The Captive Flame botg-1

by Richard Lee Byers

  Brandishing their own rods, wands, or orbs, her fellow mages joined in, one or two at a time. Remarkably, given that they hadn’t practiced together, the wizards managed to speak exactly in unison. And when the incantation became a responsory, they seemed to know instinctively who should perform the verse and who the refrain.

  Gaedynn suspected that the magic, in some sense willing its own creation, was guiding them. For certainly it was present almost from the moment Jhesrhi started speaking. It made his joints ache and filled the air with a smell like rotting lilies.

  Medrash had his eyes closed and his steel medallion clasped in one hand. He was whispering too, perhaps a prayer or meditation to aid his concentration. Gaedynn assumed it wouldn’t interfere with the ritual, or Jhesrhi would have stopped him.

  A disk of silvery luminescence appeared near Medrash. At first it was so faint that Gaedynn wasn’t sure he was actually seeing it. But the mages chanted louder, more insistently-and it clotted somehow, becoming more definite if no more solid.

  The disk darkened, as though reflecting a place more dimly lit than the cellar. Stars glittered in a stripe down its center. The borders were the facades of buildings rising toward the sky.

  A shadow leaped, or conceivably flew, across the open space between them.

  After a few heartbeats it sprang again, exactly as before. Then a third time and a fourth. But it was so tiny and fleeting that even repeated viewings didn’t enable Gaedynn to determine anything more about it.

  Then, however, by almost infinitesimal degrees, it started slowing down. At the same time, and just as gradually, it grew larger. Closer. Before, the magic had in effect put Gaedynn on the street, where Medrash had stood in actuality. Now it was like he was rising into the air.

  “They’re doing it,” Khouryn whispered.

  Then Medrash grunted and lurched like someone had struck him a blow. A white crack zigzagged through the mirror’s darkness.

  After a moment the jagged line disappeared, like the wizards’ chant had repaired the damage. But now the shadow wasn’t drawing any closer, or making its jump any more slowly either. And Medrash was shaking.

  “I don’t like this,” Balasar said.

  More cracks stabbed across the mirror. The wizards chanted louder still and spun their instruments through circular figures. The wands and other talismans left trails of sparks and shimmers in the air.

  The cracks kept disappearing. But they lasted longer than they had before. Then a gash split the scaly hide on Medrash’s forearm. Blood welled forth. An expanding stain on the front of his tunic revealed that something had slashed his chest as well.

  “Stop!” Balasar shouted.

  The mages kept on reciting. A forked cut burst open among the white studs on Medrash’s face.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said Gaedynn, springing to his feet. “The wizards can’t stop. They’re in a trance. But if we get Medrash out of the pentagram, that should halt the ritual.”

  “Then come on,” Balasar said.

  The three observers strode in among the wizards. If any of the mages even noticed, Gaedynn couldn’t tell it.

  But Medrash did. He turned his reptilian head so the yellow eyes under the protruding brow could regard them. Praise be to the Great Archer for that, anyway.

  “Go to the stairs,” said Balasar, raising his voice to make himself heard above the chanting.

  “No,” Medrash said. “I can do this, and it’s my duty.”

  “You can’t and it isn’t.” Balasar turned to Gaedynn and Khouryn. “We’ll have to move him.”

  “Fine,” said the dwarf. He grabbed Medrash’s forearm. Gaedynn and Balasar took hold of him as well, and they started to manhandle him away from the spot where Jhesrhi had put him.

  Medrash resisted, but more feebly than Gaedynn expected of such a hulking warrior. It was like he was partly entranced himself, or dividing his attention between struggling with his would-be rescuers and reliving the instant when he’d glimpsed the murderer.

  Unfortunately, the magic resisted on his behalf. The air seemed to thicken around them until it was like they were trying to walk while submerged in mud. Even Khouryn, the strongest soldier in the Brotherhood, had trouble making headway. Meanwhile, Medrash’s hide split and split again, up and down the length of his body, until it seemed likely he’d bleed to death before they hauled him to safety.

  As he shoved and dragged, Gaedynn caught glimpses of Jhesrhi and Aoth, oblivious to the struggle, prisoners of their own conjuration. For an instant it reminded him of the day his father’s warriors came to deliver him to the elves. He’d promised himself he’d be brave, but he was only seven. When the time arrived, he begged to be spared, but his parents and everyone else he loved and trusted simply stood and stared.

  Khouryn let go of Medrash and, his hands red with the Tymantheran’s blood, snatched the urgrosh from his back. He chopped at one of the glowing blue lines composing the figure. The edge sheared deep into the earthen floor beneath. But when he yanked the weapon free, Gaedynn saw that enchanted though it was, it had failed to cleave something made of intangible light.

  Balasar spewed frost at the same patch of floor. Dragon breath was inherently magical, so Gaedynn supposed dragonborn breath must be also, but it too failed to mar the pattern.

  Still, he thought Khouryn’s idea was a good one. Spoil the figure involved in raising a supernatural effect and you generally ended said effect, even if the tactic had failed dismally in Thay.

  Even indoors, even in relaxed circumstances, Gaedynn usually carried a few arrows riding in a slim doeskin quiver on his belt. He felt incomplete without them. And by good fortune, he currently had one of the special shafts Jhesrhi had enchanted for him. He snatched it out and stabbed the head into one of the luminous green handprints.

  The charge of countermagic in the narrow arrowhead sent nullification surging outward in all directions, an expanding ring that wiped the figure of light away. The floating mirror vanished too, and Medrash’s skin stopped splitting. The wizards’ chant stumbled to a halt. The cellar seemed profoundly silent without it.

  Until Medrash drew a deep breath. “I don’t know whether to thank you or rebuke you.”

  “Thank them,” said Aoth. He let his spear drop to hang casually in his grasp. A blue-green glow faded from the head. “That was completely out of control.”

  “And heal yourself,” said Balasar. “You’re bleeding all over everything.”

  “What just happened?” Gaedynn asked. “Is the murderer in the room? Did he subvert the magic?”

  Jhesrhi brushed a stray strand of blonde hair away from her golden eyes. “I don’t think so. It seems to me that he has a powerful ward in place to keep anyone from using divination against him.” She glanced around at her fellow mages. “Do you agree?”

  All speaking more or less at the same time, they indicated that they did.

  “So what does that mean?” Gaedynn asked. “The killer is a wizard unknown to us or the authorities? Someone who never had his hands tattooed?”

  “Maybe,” said Aoth, “or he could be a practitioner of divine magic.”

  “That sounds promising,” Khouryn growled, returning his axe to its harness. “I can just see a bunch of Chessentan mages trying to pin the murders on a Chessentan holy man.”

  “There are other possibilities,” Jhesrhi said. “Maybe the killer simply possesses a formidable talisman or receives aid from a supernatural entity. Or is a supernatural entity himself.”

  “In other words,” Gaedynn said, “finding out about this defense doesn’t point us at any one suspect or group of suspects. So we still need magic to track the whoreson down. Now that you know about the ward, can you punch through it?”

  “I’m game to try,” Medrash said. Gaedynn saw that some of the dragonborn’s wounds looked halfway healed, and the rest had at least stopped bleeding.

  Aoth smiled crookedly. “Considering that we damn near killed you, I don’t know whether to prai
se your courage or doubt your good sense. But I have no idea how to get around that ward. Does anybody else?”

  “I wouldn’t want to try to improvise a method,” Oraxes said. “Next time it could be me getting sliced to pieces.”

  “But given time and study,” said the elderly witch, “we may well find the key.”

  “How much time?” asked Aoth.

  She shrugged her bony shoulders. “A couple of tendays. Perhaps a month.”

  “I have eight days left. That’s the bargain I made with the war hero.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Khouryn asked. “We just keep patrolling and hope to catch the killer at his work?”

  “No.” Gaedynn picked at a tacky splotch of blood on his sleeve. Futilely; the garment was rather obviously ruined unless he could persuade Jhesrhi to remove the stains with magic. “That hasn’t worked any better than the ritual. For whatever reason, we aren’t able to stalk or track this particular beast. But there’s another way to hunt. You set out bait and wait for the animal to come to you.”

  “Interesting,” said Medrash. “But is it practical in this situation? The Green Hand doesn’t kill any particular sort of person-”

  “Rumor has it,” Oraxes said, “that he kills people who have a particularly strong hatred of mages. Unfortunately, Luthcheq possesses those in abundance.”

  Medrash gave a quick nod. “Indeed. And given that he prowls the entire city and kills the highborn and the low, the prosperous and the poor alike, how would we go about luring him into a snare?”

  Jhesrhi frowned. “There might be a way. Places can have a spirit. An atmosphere. Often it derives from their history. They attract a certain sort of person, and certain events tend to happen there.

  “Generally speaking,” she continued, “it’s a very weak effect. So weak we never feel the tug. So weak that if you mean to go one way instead of another, you will. The influence can’t change your mind. But if you kept track, you’d find that over the course of a year, or a hundred years, the groups that took each path differed at least slightly.”

  “Maybe I see what you’re getting at,” Khouryn said. “But if the effect is as subtle as all that, how can we count on it solving our problem in the next several days?”

  “The effect as it occurs in nature is subtle,” Jhesrhi said. “We wizards should be able to infuse a particular location with a negativity more potent than that found in any of Luthcheq’s dueling grounds, slaughterhouses, torture chambers, or what have you. That will cause the Green Hand to gravitate toward that area when he chooses his next victim. And we’ll be waiting there to catch him.”

  “But what about the people who live and work in that area?” Khouryn asked. “If I understand you correctly, the new atmosphere will poison their thoughts. They might end up hurting or even killing one another.”

  Oraxes sneered. “To the Towers of Night with them. If somebody doesn’t catch the Green Hand, those bastards will come back here to burn and butcher all of us.”

  Medrash gave him a level stare. “It’s unlikely that all the people whose minds you’d corrupt hate mages, or would try to slaughter you in any case. But even if they are your enemies, this is a dishonorable way to strike at them.”

  “Oh, sharpen your claws,” said Balasar. Gaedynn had never heard the expression before, but he assumed the smaller dragonborn was telling his clan brother not to be so squeamish. If so, then he thoroughly approved.

  “If a person isn’t depraved to begin with,” Jhesrhi said, “the influence won’t make him so in just a few days.”

  “What about the man who’s right on the edge?” asked Khouryn.

  “And what about angry blows and spiteful words?” Medrash asked. “A person doesn’t have to fall into outright fiendishness to make mistakes that will mar his life forever afterward.”

  Aoth frowned. “There’s no point debating the morality of it unless we’re sure it’s even possible. In the time we have left, I mean.”

  “I think it is,” the aged sorceress said. “It’s not really that complicated, just funneling the raw essence of malice into a place-and this time there shouldn’t be resistance to overcome. We can probably proceed with a ritual as early as tomorrow night.”

  “Then I say we go ahead,” said Aoth. “The Green Hand murders people every tenday. The city’s in a panic. Every wizard’s in danger, and the future of the Brotherhood’s at stake. If we can fix all that, it will more than make up for whatever incidental nastiness we cause along the way.”

  Oraxes grinned. “Unless somebody finds out about it. Because what we’re really talking about is laying a curse on a part of Luthcheq and the people who live there. And there’s no way of justifying that to fools who already hate sorcery.”

  “Then it’s a good thing we all know how to keep our mouths shut,” said Aoth. “Now, I’ve already committed the Brotherhood to this plan. Do the rest of you agree?”

  The Chessentan mages exchanged glances, then murmured or nodded their support.

  “I still don’t like it,” Medrash said. “But promise me a place among the hunters, and that you’ll lift the curse as soon as we catch the murderer, and I’m with you.”

  “Done,” said Aoth. “Now let’s decide where to center the spell.”

  “The ropemakers’ quarter,” Khouryn said. “It’s a poor district, with all the ills that go along with want, and a boy died a bloody, pointless death there just a few days back. If you want a place to stink of misery and anger, your work’s already halfway done.”

  *****

  Aoth and Jet glided over the rookeries and the narrow streets and alleys snaking between them. Aoth was the only rider in the air. Griffons were magnificent beasts, useful for many purposes, but you couldn’t expect ordinary ones to circle endlessly without screeching to one another.

  It likely didn’t matter that no one else was aloft. Clouds shrouded the moon, and few lights burned below. Even a dwarf like Khouryn couldn’t have seen much from such a height.

  But with his fire-touched eyes, Aoth could. He could even see the taint he and his fellow mages had cast over a portion of the ropemakers’ precinct. It revealed itself as a slow seething inside the deepest shadows.

  He wished they could have confined it to a smaller area. That would have made it easier to spot the Green Hand if the magic actually succeeded in drawing him in. It would also have reduced the number of innocents obliviously immersing themselves in filth.

  But Aoth didn’t find it all that hard to disregard their plight. He’d done worse things in war. And as far as he was concerned, he was at war now-a war to save the Brotherhood from ruin.

  A dark form skulked across a canted tenement rooftop. “There!” said Aoth.

  “Where?” Aoth felt his psychic connection to Jet deepen as the familiar availed himself of vision even keener than his own. “Oh, right, I see him. But is that the Green Hand?”

  “I don’t know. Fly lower.”

  Crouched, clad in a voluminous robe and a hood that covered his entire head, the man below certainly looked like anyone’s notion of a fiend. But like most slums, the ropemakers’ precinct harbored a diversity of outlaws, and a masked man could lurk on a roof for a number of reasons. Aoth didn’t want to reveal his presence until he was sure he’d found his quarry.

  The hooded man stalked to the edge of the roof and then crawled over it, clinging to the wall head down like an insect or lizard. He scuttled along the top tier of shuttered windows, seemingly peering through the cracks.

  Aoth’s doubts fell away. A thief who could climb like that, whether by dint of skill or magic, would steal from wealthier folk than paupers in a tenement. The man below was here to kill. Come to think of it, it was in just such a setting that he’d committed the first murders in his string.

  Jet perceived his master’s certainty. “I can peel him right off that wall.”

  Aoth snorted. His steed could perform amazing maneuvers in flight, but the prospect of plunging into the narrow s
pace between buildings, mere inches away from one of them, was enough to give any rider pause. “Just swoop low enough to give me a shot.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” But Jet did as he’d been instructed.

  The hooded man dug his fingertips between the laths of a shutter like he meant to rip the barrier off its hinges. Aoth aimed his spear and considered whether to hurl frost or darts of light.

  Then Jet went rigid and plummeted toward the street. His spread wings caught just enough air to keep Aoth from breaking bones when they crashed down. It was only then that Aoth spotted the arrow buried deep in the feathered part of the griffon’s flank, just behind the foreleg.

  Aoth looked up just in time to see a second hooded figure, this one armed with a bow, step back from the edge of a roof and out of sight. The man on the wall was gone.

  At that moment, Aoth hated himself for failing to spot the archer, even though no one had ever even speculated that the Green Hand might have an accomplice. “How bad is it?” He started to swing himself out of the saddle to take a better look.

  “Stay where you are!” said Jet.

  “You need-”

  “Stay where you are!” The griffon ran and leaped. His wings lashing, he rose into the air.

  Just high enough to thump down on a rooftop, where Aoth felt his exhaustion and fatigue almost as if they were his own. “Now you can see which way they went,” said Jet.

  He was right. The Green Hand and his lookout were fleeing to the north, bounding like grasshoppers from building to building. “Will you be all right here?” asked Aoth.

  “I won’t die on you. Get them!”

  Aoth dismounted, yanked his bugle from the saddle, and blew it. Then he waited for what seemed forever, although he knew that in reality it only took a few heartbeats for Jhesrhi to answer his call.

  She arrived flying on the wind, garments flapping, hair whirling around her, the gold runes on her black staff pulsing. When she spied Jet and the blood dripping down the shingles beneath him, her eyes widened in dismay.