The Red Sword- The Complete Trilogy

by Michael Wallace

  Yet even as he asked, it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario. After Bronwyn’s death, Markal had fled the king’s encampment carrying her sword and escaped into the woods before the enemy could catch him. They’d hunted him through the Sacred Forest, then quickly brought a massive force to bear on Memnet’s gardens. The king had had other things on his mind than the paladin’s body.

  Once Bronwyn was dead, some low-level Veyrian soldier must have sacked her gear and sold it on the road to someone who was then robbed by these four men. Or maybe they’d been the ones to buy it in the first place, or . . . well, any of a number of possibilities, none of them overly strange.

  “We don’t have time to question these fools,” Nathaliey said. “Not with as loud as you cast that sleeping spell.”

  They did a cursory search through the rest of the thieves’ possessions, taking a little of the food, but leaving everything else, including Bronwyn’s gear, which was really just her clothes and a partial set of armor. It was more than the bandits would have done for them, and more than they deserved.

  Nathaliey cast a small spell on the horses to wake them, and another to heal the lame mare’s injured hoof beyond what the poultice of honey and herbs could accomplish alone, and they set off again before the moon rose. They traveled carefully at first as they watched for more of the bandits’ traps, then picked up the pace when they were safely to the west.

  “We should have killed them,” Nathaliey said some time later.

  “Didn’t we already discuss that? When did you get so bloodthirsty, anyway?”

  “Not for the reason you think. They’re fast asleep on the road—easy prey for whoever finds them. If that’s the marauders, they’ll torture those fools until they talk.”

  “Hmm.” Markal hadn’t considered that. “And what could the bandits tell them? A pair of travelers with some magic, and not much else. But we’ve already fought the marauders, and it’s no secret that we’re on the road—they’ve been hunting us since we left the gardens.”

  “But they don’t know we have the sword. Didn’t you see the bandits taking note of it?”

  That was another good point. They’d cast some minor hiding spells on top of the sword before leaving the gardens, and had hoped to slip through the mountains and into the barbarian lands to find Bronwyn’s company of paladins before the enemy realized Soultrup had left.

  “We could go back,” Nathaliey added. “We’re only twenty minutes down the road. What about that incantation we were studying in the vaults? Something about tarda memoria, wasn’t it? I’ve got enough strength left to speak the spell if you feed me the words. We’ll clean their minds, wipe the memory of the encounter.”

  “Tarda memoria? I can’t remember the entire incantation,” Markal confessed. “It’s a tricky one, difficult to hold.”

  “Well, then. Only one other way to be sure they don’t talk.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I don’t have it in me to cut their throats while they sleep.”

  Nathaliey fell silent for so long that he looked over to make sure she hadn’t slipped away while he was lost in thought to take matters into her own hands, then catch up with him later. But she was still there.

  “I suppose I don’t have it in me, either,” she said. “I should though. This is brutal business—if we’re too merciful, we’ll end up cutting our own throats.”

  They continued in silence after that. Markal was tired. Bone-deep tired, and wanting to sleep, to settle into his bed along the forest path back home and let the magic of that place heal him. Between a lack of sleep—they’d only slept an hour or two the previous day—casting spells to strengthen the horses, and dealing with the four men, he was ready to collapse.

  Fortunately, there was some honey and bread left from home, and they stopped to share it out, which strengthened them a little, but that was the last of it. From here on out, it would be provisions they’d either purchased on the road or stolen from the would-be thieves behind them.

  They resisted the urge to cast another seeker as the night wore on, but stopped periodically to listen for pursuit. Marauders could travel quietly, but there was only so much you could do to silence a full company of riders, and they should have enough time to slip from the road and conceal themselves with magic if they heard anything.

  Everything seemed safe enough. The only sounds were natural: an owl, hooting from the scrub oak on the surrounding hills; the snap and growl of a fox or a wild dog; a breeze sighing through the dry grass lining the road.

  They approached an abandoned farmhouse—a rarity this far west, as this had been thinly settled land even before the drought—and stopped to see if the well would still draw water. The bucket raised a muddy, unwholesome residue that they declined to put into their waterskins.

  The moon was up and gliding along the edge of the Dragon’s Spine, which loomed ever closer. A pair of jagged peaks forked the sky, higher than their neighboring summits. Snow crowned them throughout the year, but it was still too dark to see the heights.

  “This is it,” he said. “The road we needed a week ago. It’s taking us straight toward the mountains. Not that we can take a direct route up and over. The high pass is where Toth is building his highway, and the master says the mountains are impassable to the north and south, as well.”

  “Then how are we crossing the Spine?”

  “I know a way. At least I think I do.”

  “You’ve been this way before?” she asked.

  “Once,” he said. His horse was beginning to limp again, and he gave it an encouraging pat. “Many years ago, when I was a new apprentice. Not much older than you, and merely twice as wise.”

  She gave him a playful elbow.

  “The master took Narud and me up where the air is thin,” he continued. “We were looking for the Mountain Brother, supposedly.”

  “Did you find him?”

  “He’s a god—you can’t find him if he doesn’t want to be found. Anyway, I don’t think that’s what Memnet was about, only an excuse to visit an old friend. There was a hermit living up there near an ancient circle of standing stone. A survivor of Memnet’s former order of wizards.”

  “I’ve heard of the stones,” she said. “But isn’t that near where the griffin riders are building aeries?”

  “Close to there, yes,” Markal said. “We found the hermit living in a stone tower he’d constructed stone by stone over the decades. It was cold and miserable, and the hermit was nearly naked. His beard was to his knees, and so much hair covered his body that he seemed as much animal as man.

  “Which makes sense, as he spent half the time living as a bear or a giant badger,” Markal added. “We stayed there six weeks, and I don’t think he spoke fifty words to us the whole time. Mostly, he listened to the master talking. Nodded sometimes, smiled when Memnet reminisced about old times. But his mind . . . it was mostly animal, too.”

  “You’d think Narud would take that as a warning to stay away from the shape-shifting business,” Nathaliey said.

  “Narud wasn’t frightened by what the hermit had become, he was intrigued. He started talking to birds and mice not long after that.”

  “Then he’s doomed.”

  “Eventually, maybe,” Markal said. “This hermit fellow was three or four hundred years old, so Narud has a while.”

  “Why did Narud choose a wolfhound for his first shape shifting? That thing smelled awful and left a mess in the garden before he went out looking for you.”

  “Would you have preferred a bunny or a kitten?”

  “How about a squirrel?” she said. “They can jump from tree to tree. Very useful for forest travel—that’s where he found you, wasn’t it?”

  “And yet squirrels aren’t generally known as trackers, are they?”

  Nathaliey laughed at this.

  “Anyway,” Markal continued, “there’s magic in the stone circle, whether we find the hermit or not. It will be a good place to rest before pushing south, where we’ll f
ind an old trading road the barbarians used to cross the mountains.”

  “I know the road you’re talking about,” she said. “Heard of it, anyway. I also heard it’s overrun with giants and griffins.”

  “Better giants and griffins than marauders and wights.”

  The trail continued west toward the mountains, but it had begun to dwindle, and was soon no more than a footpath. Twenty minutes later, it rose to the top of a grassy foothill and finally disappeared. An old watchtower squatted at the end of the road, occupying a third of the hilltop.

  The companions tied the horses to some brush while they took a closer look at the hill and its watchtower. Markal thought at first they might continue down the back slope, but it was too steep for the horses, dipping eighty or ninety feet before beginning an even steeper climb up the other side. In fact, there were enough poorly placed trees, boulders, and loose rocks to make it challenging even without animals, and given the poor light, it was hard to see what the terrain looked like beyond that, even if they should find a way across. Nathaliey walked around the ruined watchtower and touched the foundation stones. “There’s old magic here,” she announced. Her fingers traced the joint between two blocks. “Right here—do you feel this? A ward like one of our concealers in the garden.”

  Markal studied the place in question. There was nothing left of the old tower but its foundation, and the highest parts of it only rose to his waist, so the stones alone offered little defensive value. But she was right; there were still runes and wards, nearly eroded, but ready to be awakened. The ward she’d drawn attention to felt so familiar that if he didn’t know better he might have thought he’d placed it himself.

  “This isn’t like one of our concealers,” he said. “It’s exactly the same. I wonder if Memnet’s old order endowed this tower.”

  “Maybe someday we can ask him. Meanwhile, what do you think? Is this a good place to bed down for the night, or should we keep going?”

  “We’re exhausted, and so are the animals. Bring the horses inside. We can figure out the terrain in the morning when the light is better.”

  Once they had the horses within the ruined foundation walls, Markal cast a spell to calm them for the night, and then they spent a few minutes raising the concealing ward before curling up with their blankets and bedrolls.

  The sun was already high in the sky and Nathaliey up and grazing the horses when Markal rose the next morning and got a better look at their surroundings. They’d nearly reached the Dragon’s Spine, which dominated the western sky. Green forests blanketed the foothills ahead of them, which rose higher and higher until they touched the massive snow-topped peaks to their rear.

  He looked back to where Nathaliey was grazing the horses, and at the olive-green hill country below her that stretched toward the east. They’d already climbed perhaps two thousand feet above the vast eastern plains, and he could see not only into the khalifates, but south into the desert, brown and hazy in the distance. The Spice Road lay in that direction, where it crossed the sandy wastelands of Kratian camel traders on its way to Marrabat and the sultanates.

  Nathaliey looked exceptionally grim. Almost haunted, in fact. She stared in the direction of Aristonia, which wasn’t visible apart from a bit of green on the horizon, as if she wanted to abandon their quest to find Bronwyn’s paladins and go home.

  “I know the mountains look daunting,” he encouraged, “but we’ll make it through.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “It won’t be easy, but we have supplies, and we have magic to open our passage. Anyway, it’s too late to turn around, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “You don’t understand. Look around you, Markal.”

  He’d been so focused on the path already traveled and the route ahead that he hadn’t paid attention to the hilltop itself since rising. The grass was torn up all around the ruins, hoof marks in the sod, and horse dung, too. He bent and touched the ground, where he found the imprint of a boot. Another boot mark, this one of a different size. Fresh markings.

  “Someone came up while we slept,” Nathaliey said. “Men on horses—your spell must have drawn them.”

  “I never heard a thing. They could have killed us in our sleep.”

  “Thank the Brothers those old runes kept us hidden.”

  “How many?” Markal asked.

  “I’d say at least a dozen riders, possibly as many as twenty. Marauders?”

  “Had to be,” Markal said. “We’d have heard anyone else.”

  “So our magic kept us hidden, and their magic kept us from waking to defend ourselves. It could have been worse.”

  “A lot worse,” he agreed.

  Nathaliey returned to the edge of the hilltop and stared east into the khalifates. “Markal, look.”

  He joined her. A small cloud of dust rose two or three miles to the east on the same road they’d been traveling since before meeting the bandits. Riders, moving steadily in this direction, and he figured they were the same ones who’d nearly found them during the night. They must have retraced their steps, confused by the concealing runes activated in the ruined tower, realized their mistake, and doubled back to renew the hunt with greater determination.

  “So, master wizard,” Nathaliey said, “you’re telling me there’s a way to cross the mountains?

  Markal glanced toward the ravine on the opposite side of the hill. If he’d hoped that daylight would reveal a better way across, a closer look disabused him of that notion. It was just as steep and brush-clogged as he remembered, and the woods above were too thick for horses anyway.

  “Because if there is a way,” Nathaliey continued, “I suggest you find it and find it in a hurry. Otherwise, we are about to be captured or killed by Toth’s marauders.”

  Chapter Five

  Chantmer approached the Veyrian soldier until he was close enough to see the pores on the man’s nose and a tiny blood vessel that had burst in his right eye, leaving it bloodshot. The soldier’s breath smelled of mutton and garlic, and Chantmer, who was nearly a head taller than the fellow, could count the gray hairs emerging on a crown of otherwise black hair.

  I could kill him, Chantmer thought. Reach a spectral hand into his chest and squeeze his heart until it stopped.

  That was, if he could remember the incantation. When he tried to recall the words, they appeared briefly, then darted away like butterflies on the wind, one after another. Fine, then grab the man’s pike and ram the tip through his belly. Meanwhile, the soldier stared, oblivious to his presence, guarding the chamber against just such an intrusion as stood in front of him, but which he was incapable of seeing.

  Memnet tapped Chantmer on the shoulder and gestured. Chantmer nodded and followed his master past the soldier and through a scalloped stone archway painted with alternating white and black stripes. Geometric designs everywhere; the architect of this wing of the palace must have been a Marrabatti.

  “I was looking him right in the eye,” Chantmer said, “and he never even blinked.”

  “It’s a useful spell,” Memnet said. They walked past another Veyrian soldier, this one also oblivious to their presence.

  “Narud cast the same spell, but his isn’t nearly as powerful.”

  “That is because Narud is a young wizard and I am the master of the order.” Memnet’s tone was mischievous.

  “He wasn’t any kind of wizard when he cast it, he was a mere apprentice.”

  “Ah, then perhaps he could do better this time around. Maybe I should have brought Narud to Syrmarria instead. That way I wouldn’t have to expend my feeble magic.”

  “And leave me to defend the gardens?” Chantmer said. “I’m still a mere apprentice.”

  Memnet either missed the edge in Chantmer’s words, or chose to ignore it. His beard had been growing in since they’d pulled his body from the soil of the walled garden, and now he scratched at the stubble.

  “We haven’t seen a single Aristonian guard since reaching the palace,�
� Memnet said. “They’re all Veyrians.”

  “Given that most of the palace guard deserted to defend the gardens, I imagine the remainder shortly found themselves without their jobs, if not their heads.”

  “That isn’t what surprises me,” Memnet said.

  The wizard paused as they entered an arcaded courtyard. He touched a stone in the archway, nodded, and turned right. The library was so well hidden in the palace that even those from the order needed to study the signs to find it.

  A trio of servant girls carrying silver platters with mint tea and date pastries hurried toward them, and the pair pressed their backs against the stone wall until they’d passed.

  “The servants are still Aristonians,” Memnet said when they were alone again. “As is that fellow cleaning the fountain in the center of the courtyard,” he added with a nod to the gardener. “Why do you suppose that is?”

  “All guards do is stand around and try to look alert,” Chantmer said. “If there’s an attack, they’ll rush to the palace gates, and they have the power to challenge people entering places they shouldn’t, but neither of those things require much knowledge of the palace.”

  “Go on.”

  “Servants, on the other hand, have to find the larders, acquire supplies from the markets, dispose of night soil, and do a thousand other things to keep the palace running.”

  “Exactly right. Guards are disposable, but servants are indispensable. And what is a vizier, after all, but a servant?”

  Chantmer looked at him. “You think the new pasha has kept Omar’s ministers?”

  “There was only one trophy hanging above the city gate.”

  A grisly sight had greeted them upon their entry to Syrmarria an hour earlier—the skin of the khalif himself. Rumor in the souks had it that Toth’s torturers had skinned Omar slowly, almost tenderly, over two days, keeping him alive until the last moment. They’d cured Omar’s skin and hung it from a pole above the east gates, where a good wind made it flap like a war banner.

  The streets and markets of Syrmarria were as busy as ever, although crowded now with workers, merchants, and slaves from the eastern khalifates, many of them Veyrians. Someone whispered furtively to Memnet and Chantmer that slavers had carried off a few troublemakers, but there had been no massive purge after the khalif’s palace guard joined in the defense of Memnet’s gardens against the high king’s army.