Bureng frowned, eyes narrowed in thought. “But there is another and he resides in Sejeend — a young man, racked with fear, unable to cope with the voices thronging through his mind. When the spirit-fragment awoke within me I knew immediately that it was to be embraced, yet he continues to fight the incoming tide, struggling against the inevitable.” He laughed. “Poor fool — I can sense his feelings of panic, as if he’s slowly drowning. But he does not realise that the joining is a beginning, not an end, when all the voices begin to speak as one…”
He smiled and Rikken did so too.
“So…there’ll be more of them….fragment spirits, cap’n?”
“Yes, Rikken, and I’ll want you by my side now that you know this secret of mine,” Bureng said. “Hanavok’s ships must shield themselves from the sun with this deadening mist, thus cutting our speed. So we will not arrive at the Straits of the Vale before tomorrow afternoon, even with the greater distance we’ll cover tonight. But once near the Straits we shall still have to wait for the onset of dusk before beginning the onslaught since the web of spells is stronger after sundown.”
“But how could I serve you, master?”
“You’ll be with me when we break the walls of Hojamar Keep and storm the palace itself,” he said. “And whenever a dark spirit comes to me, your help will be invaluable.”
Rikken stood straight and gave a formal bow.
“I am your servant, captain — my blade is yours.”
“Good. Now there are a few other things to tell you, but first pour me a jack of goldpurl from that small chest over there…”
* * *
The Countess Ayoni heard the rear door of the confinement carriage open and booted feet climb inside. There was a muttered exchange with the guard at the end of the short passage and a moment later he appeared at the barred window as he unlocked the door.
“Visitor, your ladyship.”
And he stepped aside to be replaced by Ayoni’s husband, the Count Jarryc. On seeing his beloved face, she felt her carefully and rigidly maintained composure begin to crumble, and she rose quickly be enfolded in his arms. They stood there for several moments, murmuring comforts to each other as Ayoni felt the sting of tears on her face.
“Damn them,” the Count said. “This box isn’t fit for a dog!”
“Well, I do have my little wall lamp, and a volume of Roharkan devotional verse, kindly provided by the Archmage,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a kerchief. “Just think how much worse it could be — I might be in one of old Magramon’s verminous dungeons, and you might be facing real danger.”
He gave a sour smile at that. “A day out of Sejeend and not a sign, not a breath of the ‘Mogaun threat’ — why am I not surprised? Yet still I have to endure Ilgarion’s staff meetings and his inane orders which I must accept without question since Tangaroth holds you and Chellour in this wheeled cage.” He curled his lip and glanced momentarily up at the low carriage ceiling. “I saw your jailers as I was brought here.”
Ayoni knew that he was referring to the three experienced battle mages posted by the Archmage atop the prison carriage to keep a close eye on both her and Chellour, ready to subdue them at the first sign of any mageworking.
“I never imagined that your Watcher obligations would lead you here,” he said with a sad smile.
“I’m so sorry, my love,” she said. “But seeing the way that they treated poor ____ and the Duke, I just lost my head….which gave them an excuse to confine me, thus putting you in their power.”
She laid a hand against his chest and bowed her head, and moment later felt his hand stroke her hair.
“You’ve nothing to be sorry for, my sweet,” he said. “There are other who must answer for a greater burden of dishonour than any you or I might acquire.”
A throat-clearing sound came from outside the open cell door.
“Sorry, your grace, visiting is not to be very long, by order of the Archmage.”
The Count gave the guard a cold look, then held her close. She reached up to his neck, their lips touched for a gentle moment full of yearning and sorrow and farewell since she knew that fate or chance might deliver a measure of cruelty into their lives. Then they drew apart, hands joined as they gazed into each others’ eyes, then their fingers slid apart and Jarryc turned, stepped outside her cell and was gone. As her door thudded shut and the bar fell back into place, she heard his footsteps recede and vanish as the carriage door closed.
She sat down on her low box crib, cushioned with a straw pallet, and fought not to be engulfed by despair.
“Are you well, Ayoni?” said Chellour loudly from the adjoining cell.
“Here! — quiet now. No talking…”
Ayoni’s despair shifted into anger. She stood and went over to the door and after a moment said:
“Couldn’t be better, dear Chellour, and how are you this fine evening?”
“Ah, you know how it is. Too much good wine and choice viands. A fellow could get quite spoiled by this bounty -”
The guard was suddenly there in front of her door which he rapped with a short stave.
“That’ll do from the both of you! You know the rules — there will be no speaking or conversing, none, for the duration of your confinement.” He sneered. “Or shall I ask the Archmage’s men to send you to sleep again?”
Ayoni shook her head and silently went back to sit on her crib. She knew that the carriage had several Lesser Power charms embedded in its structure which allowed Tangaroth’s mages to send any captives into involuntary slumber, and to wake them, as and when they saw fit. She and Chellour had already undergone this awful enforced oblivion twice, a dreamless and empty gap between one moment and the next. She had no desire to repeat the experience but she lay back on the straw pallet and tried to put her worries about Jarryc aside, seeking natural sleep. Her mind, however, was a maze of anxiety where she wandered from thoughts of her husband to those of Calabos and the other Watchers, then puzzlement over the identity of the man in the flamebird mask who had diverted Tangaroth’s attention at Ilgarion’s coronation. And had Carvers really been involved in the burning of the Daykeep, and were Duke Byrceyn and his wife being well-treated, and was Dybel still alive, and did Calabos recapture the curious Captain Ondene….
After a while her awareness of the cell began to sleep descended and several dream threads offered themselves, each one leading to a vivid patchwork of the familiar and the improbable. But before she could make a choice, something strange happened — the hazy play of interweaving shimmers and shadows grew dim and she heard someone whispering in an elderly, raspy voice, whispering a prayer or a chant in a language that seemed vaguely familiar…
Then the wall of sleep thinned and melted away and she found that she was sitting on the edge of her crib in darkness, her wall lamp having burnt out the last of its meagre amount of tallow. Except that this was a strange kind of darkness where a faint nimbus glowed about everything, like a dusting of jewelled radiance. Ayoni looked slowly from side to side…and gasped as she saw a form lying on the crib behind her, a figure with her own face. Startled she jumped up, leaning on the cell wall for support —
— and found herself staggering through into the other cell where Chellour was examining his own sleeping image. Surprised, he straightened and grinned.
“Greetings, Countess. Are we in each other’s dreams, I wonder, or someone else’s?”
“Whatever’s happened, it’s escaped our keepers’ notice,” she said.
“I haven’t ventured outside yet, though,” Chellour said, stretching one hand out to and through the wall of his cell which was also the side of the prison carriage.
“There is no outside,” said a rasping voice behind them.
Together they turned to see an old, balding man wearing a grubby assemblage of furs and a patched tunic with a long string of beads and charms and bones wrapped around neck and armpits and across his chest. Ayoni knew that this was a Mogaun shaman, perhaps even a seer: sh
e also noticed that he was standing about a foot above the floor.
“There’s no outside?” Chellour echoed.
“No outside,” the old Mogaun said. “No inside either, where we are.”
“So honoured one, where are we?” said Ayoni.
The old shaman gave her a thoughful smile.
“Ghostland, the Domain of Undeath, the Painless Sea, the Forsakening,” he said. “Had to bring it to you to hide you from prying eyes.” He paused to look upwards, cocking his head as if listening, then shrugged and beckoned. “Now I bring you to them — come.”
He turned, still hovering over the floor, and walked off through the closed door of the cell. Ayoni shared a puzzled look with Chellour but before she could speak they both began to glide smoothly after the departed shaman. The walls of the carriage flicked past and then they were outside in the night, floating away in the shaman’s wake, steadily gaining height.
Ayoni found that she could alter her perspective just by trying to twist her head and shoulders round, and was thus able to look down at all the cooking fires and torches and clustered tents of the imperial army. The encampment had been pitched across two outcrops of higher ground, part of the irregular line of worn bluffs and broken ridges that followed the outer bank of the Great Canal. This mighty waterway, nearly half a mile across in places, encircled the ancient demesne of Besh-Darok and joined with the waters of the Gulf of Brykon several miles north and south of the city itself. Ayoni knew, of course, that three centuries ago there had been no waterway but a long curve of craggy peaks, the Girdle Hills, which the Shadowkings in their cruelty and hat had transformed into a long, black fortified wall and the twin dark citadels, Gorla and Keshada. When the Lord of Twilight was defeated, that terrible wall and its citadels had collapsed into the depths, down into the undercaves of the world, thus opening an immense channel to the sea. A sorcerous, underground highway known as the Great Aisle had also linked the two citadels to Rauthaz in the north, and its destruction also created another monstrous trough which reached all the way to the Gulf of Noriel in the north.
In the evening’s deepening gloom, the Great Canal became a curving sweep of blackness over which Ayoni and Chellour flew, as if towed by the old Mogaun shaman. The lights of the imperial camp were receding to distant glows and were gone by the time they crossed over the opposite bank. Then they caught sight of another, larger cluster of bright pinpoints a few miles further rond the Great Canal, spread out on the inner bank.
“That is Belkiol, the thousand-tent city,” said the old Mogaun. “The last resting place for pilgrims before they walk the final stage to Besdarok. There, they will perform the 3 privations, the 5 songs, the 6 prayers, and the 10 farewells.”
On they flew with their guide wordlessly pointing to bands of pilgrims moving on from or returning to Belkiol, their pole-lamps carried over their shoulders. And ther, just a few miles to the east, were the pale walls of Besh-Darok. Ayoni had visited the ancient, mostly-deserted city just once, in her youth, when she had accompanied her father on a journey to visit relatives in southern Mantinor. Their small ship had docked at one of the few piers still safe to use — old wrecks littered the waters by most of the wharfs — and they had spent the night at an inn on the front without straying any further into the ruined city. She smiled at the irony of it. Although she had been keen the next morning to go and explore the abandoned streets, her father refused out of respect for the dead and whatever spirits might walk the walls and towers, yet here she was returning to Besh-Darok as a disembodied spirit….
Through the darkening sky they rushed, feeling no sensation, neither cold nor hot, nor any taste or odour. Before long they were swooping down low over the crumbling battlements of the city and the caved-in, derelict buildings beyond, all of which possessed the same tenuous darkling radiance, a faintly turquoise nimbus. The dilapidation of the centuries and the incursion of plantlife of every kind was plain to see — tumbled masonry swathed in moss and grasses, bushes and climbing vines half-concealing doors and windows, broken pillar wreathed in dog-ivy or wallthorn, entire trees grown up from the centre of buildings, branches pushing aside walls while their roots burst through the floors and burrowed outside.
Their elderly Mogaun guide angled their course towards a huge oval building enclosed by the remains of a diamond-shaped fortification with a large, round keep at either end. From its nearness to the city wall Ayoni suddenly realised that this had to be the old imperial palace, on which the palace at Sejeend had been modelled in part. She had seen drawings and paintings of how it had once looked but at some point after the great Shadowking War, the graceful High Spire had toppled to leave huge overgrown mounds extending north from the central stronghold across the curtain wall and the city wall, both clearly breached by the tower’s fall.
Inside the palace walls, more wild undergrowth had smothered the evidence of ruin and the age-old ravages of battle. The old Mogaun brought them to alight on a weed-choked stretch of cracked flagstone before a tall arched entrance which once would have been barred by heavy timber doors. As the shaman led them towards it, Ayoni thought that she saw a pale, almost misty figure pass behind one of the upper windows, just for a moment. Chellour frowned as she hurried to catch up but shook her head and stepped smartly in front of the old shaman, turning to face him.
“What is your purpose in bringing us here, honourable one?” she said. “Who sent you to get us?”
“I am not sent by anyone,” the Mogaun said sharply as he sidestepped her. “It was and is necessary to bring you here to ask, answer and to witness…”
They were walking through a devastated great main hall, much of its area filled with rubble, sections lichen-encrusted masonry and long shards of pillars. Once a wide staircase had risen from the middle of the floor and a portion of it still jutted above the mossy wreckage, broken-off steps visible against the purpling night sky. The old Mogaun strode on through, leading them to a wide chamber off the hall, its floor littered with more grass-fringed rubble, massive shattered pieces of stone from the ceiling which was open to the outside. The pale, opaque form of a young woman sat on one of the pieces, gazing out a tall narrow window. She looked round as they entered, and smiled.
“Why, Atroc — you’ve brought guests!”
“For a short time only, Alael,” the Mogaun named Atroc said. “And theirs is a serious task.”
The woman called Alael nodded as she approached. “This must be about those newcomers,” she said to Ayoni and Chellour. “They’ve set up camp in the Keep of Day and Bardow is very worried.”
“Where is the master mage now, lady?” said Atroc.
“A little while ago I saw him up on the Silver Aggor, talking with Yasgur,” said Alael.
“Hmph, didn’t see him. Perhaps he is at the Keep of Night,” Atroc said. “I thank you, lady.”
The young woman smiled brightly then wandered off through the wrecked chamber. As she left, Ayoni exchanged a wide-eyed look with Chellour.
“Was that really….Queen Alael?” he said.
“Queen Alael’s ghost?” Ayoni suggested, trying to reconcile the slender young woman with the images of Queen Alael that she had grown up with, those of a stern, commanding woman always pictured wearing the imperial crown and sharing the frame with a sword or a shield or some other implement of war. Crowned in the aftermath of the Shadowking War, Alael had been faced with widespread chaos and upheaval from which marauders and freebooters had sprouted like vicious weeds, and in which several determined would-be rivals sought to challenge her for the throne. The first twenty years of her reign had almost been one continuous military campaign aimed at reuniting the former territories of the Khatrimantine Empire, a campaign that left succeeding generations with the enduring image of Alael, the warrior queen.
Yet here she was in this city of ghosts, looking as youthful and relatively burdenless as she might have been before her coronation. And there had been mention of other names from history, the Archmage Bardow
, and Yasgur, the Mogaun prince who had been made a Lord Regent during the war. And their guide had to be the Mogaun seer Atroc, who had been Yasgur’s closest advisor and the man who had befriended Gilly Cordale and kept him from harm.
“We could be meeting Chael Bardow,” she muttered to Chellour as they followed Atroc from the chamber by stepping through the wall. “The others will be beside themselves with envy when we tell them.”
Chellour frowned. “Something is wrong here — why would the ghost of Queen Alael be young rather than old? Does she even remember being queen, I wonder…”
The seer Atroc led them through the violet darkness of an outer pathway choked with dying bushes and saplings to a wider gap between the palacial stronghold and the inner wall. Out here, where the light was plentiful during the day, all was a profusion of foliage, flower and berry-laden bushes, great ironwood and torwood trees pressing against the stones of the inner wall, the branches decorated with hanging masses of litrilu blooms, all wreathed in subdued, many-coloured auras. Amid all this, Atroc paused to point along to the dark mass of the Keep of Night.
“Bardow awaits us,” he said. “Ask him what you will but be assured that you’ll have more questions at the end than you did at the beginning!”
“He is not there,” said a voice.
The translucent figure of a tall, bearded man in half-mail and a cloak emerged from the gloomy mass of greenery. His face was sombre, perhaps even a little weary Ayoni thought, but his dark eyes were steady and alert.
“So, milord,” Atroc said. “Where might we find him?”
“The imperial barracks, Atroc. Up in the observatory.”
“Again? Reading the stars?” Atroc snorted. “Be as well to try and read the ripples on the bay for all the good it will do. If the end is almost upon us then how can we prevent it by this gazing?”
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