The Wizard King

by Julie Dean Smith

  “This won’t take long,” the man said. Briefly, his gaze skimmed the length of her body, barely concealed by the thin gown of white gauze, his eyes reflecting indifferent regret at having to rob the life from it. “And then you’ll be back at the Devil’s side where you belong.”

  Swallowing audibly, Athaya turned all of her energies onto the larger center crystal, turning aside the ceaseless but softer murmurs of the other two. She surrounded the crystal with her presence, fiercely smothering its influences with her own. I feel nothing from you. You cannot harm me now. I know your secrets and you have no power over me. The words were fueled with dreadful purpose as she pushed beyond the crystal’s voice, forcing her way closer and closer to the heart of the gem itself. The voice grew more frantic and insistent the nearer she came, but she shunted it aside with equal earnestness, refusing to heed its false warnings of pain.

  She did not know what to expect when she reached her destination, but when she forced her way past the crystal’s defenses, past the barricades of deceit it thrust up to block her, and invaded the core with her presence, the din in her ears fell abruptly silent, the corbal’s center tranquil as a crypt. The cobwebs fouling her thoughts and actions were suddenly swept aside, like the lifting of a sealing spell to free congested magic. The corbal’s voice was gone, and here in its heart, as long as she held the vision steady in her mind, Athaya did not have to push back at all; did not have to shout defiances. The pulse of power still flowed, but it went around and past her, unaware of her existence. It was as if she had slipped past a castle’s tight defenses to stand in the king’s own chamber, none of the shouting guardsmen in the courtyard thinking to look for the intruder so deep within their midst.

  From this place of seeming peace, the world had shifted just so; offering her a new perspective, like the first time one sees a city from its highest spire rather than its cobbled streets. The corbal seemed tilted to a new angle, allowing her to glimpse aspects thus far hidden, though they had been there all along. Now she saw not walls of purple stone, solid and unyielding as ice, but myriad tunnels branching this way and that—a maze of veinlike runnels through which the corbal’s power flowed. And without its frenzied voice, Athaya felt nothing from the gem but a curious sensation of communion. Of alignment. Of potential, barely bound.

  She had known that the corbal bore a source of power, just as she did. But that was not all.

  It had more than simple facets… it had paths. The corbal had paths…

  Deep inside, she felt her own power tingle in response, sensing affinity. Like reached out to like, poised for release to whatever purpose she saw fit and eagerly awaiting her will.

  Paths, she echoed, through which power could be sent. Her power. She gasped as the last curtain was pulled aside to show a vista of frightening and unlimited potential. You can do it. It can be done…

  The realization came none too soon. Her assailant took her sharp intake of breath as a sign of surrender and decided that the moment to strike had come. But in the same instant he sprang for her, the cord pulled tight between his hands, Athaya lifted her hands and cried: “Ignis confestim sit!”

  At her command, raw magic surged like floodwaters through her paths. Then, at her direction, she aimed her power at the corbal’s heart, from which it coursed through the crystal’s labyrinthine tunnels like blood pumping through living veins. Its power was magnified a hundredfold by the glittering facets, like a single candle in a room of mirrors, growing with intensity as it surged from the center crystal to the smaller two beside it, flooding their paths as well.

  Bright fountains of green-tinted fire leaped from her fingertips, embracing the strip of cord. The rope was consumed in seconds, leaving a living line of fire in the man’s fists, glowing green and turning his sallow and astonished face the color of moss. The necklace looped around his wrist began to pulse and glow with milky white light and, stunned by spells he had been told she could not cast in the gems’ presence, the intruder flung the necklace to the ground in fright and bolted for freedom. But the fire-coils snaked down his body to snag his ankles, dropping him hard to the floor. Then the single coil became two, then four, then six… until the man was trapped in a writhing cocoon of fiery ropes, crackling and searing, smelling of smoke and the acrid stench of cooking flesh.

  The corbal isn’t just a barrier to magic, she thought drunkenly, in the midst of a miracle, it’s a conduit…

  She felt the spell’s power swell and grow as she pumped more magic through the crystals, and then felt a subtle jolt of transference as control shifted to the gems themselves; vaguely, she was aware that she was no longer feeding them power, but that the corbals were taking it on their own. Without her conscious bidding, the coils took on the twisting forms of serpents with angry red eyes and flaming tongues, winding their fiery bodies around the assassin and squeezing the breath from him as he had tried to do to their mistress. Shrieking from both pain and mortal terror, the man jerked and writhed upon the floor, futilely trying to free himself from the net of flaming serpents.

  “Athaya, what are you…?”

  Jaren’s voice was the merest scrape of a whisper, barely audible, but even through pain his shock was unmistakable. Athaya did not think to answer, so enthralled was she. Paths, Jaren… can’t you see? Fatigue began to blacken the edges of her vision but she thought little of it; she was caught in the grip of a force far more powerful than herself—a force she could no more push aside than she could a lover in the heady moments before rhythmic bliss held dominion over her body.

  Every spell at her command was open to her and at as many times its original force as there were facets in the stone. Her head spun wildly with the magnitude of what she knew could be done here, of the might that could be raised against her enemies, and for an instant she felt as if she’d been granted the powers of the angels to do with what she would.

  “Athaya, stop… for God’s sake, let it go!”

  Jaren’s labored warning barely registered in her mind. His rasping voice was fearful… but of what? Couldn’t he see what she was doing? Couldn’t he realize? Through an intoxicated haze, Athaya was awestruck at her work, swept away in the tide of her creation. More than simple fire, she had endowed the coils with a semblance of life. Even as that thought crossed her mind, one of the serpents turned its fiery eyes to her and hissed in alien deference.

  Then, like a thick blanket thrown over her head, her power suddenly sputtered and dimmed. Jaren had spent what little strength he had to throw a coverlet over the necklace on the floor, imprisoning the gems in darkness. Without them, the drain on Athaya’s power suddenly stopped. The snakelike creatures she had crafted slowly retreated into her palms, the blackened scars striping the assassin’s flesh the only testament that they had ever existed at all.

  The man crawled to the farthest corner of the room and cowered like an injured dog, rocking on his knees and gibbering in the shadows behind the bedstand.

  Blinking dazedly, Athaya turned to see how Jaren fared; how badly the kahnil had drained him. Her steps were slow and unsteady as she staggered to his side. Only then did she note that he was gaping at her in wide-eyed wonderment. “Y-you used magic. You couldn’t have… but you did.” He reached out to clutch her hand, as if to assure himself that it was still made of flesh and blood, and not something less tangible or mortal. “But then it started to use you,” he added, “and you didn’t even realize—”

  Barely listening, Athaya steadied herself against the bedpost, still drunk on what she had done; still feeling the unearthly thrill of it. “I just wanted to fight him off… to bind him up the way he meant to do to me.”

  And her next thought, as she gathered up the blanket-shrouded necklace and cradled the bundle against her chest, was that she had uncovered a weapon that Sage and his allies did not possess, and more, a power that no Lorngeld in all of history—neither Reykan Master nor Sarian Sage—had ever dared to dream existed.

  Chapter 11

  She d
idn’t know how long she stood there, dumbly shifting her gaze between Jaren, the huddled form of the assassin, and the bundled corbal necklace in her arms, feeling both lethargic and high-strung at the same time. But sometime, seconds or minutes later, the bedchamber filled to overflowing with people all shouting at one another in unison. In the outskirts of her vision, Athaya caught the crimson blur of guardsmen’s uniforms, the black swirl of an archbishop’s cassock—odd, came the vagrant thought, that Lukin should be so properly clad at this late hour—the glint of lamplight on Durek’s gold-embroidered dressing gown, and the disheveled shapes of Master Hedric, Mason, and Drianna, all of them in rumpled bedclothes and hastily donned slippers.

  Even before Durek had finished barking a command for them to do so, a pair of guardsmen surrounded the quailing intruder, now convulsing with fright, and clapped a set of irons firmly around his wrists. While Hedric hurried to Athaya’s side, murmuring frantic inquiries, Mason crouched beside Jaren and peered into his eyes, and then beyond, into what lay behind them.

  “He’s… still under a sealing spell,” Athaya told him haltingly. “And he’s got some kahnil in his blood.” Although still dazed from what she had done with the crystals now resting so benignly in her grasp, the cold fact of the assassin’s presence and intention was beginning to sink in, pushing away any pride in her accomplishment to make way for the harsh reality of what she—and Jaren—had come dangerously close to losing. “It was only a few drops, but…”

  “It doesn’t look too serious,” Mason assured her. “I can only sense a small measure of disruption.” He pressed a palm flat across Jaren’s forehead and offered him a thin smile. “You probably won’t feel so well for the next few days, but all things considered, I suppose it’s better than being dead.”

  Jaren gave him a fragile nod of agreement, but didn’t attempt to get to his feet just yet.

  “Drianna, would you go make up some tea?” Mason asked. “He’ll get through this faster with lots of fluids to flush out what little poison is in him. And Master Hedric, if you would take care of his other… er—’problem?’”

  Joints popping, Hedric knelt at Jaren’s side and deftly released the seal with a touch and a whisper. Then, returning him to Mason’s care, the Master turned back to his other erstwhile pupil. “Your spell woke me like a thunderclap,” he said to Athaya quietly, curious eyes begging for an explanation. “The force of it was like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

  Nor I, she thought, but couldn’t begin to find the right words to tell him the full scope of what he had heard. She took a deep breath to steady herself, but before she could offer even the vaguest of explanations, one of the crimson-clad guardsmen wheeled around sharply to address his king.

  “Sire, this man is dying.”

  The sickly taste of bile inched up Athaya’s throat; even though the man had sought her death, she had not meant to kill him. Justified or no, the cloud of Kelwyn’s death still hung over her in the minds of many Caithans and she wanted to do nothing to further worsen her reputation. But a quick glance at the bottle the guardsman dutifully passed to Durek proved that her spell had not been the intruder’s downfall; just before the men had reached him, he had apparently swallowed what remained of his kahnil. He had clearly ingested far more than the few drops in Jaren’s blood; already the man’s muscles were twitching uncontrollably as the poison did its work.

  “Let me,” Hedric said, moving from her side to cup the assassin’s head between his palms. “We may yet be able to learn something from him.” The guardsmen drew back, suspicious that something unnatural was about to take place. The senior officer cast a worried inquiry to his king, who flatly ignored it.

  “Find out who he is,” Durek ordered as he stalked forward to tower over the dying man. “And find out who put him up to this.”

  “But sire!” Lukin cried. Aghast, he slapped a meaty palm over his heart. “This… this is necromancy! It is wicked and immoral—”

  Durek motioned sharply to the slashed pillow casing, now ruined beyond repair by corrosion caused from the acidic kahnil. “So was trying to murder my sister in her sleep,” he snapped back, thin lips curling back in distaste as he turned his royal scrutiny back to the shackled intruder. “Now be silent and let the man work.”

  Master Hedric closed his eyes and sank deep into the assassin’s dying mind, scrying what remained of his memory. Hedric flinched once during the reading, as if he had brushed against residual traces of fright and pain, and then his frown deepened as the impressions became fewer and harder to discern. He retreated shortly after that, leaving what was left of the man’s thoughts and memories to vanish slowly into death.

  Hedric rose slowly, aged joints popping like burning logs of pine. “I didn’t get much. He was almost gone.”

  Athaya thought she saw the archbishop’s features relax slightly, but the expression of barely contained hostility on Hedric’s face revealed that Lukin had no cause to relax just yet. Not even when speaking of his onetime student Rhodri had Master Hedric ever come so close to losing control over his emotions.

  “Well?” Durek demanded, dragging splayed fingers through a crop of tousled hair. “What did you see?”

  “What I saw,” he replied, frosting the chamber with the icy glare he directed at Lukin, “is that your archbishop hired this man to murder her Highness—and her husband—as they slept.”

  Archbishop Lukin snorted indelicately as he pulled himself up to his full height, overshadowing the old wizard by several inches. “How dare you!” he bellowed, injecting every drop of righteous indignation he could muster. “Sire, this… this wizard is quite obviously lying. He would say anything to protect his precious protégé—”

  Jaren’s retort was hushed but furious. “Master Hedric would never lie about—”

  “—and you’ve only got his word for it. How can we ever know what he supposedly saw in that man’s mind?”

  “You can’t,” Athaya admitted, leaning heavily against the bedpost to fight back ever-increasing exhaustion. She could hardly be shocked at the archbishop’s hand in the plot and silently cursed herself for having ever thought herself safe within these walls. “But,” she added quickly, eager to wipe the smug grimace of satisfaction from Lukin’s face, “who else could have so easily obtained Dagara’s corbal necklace?” She had known the design was familiar, but it was only after its threat was gone that she was finally able to place it. “Or didn’t you think I’d recognize it? She wore it at Durek’s wedding, you know… to keep Rhodri from going.” Fighting down a subtle surge of nausea, Athaya handed the bundle to Durek, whispering what it contained but requesting that he not open it in their presence.

  “Apparently this man—I believe his name was Noel—was arrested by the Tribunal not long ago,” Master Hedric went on, pretending not to notice the archbishop’s wrathful glare. “He has a history of theft and other petty crimes—not exactly one of Delfarham’s finest citizens. This time, however, I didn’t perceive that he’d committed any particular crime; an associate of his held a grudge against him—something about not getting a fair share of some stolen money—and turned him in to the Tribunal, claiming he was sheltering wizards. I didn’t sense that Noel had any strong opinions one way or another about the Lorngeld—he was mostly concerned with himself.

  “In any case, Archbishop Lukin offered the man his freedom if he would secure Athaya’s death and promised that he would have easy access to the princess’ apartment. I tried,” Hedric added apologetically, “but I couldn’t find out which of the guardsmen helped to arrange that. If Noel failed—or implicated his employer in any way—Lukin threatened him with the worst that the Tribunal was capable of. Truly, he would have been better off dead than failing; from what I have heard,” Hedric inserted dryly, “the Tribunal’s Justices are not generally known for their goodness and mercy. If he succeeded, the archbishop promised him not only his freedom, but a small estate confiscated from some other unfortunate prisoner—lands rich enough to
support him comfortably for the rest of his life.”

  “The Tribunal’s activities have been suspended, Chief Justice,” Durek said darkly, shifting a narrow gaze to Lukin. “You have no authority to distribute its appropriations as yet.”

  Lukin’s eyes darted from his king to Hedric and back again, reflecting shock, outrage, and, Athaya thought, a measure of very real fear. “You trust the accusations of a wizard over me?”

  Durek’s pause was eloquent. “I think, Archbishop, that I have trusted you far too much of late.”

  Athaya saw painful indecision on her brother’s face. He was reluctant to place more trust in a Reykan wizard he had met only days before than in the long-serving and duly anointed primate of Caithe, but he also knew that Jon Lukin, man of God or no, was not beneath hiring assassins to eliminate an inconvenient member of the royal house. He had no real proof of the crime beyond Master Hedric’s word, but was inclined to trust it nonetheless—and that, Athaya knew, rankled her brother more than he cared to admit.

  “Wait here, all of you,” Durek instructed brusquely. He stalked from the room without another word, leaving Archbishop Lukin, two guardsmen, and four wizards glancing at one another in uneasy silence. When he returned a few minutes later, his eyes no longer betrayed frustrated confusion, but stern resolve.

  “It is Dagara’s necklace.” It was spoken without inflection of any kind, but the words alone were damning enough.

  Still, Lukin persisted. “Sire, surely you realize that I am not the only one at court with access to the royal strongroom. And any wizard can pick a lock… why, this is nothing but a ruse to deceive you into shunning your closest—”

  Durek held up one finger to silence him. Athaya thought her brother might explode with rage—she had been the victim of such outbursts often enough and saw the warning signs in his flushed cheeks and grinding teeth—but instead he remained strikingly composed. Not, she thought, unlike Kelwyn, the depths of whose wrath could often be gauged by how softly and rationally he spoke, rather than the reverse.