A Tapestry of Magics

by Brian Daley

  The Lost Boys looked at one another and shifted uncomfortably at that. “I’ll drag by his gorget the man who refuses to come!” Crassmor vowed. They saw that he meant it and traded dubious glances.

  “Why not speak to the Grand Master like a good chap?” Bosrow Feng suggested. “Have him round up a number of knights. A multitude of them. I should be happy to ride rearguard.”

  “A poor idea,” Bint put in. “Crassmor is accounted absent without permission. Jaan-Marl is more than moderately displeased.”

  Crassmor said in a level tone, “By the time explanations are made, Willow will be dead.”

  That startled all of them. Willow had shown special affection for the Lost Boys and hosted their revelries many times. “And di Cagliostro will control the Jade Dome. No time to go into it now, but it will put the Singularity in his grip. He means to rule here.”

  They all knew of the count. “There’s always been good guesting at House Comullo,” Pony-Keg admitted. “I should hate to see us lose a soft touch.”

  “It’s not a bad day for a ride,” Crane conceded, scratching his cowlick.

  “But no war mounts or saddle horses may leave the stables without the Grand Master’s permission,” Hoowar reminded them all. “He’s set an officer to make certain.”

  Griffin closed his inkwell and put his materials aside carefully. “If we cannot have chargers, we shall simply have to travel by other means. Or do we let Willow come to harm?”

  They immediately began to gather themselves up. Griffin showed his handsome smile. “Hoowar, tell the stablemaster to turn his head the other way for a moment while you take something suitable from the Order’s vehicle collection. There shouldn’t be any officers watching that or the draft animals. Tell the stablemaster that if he does not comply, we’ll let the head kitchener know who’s been dancing the horizontal with his wife.”

  “And what if Jaan-Marl comes after us in hot pursuit?” Pony-Keg demanded.

  “So much the better, as long as he doesn’t catch us until we get to the Jade Dome,” Crassmor was quick to declare.

  A change came over them as they prepared, a crispness of action. Crassmor turned to Bint, who was also making ready to come. “You have changed the company you keep.”

  Bint’s face was set. “Arananth has time for many suitors, it seems. Your friends aren’t such a bad lot.”

  No, they are not, Crassmor thought, suddenly feeling himself a fortunate man. He clapped his cousin on the shoulder. “She’s not the first to fall in love with life in Dreambourn; you can’t blame her too much.” It was only then that he noticed that Bint now wore the beautiful sword of Tarafon Quickhand, purchased out of hock.

  Having levered himself up, Hoowar tossed down some more beer. “Mark me: the Grand Master won’t like this.”

  Griffin chuckled. “Yes; Jaan-Marl might even send us out into the Beyonds, eh?” The Lost Boys all found a moment in which to laugh.

  Chapter 21

  ENLIGHTENED

  Aware of the glittering selection of cutlery available to the jealous kitchener, the stablemaster cooperated. Minutes later, as Crassmor paced and slapped fist to palm in frustration, Hoowar Roisterer returned.

  He was at the reins of one of the prizes of the fortress’ collection of outland vehicles; its incomprehensible name was Skiver/Newsham Delux. It was a fire-fighting wagon, some seven paces or more in length, all red-painted wood and gleaming brass fittings, high black wheels and long pumping arms. Hoowar drew in sharply where the rest waited. The eight horses in the team stamped and snorted, tossing their heads, eager to run.

  “We might conceivably attract attention with that,” Pony-Keg conjectured.

  “Board!” Crassmor hollered. “We’ve little time!” He was already swarming up to sit next to Hoowar, taking the reins from him. “How’d you get it hitched up so quickly?”

  Hoowar stroked his beard proudly. “The stablemaster was more than eager to see me gone. Had his helpers and boys jump to it. I told them all that I’d thrash any one of ’em who didn’t agree that the whole deed was mine.”

  Other knights and officers of the Order were pausing from their drill to see what was going on. Lost Boys climbed aboard the Skiver/Newsham, ducking under pumping arms to find seats on the central benches and setting their feet on the treadles. Others stood on the running boards. Crassmor took the whip from its socket and cracked it; the firewagon started with a jerk, its passengers clinging with both hands.

  Crassmor guided it around in a violent turn; a forty-foot high length of greased leather hose went sliding from its well. Then they were banging off toward the Jade Dome while water sloshed in the wagon’s cisterns.

  In one manner, at least, the vehicle was ideal; all other traffic scattered before it. Hoowar discovered a particular delight in ringing the brass bell mounted behind the driver’s bench. The horses, having pulled the wagon before, worked well. The Lost Boys, used to finding what entertainment they could in whatever situation the fates threw their way, took pleasure in Crassmor’s utter disregard for courtesies of the road.

  Lesser personages were used to getting out of the way of larger or more important vehicles or riders, but aristocrats’ carriage drivers, knights and officials of one kind or another, and pious clerics were unaccustomed to yielding the way. They learned quickly, seeing the big wagon bearing down on them at top speed, spending more time in the air than on the road. Sedan chairs, oxcarts, and pedestrians of all stripes were at great pains to get out of the way as promptly as possible. But one rider, a huge, mightily thewed, sun-browned swordsman, apparently considered himself deadly insulted by the Skiver/Newsham’s near-collision with him.

  He came galloping after, long raven locks flying, waving a broadsword. Crane and Pony-Keg, who knew something of the firewagon’s operation, got the men seated on the benches to work the auxiliary pumping treadles. Griffin aimed the brass playpipe. A stream of water gushed forth, straight into the face of their pursuer, also drenching his frightened horse. The man howled his fury as the horse lost its footing. The Lost Boys left the man in a sudden mud puddle in the middle of the road. The swordsman shook a fearsome, scarred fist at them as they bounced off.

  Crassmor had taken little note of this or any obstacle before him. He was watching worriedly for the armed band from Virtuary. Had he come upon them on the road, his intention had been simply to ride through their formation, eliminating whom he could, and carry on the fight from the firewagon, since the Skiver/Newsham Delux couldn’t outrace horsemen. He saw no sign of them and slowed the horses slightly to save the team for the extended trip to House Comullo.

  As he drove, he yelled what few words of explanation he could to Hoowar. When the firewagon came jolting over the top of the last hill, Crassmor saw in the distance a turmoil around the gates of the place. The sight of the gates of House Comullo ajar put a chill in his spine. Men fought there; the knight could make out both the diverse costumes of the hirelings and the colors of Willow’s guardsmen.

  Hoowar saw too, shouted to the others, and pointed. There was still a considerable distance to cover across the valley. As they watched, the mercenaries fighting before the gates began to pour into the bailey.

  “Too late!” the fat knight mourned over the furor of their passage. “They’ll be into the Jade Dome before we can get there.”

  Crassmor shook his head. “We’ve got just enough time; tell the others to be ready.”

  Hoowar asked, “How can they not be in the Dome in good time? Did you not say they know it from a model of the place?”

  Crassmor nodded without taking his eyes from the road. “Aye. But before I was discovered at Virtuary, I gave its Dome-piece a half-turn within the rest of the model.”

  The Roisterer exhaled a laugh that rose above the noise of the wind. “They will be fumbling around so badly that they’ll have trouble finding their own arses!” He slammed a meaty hand against his thigh, then turned to warn the others to prepare.

  Crassmor had to s
tand, one foot braced on the driver’s footrest, one on the brake, and haul with all his might to bring the team in and gradually halt the Skiver/Newsham Delux. Before it had stopped, he sprang down with Shhing in his hand and ran for the still-open gates. At his back came the Lost Boys, blades out, no longer merry.

  In the bailey was Fordall Urth, prone, moving feebly. Around him were others of Willow’s guardsmen; all bore wounds, and several were almost certainly dead. They were no longer the fierce, hulking sentinels Crassmor had been permitted to glimpse, but aging, out-of-condition pensioners. That would be di Cagliostro’s doing. In some magus fashion, he’d used the disguising magic of the guards against them, making them in fact what they’d only appeared to be, forcing substance to conform to illusion. To be sure, the count had had ample time and resources to ready such an enchantment during his stay at House Tarrant. But the guardsmen had given what battle they could; Klybesian hirelings, wounded and dead, were on the scene too.

  Crassmor took in and thought all of this as he charged across the bailey without pause. Through the main doors of the keep he dashed, into the gloom of ill-kept, ill-lit corridors. Then he slid to a stop. The Lost Boys caught up with him as he tried to think.

  “Which way?” Griffin pressed him.

  “They’ll think the entrance lies that way, to the left,” Crassmor answered, “when in fact it’s to the right.” If Furd didn’t notice the discrepancy, Crassmor added to himself. He could only hope it was so. Furd had never been one to occupy himself with details; there was a good chance that the abbot had taken only a cursory look at the model. Racklee had joined his ancestors, and there had been no one else in Virtuary who could have spotted the deception.

  “Twill not take ’em long to find out they’ve been diddled,” Hoowar predicted.

  “Then we’ll go straight on,” Crassmor decided, “as near the Dome as we can get, and cut to the right.” Off he sprinted, concentrating on recalling the layout of the place, the others close behind him. The compulsion put upon the mercenaries with the aid of the altered model would make it possible for them to find their way around despite House Comullo’s spells of misdirection and glamours of confusion. The best course for the raiders, once they’d discovered their error and found no doorway to the Jade Dome, Crassmor concluded, would be to skirt along the Dome and search for it. If Crassmor and his friends intercepted the hirelings, all well and good; getting to the Dome’s doorway first, on the other hand, the Lost Boys would be able to defend it. What clutched at Crassmor’s heart was the fear that they might be too late.

  He led the way through the hall, across the little laird’s garden, and down homecoming walk. Moments later, he was rushing down the grand staircase at the keep’s fest-hall, and speculation became reality. He heard, then spied, the company of armed men running in his direction from the left.

  The Lost Boys raced down the steps, savage in attack now that they were committed to it. The numbers of the two groups were closely matched.

  Crassmor, riding surprise like a charger, threw himself in among the mercenaries with a two-handed swing of his sword. Before him was a hireling decked out in a crude ring-mail hauberk, wearing a helm of boar’s tusks, and carrying a round shield and spike-headed mace. Astonishment made the man slow to react. Shhing found an unprotected spot under his arm as he threw up his shield; the man fell before he was well aware of what was happening, blood, pumping from him rhythmically.

  The knight turned just as another mercenary, bearing a greatsword the height of a man, brought it up in defense. This was the fellow who’d ridden to Virtuary with Crassmor, the one who’d termed himself a landsknecht. The landsknecht held his weapon’s leather-bound ricasso to shorten his grip for close fighting. Crassmor had brought his lighter blade around quickly, to his great advantage. He put his shoulders behind it, battering down the heavier greatsword. The place was chaotic with the general melee that had ignited all around him.

  There was a fleeting moment in which the knight saw in his opponent’s eyes the knowledge that no maneuver would save him, a forever-instant. But the landsknecht tried, with an upward slash, backstepping at the same time, pulling frantically on the ricasso for that stroke. His ribbons and plumes swirled. Crassmor deflected the stroke blade to blade, the respective leverages favoring him. He was inside the other’s guard, rammed hilts aside, and ran him through. The man let his weapon fall as his knees gave, his hands clutched to his neck.

  Crassmor turned to look on the part of hell suddenly let forth in House Comullo. The Lost Boys, for all their storied reluctance, were hardened Knights of Onn; the Klybesians had enlisted veteran, uncaring warriors and motivated them with compulsion. The fest-hall was filled with swirling combat, darting weapons, cries, pealing steel, and death.

  Crassmor spied di Cagliostro among the raiders, staying well back, plainly under no compulsion; the count saw him as well. Though the heavyset little mage carried a long, thin blade, he had no intention of putting his life at risk. Instead, he yelled to one of his men, “Teach!”

  The knight followed his enemy’s glance and saw an enormous man in a red, knee-length coat and high black boots. The hireling had tied slow-burning wax matches in among the plaits of his black beard and set them alight for the raid, tucking others under the wide brim of his hat. The sight made his scarred, hate-mad face doubly intimidating. He bore a bloodied weapon of the sort Crassmor knew to be a cutlass.

  Teach, if that was his name rather than a mannered injunction from di Cagliostro, saw whom his master had singled out with a point of the rapier. Some distance separated them; Crassmor expected to see the man come at him. Instead, Teach pulled a bludgeon-sized device of wood and metal from his baldric and pointed its hollow end at the knight.

  Firearms weren’t unknown in the Singularity, though they were rarities. Crassmor had been around long enough, in both the Singularity and the Beyonds, to duck when a hollow tube was aimed his way. There was the puff of the weapon’s primer pan. An instant later the pistol belched flame and black smoke with a roar. Something whizzed past the knight’s ear and ricocheted off the marble banister, whining away into the distance. Some of the combatants seemed shocked, but there was only a slight lull in the battle. In an instant it had resumed at full pitch.

  Teach hurled the pistol aside, which told Crassmor that it was a single-shot weapon. The man apparently had no other; he rushed at the knight, dodging other fighters, cutlass raised high.

  Their swords belled from one another. Crassmor quickly found that his foeman used both edge and point. He was dangerous by dint of his size and brute strength, but not as skilled as Crassmor had feared. Teach was a hacker, very like a berserker, but quick to defend himself from Crassmor’s parry-riposte.

  The knight ignored the slow-burning matches and ferocious grimacing, pressing his attack. Teach, eyes bulging, roared, cursed, and foamed at the mouth, but he’d come up against the only man in House Comullo at a higher emotional pitch than he. Willow was in danger; Crassmor couldn’t have cared less about Teach’s histrionics. Crassmor used Shhing one-handedly for the most part, but resorted to two hands when Teach’s maniacal attacks demanded it.

  Teach put him on a determined defensive with an especially furious advance. The knight withdrew slowly, a foot or two at a time, waiting, countering when he could. In time, the cutlass, much the heavier weapon, must tire even this giant.

  The attack began to flag. Crassmor threw all his strength into a bind, taking the cutlass around. The bigger man exerted himself to work out of it, as the knight had thought he would. Crassmor reversed the bind, carrying the movement, and found a clear way. Shhing flashed. Teach threw himself back, taking the slash across his ruffled shirt and the flesh of his chest instead of his throat. It put him off balance.

  Crassmor followed up with a drawing cut, opening the man’s forearm to the bone. Teach dropped the cutlass, clapping left hand to forearm to staunch the blood flow. The madness left his face; it looked to Crassmor as if the trauma of the
wounds had wiped the compulsion away. The wounds slowed him little, however; Teach turned and ran, high boot tops flopping, the matches and his beard whipping back, abandoning the fight.

  There was the sound of a body hitting the floor behind Crassmor. He pivoted, to see another hireling, a man dressed in greaves, breastplate, and horsehair-plumed helmet, stretched out face down. His tower shield had fallen from his arm, and one of Crane’s throwing crosses stood out from the hireling’s back. Crassmor had no opportunity to thank the gawky knight for saving him from the mercenary’s shortsword; Crane was already engaged with another opponent. For all his resemblance to a bucktoothed adolescent at other times, Crane was lethal and self-assured now.

  Crassmor scanned the fight, looking for di Cagliostro, but saw him nowhere. Hoowar Roisterer, swinging his broadsword two-handedly, was being backed toward a wall by two adversaries. As he was about to be joined by Logran the Wooer, he needed no help from Crassmor. Another Lost Boy, Kylon of Beck, though wounded, was holding his own against a tall, hawk-faced man who wielded a scimitar and was also losing blood. Griffin was putting on a dazzling display of the fencing style he’d evolved from the many he’d come to know. He was against an equally able foe, a cadaverous fellow in brocade who also knew a great deal about that art.

  Nowhere in the confusion could Crassmor see di Cagliostro. He was struck by the sudden conviction that the count had gone on toward the Dome and Willow. The knight started off in that direction, only to have his way blocked by a fox-faced man with a wickedly curled mustache and a darting rapier. There was no getting around him; Crassmor agonized over what the delay might cost.

  All at once there was a third man on the scene, back to Crassmor, sword en garde—Bint, with Tarafon Quick-hand’s weapon. Fox-face’s eyes opened a little and one eyebrow lifted. He engaged the young knight. Bint answered well. As they ran a quick dialogue of blades, Crassmor found his way clear. He bit his lip, seeing the opportunity to go on, but fearing for his cousin; this opponent was very capable.