The Realms of the Elves a-11

by Коллектив Авторов

  He stalked onward, through a succession of conjuration chambers, where artisans or magic had inlaid complex pentacles in gold, silver, jade, onyx, agate, and lapis lazuli on the floors. Many of the forms, and the symbols inscribed along the arcs and angles, were strange to him. He could have gleaned a great deal from them, but only if he'd had the leisure to study them for months or years. As matters stood, he needed a more readily accessible source of knowledge.

  It didn't appear to exist on the ground floor, but he explored the area thoroughly without discovering a ready means of ascending to the levels above. Squinting, he scrutinized the ceilings with his magesight, and finally found a hanging whirlpool of phosphorescence that indicated the presence of an illusion. Appearances to the contrary, that particular patch of ceiling didn't exist. Rather, it was an opening, the first of a series positioned one above the other. A creature as huge and agile as a wyrm could easily employ them to scramble up and down.

  Rhespen used a spell of levitation to accomplish the same thing. He explored the second story, where kilns, alembics, shelves of jars and bottles, and mazes of glass tubing attested to studies in alchemy, then started floating up to the third. He was partway there when he heard a soft dragging overhead. From long experience, he recognized the whisper of a dragon's tail sweeping across a floor.

  A heartbeat later, the darkness above Rhespen changed. It had shape and solidity, and it plunged at him. The gold couldn't spread its wings and fly through what were, for a creature of its immensity, relatively narrow openings, but it was too impatient to climb or float down. So, confident that it could weather the shock of impact, it had simply jumped.

  That meant Rhespen had only an instant left to haul himself out of the way. No handhold was in reach, and the charm of levitation could only carry him straight up or down. He bade it jerk him upward fast as it could, until he could plant his hands on the alchemical level's ceiling and pull himself along it like a fly crawling upside down.

  As soon as he cleared the opening, the dragon plummeted by, so close he could have reached out and touched it. He only saw it for an instant before it plunged on out of sight, but even so, he recognized Prince Bexendral.

  The important question, of course, was whether Bexendral had noticed him. It was entirely possible, his invisibility notwithstanding. A dragon's nose was sharp enough to catch his scent, and its ears, to register the pounding of his heart. He waited motionless, scarcely daring to breathe, until he heard the iron door groan open and clang shut. Evidently the prince hadn't detected him. Perhaps Bexendral had been preoccupied, or maybe he'd simply hurtled by too quickly.

  Rhespen struggled to calm his jangled nerves, then ventured onward until, nearly to the top of the keep, he found the library.

  One great chamber occupied the entire floor. Some of the books and scrolls were of conventional size. Any elf or human scholar could have managed them conveniently, and Rhespen inferred that drakes capable of changing shape must have written them. Most of the volumes, however, were huge, and composed of substances more durable than parchment, ink, and leather. One wyrm had etched its lore on copper plates stitched together with a silver chain. Another had scratched glyphs onto octagons of teak, while a third had employed oblong sandstone tablets resembling the lids of sarcophagi. When Rhespen examined the collection with his magesight, it shined as though aflame.

  He took an eager stride forward, and only then noticed the shifting stripes of crimson light masked by the general blaze, at the same moment that a gate between worlds yawned open. He couldn't see it, but he felt it as a gnawing, nauseating wound in the fabric of reality. Then something surged through.

  For an instant, he mistook it for a dragon, simply by virtue of its size, for it was big enough that no smaller chamber could easily have contained it. But its shape was altogether different, with nothing of a drake's grace or beauty. It was a towering, bipedal mound of a thing, with a lashing prehensile tail terminating in a coal-black stinger, a dozen mismatched, many-jointed arms sporting one or more talons, and a head that was virtually all mouth lined with row upon row of tusks. Despite Rhespen's invisibility, it oriented on him immediately.

  He'd never encountered such a horror before, but from his studies recognized it as a ghargatula, which was to say, a sort of devil. Evidence that Orchtrien, for all his pretensions to being nobler than the chromatic wyrms, wasn't above trafficking with infernal powers.

  Frightened as Rhespen was, that insight steadied him, rekindled his anger at Orchtrien, and reminded him of the Tightness of his cause. I slew the green, he told himself, and I can kill this thing, too.

  But he'd need protection. He rattled off an incantation and sketched a glyph on the air. Figures identical in every way to himself, three-dimensional reflections created without the instrumentality of mirrors, sprang into existence all around him.

  The ghargatula's sting whipped around its massive body and struck one of the images, popping it like a soap bubble. Good. That meant the gigantic fiend couldn't tell the difference between the real Rhespen and the false ones.

  Of course, at any given moment, it might still target the genuine article by chance, and even if it didn't, it wouldn't take it long to obliterate all the phantoms. As the ghargatula crouched low, compressing its ungainly form, to destroy a second illusion with its fangs, Rhespen declaimed another spell, whereupon he started shifting rapidly back and forth between the material world and a higher level of reality. During those moments when he was elsewhere, the devil shouldn't be able to touch or even see him.

  Like the phantom duplicates, the trick was a useful but less than perfect defense. Rhespen could only hope that, functioning in tandem, they'd prove sufficient. He brandished his staff and hurled a blast of flame at the ghargatula.

  As far as he could tell, the attack had no effect. The devil eradicated another illusion with a jab of its claws.

  He battered it with conjured hailstones. That didn't appear to hurt it, either. Obviously, like many spirits, it was essentially impervious to certain forces. But he couldn't remember which ones, and could only pray to discover its vulnerabilities by trial and error before it succeeded in landing an attack.

  He splashed it with steaming acid, and that was useless, too. It still squatted low, and its gaping jaws leaped at him. He smelled its fetid breath-actually felt the points of gigantic fangs as they snapped shut on his body-then he was a wraith once more, and the teeth passed harmlessly through him. He scrambled clear of the ghargatula's mouth before his body could slip back into the sphere of solid matter.

  He pierced his foe with darts of force, and at last it hissed and jerked in pain. He cast such spells for as long as he could, then switched to bright, crackling flares of lightning. The thunderbolts charred it and made it convulse.

  Yet when Rhespen expended the last of his lightning, the behemoth was still on its feet. Its flanks heaving, arms and stinger lashing, it lunged forward.

  Rhespen retreated. Glancing about, he saw that he only had a single duplicate left. His jumps between planes were slowing as the enchantment that enabled them ran out of power.

  If the gods were kind, he might have time for one more spell before the ghargatula plunged its fangs, talons, or stinger into him. But perhaps that was all right. With his weapons-the effective ones, anyway-all expended, he only had one more tactic, one final forlorn hope, to try anyway.

  He raised the truesilver staff in both hands, high above his head and parallel to the floor, and declaimed the opening phrases of his spell. He tried to make the cadence and intonation precise, and to invest the words of power with all the concentration and willpower he could muster. To believe that the magic would prevail was the only way to make it perfect, and he was certain nothing less would do.

  The ghargatula reared above him, and hurtled down like an avalanche, jaws spread wide. He chanted the final word of his incantation, and green light suffused the devil's form as if it were burning from the inside out. In an instant, its form dissolved
, leaving only a luminous haze behind to fade gradually away.

  Panting, trembling, Rhespen marveled at his luck.

  Killing the ghargatula would have been a considerable feat, but as far as he was concerned, he'd accomplished something even more extraordinary by returning it to its own infernal domain. That had required breaking the enchantment that summoned and controlled it, which was to say, overcoming Orchtrien's mystical power with his own.

  It shouldn't have worked. The gold was by far the superior mage. That was the point of the whole lunatic enterprise. But because of the element of chaos intrinsic to sorcery, it was theoretically possible for any magician to break the enchantment of any other, and tonight he'd proven the theory valid.

  Which, he realized with a stab of alarm, didn't mean he was out of danger. He'd activated a ward that had unleashed the ghargatula on him. What if the same magic had also alerted Orchtrien that an intruder had entered the library?

  Rhespen listened for sounds emanating from elsewhere in the keep, and heard nothing. With his mystical sensitivities, he examined the ether around him. It didn't appear that anyone was about to teleport into the chamber.

  So apparently he was all right. He flourished his staff and shifted and molded the ambient patterns of magical force as a painter might swirl and blend paint on a palette, recreating an approximation of the red bands he'd noticed before. They were inert, but if one of the golds glanced around the room with magesight and didn't look too closely, he might think the broken ward was still intact.

  Rhespen extracted a series of tiny objects from his pockets and set them on the floor. He waved his hand over them, and they swelled into normal-sized pens, bottles of ink, and blank books. He then called on certain spirits of the air, who revealed their presence by taking up the writing implements and beginning to copy the contents of several of the dragons' grimoires. The quills flew and the pages turned with supernatural rapidity.

  Rhespen set his hand on Winterflower's head and whispered words of power that sent the shadows spinning around the darkened chamber. Every magician learned spells to dissolve the works and break the bindings of another, but he felt at once that this one was different. His arm burned with power straining for release.

  On the final syllable, it blazed from his flesh into hers. She jerked, but afterward eyed him uncertainly.

  Assailed by doubt, he asked, "Do you feel any different?"

  "I… think so," she said.

  "The counterspell was supposed to break Orchtrien's hold on you. I was certain-"

  "By the Winsome Rose, you're right! I'm myself again! It just took a moment for me to realize." She threw herself into his embrace, and for a while, they were too busy to talk. But finally she asked, "How? How did you kill him? Did you take him in his sleep?"

  He blinked in surprise. "I didn't have to kill him to liberate you. The magic cleansed you all by itself. I stole his secrets to obtain the proper counterspell. They're right there." He nodded toward the haversack containing the copybooks, shrunken again for ease of transport, where it sat on a chair with his rod leaning beside it.

  Now it was her turn to seem nonplussed.

  "It will be all right," he assured her. "I now possess all the lore Orchtrien does. I haven't crammed every bit of it into my head yet, but it's in that bag, available for use. That means we can run far away, and he won't be able to track us. I can block his attempts at divination."

  She gave her head a little shake, as if to snap her thoughts into focus. "That's wonderful. How will you sneak the secrets-and me, of course-out of the city?"

  He grinned. "That's the easy part. I have a spell of teleportation stored in my staff. Grab anything you wish to carry with you, and I'll whisk us both away."

  "I only want my jewelry box." She turned to fetch it, and something banged. Rhespen realized it must be the door, flying open and smashing into the wall. Running footsteps pounded toward the bedchamber.

  Startled, he hesitated. Dazzling light blazed, filling the air, blinding and disorienting him. When the glare died, his tortured eyes could just make out, through floating blobs of afterimage, Maldur, ivory wand in hand, and the several half-dragon crossbowmen he'd brought along with him.

  "These fellows," the human wizard said, "are watching you closely. Start murmuring an incantation under your breath, begin an occult gesture, or ease a hand toward one of your pockets, and they'll shoot."

  "How did you know?" Rhespen asked. He didn't really care how, but if he could get Maldur talking, gloating, it would give him time to try to figure a way out of his trap.

  He told himself there had to be a way. It was ridiculous to think that he, who had defeated a ghargatula, might prove unable to cope with half a dozen humans. But actually, he knew such could easily prove to be the case. Wizards were mighty, but only when given a chance to bring their powers to bear. When not, they were as vulnerable as anyone else.

  "When you came home," Maldur said, "and found out that this damsel had become the king's whore, it broke you. I have made a study of you and could tell, no matter how you tried to hide it. I watched with satisfaction to see you wither away, but you didn't. The iron came back into your nature, and at the same time, you started to betray signs of exhaustion. I inferred that you were visiting Lady Winterflower at times when the king was elsewhere, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't catch you sneaking in or out. Not until tonight."

  "Because," Rhespen said, "I haven't been coming here. I spent my nights in study of new magic. Tendays ago, I sneaked into the golds' tower of magic and copied all the grimoires."

  Maldur's eyes widened. "Impossible."

  "No, merely difficult. The lore I stole, all the secrets of draconic sorcery, is in that pouch." He nodded at the haversack.

  Rhespen was reasonably sure Maldur would turn in that direction. The white-haired man was, after all, a magician, surely avidly curious, jealous of the arcane might of the wyrms no matter how he tried to suppress such dangerous feelings. He hoped the guards would reflexively shift their eyes as well.

  Because he only needed to distract them long enough to speak a single word of power. He whispered the first syllable, and crossbows clacked. Pain stabbed into his guts.

  His knees buckling, he denied the agony long enough to grit out the remaining syllables. Magic chimed through the air, and his enemies dropped. The half-dragons were quite possibly dead, or failing that, unconscious. But thanks, perhaps, to some talisman or enchantment of protection, Maldur was merely stunned. Shuddering, blood streaming from his nose, teeth bared in a snarl of effort, he shook his head and managed to raise himself to his knees.

  He struggled, too, to level his wand.

  Rhespen attempted a second spell and immediately botched it. The excruciating fire in his midsection, the trembling of his hands, and the choked rasp of his voice, made precision impossible. But if he could get his hands on his staff, perhaps he could still shift Winterflower and himself away from here before Maldur recovered sufficiently to stop them..

  He looked for Winterflower, and rejoiced to see that she'd already had the sense to pick up the staff and the haversack, too. Then she released the teleport spell he'd bound in the rod and vanished.

  He goggled after her in astonishment and horror, until a blast of force from Maldur's wand slammed him into oblivion.

  Rhespen woke lying on a rack, his wrists and ankles manacled to the torture apparatus and a vile-tasting leather gag in his raw, dry mouth. Such restraints were an effective way of ensuring that a magician couldn't cast spells.

  He wondered if he could have cast them in any case. A healer had evidently tended the multiple puncture wounds in his guts. Otherwise, he might well have succumbed to them already, or failing that, remained unconscious or delirious. But they still throbbed so fiercely he could scarcely bear it, and he felt as weak and feverish as he was parched.

  He lay alone in the dungeon for what seemed an eternity, until he wondered if a slow, agonizing, solitary death by thirst
was the punishment Orchtrien had decreed for him. But finally footsteps sounded on the stairs. Rhespen turned his head to see the king himself, wearing his elf shape, descending.

  Orchtrien extracted the gag from Rhespen's mouth.

  "Maldur begged me to put him in charge of your interrogation and punishment," said the gold. "I'm considering it."

  Rhespen tried to answer, but his voice was inaudible. Orchtrien unstoppered a leather bottle and held it to his lips.

  "I'm told you must content yourself with just a swallow at first, lest it make you sick."

  Despite his pain and fear, the cold water sliding down his throat gave Rhespen a moment of bliss, the last such he might ever know.

  "Thank you, Majesty," he croaked.

  "Thank me by answering my questions truthfully. It may go easier for you if you do. You told Maldur you copied my grimoires. I'd hoped it was simply a lie, a distraction, but I've since discovered that something broke my ghargatula's tether, so I suppose it must be true."

  "Yes."

  "And Winterflower absconded with the texts."

  "Yes." Abandoning Rhespen in the process. He could only assume she'd been too panicked to linger long enough to dart across the floor, grab his hand, and carry him along with her.

  "Where did she go?"

  "I don't know. We hadn't decided on a destination."

  "Curse it, anyway! Why did you betray me, Rhespen? Haven't I given you everything?"

  "Everything but what I wanted most. When I begged for that, you sent me away to die."

  "No!" The gold hesitated. "Well, all right, that possibility was in my mind. I wanted her, and no hunter likes it when someone tries to balk him in the pursuit of his chosen prey. I was annoyed with you, but by no means certain you'd die. I thought it more likely that your exile would simply cure you of your infatuation and your impudence. And that if you succeeded in your mission, the rewards would more than compensate you for the loss of a woman, however fetching."