by John Dalmas
After putting his coat back on, he knelt and looked over the end. It scarcely overhung the balcony rail at all; a foot at most. He bellied over feet first. His feet found the rail and took his weight. Letting go the roof edge with one hand, he carefully reached upward and inward, finding and grasping a roof brace. Then he let go with the other hand, and hopped down onto the balcony-another remarkable feat taken for granted. The easy part was the balcony door. He turned the handle and it opened. Inside he lit the candle and looked around the room. Bookshelves were built against the wall on both sides of the balcony door, their books gone. Now they held miscellaneous containers, loose goods, and weighted stacks of paper. Each side wall had a door. He examined the room no further, trying one of the side doors instead.
It opened into a smaller room. A slender metal tripod stood in the middle, topped with a black metal bowl, like the one he'd seen at Schloss Tannenberg. But that one had held a crystal. This one was empty. Next to it was a small stand, chest-high on Macurdy, holding a small casket of black lacquer. Macurdy unhooked its black-iron latch and lifted the lid.
There on a black velvet cushion lay the crystal, black as obsidian, reflecting the candle in his hand. It seemed alive, and he stepped involuntarily back. Like the one he'd destroyed, it was perfectly round, but much larger, the size of a goose egg.
Hesitantly Macurdy reached, then took it from the stand. The sensation jarred him. It was as if an alarm had sounded, silent but shrill. He shoved the stone deep into a coat pocket, beneath the mitten it already held, then darted from the room. There were shouts in the hall. Jerking the balcony door open, he stepped out, even as the hall door was being unlocked behind him. Vaulting over the railing, he landed without falling.
‹I am with you. Hurry.›
Vulkan, there, invisible! They dashed around the corner to the north side. Varia was on the balcony. She saw Macurdy through his spell, but as she started over the railing, someone came through the curtains and pulled her back.
A third figure stepped to the railing. Kurqosz! His glance took in Vulkan's massive bulk, but it was Macurdy he stared at. For a long two seconds their gazes locked, then Kurqosz turned away, bellowing orders in Hithmearcisc.
‹On my back!› Vulkan's thought hissed in Macurdy's mind. He vaulted aboard him, and they fled eastward toward the forest, the boar sprinting faster than he'd ever carried Macurdy before.
Overhead, the aurora shimmered and pulsed unnoticed.
***
Their flight was not mindless however. Vulkan's course angled to the road, where the new snow had been heavily tracked by Chithqosz and his escort. Within the forest edge, Vulkan stopped, and they looked back. Two figures were trotting to a point beneath Varia's balcony, where they stood as if studying the ground. Looking at tracks, Macurdy told himself.
Vulkan started down the road again at a brisk trot. Macurdy put a hand in his coat pocket. The crystal was noticeably warm. It hadn't been when he took it.
"Where are we going?" he asked.
‹Hopefully where you can destroy the crystal. You will have to tell me.›
"What about Varia?"
‹Your suicide will not benefit her.›
Macurdy's fingertips felt the crystal's glassy surface. Put it on a rock, he told himself, and hit it with another. But he hadn't seen a stone pile or boulder since the day before. Though he didn't know it, the locale was part of a postglacial lacustrine plain. The only stones were those brought in for construction.
"How much did you see or hear while I was inside there?" he asked.
‹Much of it.›
"I suppose taking the crystal caused the alarm."
‹Correct.›
And the crystal contained some of Kurqosz's essence-his and all his circle's, woven together by who knew what spells. With Chithqosz and his circle tied in. Macurdy was glad now for the hours spent in the Cloister library.
"When Kurqosz left earlier, where did he go? Or didn't he?"
‹He left the house with his circle. They went to the center of the clearing, where a pyre had been piled, and lit it. Perhaps you saw it.› Macurdy shook his head. ‹Then they sensed something amiss at the manor, and abandoned whatever they'd started to do.›
Macurdy put a hand in his jacket pocket. The crystal was distinctly warmer. "They're gaining on us," he said.
‹Seemingly.› Vulkan speeded his trot a bit.
Before long they saw a solitary horse ahead, coming toward them with a hithik rider. A courier, apparently. "Stop," Macurdy murmured. "I'm going to steal a horse."
Vulkan stepped off the road and stopped. Macurdy slid from his back, willed his own cloak off, and stood waiting, a powerful figure dressed as a rakutu, with a hand raised in command. The horseman stopped, and Macurdy walked up to him. "Get down," he said roughly in Hithmearcisc. Hoping the order was too brief for his accent to be conspicuous.
With a worried expression, the soldier dismounted, letting the reins hang so the horse would stand. Macurdy stepped up to him and peered intently into his face. Then, as if to see the courier's features more clearly, he removed the man's thick winter cap-and slammed him hard between the eyes with the heel of his hand. The hithu dropped like a stone.
Macurdy turned to Vulkan. "I'm going to load him over your back. Can you keep him on board?"
‹Hardly. I can carry him with my tusks, but neither fast nor far. And if he regains consciousness, I'll be unable to kill him. Killing an ensouled being is an act not available to me.›
Macurdy didn't hesitate. His thumb found the man's carotid, and he compressed it with force enough to crack walnuts. After half a minute he released it, and loaded the slack figure across the horse's withers. Then he swung into the saddle, and after recalling his cloak, he and Vulkan continued eastward side by side. A check found the crystal warmer than before. Kurqosz, Macurdy decided, could run even faster than he'd thought.
Not far ahead they came to a lesser road that crossed Road B. On its surface, not a single track marred the morning's snow. Macurdy stopped. "I suppose," he said, "they can sense the crystal, and that's what they're following."
‹I do not doubt it.›
"You turn south. They'll see your tracks, and probably follow them. I'll keep going east a little way, then circle north through the woods and head back to the farm. Where there are nice rock walls."
Vulkan answered by turning south and trotting briskly away through the virgin snow. For Vulkan's information, Macurdy continued his monolog mentally as he continued down the heavily tracked Road B. When they realize they're on a false trail, it should take them awhile to sort things out, and I should be able to keep ahead of them. When I get to the headquarters clearing, I'll head for the woodpile and grab a splitting maul or single bit. Lay the crystal against a stone wall, and smack the sonofabitch.
Then I'll get Varia out of there.
He didn't wonder how. A hundred or so yards farther east, he took advantage of a windthrown hemlock whose top reached the edge of the road. There he turned his horse northward into the woods, walking it along the very edge of the fallen treetop. If Kurqosz got that far, he was unlikely to see the tracks.
When he'd passed the hemlock's uprooted base, he continued northward a ways, then turned back toward the clearing. He reached the virgin snow of the lesser road where a sleigh trail entered it from the west.
He took it.
***
With the help of motion sickness pills, Kurqosz had learned to ride horses. Learned well enough to stay in the saddle at a gallop. Riding wasn't pleasant for him, nor were the pills, but it allowed him greater middle-distance speed than he had on foot.
Tsulgax rode ahead a hundred yards, and another rakutu behind. They were all the escort Kurqosz had on this mad ride. The loss of his crystal had shaken him deeply, and he would not wait for a platoon to be called out and mounted.
It was Tsulgax who saw the tracks of cloven hooves turn south on the lesser road. He stopped, and when Kurqosz got there, pointed
them out. All three turned south then, following them.
Kurqosz was queasy from the ride, and his senses somewhat dulled from the pills. If they didn't catch up soon, he thought, he'd get down and run awhile. They'd gone nearly half a mile before he realized something was wrong, and called a halt. Tsulgax rode back to him, his expression concerned.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"We should not have turned. He must have thrown the crystal away, or hidden it. Near the crossroad. We are getting farther away from it."
He turned his horse then, and started back north, riding hard. The crystal! he told himself. Follow the crystal! The thief, the tracks, are secondary.
***
Macurdy had ridden half a mile up the sleigh trail, when he came to a three-sided woodsmen's shelter. In front of it lay a snow-capped heap of firewood blocks, with a splitting maul standing upright beside it. He stopped, and getting from his horse, stepped into the shelter. Inside was a split-log bench. A heavy steel splitting wedge lay on it, and he picked it up. It could almost have been made in Indiana; it had the familiar deep grooves on its slanting faces.
He knew at once what to do. Stepping outside, he lay the wedge on the battered maple chopping block, then reached into his pocket. The crystal was almost too hot to handle! Alarmed, he laid it hurriedly on a groove of the wedge, then reaching, took the maul and hefted it. Eyeing the crystal, he swung hard, overhead and down.
The heavy steel head slammed the crystal-and a shocking pain stabbed through Macurdy's skull! At the same instant he heard a terrible cry perhaps a hundred yards away. Dropping the maul, he staggered to the horse and pulled himself into the saddle. Then he kicked the animal into a canter, and lying low on its back, fled westward through the trees, toward the clearing.
***
Kurqosz lay shuddering and puking in the snow, with Tsulgax and the other rakutu kneeling beside him. The blow that had struck the crystal had hammered Kurqosz much harder than it had Macurdy, whose bonding with it had been brief and superficial. After a couple of minutes, the crown prince raised an arm for help, and Tsulgax hoisted him to his feet.
"He tried to destroy it," Kurqosz croaked, "but it's still here somewhere. Unbroken. Help me."
With Tsulgax supporting him, he hobbled on, the other rakutu bringing the horses. A minute later they saw Macurdy's tracks, and in another the shelter and woodpile. They went to it, Kurqosz scanning around with his mind for the crystal. It took awhile to find it. Instead of smashing it, the force of the hammer stroke had sent it flying twenty yards, where it lay buried in snow.
When he had it in his mittened hand, Kurqosz raised it to his forehead, closed his eyes and concentrated. In his mind he saw a rakutu-no, a human or half-ylf dressed as a rakutu. Saw the face from the crystal's point of view. A face he remembered from the hive mind scene, of raiders murdering the headquarters staff at Colroi. And from somewhere earlier. He watched the attempt to destroy the crystal, saw the hammer raised and swung. And that was all. As if the sentience in the crystal had blacked out.
He realized now what had happened to Chithqosz and his circle-those who'd survived the flood. This same creature had somehow gotten Chithqosz's old crystal, and destroyed it. Crystals of power formed to resonate with the circle leader, and his younger brother wasn't hard like himself.
Turning, he gripped Tsulgax's shoulder. "I have seen his face," he told him. "And I will remember. I will hear him scream curses at the parents who gave him life. He will beg me to kill him."
The second rakutu held out Kurqosz's reins, but the crown prince declined. "I will run," he said.
Haltingly he started in Macurdy's tracks, while the rakutur mounted and followed. As he ran, he strengthened, his head clearing. He would, he told himself, have his revenge, but not tonight. First he would win the war, and he needed all his attention, all his strength, to control the forces he would use. His circle too would need to be clear-headed and strong.
So. Tomorrow night then. Tomorrow night he would win the war. The aurora would still be there for him; he sensed it with certainty. Slowing, he looked up. Through the leafless crowns of hardwood forest, he saw it flickering and pulsing. Victory and devastation would be the ultimate vengeance. He'd devastated the east with fire and steel. The energy storm he'd create tomorrow night would roll westward with far greater devastation. Where he willed, as far as he willed. Tomorrow night vast tongues of flame would lick the enemy army from the face of the earth, leaving not even bones!
Kurqosz did not follow his enemy's tracks. He pressed forward toward the farm. That was where the creature was going, he had no doubt. Going to collect the ylvin lord's widow. A half minute more and he'd have taken her earlier; she'd have been over the balcony railing and gone.
***
At the manor, Kurqosz posted guards inside every entrance, every ground-floor window. After working a spell, and showing them through the crystal what to watch for: a giant boar, and the face from the raid on Colroi. Kurqosz was familiar with cloaking spells. Being warned, and knowing what to watch for, was half the task of seeing through them.
When Tsulgax was shown the face, he said a single word, a name: "Montag!"
Kurqosz knew at once that Tsulgax was right. Kurt Montag, the German half-wit! But clearly no half-wit after all.
And Montag had been inside this house, inside his bedroom. Worse, inside his sanctum! Kurqosz hadn't been aware of the drape hanging from the loft vent till he'd returned with the crystal. Things became clear then; Montag had bypassed the door guard by using the loft. Ingenious! Daring! What kind of man could even contemplate the act, let alone carry it off?
Before he put him to the torments, he decided, he'd sit down with him, question him. There were things to be learned from him, and at any rate the man would be interesting.
The realizations, along with his run in the forest, had fired Kurqosz with a land of manic exhilaration, though without canceling his wits. Back in the manor, he order the woman called Varia locked up with the other ylvin women. She was dangerous. He would still beget sons on her-this evening had added to his respect-but he would not have her as a lover.
Having had two long runs in the snow, Kurqosz expected that when he went to bed, he'd fall quickly asleep. He was mistaken. There were things on his mind, demanding attention. Back in Bavaria, Tsulgax had said that Montag was dangerous, and should be killed. Tsulgax, with no access to the hive mind, and no apparent psychic talent. Only his hard, highly trained body and unbendable loyalty. But his concern over Montag had seemed ridiculous. Perhaps, Kurqosz thought, he has a talent that I do not: sensing future dangers. He warned me about the ylvin she-wolf as well.
Tsulgax. What kind of father had he been to him? By hindsight, better than he'd realized, it seemed to him. He'd been kind, and not overly demanding.
He looked back then at Kurt Montag in Bavaria. Had there been signs he should have seen? That should have warned him? None came to him. He focused on the man as first he'd seen him: earnest, stupid, and lame. He'd even felt a certain fondness for the creature. Montag, whose psychic talents were strong only by comparison with the other Germans at the Schloss.
Unexpectedly, his concentration on Montag's face clicked in another picture from the hive mind, one Kurqosz hadn't seen before: Montag wearing a peculiar uniform-baggy, and with many pockets. In Hithmearc, speaking to a guard corporal at the gate shelter! Montag, intelligent and self-assured, standing straight, and for a human, tall. This was the man in the raid at Colroi! No wonder he hadn't recognized him at first.
The corporal's trace in the hive mind ended with his shaking hands with Montag, and at the same moment a shocking pain in the abdomen. And unconsciousness. Kurqosz scanned ahead. On that same day, the gate lodge had burned to the ground, killing all but one of the guards and hostel staff. Days later the gate itself had collapsed, seemingly destroyed, stranding Greszak and his staff on Farside. Too much had happened, in too short a time, and the corporal's trace had not been investigated. Th
e assumption had been, the man had died in the fire with the others.
Montag! The human was more than intriguing. He was sinister! And how had he come to Vismearc? Perhaps Tsulgax was mistaken. Perhaps this man simply resembled Montag. But no, for that had surely been Montag in the uniform of many pockets. For it not to be him would require nearly impossible coincidences-a Montag in Bavaria, a lookalike in Hithmearc, and another here. No, all three were one man. Kurt Montag.
The crown prince swung his long legs out of bed, wrapped himself in his robe, and had the officer of the guard called. And Tsulgax. When they reached his room, he gave them only one order: "Montag must be taken alive! At whatever cost! Alive and sound! I have questions to ask him, and he must be able to answer. If anyone kills or sorely wounds him, except on my order, that person will replace him in the torments."
***
Macurdy was captured in the hour before dawn, but when Kurqosz learned of it, he decided his prisoner could wait. He'd awakened with his attention on the coming night, and the sorcery he would work. It must have priority, even above Montag.
It was Tsulgax who reported the capture, and asked to be allowed to kill the German. His master's refusal so upset the rakutu, Kurqosz feared his son's protectiveness might overcome his obedience. So within the hour, Kurqosz sent Tsulgax off to Camp Merrawin, carrying a written order. He was to take command of the rakutur there-a "promotion" that did not fool Tsulgax. Nor did Kurqosz suppose it would. But it enforced his restriction without the odor of punishment.
He'd always been a loving parent.