Death of a Darklord (ravenloft)

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  Elaine knew the answer; Konrad didn't. He took a deep breath as if trying to decide what to say. "I believe it is a reaction to his healing of the others."

  "But he has healed me many times," Fredric said. "He has not been like this before."

  "Yes," Randwulf said, "he is a cleric. They heal; it is what they do. It would be like my shooting an arrow and having it harm me. It's ridiculous."

  "Perhaps, Randwulf is closer to the truth than he knows," Elaine said softly.

  Everyone turned and looked at her. Even Silvanus's strange eyes were upon her face.

  "Go on, Elaine," Konrad said. His expression was neutral. It didn't seem to bother him that she was usurping his territory. Konrad always wanted to hear what others had to say, if it would save lives.

  Elaine licked her lips and took a shaky breath. Suddenly she felt silly. What if she were wrong? She looked round at their expectant faces. Silvanus's face was very patient, gentle even. What if she were right and did not speak up?

  "Gersalius and Thordin say magic healing does not work in Kartakass. Not even laying hands on a wound will work here. But Silvanus has raised the dead. What if he can still heal, but it harms him as it helps others?" Spoken aloud, the idea sounded farfetched, the barest conjecture. She felt heat crawl up her face as they all continued to stare at her.

  "That is ridiculous," Averil said. Her voice held the scorn Elaine expected.

  "No, Daughter," Silvanus said, voice harsh with coughing. "Hear her out."

  Hear her out, Elaine thought, that was it. That was all the theory she had. Averil's face was set in disapproving lines, but she waited. They all waited for Elaine to go on, but there was no more.

  Silvanus took his hand from Averil's grasp and held it out to Elaine. The hand trembled slightly. She took it. The skin was cold, or perhaps it was her own hands. She almost apologized for not warming her hands first, but something in his eyes stopped her. She was babbling in her own head, trying desperately to think of something useful to say.

  "Do not try so hard," the elf said softly.

  What did he mean? "I'm not trying at all."

  "Ease your mind. Empty your thoughts. Feel."

  It was something Gersalius would have said and just as inexplicable. "I don't know what you mean."

  His gold eyes seemed larger than they should have been, great molten pools of glittering metal. The dying light that beat against the tent walls glimmered in those eyes. That glimmer pulled her down. His hand in hers held her up, or she might have fallen.

  "You are hurt," she said. Her voice sounded very faraway, even to her own ears. But with the words, Elaine knew she was right. "I feel something around you, in you, mingling with my skin … I…"

  "Life-force, Elaine, you sense my life-force."

  She nodded. Of course. His hand tightened around hers, squeezing until she gasped. Then he slumped back, hand almost limp in her grasp. His life-force pulsed and fluttered along with his heart. The heart was steady, but the life-force, that invisible something, was weaker.

  "There is nothing wrong with your heart," she said.

  "Of course there is. We felt it." Averil's voice was startling. Elaine jerked and turned to look at the girl. It was almost a shock to see those eyes so like what Elaine had just seen, but so unlike, as well.

  "Elaine," Silvanus said. That one word brought her back to him. She was not lost in his eyes anymore, but something was happening. Something was growing between them. It held that same slow building of power that she had sensed when Silvanus raised Randwulf.

  "If my heart is not injured, what is wrong?" His words were careful, leading her like a string of words through an unfamiliar maze.

  "Your life-force is hurt. Something feeds on it."

  "What feeds on me, Elaine?" His voice gentle, his hand firm in her grasp.

  She could see the others, knew she still knelt in the tent. Elaine was still aware. It was not like the magic that Gersalius had shown her, where she had lost herself in herself. Mow she was aware of power, but only the spark of it was inside her. She stared at Silvanus. "Am I drawing power from you?"

  "No, Elaine," he said softly.

  "Then where …" Even as she asked it, she knew the answer. She felt the earth under her move, roll like a giant waking from long slumber. "The land." That last was the barest of whispers. She wasn't sure anyone heard, but Silvanus's eyes said he knew. Whether she spoke aloud or not, he knew.

  In that one instant, she knew one other thing. The land hated the cleric. The sensation was so strong, it escaped her lips in a soft moan.

  "Elaine, are you all right?" Konrad asked. He touched her shoulder.

  "Don't touch me!" The fierceness in her voice surprised even her. Hatred spilled through her, scalding. He did not love her. How dare he. Elaine shook her head sharply, as if trying to wake from a dream.

  "You are still yourself, Elaine. You gain power, but you never lose yourself in it," Silvanus said.

  That voice drove out the hate, let her think clearly again. It was this power that the land, Kartakass, despised. The cleric was stronger, in some ways, than all the land combined.

  "Konrad, you must not touch me, not now." Her voice sounded almost normal, but the edge of anger was still there, roughening it, making Konrad's eyes widen.

  "What is happening?" Konrad asked. He looked at Silvanus when he spoke.

  "She is laying hands on me, to heal me."

  "But she cannot do it," Konrad said.

  "Oh, but she can," the elf said. His face was utterly serene, confident Elaine could do it. His belief was her belief. Her source was hatred, envy, but she was not. She was still Elaine Claim, who had lived all her life in Kartakass. The land had fed and clothed and held her in its dark arms, forever.

  She let those dark arms touch her now, aware for the first time that the very ground was alive with something more than next year's crop. It should have frightened her, but it did not. That lack of fear should have frightened her all on its own.

  She felt her own body, beating, pulsing, living. She was aware as never before of the workings of her flesh. Over all that ran a force like water, running over and through her. That water ran into Kartakass and out again, like the source of a spring, though water was just a word to use where no words were sufficient. It was a device to hold in her mind what shouldn't have existed. Water, but it was not water at all.

  "Look at me, Elaine. What do you feel?"

  She looked at Silvanus, felt his skin, the bones of his hands against her own. There, a flutter in the water that ran round his skin. A patch of darkness that had attached itself to him when he healed here in Kartakass.

  Elaine reached out her hand to that darkness, drawing power from the same source that sought to destroy him. She touched not his heart but that force that wove round him. Her hand hovered over his chest because that was the weak point, the place of attack, but it wasn't the heart she sought to make whole. It was his life-force, that invisible water that held him safe. The darkness was like a hole through which the water could seep away until there was nothing but an empty skin left.

  But if it had been a hole, Elaine would have tried to plug it; if it had been a stain, she would have cleansed it; but it was more a thing to be plucked off, a piece of darkness attached to suck away life in bits and pieces.

  She drew that patch of blackness into her hand, into the invisible force around her own body, and let it flow down her into the ground itself. Kartakass swallowed its blemish back into itself with hardly a murmur.

  Then Elaine did lay her hand on his chest. She felt his heart underneath the cloth, the skin. It seemed she could have closed her hands around the heart and squeezed. Instead she poured some of that invisible force through her hand and over his heart. The power itself seemed to know what to do. It mended the damage the blackness had caused, healed without Elaine really knowing how it worked. It was not her hand, her knowledge. She was just a tool.

  Silvanus took a deep, shuddering breath
. Elaine raised her hand from his chest. He smiled, and she could not help but smile back. She released his hand and knelt back from him, hands clasped in her lap.

  She was herself again-alone, aware of that invisible force, but distantly-and she felt the distant beat of Kartakass, almost like music just out of hearing. The sensation drifted away until it was gone, and she was herself again. The last thing she sensed was a vague pleasure. The land was pleased.

  FIFTEEN

  The night was bitter cold. Jonathan sat by the fire in their camp. He stared into the orange flames until his eyes ached, then turned toward the darkness, night-blind from the light. Tereza sat watch at the edge of the campsite, huddled in her cloak. Konrad had been on watch when Jonathan sat down. How long had he been by the fire?

  He wanted to call his wife over to talk, but didn't. She was sitting in the cold dark so her eyes could see without being ruined by the flames, far enough away from the tents that she might see whatever might be creeping on them.

  Tereza was guarding; he would not distract her from that. His brooding before the fire would bother her enough. She would worry about his frame of mind. When he sat for so long unmoving, thinking, it was often a bad sign. He tended to black moods, but this was not a mood. He was trying to make sense of what he had seen this day.

  Jonathan had always believed magic to be evil, or at least weak, lazy. Most things that magic could accomplish could be done by honest work. The task was harder, perhaps, and took longer, but it could be done.

  But this. raising the dead to true life. Jonathan held his hands close to the flames until the blood was like to boil. The fire did not seem warm enough. Perhaps it was not his body that was cold, but something deeper.

  The extra tent they had packed for emergencies was set up against the soft rise of the hill behind him. The elven cleric and his daughter were tucked safely away behind the hide walls. And the two men, the two deadmen, had gone to their bedrolls cheerfully, tired, but not worse for wear. How could that be?

  A soft sound behind him made him whirl, his heart pounding in his throat. It was Elaine. She held her white cloak tight about her. There were still bloodstains here and there on the fur.

  She was the last person Jonathan wished to see.

  She stood there, face uncertain, as if she knew she was not welcome. The hurt in her green-blue eyes cut him like a knife. He did not want to hurt her. For her, he had betrayed everything he thought he believed. He had saved her life, but had he endangered something more precious? And whose fault was that? His? No one's?

  He extended a hand to her. She smiled and came to him, taking it. He drew her into the circle of his arm and his cloak, as he had when she was small.

  With a sigh, she settled against him. It was the same sound she'd made when she was ten, the first time Jonathan had ever held a child and told the lies that all parents tell, that the world is fair, and adult arms can protect them from all harm. Her hair was soft against his face and smelled of herbs and. her. The warm scent of a child. No mere perfume could ever disguise it from him.

  "Was it real?" she asked, softly.

  "Was what real?"

  "The elf, he brought those two men back from the dead. I saw it, but I still don't believe it."

  "I wouldn't have believed it either, had I not witnessed it myself."

  "Thordin and Gersalius said no cleric should have been able to raise the dead in Kartakass. Why is that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you know Gersalius was an outlander, like Thordin?" she asked.

  "No, I didn't." Jonathan wondered what else he didn't know about the wizard.

  "Could the elf heal Calum?"

  Jonathan sat very still. He had been so busy worrying about magic and the state of souls, the matter of Calum had slipped his mind. It was Elaine, the corrupted magic-wielder, who had thought of Calum and his pain. Jonathan was ashamed of both his for-getfulness and his suspicions.

  "I don't know. Thordin has spoken of them healing wounds, injuries, but not disease, not old age."

  "But perhaps Calum would not mind being old so much if he were not in such pain." She looked up at him, her head still on his shoulder, a mere rolling of eyes. It was an old gesture; for a moment, the little girl looked out at him. Then she straightened, not pulling away, but looking directly at him. Her eyes were honest and unrelenting.

  "Do you hate me?" She did not turn away after she had asked it, but met his gaze. Whatever his response, Jonathan would have to speak it into those familiar blue-green eyes.

  "I could never hate you, Elaine. You know that."

  She searched his face as if looking for some clue. "I know you hate magic and all who practice it. Now I am a mage, or learning to become one. You hate that I have magic in me." The last was statement, pure fact.

  Jonathan had to look away from her searching eyes. He stared into the flames.

  Her fingertips touched his bearded chin and turned his face back to her. "Tell me true, no half-truths."

  "You are as dear to me as flesh of my flesh."

  "That is not the question I asked." She was relentless. Tereza was the bravest woman he had ever known, but even she might not have pushed the question. Tereza might never have asked at all; most people wouldn't. They would fear the answer too much.

  "I wish you were not a mage, Elaine."

  "I know that," she said. Small frown lines formed between her eyes. "Do you hate it? Do you wish me to leave?" It was her turn to face away. She huddled against him, but would not meet his eyes. "I wasn't going to ask that, but I couldn't stand to watch you hate me, Jonathan." She looked up suddenly, the pain in her eyes so raw it made him gasp.

  "I would rather go away than watch you grow to fear me."

  "Fear you? I don't. "

  "I saw the look on Tereza's face in the shed that night. I saw your face after my vision." She shook her head. "You were both afraid of me."

  "Of your new powers, perhaps, but not of you." He hugged her to him, chin resting in her yellow hair. "Never of you."

  "I know you're lying." Her voice was choked with tears. "I can read your thoughts like words on a page."

  He pushed away from her, half-tumbling before the fire. His heart choked in his throat. His lips formed the word, and said it soundlessly, a silent hiss: "Witch."

  Tears shimmered in her eyes like water at the brim of a glass. She widened her eyes, fighting so no tear would fall. "I have my answer." She stood, hugging her cloak to her as if it could protect from more than cold. "When we come back from Cortton, I will pack my things and go with Gersalius. We can go back to his home. I don't think he will mind that I can read his thoughts."

  She turned and walked slowly back to her tent. Her spine was rigid, movements confident, proud, stiff with pain.

  He wanted to call her back, to say he was sorry, and he was. He was sorry, so terribly sorry, but he had fought magic all his life. He could not change now. If she had not confronted him, they could have pretended. He could have pretended, but if she could read his thoughts … it was hopeless.

  He sat up, folding his cloak closer about him. Tereza came to stand beside him. "What did you and Elaine talk of?" She knelt to warm her hands before the fire.

  Jonathan did not answer right away. He didn't want to tell his wife what a fool he was, though if anyone knew his frailties, it was Tereza. The wonder was that she stayed with him.

  "Talk to me, Jonathan. She was crying when she left."

  "She asked me if I hated her for being a mage."

  "And you said yes?" Her voice was outraged.

  He looked up at her, anger flaring through him. "Of course not!"

  "Then what happened?" Her face was already angry, frowning and suspicious.

  "She read my thoughts. I can lie in words. I can lie even with eyes and gestures-but thoughts, Tereza.. who can lie with thoughts?"

  She stood up so abruptly her cloak trailed into the fire, sending sparks whirling skyward. She stalked around the fire lik
e a caged beast, every movement etched with anger.

  "And what did she say after she read your thoughts?"

  "She said …" He could not say it. To say it out loud to Tereza would make it real. If he told anyone else, Elaine would leave, and he wouldn't have a chance to apologize, to beg her not to go.

  "Jonathan," she stood across the fire, hands on hips. The flames bathed her face in strong shadows, leaping light. "What did she say?"

  "I'll make it all right. I'll talk to her."

  "Jonathan. " Tereza let her hands fall to her sides, cloak swinging closed. She stood there like a pillar of flame. "She's going away, isn't she?"

  Jonathan wanted to look away, to not see the accusation in her eyes, but he forced himself not to move, not to blink, not to flinch. He would always remember the disappointment on Tereza's face. The contempt.

  "I told her she was as dear to me as a daughter."

  "But you couldn't hide your hatred of her magic." She bit off each word, spitting it at him. He had never seen her so enraged, not at him. It frightened him.

  "She knew I hated the magic. That wasn't what bothered her the most," he said.

  "What then?"

  "It is the fact that we fear her powers. That is what she cannot tolerate."

  "We?"

  "She said you were afraid of her after the night in the shed."

  Tereza glanced away, then back. The righteous anger slipped away from her face. "She's right."

  "I know," he said softly.

  They stared at each other over the crackling fire. A branch broke with a sharp sound, settling farther into the fire. Sparks spilled upward into the dark. The sound of the flame was loud like voices whispering in the other room.

  "What are we to do, Jonathan?"

  He shook his head. "Perhaps, we can ask the wizard for help."

  "You would do that, turn to a wizard on such a personal matter?" She looked surprised.

  "To keep Elaine with us, I would do nearly anything."

  Tereza smiled, and something inside of Jonathan relaxed. He felt as if he'd been given a reprieve from a sentence of death. Tereza had forgiven him.