Vered pulled his blade free and advanced. In the distance he heard the Glass Warrior calling to him. He ignored her. Santon must die. Kill or be killed!
The expression on Vered’s face when he lunged and missed by a fraction of an inch told of his expertise. None bested Vered in battle! Not even a demon in human form like Santon.
“Vered, stop, don’t!” Santon used his shield to deflect a lunge.
“Both of you, stop,” came Alarice’s harsh command.
Vered saw fear on Santon’s face. He knew he could not fail. He redoubled the speed and power of his attack, working around, trying to pink Santon’s good arm. Only by playing on his fear of losing his left arm might he slay this foe.
“I don’t want to do this, Vered. Please, don’t force me.” Santon parried the blows with his heavy axe, but his protective glass shield accomplished more.
“The mind leech,” pleaded Alarice. “It creates fear to gain control over you.”
“It has Vered,” Santon cried in anguish. “I don’t want to harm him.”
The Glass Warrior did not reply. Vered circled even faster. His heart almost exploded in fear when he saw the woman enter a shallow cave.
“No, stop, don’t go in there!” he shouted. Vered broke off the attack he launched against Santon. He had to stop the Glass Warrior!
Santon used the edge of his shield to smash into the side of Vered’s head. The smaller man went spinning, blood matting his brown hair. The impact jolted Vered and pain burned through his brain — and cleared it!
“The mind leech,” he gasped. “It used me. Alarice is going after it. We must help her!”
Santon looked at him sceptically, then indicated that Vered should precede him into the cave. Vered wasted no time. He had not detected the leech’s insidious presence in his mind. He had been too wrapped up in the heat of battle. But now he knew the sensations. The instant he entered the cool mouth of the cave, he felt the leech again trying to subvert him.
“Santon,” he said. “It works on me. Help me!” Vered turned to his friend. Santon stood in silence, as immobile as a marble statue. The expression on his face told Vered that the leech had taken over the man’s mind.
Without thinking, Vered dropped to the cave floor and kicked out, his legs scissoring. One foot went behind Santon’s ankle. The other foot snapped into his kneecap. Like a giant tree felled in a forest, Santon crashed to the rocky ground. When he sat up, the dazed look had passed and one of chagrin replaced it.
“The demon-damned thing had me!” he exclaimed.
“Alarice. We must help her.” Together the men hurried into the depths of the cave. Less than ten paces into the low-ceilinged cave they found the Glass Warrior. She stood with sword drawn. Her entire body trembled, as if she fought against unseen bonds.
“There,” she said between clenched teeth. “There it is. The mind leech!”
Vered almost laughed. The pitiful creature cowering against a cave wall could hardly be the magical beast capable of subverting his mind. It was smaller than a princess’ lap dog, a sickly pink in colour, and had eyes as round and wide as yellow spring flowers. A long, slender tongue probed constantly from between its lips. No teeth showed as its lips drew back in a grimace.
“We must kill it!” Alarice shrieked. The echoes down the iron cave assaulted Vered’s ears and sent new waves of pain into his head. The surge of agony pulled him free once more of the mind leech’s power.
A heavy hand tried to restrain him. Vered twisted, grabbed Santon’s left wrist, and broke free. The fear on Santon’s face came not from within but from the leech’s fear for its own death. It had again taken over Birtle Santon.
Vered dodged to one side, tripped Santon, then used his dagger on the mind leech. The first prick produced a tiny spurt of thin, orange blood. Vered felt the lifting of mental pressure as the leech panicked, sensing its own death.
Vered had no chance for a second strike. Alarice’s glass sword slashed past, barely gutting the mind leech before Santon’s axe decapitated it.
The magical creature’s death released them totally from its mental influence. The trio sank to the cave floor and shook in reaction. Alarice reached out and put her arms around both men’s shoulders. For a long time, no one spoke.
Then Santon said, “See? I told you. I’m not afraid of losing my arm. I’m afraid of nothing!”
“At least one of us has kept his sense of humour,” said Vered. It was all he could do to keep from staring at the dead mind leech and reliving the horror of its bondage.
CHAPTER XVI
Vered almost tumbled from the saddle. Exhaustion had taken its toll on him over the past three days. They had defeated the mind leech, but the heat, the constant pounding echoes, the hardship of traveling through the barren Iron Range had worn him down.
“There,” came Alarice’s quiet voice. For a moment, he thought he had gone deaf. No echo returned to torment him. He rubbed his bleary eyes and sat straighter in the saddle. Hot winds blew at his back. For a moment, this confused him. Then he realized that they had finally escaped the black mountains and had emerged on the side most distant from fair, green Porotane.
Shock rolled through him. He had never recovered fully from the encounter with the mind leech. Afraid to fall asleep because of the nagging fear of having his mind taken over, Vered had become increasingly tired. The heat radiating from the high walls of the iron canyons had also sapped his strength, but now he stared out across land presenting a true challenge.
Vered was not sure he had the strength for it.
“Never have I seen such desert,” he said. The barren waste appeared stripped of all vegetation.
Huge dunes of ochre sand rose like waves in the ocean. The tireless winds had cut creases into the sides of the dunes in their quest to move the ponderous mounds from one location to another. Here and there Vered saw the grit whipping along the ridges. The winds caught it and sent it upward, sometimes over five hundred feet high in a miniature tornado. More often, the winds played sleight of hand and hid the airborne sand behind the dunes.
“The Desert of Sazan,” said Santon. “Only once before have I seen it. Luckily, I skirted the edge on my way south to Rievane.”
“We must cross it. Straight across. In that direction.” Alarice stared into the heart of this sprawling, overheated monster.
“Water,” said Vered. “Do we have enough? Just looking at it turns my mouth into a furnace.”
“How far do we need to go before finding the City of Stolen Dreams?” Birtle Santon hooked one leg across the saddle pommel and bent forward. “Vered has a point. We could never find water if we begin wandering aimlessly.”
Alarice silently held out her scrying cord and crystal. The sunlight caught the facets of the glass splinter and turned them into glittering rainbows. Santon raised his hand to hold back the blinding glare. Vered found himself drawn into the ever-changing pattern as Alarice spun her spells.
The crystal spun in circles, never stopping until the Glass Warrior’s spell came to completion. Like a true compass needle, the crystal pointed in the direction Alarice had indicated.
“Perhaps it means we should follow the hind end and go back into the Iron Range,” said Vered.
“The City of Stolen Dreams,” she said. “I…I cannot see it. Patrin still prevents direct viewing through a scrying spell, but I can do this much. My power seems to grow.”
“Enough to confront Patrin directly and challenge him for the twins?” asked Santon.
“We don’t even know if this Patrin has them. All we truly know is what Tahir told us — and I brand him a liar. He might have been imprisoned, but what evidence do we have that it was Patrin’s doing?”
“Ah, Vered, you doubt even the rising of the sun every morning.” Alarice put away her scrying crystal.
“There’s no way to know if the sun will rise until it does,” he pointed out. “Simply saying it will because it always has before is to deny change.”
; “I’ll wager that it does,” said Santon. “How much on the rising of the morrow’s sun?”
“Fifty gold pieces,” said Vered.
“Do you want odds?”
“Fifty to one.”
“You seek twenty-five hundred if it does not?” Santon laughed. “What a crazy bet! If the sun does not rise, what matters gold?”
“At least I’ll die with money owed me. The saints might appreciate that and enter it in the Death Rota.”
“We will not die. We will prevail.” The Glass Warrior spurred her mare forward. The horse hesitated when the hard hematite of the Iron Range turned to shifting sands beneath her hooves, but Alarice’s insistence kept the animal moving. Vered and Santon followed, silently agreeing with the mare that they should not venture forth.
Vered let the Glass Warrior ride ahead. In a low voice, he said, “We can stop this now. There’s no need for us to continue with her. What use can we be against Patrin?”
“We’ve not been promised riches,” agreed Santon. “Nor are we likely to find anything but death.”
“The Demon Crown is a dangerous relic. The wearer might become perverted by its power. The war might worsen.”
“Even with a strong ruler, the civil war might have raged overlong,” said Santon. “There is nothing to suggest that a new ruler will put an end to the warring.”
“You mentioned Rievane to the south. What sort of city is it?”
“A fine one,” said Santon, remembering with relish. “Women come into the street and beg you to join them in their soft bed and share their soft flesh.”
“What of their men?”
“Few. Most go into the desert to hunt artifacts. They are gone much of the time, leaving the women — and how fair and beautiful they are! — to pine away.”
“My kind of place.”
“Ah, yes, Vered. And mine. And the women. They are alone so much of the time, they seek out companionship in foolish ways. Gamble? They are worse than even you! Anyone who could not come away from Rievane with a pouch brimming with gold is a fool.”
“And the women.”
“Yes, and the lovely, lovely women.”
The men fell silent, each lost in his own thoughts. But neither looked to the south toward Rievane. Both stared at Alarice’s back, the proud set of her head, the straight back, the determination in her mount. Vered’s mind turned over and over as he wrestled with the problems of following the Glass Warrior. She offered hope to Porotane.
For Vered and Santon, she offered hardship and pain and probable death. Vered forced his body to forget some of the tiredness. He saw how Santon responded to the woman. Alarice had a quality about her that he found appealing — for Santon it had been irresistible. He could not deny his friend Alarice’s companionship and love.
He forced such a notion from his mind. He had no designs on Alarice, and Santon’s attachment to her had no bearing on his own decisions. He and Birtle Santon had gone their separate ways often enough in the past, only to rejoin and rediscover their friendship. If he let Alarice and Santon continue and headed for Rievane or some other spot to while away the time, neither would object. Vered had to admit that he stayed with Alarice because of the adventure it afforded. Life had not been dull, but it had become routine.
Brigands and rebel bands and renegade wizards and constables. Dodging them and trying to live the best he could took on a deadly sameness. Danger followed by flight and a seeking of new territory. Alarice offered something different and, as much as it wore him down physically, Vered had never been more excited about the future.
“Baron Vered,” he said to himself, letting the title roll from his tongue like a honey lozenge.
“Rogue Vered,” Santon said gruffly, interrupting his fine daydream. “We’ll be lucky to escape this alive, much less with fine and fancy titles.”
“One can hope,” Vered said. “Restoring a monarch to the throne ought to be worth something.”
“A title is little enough. What would you be like as a ruler of a small barony?” asked Santon. He answered his own query. “Miserable, that’s how you’d be. So would I. What do we know of rule?”
“More than Freow, if Alarice’s tale is even half true.”
“He has done well enough, for a common ruffian,” said Santon. “But would you want to live as he does?”
Vered’s face tightened as a breath of hot desert wind brushed by. Pillars of dust rose on either side as cyclonic winds pulled aloft huge amounts of sand. He laughed aloud. Even if he had to live in a miserable place like the Desert of Sazan, Vered would not trade places with Duke Freow.
“My feelings, too,” said Santon. “We have a freedom to roam.”
“A freedom to do!”
Alarice had reined in. They came even with her. She said in a voice carrying a steel edge, “We also have the freedom to die. There. The City of Stolen Dreams.”
“So soon?” Vered peered into a haze of dust blowing across the dunes. He saw nothing.
“Patrin’s magical city is in the centre of the Desert of Sazan.”
“But,” protested Santon, “we’ve ridden less than an hour!”
“We could ride for eternity and never find the city — if Patrin desired it.”
The woman’s words caused Vered to shiver, in spite of the furnace winds gusting around him.
“You say that Patrin wants us to enter this phantom city of his?” Vered did not like the implications. He felt like a bug being drawn into a spider’s killing web.
“That is true,” Alarice said.
Vered started to ask where this mysterious city was when he heard a deep rumbling. It built to a roar. He fought to keep his horse from bolting. The sound mounted, higher, deeper, until Vered felt his internal organs grinding against one another. And appearing through the brown haze came a city shimmering not with heat but with magic.
“The City of Stolen Dreams,” Alarice said in a low voice. “The place where all your dreams can be snatched away and you are left hollow and haunted.”
“Patrin steals dreams? Truly?” asked Santon.
“He tends the poisoned gardens of your mind, finding those weeds most likely to destroy you. The fine plants Patrin plucks and kills. What remains is vile.”
“He drives his victims insane?”
“Worse, Vered,” said Alarice. “He leaves them bitter and knowing that their lives were once better. Your fondest ambition, your greatest dream, that is Patrin’s target.”
“What are we to do? How do we fight him?” Birtle Santon looked uneasily at his withered arm. Vered read the concern in his friend’s face. Recovering the use of that nerve-injured arm was Santon’s dream. To lose that meant to lose much of the will to live.
“No sword can defeat Patrin. His weapons are magical. He is not the greatest of all wizards — the Wizard of Storms is that — but Patrin is powerful.”
“More powerful than even the Glass Warrior?” came a rumbling voice. “Such humility. I never thought to hear it from you, dear lady.”
Vered looked about but saw no one. He had almost called out to Alarice, named her name. He did not know if Patrin held this power over her, but he would not be the one giving it inadvertently to Patrin.
“Come. We ride to the City of Stolen Dreams,” she said. Slowly, the trio rode forward. Outwardly, they showed no fear, but Vered fought hard to keep his hands from shaking. His horse trembled, eyes wide and nostrils foaming. Alarice’s mount reacted similarly. Of Santon and his horse he saw nothing. The man rode behind.
But the Glass Warrior gave him courage. She rode, back ramrod stiff, hand easy on the reins, and with a determination to her that outshone any possible fear. Courage lay not in having no fear but in overcoming it.
The hollow clicking of the horses’ hooves against paved street startled him. Vered looked around, then spun in the saddle and peered behind. The Desert of Sazan had vanished totally. Everywhere he looked, he saw a fabulously rich city. Buildings constructed of jasper and jade an
d onyx. Fixtures of silver and precious stones. Windows of stained glass depicting valiant scenes of combat and courage, crystalline sheets with bevelled edges opening into lavish suites and courtyards with delicately spraying fountains filled with subtle perfumes. Everywhere he looked he saw opulence and…emptiness.
“Where are the citizens of this fine city?” he asked.
“There are none. Who can live without dreams?” asked Alarice.
Again Vered shuddered. To Santon he said, “My aspirations are simple but they are mine. I have no wish to lose them.”
“Speaking seems sacrilegious,” said Santon. “Any sound in this dead city is wrong.”
Vered looked along intersecting streets, some paved with gold and other precious metals, some homey and quiet and begging for the laughter of children and the soft sighs of lovers. No sound reached him. Only the muffled clicking of their horses’ hooves interrupted the deathly silence.
“Where do we find Patrin?” he asked the Glass Warrior.
“We ride until we come to him. As before, it might be an hour or it might be eternity. This is Patrin’s centre of power. We do his bidding or die.”
“Why doesn’t he just kill us?” asked Vered. “We disturb him. Surely, a wizard who hides in a place such as this does not wish to waste time with our like.”
“Patrin did not exile Tahir and steal away the twins for amusement. He has plans. Somehow, we must fit into the matrix of those schemes.”
“She has a point,” said Santon. The man looked around, his sharp eyes missing nothing. “Patrin’s power is immense to maintain such a city. He wants more, and we can give it to him.”
“Very observant, Birtle Santon,” came the booming voice. The three halted. From a small, simple peasant’s hut walked a man of medium height, age, and colouring. Of his clothing, Vered saw nothing out of the ordinary. In truth, the harder he tried to find something unique about this man, the more he failed.
“It is a trick of Patrin’s,” explained Alarice. “He manipulates his image. I am uncertain that any has looked upon his true visage.”
The Glass Warrior (Demon Crown Book 1) Page 17