by David Gross
The two guards in the lead wagon dropped their crossbows in favor of sharp axes and leaped to the ground. There they hewed like harvesters, chopping the lively vines as near to their beasts’ feet as they dared. The reptilian creatures plodded forward against the vines, the only indication of their panic a steady, lowering moan.
The fire-throwers covered their companions’ actions with a series of short bursts. Despite the dwarves’ restraint, the boughs above them crackled with flame. Blackened limbs began to droop precipitously over the wagons.
One of the dwarves on the ground shouted a familiar-sounding epithet. The vines had encircled both of his legs and was pulling him away from the struggling lizards, toward the squirming center of the patch.
“I am definitely too old for this,” muttered Thamalon.
He ran toward the fallen dwarf, crouching low to present as small a target as possible to the unseen archers. His injured hip gave him a horrendous limp that might have looked comical in other circumstances.
The vines stripped the dwarf’s axe from his hands and drew him deeper into their tangled mass, leaving the weapon behind.
“Roendhalg!” the dwarf’s companion called, turning to cleave a path through the wriggling vines between them.
Arrows spanked off the back of his steel armor, but one found the gap between his helmet and his back plate. The dwarf reeled forward, clutching awkwardly at the arrow in his neck. The vines reached for his legs.
Thamalon snatched up Roendhalg’s axe and chopped at the vines encircling the other dwarf’s ankles. Three strokes was all it took to free him that far from the center of the creeper. The freed dwarf backstepped and fell as the shock of the arrow wound struck him fully. Thamalon dropped the axe and grabbed the fallen dwarf. He was heavier than he looked, even considering the armor.
“Get away!” shouted the dwarf atop the wagon.
He finally turned the flame weapon toward the creeper. The monstrous plant had already plucked the captured dwarf’s helmet from his head and was peeling off his armor. Beneath his black beard, the dwarf’s face was red from throttling, his eyes bulging, tongue distended.
Thamalon dragged his charge back toward the wagon. He heard a hiss as the dwarf atop the wagon squeezed the lever for his flame weapon.
“Wait!”
Heedless of Thamalon’s shout, the dwarf unleashed a tremendous burst of fire upon the creeper and its captive. The vines thrashed as the flame blasted away their leaves, leaving nothing but the blackened stems and the immolated corpse of their last victim.
“Lift him up!” yelled the driver. He reached down to receive the lolling body of his wounded guard. Immediately after, he offered his arm to Thamalon. “Up you come!”
Inside the basket, Thamalon knelt beside the wounded dwarf while the driver once more took up his goad. While he was no battlefield surgeon, Thamalon knew the basics of tending a wound. Careful not to bump the driver as he beat and cajoled the draft beasts, Thamalon gently removed the wounded dwarf’s helmet and began unbuckling his armor. He left the arrow in place. It had pierced the thick muscle of the dwarf’s neck about a handspan away from his spine. Thamalon shrugged off his robe and tore a sleeve from his linen shirt to staunch the bleeding.
Behind them, someone in the second wagon blew a staccato blast on an iron horn. The wagons lurched forward as the reptiles slowly but steadily left the forest and their arboreal attackers.
Only after they were out of range of the arrows did Thamalon realize sadly that their attackers had almost certainly been elves. While he had no elf blood, Thamalon had always felt an affinity with the fair folk—so much so that he had sired a pair of twins with an elf woman named Trisdea, even after his marriage to Shamur.
“How fares Grunlaern?”
The driver’s question spared Thamalon from further uncomfortable introspection. He glanced only briefly at Thamalon before returning his attention on the path ahead.
“It is a dire wound,” reported Thamalon, “but not mortal, I think. As soon as we can stop, someone should cut out the arrowhead and bandage this properly.”
They halted the caravan half an hour later, when the wagons were well clear of any trees. While one of the dwarves tended Grunlaern, the other examined the damage to their wagons. They plucked a few dozen arrows from the wagons, murmuring appreciatively when they saw none had penetrated the armored flanks.
“Well met,” said one of the dwarves who’d operated the flame weapons. He carried his goggled helmet under one arm as he walked toward Thamalon. The dwarf smelled faintly of candied almonds. He clasped Thamalon’s forearm in a gloved hand. “I am Baeron Longstrides of the Deepspire Miners, son of Hurglud of the Keen Nose, subcommander of the throbe caravans.”
“Well indeed,” said Thamalon, returning the grasp. He’d already decided that he didn’t wish his true identity known until he was sure he was among allies. “Call me Nelember the Far-Traveler.”
The dwarf’s eyes narrowed as he considered the introduction, but he slowly nodded. Thamalon had offered a sufficiently polite disclaimer that he wasn’t sharing his true name.
“In fact, I am so far-traveled,” added Thamalon, “that I have completely lost my way. Is your destination near?”
“Three days,” said Baeron. “We owe you a service. If you wish it, you may ride with us.”
Thamalon nodded. “I will. Perhaps there I can recover my bearings.”
“No doubt of it,” said Baeron. “For we travel to the greatest of all human bastions. We go to Castle Stormweather.”
CHAPTER 7
SHADOWING
Chaney clambered up the outer wall of the Hunting Garden. How his spectral hands could grip the fine crevices between the granite blocks he still couldn’t fathom. For some reason, the phenomenon seemed more paradoxical than the question of why he didn’t sink into the ground when he walked, yet he could thrust his face through a wall and peer into the room beyond. He could see and hear, though he could no longer smell or taste, and he could barely feel.
The bodiless existence was full of conundrums.
Briefly he considered letting go to glide along in Radu’s wake as the assassin spidered up the wall. It would be fun, unless he was pulled through the stone as Radu leaped down the other side. The sensation of passing through solid objects was unlike anything Chaney had experienced in life. It was an uncomfortable, disorienting numbness. It didn’t hurt so much as it made him queasy and fearful of a sudden agony.
Besides, Chaney liked imitating an action that had been so familiar in life. The ghost smiled as he recalled a few of the windows through which he’d crept as a mortal man. He wished regretfully that he’d slipped through a few more before his life had ended.
Radu had tied his boots together and slung them over his shoulder. He had no special knack for climbing apart from his infernal strength and alacrity, but for this occasion he’d purchased a battery of spells from a Thayan witch.
Back at her waterfront shop, the dark-tressed woman had seemed well accustomed to anonymous customers, even masked swordsmen.
“Well met,” Chaney had said to the woman. “I’m his haunting.”
As Chaney expected, she didn’t mark his presence.
Radu explained his needs, showed the woman a pair of tiny diamonds, and surrendered a third at her insistence. The witch took one of the gems and crushed it in an enchanted mortar. When she turned back to Radu, her dozen bracelets chimed as she raised her hands to pluck magic out of nothing.
Even through his high collar and mask, Radu could barely disguise his contempt for the spellcaster—or for himself, for needing her Art. Nevertheless, he stood motionless as she incanted her spells, fed him a spider squirming in bitumen, blew a pinch of cat’s fur into his masked face, scattered the glittering dust of the crushed diamond over his shoulders, and finally snapped her fingers on her own eyelash rolled in a bit of tree gum. After the resultant flash, Radu faded from sight, even from Chaney’s spectral eyes.
Whil
e the witch worked her magic, the shadowy ghosts that stood behind the assassin moaned and swayed like old willow trees on a dry creek bank. Chaney saw Radu’s head turn slightly, as if the man noticed some distant sound but couldn’t identify it.
Silently, Chaney applauded the unhallowed choir. Anything that disturbed Radu Malveen was a delight to his heart.
The witch bowed her head as the remaining two diamonds appeared in her open hand. An instant later, Chaney felt the tug of his mortal anchor as Radu left the shop.
From the docks, Radu had run north across Sarn Street, where the moon shadows mingled with those cast by the flickering street lamps. Selûne’s reflection and those of her trailing tears rippled on Selgaunt Bay, where the black silhouette of the boaters formed a tiny, ragged village between the docks. There the city’s cutthroats, thieves, and smugglers made their deals in vessels lashed together to form a community each night. At dawn, they would cast off again, only to join with different neighbors the next night.
After they scaled the outer wall of the Hunting Garden, Radu dropped into the rough brush of the Hulorn’s Hunting Garden. Ostensibly private, the place was constantly invaded by teenagers dared by their peers to crawl through the sewers and return with a rare flower as proof of their trespass.
Chaney himself had slipped inside once, with his best friend, Talbot Uskevren. Once within the walls of the gloomy place, Chaney tried spooking Talbot with the story of a girl who’d slipped into the Hunting Garden a few years past, never to be seen again. He succeeded only in frightening himself, and in the end he was the one who bolted first, cutting his chin in the rough sewer grate as he fled a sudden hooting, certain it was the girl’s spirit luring him to his doom.
He touched the scar on his chin and imagined he could still feel it. Ten years later, he was the only ghost who haunted the tangled woods—he and his eight inarticulate fellows, who’d fallen back into their customary silence.
At least, he hoped they were the only inhabitants of the garden. Something rustled at the edge of the wood, and all the fireflies hid their glowing bellies as the assassin and his ghosts approached.
Radu kept to the deep shadows until he came to the western barrier of the Palace of Beauty. Chaney could hear the faint strains of a zulkoon from beyond the wall. The eerie sound grew louder as Radu ascended the wall, his bare hands and feet clinging to the stone.
At the top of the wall, they looked down upon the ill-named Palace of Beauty. It was a grotesque edifice of spiraling towers and arches, ranks of balconies, a parliament of gargoyles, and garishly glowing windows. Unlike the similarly eclectic Stormweather Towers, Chaney thought the palace looked like a feverish child’s vision of a fairy castle.
It was to this monument to the Hulorn’s poor taste that Radu had followed Drakkar for the past two nights. For a wizard of some power, Drakkar was surprisingly oblivious to being followed.
He was also a creature of habit. In just two nights, he’d demonstrated a banal routine beginning with a visit to the Hulorn’s palace and ending in one of the city’s less savory festhalls.
“There he is,” said Chaney.
He slapped his forehead when he realized he was helping Radu. With no other company in his long months of phantom existence, Chaney felt his chatter slipping from the spiteful annoyance he intended to the friendly banter to which he’d grown accustomed in life. He wasn’t beginning to like Radu Malveen, for there was nothing remotely likeable about the cold and silent man. The truth was he was lonely, and there was simply no one else to whom Chaney could talk.
Chaney consoled himself with the thought that Radu could see him no better than he could see the invisible assassin. Nevertheless, Radu must have spied Drakkar’s dark blue cloak as it crossed the courtyard. Rather than join the audience at the amphitheater, he went directly to the main building. The guards nodded respectfully as he passed.
Radu moved toward the palace, carrying the ghosts in his wake. Chaney hurried to keep up and avoid being dragged through a wall or a guard tower. Even while invisible, Radu radiated a cold, dark presence that guided Chaney across the walls and rooftops, past the unwitting guards.
Chaney held his breath as Radu sneaked past a pair of sentries wearing the Hulorn’s red-and-black livery. Fortunately for them, they didn’t hear the faint padding of Radu’s naked feet, and Chaney was spared another horrid rush of death. A moldy taste still lingered in his mouth from the most recent murders.
While the killings made Chaney feel sick, they filled Radu with vigor. For days after a killing, he enjoyed inhuman strength and speed. Since the recent double-murder of Thuribal Baerodreemer and his hated rival, Chaney could see a faint white aura around Radu. At first it was more brilliant than the corona of an eclipse, but gradually it would fade to a milky halo then to nothing.
Radu visited each of the lighted windows on the north face of the palace in turn, clinging like a beetle to the wall. At last, he came to an open balcony through which Chaney saw what could only be the Hulorn’s private gallery. As a twig on one of the least prominent branches of the Foxmantle tree, Chaney had never been invited to tour the private wings of the palace. From what he’d heard from those who had seen it, he’d never regretted missing the experience.
Beyond the balcony, the gallery spread out in the shape of an amputee starfish. The floor was a vast chessboard of crimson and green tiles. Near the center its squares were perfect, but they turned trapezoidal and finally shapeless near the ends of the five short arms of the chamber. One arm housed the balcony, while the others ended in huge doors of various shapes.
Two dozen statues in as many different materials stood among the room like pawns in an unfinished game. They ranged from classical nudes painted in bright hues to abstract collisions of glass, bronze, and driftwood.
The paintings for which the gallery was infamous floated above their own illuminated tiles. Some hovered still, while others drifted slowly on their own, uncertain axes. Most were strange portraits, the most pedestrian of which resembled famous and infamous lords and ladies caricatured with the features of one or more animals. Chaney recognized Presker Talendar’s head on the body of an elegant white cat lapping blood from the street. Others were so abstract as to bear little resemblance to anything human. These were the ones that made Chaney feel as though centipedes were crawling in his stomach.
Chaney heard a hiss and thought it came from Radu.
“What is the matter?” he said.
Radu didn’t reply, but Chaney felt the killer’s presence like a winter shadow.
“What?”
Chaney realized he would have no answer then, so he decided to ask later. In the meantime, he moved into the gallery, where he discovered that even the worst of the paintings was less obscene than the gallery’s sole occupant.
The man lay on the floor, gazing up at a slowly spinning painting. He wore the familiar purple doublet and black hose of Andeth Ilchammar, the Hulorn, but otherwise he bore only the roughest resemblance to the man the public knew as the Lord Mayor of Selgaunt. His skull appeared to have been crushed and remolded by a blind and palsied sculptor. While the right side of his face seemed human—if one could overlook the fang jutting up over his mustache—the left was black and as scaly as a constrictor’s hide. His sinister eye bulged with a slitted pupil.
The man drummed his fingers on the floor as he regarded the painting. Chaney flinched to see that one of the man’s hands was a birdlike talon except for its soft, wormy fingers. The other hand looked more human but for its patchwork skin. Upon his furry forefinger he wore a massive gold ring, while his feathered ring finger bore a brilliant green emerald.
A bell rang outside one of the doors. Andeth rocked back onto his shoulders and rolled forward to stand. A moment later, a servant opened the pentagonal door.
“My lord, he has arrived,” said the servant, keeping his gaze on the floor.
Andeth murmured a few arcane words and mimed the act of washing his face. Where his mismatched hand
s passed over his visage, his features transformed into those familiar to the citizens of Selgaunt. As he completed the gesture, there was no sign remaining that he was anything other than a neatly groomed merchant lord.
“Let him come,” said Andeth.
The servant withdrew. With a wicked smile, the Hulorn slipped a wand from his sleeve and shook it three times at the door.
In rapid succession, three small brown clouds appeared, each punctuated by a nasty, wet popping sound. The smoke dissipated to reveal a trio of huge rats. Their eyes burned with infernal light, and their slavering lips trembled and dripped steaming spittle. As one, they looked to their summoner.
Andeth waved once to either side of the door, and the abyssal vermin skittered out of sight just as the visitor arrived.
Drakkar strode purposefully through the door. Chaney thought the tension in his neat jaw was obvious, but the man’s expression did nothing to dim the Hulorn’s mischievous smile. As he came near the Hulorn, Drakkar looked up and saw the man’s mirth—too late. Andeth snapped his fingers and beckoned his rats.
“Beggar!” spat Drakkar.
He whirled to face the vermin, his long dark fingers plucking a thorn from his staff. He hurled it at the rats.
As it left the wizard’s fingers, the thorn turned into a burning black spot of energy. It sizzled and split into five individual points, three of which shot into the body of the nearest rat. The creature’s momentum hurled the three messy pieces of its body to flop at Drakkar’s feet.
The remaining missiles diverged, each striking one of the other attackers. One of the rats screeched like a crow and veered away. The other fearlessly charged Drakkar and climbed straight up his cloak toward his face.
“Dark!” cursed the wizard, beating at the rat with his thorny staff.
“Serves you right,” laughed the Hulorn. “No direct spells. You know the rules.”
His face twisted in revulsion, Drakkar seized the dire rat with his free hand. The creature sank its teeth into the man’s wrist, evoking a shout before Drakkar flung it away.