At last they reached the end of the trail. It had become nothing more than a raised causeway, and now it ended in a small lake. Across the lake from where they stood, maybe a hundred feet distant, a house sat on an island. The house was a low-slung thing with a sod roof. A light flickered through the windows and a small boat rested at the edge of the island, motionless in the still waters of the lake. The three companions backtracked so they could talk.
“He’s in there?” Darik whispered, his heart pounding with nervous energy. He touched his forefinger to his thumb to ward evil.
Sofiana crowded in close, as if afraid to stand by herself. “Whatever for?” she asked.
Whelan whispered, “Yes, he’s in there. Perhaps he’s binding the wights that hide out here.”
Darik swallowed. So they were wights that he saw. Sofiana grabbed her father’s arm.
Whelan explained, “Something about the swamp makes it hard for the Harvester to gather souls. But he still tries. Listen!”
For a moment, Darik heard a horn in the distance, and baying hounds, but it passed so quickly that he wondered if he’d formed the sounds from the other noise in the marsh. “How do we get out there?” he asked.
Sofiana said, “We swim. You can swim, can’t you, Darik?”
“Not very well,” he admitted. He’d gone swimming a few times in the Nye outside Balsalom, but was not proficient.
Whelan said, “It’s not deep. You won’t have to swim until the last twenty feet or so.”
“I can manage that.”
“Good,” Whelan said. “Be quiet, but don’t dawdle. There might be snakes in the water, or giant gars that think you’d make a nice change of diet from frogs and turtles. I dropped a few stones in the water earlier, and attracted nothing, but that is no guarantee. As for the house, I don’t expect more than one or two guards. I’ll go right for the wizard unless his guards are awake. I want the two of you to wait outside and keep watch. There will be others nearby; if they come, you’ll have to take care of them.”
“How do you know he’s in there?” Darik asked.
“There is a reason my sword is called Soultrup, as you’ll learn to your regret should you ever use it to fight a living human. It’s like the Harvester, gathering the souls of its victims, like it did with Memnet the Great. It senses wights, and wights encircle the dark wizard continually. Once Markal told me that the enemy travels alone, I simply followed Soutrup’s lead. Come, dawn is near, and this is work better suited to night.”
They crept back to the water, then made their way around the lake until they no longer faced the front of the house. Sofiana and Whelan took off their boots and tied them around their necks and waded into the water. Eyeing the oily water with distrust, Darik reluctantly followed. Mud squished around his toes and something swam past his legs. The water rose first to his waist, then to his neck and at last he dog-paddled toward the island. The house stood on the island ahead of them, dark and forbidding.
At last they reached the shore. Darik cleared his mouth of the dank water, then crept up the hillside toward the house. He joined Sofiana and Whelan in the shadows at the back of the house. The house was built of dried peat, with a roof that sprouted rushes and even a few small trees. He put on his boots and discovered leeches feasting on his feet and legs. More leeches fed on his arms and his neck. Disgusted, he plucked them off and helped Whelan and Sofiana find their own leeches. When he finished, his hands were slick with blood. He wiped them on the ground.
Whelan gestured for Darik to watch the front and Sofiana to position herself on the other side of the building and watch the back. The girl nodded and crept away, while Whelan crawled toward the door on his hands and knees, below the fire light that flickered from the windows. Darik drew his sword and sank into the mud to wait. The rain came down harder.
His heart pounded in his chest as he waited for shouts. Or maybe a burst of light would explode through the door as Cragyn burned them with a magical fireball. He certainly wasn’t expecting what happened.
“Darik,” Whelan’s voice whispered. “Darik!”
Scrambling to his feet, Darik was surprised to see Whelan leaning his head out the window. “Get Ninny, then come here. Hurry!”
Darik obeyed, and a moment later Whelan let the two of them into the house, then pulled the door shut. He pointed to a figure on the floor in front of the fire.
The room was bare. A single trunk, brass bindings over a dark wood, sat on the far side of the room. A small peat fire burned in the hearth, and not all of the smoke filtered up the chimney, so it was smoky in the room. A man in a gray robe lay on the floor. Cragyn. Whelan’s sword dripped blood onto the floor.
Darik had expected Whelan to call to say he’d been misled, or perhaps point out some new clue he’d discovered. He could hardly believe that it had been so easy.
“You did it,” Sofiana said, reaching out to hug her father, but he resisted the embrace.
“No,” Whelan said. “I suspected when I saw him, but my sword confirmed it.” He shook his head. “The dark wizard was already dead when I found him.”
Chapter Six
Mol Khah had no doubt that his master would free him from the khalifa’s dungeon. He had assumed that Kallia would kill him immediately, but she proved too soft to be an effective ruler. Mol Khah doubted, indeed, that she would kill him even when the master’s forces attacked Balsalom. No, he would be rescued. And when that rescue came, there would be slaughter such as Mithyl had never seen.
Mol Khah was, however, surprised with the means of his rescue.
He slept in the dungeons below the palace, if they could be called dungeons, he thought with contempt. They were small and poorly lit, but clean, with regular meals and no more vermin than anywhere else. But dungeons, no matter how clean, were still prisons. The smell of urine and vomit wafted through the chambers, and cries reached his ears from those Veyrian soldiers who continued to resist. It would take harsher measures than a few whippings to break his army’s spirit.
His first prison guard was a short, fat man with a pathetic, quivering chin. Mol Khah amused himself by sharing convincing lies about the man’s eight-year-old daughter, a daughter whose existence was revealed through a careless conversation between two other guards. The guard ignored him the first day, snarled at him the second and third days, and disappeared the fourth, replaced by some old fool, half deaf and immune to such tactics.
Mol Khah’s only remaining pleasure came from the grand vizier’s visits, when he invented coarse details about Cragyn and Kallia’s wedding night. Saldibar kept his emotions carefully veiled and pried at details about Cragyn’s army. Mol Khah happily shared whatever he could convincingly invent.
The night Whelan, Darik, and Sofiana crept to the dark wizard’s hideout in the Estmor swamps, Mol Khah woke to the sound of his name.
“Mol Khah.”
He opened his eyes and looked through the grating on the door, expecting to see Saldibar, and readying a retort for being wakened in the middle of the night. But he saw nothing but darkness behind the window; the speaker remained hidden. A nervous patter sounded in his chest; he feared an assassin. He opened his mouth to cry for the guard, but the man would surely be dead by now, throat slit or wine poisoned.
Mol Khah rose to a sitting position. The shackles and chains rattled about his wrists and ankles. Chained to iron rings fastened to the ground, they were loose enough to permit movement; there was a chance that he could swing them about his assassin’s neck.
“Mol Khah,” the voice said again. “Bow before your master.”
The voice came not from beyond the door, he realized first with terror, and then jubilation. It floated over his head, and if he looked into the blackness, he could make out a single pinprick of light on the ceiling overhead.
“Master,” he whispered. “You’ve come to free me.”
“Yes, my slave,” Cragyn’s voice replied. “But first I have work for you. Listen carefully.”
The
dark wizard explained. Cragyn would give him a great gift, the wizard’s own soul to guide him, but he must listen and obey. His first goal, kill Saldibar. They had underestimated the grand vizier’s influence over the khalifa. Once this was accomplished, Mol Khah would capture Kallia herself, and spirit her from the city, and make his way west to the army. Where she will join my soul completely, the master added. I will show you the way out of Balsalom.
He accepted his master’s charge willingly. The speck of blue light grew on the ceiling, pouring over the walls like weaver’s dye, illuminating rusting hooks high overhead, and scratches in the wall where prisoners had marked days. It grew until his eyes hurt with its bright fury. And the master came!
Pure, raw power surged through Mol Khah’s veins when the blue light entered his nostrils. His muscles bulged, and the shackles tightened at his wrists and ankles. He broke them as if they were dried husks of bread. Hushed conversations came to his ears, the sound of a mouse whispering through its burrow. Mol Khah jumped to his feet and slipped to the door, feet barely touching the ground and making no more noise than the mouse. He reached the door and burst it outward on its hinges.
The guards—three of them, including the old man—looked up in surprise from their bones. One man picked at his fingernails with a dagger, while another gnawed at a leg of mutton, bits of grease and meat flecking his beard. The third shook bones, casting them onto a table with a pile of crana sitting in the middle. Swords and helmets sat in a heap to one side.
For all his age, the old man recovered the fastest, tossing down his dagger and snatching up his sword. He threw himself at the pasha.
But the old fool was no match, not with Cragyn’s soul bursting in Mol Khah’s breast. He swept aside the blade and snapped the man’s neck like he might a rat’s. The man knocked over the table and spilled money and food onto the floor. The other men moved like they were encased in mud, and Mol Khah spilled their intestines onto the ground.
Snatching up the best of the swords, Mol Khah paused only long enough to cut the cricket cage from the ceiling and crush its occupant under foot. The master didn’t like the meddlesome creatures. He glided up the stairs and broke the lock in his fist to discover the prison master asleep at his post, snoring peacefully with his head resting on his chest. A wine skin dribbled its purple residue onto the flagstones.
The man would never wake.
Mol Khah stood over the guard’s body. His sword dripped in his hand, blood mingling with wine drops. He eyed the dead man at his feet with contempt. No doubt they had expected attack from without, not within, but three guards and a drunk prison master? These weak fools deserved to die.
His bare feet felt whispers of movement throughout the palace, like a pulse, his ears heard the palace breathe. Two lovers whispered in chambers to his right, while to his left a family of servants slept. He had not the luxury to destroy their peace, but flowed through the passageways, through the wreckage of burned-out buildings, led to the grand vizier’s rooms by the master. First the vizier, then the khalifa. When he found the man’s chambers, they were quiet. He killed the guards and entered.
#
Balsalom had struggled to right itself in the days following its recapture, with Kallia leading the efforts. Souks opened for business, the guilds reorganizing trade and production. Farmers returned to their fields and irrigation sluices opened.
The dead were collected from stakes, or from the streets where they’d fallen. Families mourned, then sowed the plain with towers of silence. Crows and vultures feasted until they could eat no more, then feasted again.
The population of the city swelled, as a steady stream of refugees poured into Balsalom from the mountain freeholds, or those khalifates brutalized by Cragyn’s pashas as they paused from forced marches west. Saldibar’s spies brought rumors of pending revolts in other cities of the Western Khalifates, but nothing materialized. Starner, Medras, and Serpia, and several small Western Khalifates to the south hadn’t surrendered with the others after Balsalom’s fall, but neither did they send help, too busy fortifying their own lands.
Ter, where Kallia’s brother Omar had ruled, maintained a strong garrison, and served as the last stopping point for Cragyn’s armies before they crossed the Desolation of Toth. The khalifa didn’t dare risk her forces to free Ter, and neither did Ter attack Balsalom. Instead, the two cities eyed each other uneasily across the plain, each waiting for the other to make a move.
Meanwhile, Kallia added willing newcomers to the army and threw the rest into digging a defensive dike around the city walls. She promised to buy the freedom of able-bodied slaves who joined the army, together with their families, and even recruited from her palace servants. Some of the guilds complained that she was disrupting trade, but most supported her. Saldibar and Pasha Boroah threw these new recruits into intensive training.
Kallia woke one night to an insistent pounding on the door. She opened it to see Saldibar standing with a lamp in the hallway. A wave of vertigo washed over her and she grabbed at the doorframe. The grand vizier took her arm insistently and helped her to the bed pillows. She grabbed the bed pan just in time and she threw up.
“What’s the matter? What did you eat?”
She took a sip from the cold tea sitting on her bed table, speaking only when she washed the bitter taste from her mouth. “I haven’t been poisoned, if that’s what you’re worrying,” she told him. “It’s the child.”
They called it morning distress, that sickness that women suffered in the first few months, but the queasy feeling in her stomach had been more or less continuous for the last two days. It was as if the child itself poisoned her, or that her body tried to reject it. Tea calmed the nausea enough to hide it from others, but it never disappeared completely. She reached for the pan and her stomach clenched again, although there was nothing left to throw up.
“I spoke with a physic,” Saldibar said when she finished heaving. “The herbs are best taken early.”
She collapsed to the bed. “No. I will deliver this baby, and he will never take it away.” Sweat stood out on her forehead.
Saldibar put his lamp on the table and stroked her cheek. “Oh, child, why must you be so stubborn? You have defied him already, taken his city and declared his marriage invalid. Why make it a point of honor for him to destroy us?”
How could she explain? She wasn’t sure she understood the emotions herself. Yes, this child was part of the wizard, but it was also part of herself. And she refused to believe, as Saldibar thought, that the child would be evil simply because of its father. She didn’t believe this any more than she believed that Cragyn had always been evil. Neither would she deny the child’s paternity as Whelan suggested. People would know who the father was, no matter how she tried to hide it.
“Why have you wakened me, Saldibar?” She noticed for the first time the bags beneath his eyes, turning him into an old man.
“Mol Khah is missing.”
Kallia sat up in bed, alarmed. “Missing? What happened?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” he explained. “Night terrors.” He shuddered. “I wandered through the gardens and the burned throne room until two bells, then walked down to the dungeons to speak to Mol Khah, see if I could pry loose any more information. He spins a web of lies, but kernels of truth hide within his words, if you know where to look.”
“Saldibar,” Kallia pleaded. “Just tell me what happened.”
He nodded. “Mol Khah gone from his cell, the guards butchered. Another guard murdered at the top of the stairs, body still warm. Someone broke him loose. Don’t worry. Eight guards stand outside your door, and Boroah’s men scour the palace even as we speak. He won’t escape. And you are safe.”
She didn’t feel safe. Indeed, she’d had a sense of foreboding since Saldibar knocked on her door, and it increased with this news. She opened her mouth to say as much, but her cricket stopped chirping in its basket. Shouts sounded outside the door. Alarmed, Saldibar moved between Kallia and the do
or.
A voice screamed from the hallway, “No! Cragyn, no!”
Kallia’s blood ran cold.
#
Mol Khah had discovered the grand vizier’s rooms empty. Driven to madness by the master’s rage, he tore through the quarters of Saldibar’s servants, killing everyone he found, until at last both he and the dark master gained control again. Frustrated by the wasted time, he sped toward the khalifa’s rooms. The dark wizard knew her scent, and it drew him inexorably to her chambers. As he approached, he heard the grand vizier and the khalifa speaking, and knew he hadn’t failed the first of his two goals after all.
The guards at the door were not like the men at the prison, chosen because they were too old for the army. They were the best fighters left in Balsalom, and ready for his attack. They shouted for reinforcements at his sight and spread to allow as many to attack him at once as possible.
Before, the dark master had given directions, but now he seized control. Muscles and actions molded to the wizard’s overwhelming presence. Terrified by this new turn, Mol Khah struggled to free himself, less afraid of death, or even capture and torture, than this.
We are one, the dark master cried. I will never leave you.
“No!” Mol Khah cried in terror. “Cragyn, no!”
The presence spoke with a cold voice. I am not Cragyn. A chuckle. Cragyn is dead.
Mol Khah opened his mouth to scream again, but this time nothing came out. Instead, his consciousness was suppressed, and a new consciousness came to the surface, pleased by this new body, much stronger than the feeble body of that pathetic wizard, Cragyn.
But this, this was a body that would serve him well until his final, triumphant rebirth. King Toth opened his mouth and roared.
The khalifa’s guards blanched at this sound, but they recovered by the time he cut the first man to his knees. They threw themselves in his way, determined to protect their queen. Four times he drove them back, and four times they redoubled their attack. One young man, eyes like glittering topaz, fought with the savagery of three men, dancing out of the way of Toth’s blade and twice inflicting cuts on his arms. He ignored these wounds, knowing he could heal himself later. More important was time; he had only a few more seconds before others joined the fray.
The Free Kingdoms (Book 2) Page 10