“Present!” Riss’s mother shouted from mid-ranks in the outer courtyard, in that contralto military voice that instinct obeyed before mind could catch up to what it had heard.
The unit at the front stepped forward and three men presented a white-wrapped body, then knelt and raised it high. Lady Blackburn stood in silence for a moment, turned, and started slowly down toward the gate. She stumbled when she was even with Riss, and without thinking Riss moved to steady her elbow. They walked together, like brides to the altar, down to the courtyard that now served duty as a gravesite.
The guards unwrapped the face as Lady Blackburn approached. Riss winced. Just as in her vision, one side was cruelly melted away. The other did not fare much better; just enough for a lover to recognize, if no one else.
“Lord Blackburn is dead. Long live Lord Blackburn,” one of the men said, voice hoarse from smoke and fire. He took a swig from a canteen but grimaced; the water burned.
“Long live Lord Blackburn,” the lady herself answered, and as she surrendered herself into the custody of the Eastland soldiers in their gleaming armor, others took up the chant. Riss threaded her way between the ranks, and found herself enfolded in arms without any powder to get in the way. Except one dab square on her nose, joined by her mother’s impish grin.
“Long live Lord Blackburn,” Riss said with a half-sardonic smile.
Riss’s mother shook her head. Pride looked enigmatic on her, like she was hiding something. And she was. “Long live Larissa, Steward of Starkeep.”
Riss’s eyes filled again and she turned away. “What will you do with him?”
Riss’s mother smiled, not kindly. “His head will grace the spike of honor, of course, so that all may see it.”
Riss bowed her head. “Lady Adrienne, Royal Majesty, allow him burial on the grounds. He is royalty too. And he grew up in Starkeep every bit as much as I.”
Her mother lifted Riss’s chin and peered curiously into her eyes for a long moment. She nodded, stepping back, and offered Riss her hands. The Talent was strong in the family, and she may well have read important things there. “It must be done,” they said together. And then, finally then, hugged properly. It was the end of the Blackburn reign and a closing of the distance of ten years, and all the rest could wait.
A LOT OF SLY WORK AHEAD
Ed Greenwood
They buried the king in the Ghost Tower this morning. Feet high and head down, with a slim silver blade through his heart to keep him from walking. Of course.
The true and loyal are so damned persistent. Not like we slyboots.
5
As they set the graven stone over the withered royal heels, I was loath to turn away. I knew who would be waiting for me, wintry eyes above sneering smiles. The Wyrmcloaks.
Stornan, tall and grand with his dagger-like beard and new high-cowled robe, every arrogant inch the mighty wizard. Beside him, Aeregul, storm-haired handsome and knowing it, hands toying with the dashing blade he wore and gaze fixed smugly on me because—for once—there were no ladies to make smoldering eyes at. At Aeregul’s shoulder, Hamreth; fat, surly and sour. And beside him, the fourth and last Wyrmcloak: Lrentorn, as balefully ugly as he’d come from the womb, his lopsided hatchet face alight with malice.
Four wizards who would prefer to rule the new king themselves.
Four wizards who soon would. I could overmatch any one of them, perhaps my choice of two, but...they stood across my path, with lesser mages behind them, and many dark-armored warriors of the realm, too.
“High Vizier Glardrim, a word with you.” Stornan’s words were a cold and drawn blade.
I shrugged. “Treason? Is that your one word, lords?”
“Aha, you know your own guilt,” said Aeregul, gloating openly. “You also know the penalty, I believe.”
“The things you believe, Aeregul,” I replied, striding straight at him, “are among the problems besetting Duskember.”
He flinched back, and with a snarl drew his sword. “Stand and surrender, old man!”
“Such discourtesy,” I replied sadly, speaking to the folk behind the four Wyrmcloaks, as I felt the chill of cold iron sliding through me—as I stepped through it. “Here in the Chamber of the Fallen Kings. Let us meet this evening in the Room of the Riven Throne. After the memorial feast.”
“When you’ve had time to prepare for us?” Stornan snapped. “Not garruling likely!”
Aeregul was busy collapsing and retching, tears of helpless pain on his cheeks, and the men beyond him were hastily giving way before me.
No wonder. They’d just seen me step right through a man as if I was a ghost—and that man was all too obviously feeling all the yawning agony of his body stretched by magic colder than any grave.
I turned, gave Stornan a tight smile, and replied gently, “I am always prepared for the likes of you, Stornan of Haelmantle.”
I kept on turning, so as to favor Hamreth and Lrentorn with my smile. As they writhed and staggered in the aftermath of having the fell magics they’d just cast at me thrust right back into them.
Oh, yes, magic hurts.
As I knew all too well—and would be reminded of anew, all too soon. When the memorial feast was done.
5
“Marl Glardrim, know this: you are High Vizier of Duskember no longer!” Stornan’s voice rang with warm satisfaction.
He seemed to be expecting some sort of reply, so I nodded.
The thirty-three other men in the room waited tensely for my outburst, wands of warding raised and ready. They expected me to lash out with spells, not knowing how few I had left.
The women of Duskgard expected even more; there was not one of them in all this wing of the castle. That much, the tatters of my failing magic still told me.
“You were born in the village of Thaler’s Bridge,” Lrentorn spoke up, “and to there you shall return. In lasting disgrace.”
“For your tyranny, you deserve death many times over,” Aeregul put in. “For what you did to our great king, all of those passings should be slow and agonized.” His voice went bitter. “Yet we dare not, because of what you have done.”
I nodded again, not bothering to add a smile.
Their words held no surprise for anyone in the room. Everyone in Duskember knew Marl Glardrim for a murderous villain.
Everyone in the chamber around me knew I’d risen ruthlessly to become the realm’s most tyrannical High Vizier, manipulating a weak-minded, frail old king and his equally weak-minded young crown prince. I’d started wars and finished them, wars that had raised Duskember from a backwater kingdom into the mightiest empire this vast world of Aglirta had ever seen. As King Baerence Wyrmgar sat mumbling on his throne, I’d played kingdom against kingdom. Malaunt, Narsym, Pelevvar, and Thondur...slowly Duskember had swallowed them all, the blood of thousands shed in the doing. As, closer to home, I played archmage off against archmage.
I got very good at it all. And very tired of it all.
This ruling from behind thrones was a demon steed. Once mounted, you were trapped in the saddle; the only end for this wild ride was death.
Baerence had been a good man, once. I had sickened of ruling him. Crown Prince Aladar Wyrmgar was a spineless weakling, whom I detested as much as he hated me, and I was revolted at the thought of ruling him.
So I merely nodded.
“We have discovered,” Hamreth growled, his voice heavy with distaste, “that we dare not execute you. Yet. Because of all the magics.”
I felt like smiling then, but kept it off my face and merely regarded him patiently.
They needed this time to gloat and toy and justify, these four spineless malices, before they carried out whatever unpleasantnesses they had planned for me.
They dared not kill me, indeed. I had made myself indispensible. Without lifting a finger, by merely willing one thing o
r saying another, I could hurl this palace and the three greatest castles in Duskember down into ruin right now, on the heads of all inside.
Cutting out my tongue or manacling me spread-rigid wouldn’t stop me. I had enjoyed thirty years of crafting new magics and altering old enchantments, to make myself the focus or keystone of them all. And I had used those years well.
If I died suddenly, before these Wyrmcloaks put in a decade or so of hard and exacting spellcasting, Duskember would fall with me, leaving them ruling a realm of rubble, whirling magical storms, and chaos.
“Too many magics,” I admitted softly, keeping my eyes on Hamreth’s face. “Done with the purest of intentions.”
“To raise yourself to be a tyrant,” he spat scornfully.
“Just as you four are now attempting,” I said calmly. “With the purest of intentions, of course.”
I ignored their sputtering responses. For it had begun with the purest of intentions. When I’d first set foot in Duskgard, it had been a softly sinister place of warring vipers, courtiers who led good Baerence astray daily for sport and their own waxing gain. I’d bound magic after magic to me for the good of the realm. I dared trust the future of Duskember with no one else, you see.
No one who’s not a fool dares trust anyone, these days. As all the world knows, one can always trust a dragon—but nothing and no one else. And it seemed there were precious few dragons around these days.
They’d been rare since the rise of archmages who exalted themselves above mere wizards, by crafting dragonscale cloaks that could hold dozens of spells in their shimmering scales and so make a spellhurler mighty. Rather than remaining mere neighbors who had to putter all day to ready one magic, and so stay easy prey for any thug with a cudgel.
Aye, dragons loath to part with their scales—that is, every last living wyrm—had become rare indeed.
Men stepped forward at Stornan’s signal, and my throat was suddenly ringed with glittering swordpoints. Freshly polished. Ah, such an honor.
“Stand still,” Stornan ordered.
I shrugged and spread empty hands.
When one blade darted at my fingers, I slapped it away, shaking its wielder with a child’s spell that sent sparks racing up his steel to snap out of his nose and mouth. Through streaming tears, he backed hastily away, trying not to sob aloud.
The other swordpoints slid in closer.
Hameth and Lrentorn were casting now. Unfamiliar magics, slow and complex.
“The spells now being laid upon you,” Stornan announced, lifting his long-bearded chin in satisfaction, “will you keep you awake and aware throughout what follows. Experiencing every moment.”
He smiled then, and it was not a pleasant sight. “It may be that you will not sleep again for years.”
And then the man with the forgehammer came in.
5
I was glad I’d bought that little time before the feast to prepare. Among other things, what little I’d managed blunted the worst of the pain. Discomfort the Wyrmcloaks wanted to go on for years.
The years it would take them to trace, identify, and alter every last spell in Duskgard that held up sagging roofs, spires, and domes, that buttressed aging walls, that painted and stuccoed so many grand ceilings and tiled so many floors. Not to mention the three castles.
I hoped they’d remember the three castles.
The man with the hammer had broken every joint of my limbs—and then my jaw—with careful, brutal precision. For which I was grateful.
Then they’d strapped my flopping, bleedingly useless limbs to my body with far more pack-straps than were necessary, binding me into a bundle, and packed me off to my home village in an open horse-cart that same night.
With me in the groaning, rattling conveyance was a geased-to-serve-me servant, a quiet, drab young girl named Flaer, who regarded me with cool gray eyes. Presumably she was really “Flaera,” but my jaw was in no condition to ask her anything, and learn of her kin and home village. So in frosty silence she fed me gruel, watered me, and sluiced away my wastes with the same deftness, doing what the Wyrmcloaks wanted: keeping me alive in agony.
With the cart rode knights bearing a proclamation from the new king. One of them took some delight in reading it to me. “The villain Glardrim is to be kept alive and in the best of health, but confined in the village and not allowed to speak to any visitors save My envoys. You need not treat him with respect. He caused the deaths of uncounted thousands, and ruined more lives besides, and has earned his lasting punishment. On no account trust him, in matters small or large.”
Well, that was astute enough. More than I’d thought Aladar capable of, if one of the Wyrmcloaks hadn’t written every word for him. And possibly signed it for him, too.
Eventually the long torment of the cart ride had ended. Here I was, back in Thaler’s Bridge. Lying alone in the dark, with Flaer snoring faintly in the next room.
My shattered joints merely ached now, as I lay still, but inside me I could feel the slow, shifting nausea of one more spell anchored in me being dissolved into an anchor elsewhere. The Wyrmcloaks were already hard at work hastening the moment of my irrelevance.
Also inside me was a weapon they knew nothing of, hidden from their pryings among all the spell-nodes—the hundreds of pebbles I’d had sewn into my body over the years rather than trusting in a dragonscale cloak someone could steal or slash away in battle. One of them let me read the uppermost thoughts of anyone touching me, another made me...but enough; my thoughts ramble.
Three small glass vials of lorarra. Enspelled dragonblood. The instruments of my revenge.
Enspelled to me, so the moment a mere drop out of my vials sank into the flesh of a living person, they will fall under the influence of my mind. Vials that had been riding inside me for years, put there by that fell sorceress Lady Summertide, who’d once been a war-prisoner of Duskember.
Fiery-tempered and lash-tongued, eyes like two burning flames of fury...Ieira Ahmruth, a dusky-skinned, willow-thin outlander from the hot jungles of Surruth over the mountains, nicknamed “Lady Summertide” because she came from that warm country. I’d spared her life and arranged her escape in return for my three vials. That had been long and long ago; what had become of her?
Ah, but the past is the past, and here I was in the present, crippled—and strapped into a bundle so my limbs would henceforth be bent and deformed, when they did heal. A prisoner of my own shattered body.
I had a few feeble spells, and one other little trick. The nails of the smallest fingers on each of my hands were cut as sharp as bright-honed daggers. Usually I coated those nails nightly with the sleep-inducing venom of the river adder, but my bottle of that was behind me in Duskgard, well hidden. The smallest nail of my right hand bore another sort of coating: arraul, a deadly slay-at-a-touch poison I was immune to, thanks to years of sickening treatments. Best held in reserve until I was no longer strapped to a board, and had healed enough to move about.
In the meantime, if I could expel just one vial of lorarra, dip my left nail in it, and scratch villager after villager, as they handled me...
5
Had Flaer been reading my thoughts? I hadn’t sensed her mind in mine for an instant, but upon awakening she’d silently drawn a knife from low under her shift. Then she’d calmly dipped it in a bowl of wine, sliced open my side in exactly the spot where the uppermost vial rode between ribs, eased out that tiny glass cylinder with a minimum of pressing and tugging, used more wine to sluice clean the cut and her fingers, and bound the wound with swift skill. Then, stonefaced, she’d immersed the smallest finger of my left hand in the vial, ere making knife and vial both vanish beneath her shift.
It had been ease itself to scratch her, but when I tried to command her, she ignored me, and I felt no mind-thread. Either she was as guarded against lorarra as I was, or the geas on her was stronger than its lure.
I couldn’t be sure, because I couldn’t feel her mind at all, let alone read it. No matter how I stared and concentrated, I couldn’t win past the gentle, inscrutable smile she was giving me now.
She turned her back on me to pull her kirtle on over her shift, then reached for her worn linen-and-leather overdress. I stared at its patchwork of scraps settling into place over her.
How had she known about the lorarra? And why arm me so?
5
I smiled. Another one scratched, this one not even noticing.
Soon Marl Glardrim will reign in Thaler’s Bridge.
Soon I’ll have all your daughters. Soon...
Not that I’ll be in any shape to do anything to any of them.
My healing was slow. After an entire season of enduring the daily taunts and spittle of Thalen-folk, I still ached, my body forever curled into a twisted ball despite the straps being long gone. I could crawl and drag myself along like a legless beggar, but not stand or be deemed less than hideous in anyone’s eyes.
Just as the Wyrmcloaks intended, of course.
Yet I’d scratched a goodly number of villagers, not quite three out of every four Thalen-folk, and my influence over the village was strong and growing stronger. I could summon many to me, and order them about as if I was their emperor. These nights I dined on the best of their food and wine, not the rotting scraps they’d brought me when that damned cart had dumped me in their midst.
“Little toad of an emperor,” some of them called me now, when they were far from the rooms they’d given me. Thinking of that title always awakened my best wintry smile.
The one that made Flaer turn away.
She turned away often, these days. She seemed not to approve of my grooming and pruning of Thaler’s Bridge. I used my power over those I’d scratched with ruthless care, making those I commanded eliminate fellow villagers I knew to be spies for the Wyrmcloaks, but always staging such passings as “accidents.” Accidents that were now spreading to the ranks of the more dangerously energetic of the villagers who hated me deeply.
When the Villian Comes Home Page 41