop woolgathering and start concentrating again.
I did. That was a mistake, because I asked myself what I was doing on the road in the first place, or the second place, for that matter. Antonin had brushed me aside like nothing. And if my dreams were to be trusted, he had even trapped Tamra, who had been far warier and more capable than I. So what was I doing riding toward his stronghold?
“What am I doing?” I repeated out loud.
Wheeee… uhhh… That was Gairloch’s only reply, but he kept putting one foot in front of the other, as if he had no choice.
Maybe that was the answer, the only answer. With all the deaths, and all the sacrifices, maybe I really didn’t have much choice either. I didn’t like that thought, either, since it made my stomach tighten up, and that meant I did have a choice.
Some choice-cut and run like all the other black masters had for so long; or, probably, get incinerated by the greatest white wizard in generations. That was a choice of being a live hypocrite like Talryn or a dead hero like that poor Kyphran outlier.
“Wonderful choices…” I muttered under my breath.
Yeee-ahh… answered the nearby vulcrow.
I glanced up.
In the cloudless winter blue sky north of where I rode, two other vulcrows swept in slow wide circles.
Once again, the road stretched ahead down a narrow valley, straight for at least another two kays before it began a gentle turn toward the right, northward.
The mountain grass beside the road was all brown, but I saw no more horses as Gairloch carried me toward the wide curve and I followed the grooved coach traces back toward Antonin.
Mid-morning came and passed. I rode silently along the slowly-rising road, a road so dry that only a few stunted bushes and-patches of mountain grass grew. A road so silent that the occasional screech of the single vulcrow that followed us, and the sound of Gairloch’s hooves, were the only sounds echoing between those rocky walls.
The pair of vulcrows remained circling behind us and to the north, but the one continued to follow us. I knew why, but doing anything about it would have been stupid. The less capable Antonin thought I was, the better.
Before noon, I stopped at the first water, a brook barely a cubit wide. Gairloch appreciated the water, cold as it was. I did also, and fed him some grain cake, not much, and let him browse on the scattered roadside grass. I appreciated the yellow cheese and travel bread, though they were sustenance and not much more. Eating beat starving. I threw a morsel toward the vulcrow that perched on the rocks on the far side of the road.
For a time, the bread lay on the grass untouched. Then, with a rush, the scavenger swooped down and bore it back to its rock perch.
After saluting the black-feathered creature, I continued slicing and eating cheese. I’d never been the type to tear it right off the block.
The silence continued, and I wanted to talk, even to the vulcrow. Instead, I packed away my remaining travel food, filled the water bottle, and climbed back on Gairloch.
The rock walls flanking the road seemed to get whiter and deader, and the silence increased. Not even insects chirped, and the only living things were a vulcrow, a pony, and a damned idiot. In the high distance, the cold reflection of the high Westhorns glittered.
I kept riding.
Until I found the gates.
At first glance, the valley continued as it had for all too many kays, long, narrow, straight, and dry, the clay-covered white pavement stretching out before me. On the north side, there was a dip in the high rocky walls, and the grassy stretch that led to the near-sheer rock was nearly flat.
I blinked and looked again, sensing the illusion. Behind the apparent grass and rock lay another narrow passage. Unlike the road, the rock walls of this entrance were not timeworn and smooth, but sharp and clear, and the imprint of chaos was far more recent.
As Gairloch stood there, reined to a halt, I studied the reality behind the image, wondering if anything created by chaos could be said to represent reality.
The passage through solid rock was not that long, perhaps fifty cubits, and the rockface through which it had been cut was far shorter than most of the valley walls, less than thirty cubits above the road at the highest. Still, to destroy that mass of rock was impressive.
Midway into the passage were two heavy white-oak gates, their hinge brackets mortared into the rock itself. Both gates were closed.
Blocking the illusion from Gairloch, I nudged him forward. To any bystander, we would have appeared to walk into solid rock.
No chaps-forces touched the gates themselves, save for a •thin link across them. A heavy but simple latch kept them closed. While I could have rerouted that thin link and opened the gates without breaking it, I did not. After all, what simple blackstaffer would have known that?
As I opened the latch, a spark flew, but nothing else happened.
Gairloch and I rode through, and I dismounted and re-closed the gates. Simple courtesy.
Once through the passage, the road ran between two treeless and rocky hills, then sloped down to a rock-strewn plain stretching for half a kay toward a towering and shimmering white cliff that held swirling chaos-energies, and glowed even under the noon sun. Beneath the cliff was a castle, composed of a stone house and a wall. The white stone house, barely visible to me even from the top of the hill, must have stood at least a full three stories high, with a white tile roof. Around the house ran a wall of white granite, merging with the cliff at each end.
I shivered. I really wasn’t sure I wanted to be there. In fact,.I knew I didn’t, but I’d backed myself into my own particular corner. How could I not try to stop Antonin after all I had said and seen? How I could possibly succeed was another question.
After another shiver, I looked down at the castle.
No doubt about it-the structure was impressive, but it was small, smaller than I would have thought for a cha
os-master of Antonin’s standing, and simple. No towers, just a sheer wall jutting out from the flat cliff rising behind it, pierced by a single visible gate. A narrow ravine, too deep to see the bottom from the entrance road where I sat upon Gairloch, and too raw to have been naturally caused, separated the castle and its walls from the more recently created wizards’ road that I had followed from the original wizards’ way.
Beside the newer road that led from the sharp-cleft rock passage and the castle gates ran a narrow brook, and a few patches of grass sprouted here and there. I dismounted, not wanting to bring Gairloch into that castle. Again, I could not explain why. I did not unsaddle him, but left him free to browse in the shaded area by the brook.
Then I took the staff and began the walk along the sunlit road between the two hills and down toward the castle.
Once I was halfway down the hill, I could see a simple railed and wooden span crossed the ravine, a span scarcely more than a rod in length. It was not a drawbridge, but a plain wooden structure, probably of heavy pine that could be easily fired with chaos-energies.
The castle itself could have been taken within a few days by a competent army-provided the castle’s master were not a chaos-master, and provided that any army could have been coaxed into the Westhorns to begin with.
I shivered. The whole place was even more forbidding than Frven, more desolate than the patch of desert created between Gallos and Kyphros by Antonin’s reckless use of chaos supposedly on behalf of the prefect, but clearly for Antonin’s own benefit.
Not a single banner flew from the white castle. Not a single plume of smoke drifted from the eight chimneys, yet the heavy white-oak gate was open and the road ran straight from the gap in the hills to the ravine and the bridge to the castle.
Like a perfect painting, the castle sat framed by the high cliff and the ravine.
I shivered again, wondering why I was even trying. Then I thought of the nameless outlier, with her blasted face, and the beheaded blond soldier on the prefect’s wall, the fountain of chaos, and, more important, the smugness of the Brotherhood, building isolated order, using Antonin as he used Justen.
There was one other factor-I had been used, just as Jus-ten had. It was the only thing that made sense. By fighting the prefect, my attempts at order had led to greater disorder and greater conflict between Gallos and Kyphros. No wonder I had been unmolested until I left. I had done exactly what Antonin wanted. I almost retched right there on that dry and barren road, wondering at the same time why I had to have been so damned slow and stupid.
Instead, I straightened my steps and marched onward toward the ravine and the bridge across it, guessing that the longer before I had to raise a shield, the better. I did let my perceptions sense the area around me, to alert me if Antonin should begin to mass forces against me.
I had thought about ringing the castle with a balance barrier, but traveling the ravine and climbing the hill would have been difficult without using order-mastery to bridge some of the gaps, and that use of order would have spelled out my presence like fireworks in the night sky. Not to mention my abilities. And even had I been able to create that large a barrier, it would have failed my purpose.
I needed to get to Antonin face-to-face, and I suspected that he would let me, if only to get an explanation of how I had eluded him thus far. That was a gamble, but not a big one. Besides, I really didn’t have much choice.
So step by step I walked downhill, further from Gairloch with each stride, closer to the hidden fires that shimmered behind each stone of the white castle, closer to the fears that threatened to paralyze my spine.
LXV
NOT ONE SOUL-not even a demon-looked from the empty parapets as my feet scuffed the white stone of the road that arrowed straight for the white-oak bridge and the open gate beyond.
With each step a puff of white dust rose, then fell, in the noonday stillness. Not a breath of air carried down that narrow valley, and the winter day felt like a bone-dry summer afternoon. The ice- and snow-tipped peaks of the Westhorns glittered like glass on their heights to my left, as indifferent as to what might happen as they had been to the rise and fall of Frven or the honest and deadly strategy of Recluce.
Thud, My first step on the wooden span reverberated like muted thunder from the narrow ravine below, all red rocks, needle-pointed and razor-edged. At least there weren’t any bones, not that I could see.
Tharooom… thud… tharooom… Walking the white fir was walking across a massive drum. Antonin’s coach must have vied with the real thunder when it rumbled across his bridge… Tharummmm…
Creaaakkkkk… The heavy wooden gate, set on massive bronze hinges, eased open even more widely as I watched.
No one appeared. No thing appeared, either, but I could feel the creatures of chaos beyond that open gate-red-sparked and dead-white beings that made the lingering demons of Frven seem merely plaintive.
My fingers were slippery on my staff, and I wanted to wipe the sweat off my forehead. Not all of that dampness was from the heat.
Tharuum… thump, thuuuud… The drum echoes of the bridge told me that my steps were not exactly even, or ordered. I repressed a laugh, but why I thought it was funny I couldn’t say.
Creakkkkk… The solid oak gate opened wide to the courtyard beyond the wall, and to the main floor windows, all casements, and all open to let in air and light. No figures appeared anywhere, even as my feet again touched the solid white stone beyond the bridge and outside the gate. Again, I could feel the unseen chaos-energies swirling around the courtyard.
I swallowed and stepped up to the gate.
“Hello the castle.” The stone swallowed my words, rather than echoing them.
No answer.
I looked around the gate, let my feelings sweep the courtyard, but the space was vacant. Not cloaked, the way the white knight had been, but vacant. I took one step up to the gate, and another around it. My feet carried me past the gate, and I looked back. The heavy oak structure remained on its hinges-open.
The white-paved courtyard, less than thirty cubits square, was empty and bare, except for a mounting block designed for a carriage, and a carved design above the doorway of the carriage-entrance. The open windows were hinged open slightly beyond the roof line.
Like the castle gate, the doorway above the carriage steps beckoned.
Both of its unadorned, gold-varnished double doors stood ajar. A glint of bronze told me that they, too, were set with bronze hinges.
Even with my feelings extended, I could sense nothing living nearby, just the swirling chaos-energies, a deeper underlying chaos, and a greater and a lesser concentration of living white fire on the floor above. That fire had to be Antonin-and some other white wizard.
Thrap! Thrap! I banged the heavy brass knocker far harder than necessary, and the sound echoed into the corridors beyond the doors.
This time I waited. One did not enter the domain of chaos totally uninvited. Standing there-staff in hand, shifting my weight from one foot to the other-I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my sleeve, still marveling at the unseasonable heat, and wondering if the castle were an extension of chaos, or of the demons’ hell itself.
I swallowed, then began to examine the stone around me, and the wood of the doors outside which I waited.
Uncle Sardit would have frowned. Even Bostric would have frowned. The mitering on the panel edges was rough, with gaps big enough to slip a knife through. The spaces between the frame and the stone were even wider, as if hurriedly installed, or by poor crafters indeed. The golden varnish had been slopped on, in some places actually showing where raised globs had dried, without even a sanding or a second coat.
Although I did not know stonework, the same careless finishing was evident there as well, with blocks joined and held in place by mortar of differing thicknesses, rather than having the mortar as a sealant for solid and well-fitted stones.
Thrap! I knocked again.
Click… dick… click… The
steps were slow, like water dripping from a leaky shower. Had I even seen a shower since Recluce?
… click…
A thin footman not much taller than my shoulder stood and opened the left door fully, stepping back as he did so. His hair and skin were white, as were his jacket, boots, and trousers. The whites of his eyes were reddish-tinted. Only his pupils were black.
“The master bids you welcome.” Hoarse and mechanical, his voice sounded as though I were the first person to whom he had spoken since he died. Then again, maybe he only looked dead. Although he might be alive, he bore no energy save chaos, and without it he would have ceased to be. That in itself was another paradox-pointing out that even chaos-masters had to use some order.
“I would like to see him.”
Without another word, the white footman turned and started down the wide white marble hallway and toward a set of circular stairs.
Click. Behind us, the doors closed.
I grasped the staff, knowing its comfort was short-lived, and followed the footman to the grand staircase.
Once more I was disappointed in the workmanship, especially to see such a well-proportioned and superior design flawed in execution, with columns more than fractionally off-center and stone joints with thumb-width gaps instead of hair-thin lines. Everywhere lingered the hint of a white haze, a dust not quite dust that did not exactly settle on the unevenly-polished marble floors.
Another lack bothered me, but not until I was halfway up the circular staircase did I observe the lack of wall decorations-no paintings, no wall hangings, not even any carpeting.
The whole castle reeked of being unfinished, clearly finished as it was. The lack of order? I wondered, but kept pace with the silent footman.
At the top of the staircase, he turned left for several steps before stopping at a closed doorway that seemed to lead back toward the front of the castle.
Creakkkk…
Oak doors should not creak, not well-made doors, but those of the white wizard did. I shook my head, then followed the footman inside.
The Magic of Recluce Page 49