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 find 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 h
idden.”
“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.
“Yes, but the viziers?” Chantmer asked. “Why would King Toth trust them?”
“I’m sure he doesn’t. But he’s expanded west so quickly that he might have no choice. He needs ministers to raise taxes, conscript men for the army, and ensure that the city functions as it always has.”
“Syrmarria is more than functioning, it’s booming.”
“And why shouldn’t it?” Memnet asked. “Aristonia is the farthest west of the khalifates, the crossroads of Toth’s new highway. Wait until he builds south to the Spice Road.”
“More strangers from foreign lands—the city is changing quickly enough as it is.”
“Syrmarria is only half Aristonian now. Give it ten years, and it will be something else entirely. The entire khalifate will be transformed.”
“I wonder how the Aristonians will feel when they’re only a remnant in their own lands,” Chantmer said.
“Has any people anywhere ever been consulted by their invaders?” They reached the south side of the palace hill, and with it the stairway to the lower levels. “Go ahead, Chantmer. Find the library from here.”
“A test?”
“Practice.”
Chantmer frowned in concentration. On past visits, he’d either relied on Markal to find the library or been greeted at the gates by an archivist. He led the master to the bottom of the stairs, took a wrong turn, and shortly found himself atop the stairs where he’d started. Chantmer tried again, took a left where he’d taken a right before, and somehow found himself in exactly the same place.
He threw up his hands. “But . . . I went the opposite way this time.”
Memnet leaned against his staff and looked on with an amused expression. “Not really, but I see how you might think that.”
No offer of help was forthcoming, and Chantmer refused to ask. He tried again, and this time didn’t double back. But there were several more embarrassin
g detours before they finally approached the simple oak door that marked the entrance to the library.
“There,” Memnet said, rapping the door with the end of his staff. “Remember that for next time.”
The library door swung open, and an elderly archivist greeted them with a solemn bow. He clasped Memnet’s right hand with both of his own, and a broad smile broke over his face.
“Master. Well met.”
“Jethro,” Memnet said warmly. “Very well met indeed.”
Chantmer struggled to respect the lesser members of the order, who were failed wizards after all, apprentices who had never risen above their limitations, but they had their purposes. The keepers tended to the magic of the gardens, maintaining their citadel against the outside world. The acolytes stored magic that could be called forth by their betters, and the archivists held tremendous amounts of magical knowledge in their heads, even if they lacked the power to summon it.
Jethro was the most important of the five archivists who maintained the library beneath the Syrmarria palace, and he led the master and apprentice through the doors and into the expansive first room of the library. High bookshelves held thick leather-bound volumes, while niches in the wall contained scrolls and clay tablets.
An archivist sat at a table with a piece of cut glass pinched to her eye and a quill gripped between stained fingers, with an open book on one side and loose leaves of parchment on the other. She was so intent on her work that she didn’t look up when Memnet and Chantmer approached.
Fire was the enemy of most libraries, but here candles burned freely, including four lighting the copyist’s work as Jethro, Chantmer, and Memnet walked past her on their way to the Vault of Secrets. The runes and protective wards were so strong, even in the outer rooms of the library, that the copyist could have taken the leaf from her book, dipped the edge in camphor, and thrust it into the flame without it catching fire.
They passed through an archway and into the small chamber at the rear known as the Vault of Secrets. The ribbed ceiling was low enough that Chantmer had to duck until he reached the center of the room, and not only was the vault smaller than the outer room, but to the untrained eye, the small number of books, scrolls, and tablets on shelves and in niches would have appeared unimpressive. Not that any untrained eye would ever see this place; the air fairly shimmered with protective magic. A palace guard or servant would never even spot the door leading to the library, wouldn’t even find the stairs that had given Chantmer such trouble, but if a guard were somehow dragged in by a member of the order, he would immediately double over and vomit before fleeing in unnamed terror.
The Black Shield (The Red Sword Book 2) Page 5