The Wizard_s Fate e-2

by Paul B. Thompson

  “Your Majesty!” Mandes said, taking advantage of the silence. “Permit me to say these claptrap machines are not worthy of your attention! Leave such mechanical trivialities to the gnomes. The Emperor of Ergoth can rely upon the swords of his brave warriors and the magic of his loyal sorcerer!”

  If Mandes hoped to win the sympathy of the assembled warlords with his remarks, he failed. Even the dullest soldier present could see the value of Elicarno’s invention, and many of them had been on the receiving end of Mandes’s spells and potions. Not a word was spoken in his support. Mandes’s eyes kept darting to Prince Nazramin, but he was engaged in a murmured flirtation with the ladies seated on either side of him.

  Elicarno bristled. “Claptrap? Trivialities? Bold words from a weaver of mists and concocter of poisons!”

  Pale blue eyes narrowing, Mandes raised a hand, fingers spread, a conjuration forming on his lips. Tol grasped the engineer’s arm, as though to restrain him from further heated words, but in fact to grant him the secret protection of the millstone. However, the agitated expostulations of Chamberlain Valdid reminded Mandes where he was, and he ceased his spellcasting.

  Instead, he drew himself up haughtily and stated, “You slander me, Master Elicarno. I demand an apology!”

  Elicarno’s reply was brief and pungent. Courtiers gasped to hear profanity spoken in the emperor’s presence, but the warlords guffawed. More heated words would have followed, but Ackal IV, looking wan, called for silence. Although he shivered visibly, sweat had formed a sickly sheen on his forehead.

  “Neither of you is a Rider,” he said hoarsely. “Dueling is forbidden to the common born.”

  Sorcerer and engineer continued to exchange fulminating looks, but their anger turned to surprise with the emperor’s next words.

  “Still, I see no reason why your skills cannot be tested against each other. We shall have a contest, a match of magic versus mechanics.”

  Excited whispers buzzed through the assembly. Valdid, hovering at the emperor’s elbow, asked, “Is that wise, sire?”

  “Let them test their strength with their creations, not by shedding each other’s blood. The empire needs both magic and machines to be strong. Let the champion of each try conclusions against the other.”

  Ackal IV pushed himself to his feet. The assemblage of courtiers and warriors likewise rose.

  “The contest shall take place on the Field of Corij, two days hence, at five marks past dawn.”

  Elicarno and Mandes bowed their heads, signifying their acceptance.

  Leaning heavily on his chief wife, Ackal IV told Valdid the celebration should continue, though he was retiring. Everyone waited in respectful silence as they withdrew.

  When Ackal IV reached the top of the palace steps after a slow, painful climb, Tol shouted, “Long live the emperor! Long live Ackal IV!”

  Thousands of throats took up his cry. The emperor turned and acknowledged their salute with a brief lift of one hand, then he and Thura vanished into the palace. Tol had hoped to speak with Valaran at some point, but when their ailing husband withdrew, protocol demanded the imperial consorts retire as well. With a swirl of crimson silk, Valaran entered the shadowed palace.

  Freed of the presence of imperial dignity, the feast immediately grew louder and more raucous.

  Mandes slipped away as Egrin, the Dom-shu sisters, and Tol’s officers came forward to meet Elicarno. Miya in particular seemed quite taken with the hand catapult. She and Elicarno spent the rest of the party talking earnestly together. Tol remarked to Kiya that he’d not known Miya was so interested in machines. Kiya said it wasn’t engines that held Miya’s attention so much as the engineer.

  Tol invited Elicarno to stay with them at the villa, citing Mandes’s treachery. He wouldn’t put it past the sorcerer to make an attempt on the engineer’s life before the contest.

  Elicarno agreed. He’d long suspected Mandes had been behind the strange, crippling arthritis that had afflicted his old master practically overnight. The illness struck just after Master Wurdgell had argued with a prominent courtier over a fee the courtier refused to pay. The courtier, Elicarno explained, was known to be one of Mandes’s clients.

  Midnight had come and gone when Tol and his party finally left the continuing celebration. They recovered their weapons at the Inner City gate while they waited for their horses to be brought. As he and his apprentices had no horses, Elicarno accepted Miya’s offer to ride double with her.

  Elicarno told his apprentices to return to the workshop and prepare for the coming contest.

  “What should we prepare, Master?” asked the eldest.

  “Everything. Tools, timber, the portable forge, ingots of iron and bronze. I want to be on the Field of Corij one mark after dawn!”

  The trip back to the Quarry District passed in silence, surrounded as they were by the celebrations ringing through the streets of Daltigoth.

  Nazramin rose from the tangle of bedclothes. The chamber was stifling. His head swam from too much wine and his throat was dry as dust.

  Pulling on a robe, he slipped out, stubbing his toe on a table leg before reaching the door. The resultant shower of curses did not wake the two women snoring softly on the bed behind him. He couldn’t remember their names. They were the sisters-daughters? — of an ambitious courtier and had sought him out at the feast, eager to curry favor.

  He’d found them amusing enough at first but loathed the sight of them now. He’d have the servants throw them out at daybreak.

  In the antechamber, he went to a small table that held a pitcher of cider, several cups, and a tray of breads and sweets. Servants replaced the food on the tray regularly, knowing better than to allow their master to discover anything stale or less than perfectly presented on the tray.

  The tart cider stung his throat as he gulped it down. He was about to refill his cup when he noticed a strange shadow moving on the wall in front of him. Spinning, he flung the cup at the fireplace.

  The brass cup clanged against the stone hearth. Mandes easily ducked the awkward throw.

  “How dare you come here unbidden!” Nazramin snarled. “Get out!”

  “Please, Your Highness! Be not hasty!” said the sorcerer, holding up his gloved hands in a placating gesture. “We have common cause against these upstarts, Tol and Elicarno! If you will lend me a few men, Highness, I could chastise them properly!”

  “I’d sooner throw my men off a cliff. Master Tol has taken the engineer under his protection. He’ll be vigilant. Armed assassins won’t get within bowshot of either of them.”

  Nazramin drank greedily from the heavy brass pitcher, cider trickling down his cheeks. Sated at last, he slanted a dangerous glare at Mandes.

  “You are not welcome here, Mist-Maker. Get out.”

  “We are allies,” Mandes insisted.

  “You are my hireling, not my equal!”

  Hefting the brass pitcher in one hand, Nazramin advanced. The flickering firelight was the room’s only illumination, but it plainly showed the violence in the prince’s eyes. Mandes sidled out of reach, beseeching his former patron to listen to him.

  Without warning, Nazramin relaxed. He dropped the pitcher carelessly to the floor. Cider dregs splashed onto the intricately woven wool and silk carpet.

  “The peasant was at your house last night, did you know?” he said. “He came there to kill you.”

  Mandes nodded. He’d been told as much.

  The prince snorted. “He would have slain you tonight, in front of the entire coronation party, had not Elicarno diverted him. You should be grateful to Master Soot-and-Gears. He saved your cowardly carcass.”

  “No one spoke up for me at all,” Mandes muttered.

  Another snort. “You’re hardly well loved, sorcerer.”

  “After all I’ve done for those lords and ladies-the troubles I’ve handled for them-and they just sat there, gawking, while I was threatened! Even the emperor failed me.”

  Nazramin’s eyes narrowed. “He
seems to have recovered much of his will. What happened to your spells?”

  Mandes explained that Ackal IV had been spending an unusual amount of time in the Tower of High Sorcery, which had helped to restore some of his equilibrium. “His recovery is only temporary, Highness,” the sorcerer added.

  From a squat vase in a corner of the room, Nazramin drew a hefty cloth bag. He tossed it at Mandes’s feet, and the contents clinked loudly.

  “The balance of your fee.”

  “Highness, your brother still lives and reigns. My task is not yet done.”

  “You’ve done enough. Amaltar won’t last long on the throne. Besides”-the prince smiled in a most unpleasant fashion-“something tells me you won’t be in Daltigoth much longer.”

  Mandes, fingering the bag of money he’d picked up, froze. “What do you mean?” he stammered.

  “You’re finished here, sorcerer. Surely you realized it yourself, tonight. You’ve gone too far. None of your wealthy ‘friends’ is willing to be your patron. Master Tol thirsts for your blood, and the engineer will do his best to shame you on the Field of Corij. When that happens-”

  Mandes flinched hard, and Nazramin’s smile widened.

  “When that happens,” he repeated, “your only recourse will be exile, unless you wish to face the tender mercies of the farmer or any of the several hundred other worthies in the city who hate you for what you’ve done to them.”

  The cold words were like a judgment. Mandes shivered, but he was not finished yet. Drawing a deep breath, he straightened his back and declared, “That tinker will never beat me!”

  “Care to wager on it? That villa of yours is quite handsome.

  Want to hazard your house against my gold that Elicarno humiliates you?”

  Mandes’s hard-won composure failed him, and his gaze dropped. Nazramin laughed harshly.

  “No? Well, no matter. When you’re gone, I’ll claim it anyway.”

  Mandes looked utterly bewildered. His empire was crumbling, and he couldn’t begin to understand why. The prince, his most powerful client, was exploring the food on the tray with a casual hand, ignoring him completely.

  “I know many compromising things about this city’s nobles,” Mandes whispered desperately. “I will speak. I will tell all.”

  Nazramin made a disgusted sound. “Open your mouth, and I’ll see your tongue cut out before you finish your first word.”

  This was no idle threat. Nazramin would likely do the deed himself-and enjoy it.

  The sorcerer pulled the shreds of his dignity around himself and backed away. His dark blue robe blended with the shadows by the wall.

  “Don’t be too smug, cruel prince. I can see your future,” Mandes said. His form began to fade away. “You will gain what you most desire, only to have it taken from you, bit by bit. Your own blood will strike you down, and the last thing you see in this life will be the eyes of the one you have wronged most…”

  Nazramin uttered a loud, vulgar exclamation, but Mandes was gone, dissolved into the shadows by the hearth.

  The prince tied the belt of his robe with angry, abrupt gestures. The Mist-Maker was obviously flinging false prophecies in hopes of saving his waning prestige. When Nazramin wore the crown of Ackal Ergot, his enemies would know true fear. Already he had a list of those who would not long survive his coronation. The list grew longer with each passing day.

  He returned to his bedchamber. The rasping female snores and tangle of pale limbs in his bed filled him with revulsion. He strode back across the antechamber and flung open the doors to the upstairs hall.

  The walls rang as Nazramin bellowed for his servants. Soon the calm was shattered again by the shrieks and protests of his former guests, driven out into the night with whatever bedclothes they could grab.

  An uneventful day and night passed at Rumbold Villa. A steady stream of Elicarno’s apprentices came and went, bringing their master reports on the progress of the many projects underway at his workshop. The shop was in the New City, between the Old City and the canal district. A three-story barn-like structure housed Elicarno’s workshops on the ground floor, storerooms and studies on the second, home quarters on the third. Forty-two apprentices worked under the engineer; most were young men from provincial cities like Caergoth and Juramona.

  Tol had taken an immediate liking to the brash engineer. A few years younger than Tol, Elicarno bristled with energy and enthusiasm. Like Tol, he was of low birth and had gone far by hard work. In between visits from his assistants, he, Tol, Egrin, and the Dom-shu sisters talked about what they’d seen of the wider world. Elicarno examined Number Six with keen interest, having never seen steel before.

  Although based on common iron, steel required a forging process said to be so laborious only a few such blades were made each year. The dwarves fashioned small quantities of the hard metal mainly for their chiefs or to trade to the Silvanesti.

  The day after the coronation, they were all enjoying dinner in the villa’s elevated garden. Late day sun washed the wooden table and benches in warm light as Elicarno described how his most successful invention, the rapid loading lever for catapults, had helped defeat a warlike clan of dwarves in the northern Harrow Sky Mountains. This brief campaign had occurred as the war with Tarsis raged. A small force of Riders under Lord Regobart’s nephew Heinax, accompanied by a corps of catapulteers trained to use Elicarno’s rapid loader, had caught the recalcitrant dwarf band in a high canyon and wiped them out.

  “With my loading lever, a team can loose ten missiles where one used to go,” Elicarno explained.

  Egrin shook his head. “It’s a sad thing for brave warriors to be slain by soulless machines.”

  “There’s no honor in such a fight,” Kiya agreed. “Not for the victors or the victims.”

  Elicarno’s black brows drew down in a confused frown. “Honor? Bravery? I thought the purpose of warfare was to win, inflicting the most damage on the enemy, while preserving your own men.”

  Egrin was an old-fashioned warrior and proud of it. Kiya had been raised a warrior of her forest tribe, with all the sentiments of the primeval Dom-shu. Tol respected their beliefs, even if he thought them outmoded, and so made a diplomatic remark about progress. Miya, unburdened by considerations of subtlety, loudly proclaimed Elicarno’s point of view the only correct one.

  “Pah!” her sister retorted. “You favor the speaker, not his words!”

  Tol smothered a smile. Whatever Miya’s beliefs about the purpose of war, Kiya’s shot had been a true one. The younger Dom-shu hadn’t left Elicarno’s side all morning. Her fascination with him was all the more striking since, in all the years she’d been with Tol, she’d never shown a particular interest in any man. Tol loved Miya like a big sister and wanted her to be happy. Kiya was plainly put out by the whole situation.

  Talk turned to the coming contest.

  “The test must be a problem both magic and machines can address,” Elicarno mused. “Perhaps shifting a large boulder or erecting a length of wall.”

  “Nothing so constructive, I’d wager,” Egrin remarked, tugging gently at his beard. “If I were you, Master Elicarno, I’d form my plans around destruction. His Majesty has always been taken with displays of power.”

  It was true. No matter how subtle his purpose, Ackal IV usually favored overwhelming force to achieve his ends.

  Taking their advice to heart, Elicarno decided not to bring a broad assembly of materials to the contest. Instead, he would have his men disassemble one of the larger catapults, outfitted with his famous rapid loading lever, and carry that to the duel, along with two wagonloads of missiles.

  The character of Elicarno’s opponent was the next topic of conversation. Mandes was a wily and powerful sorcerer, but his repertory was limited, Tol advised the engineer. His specialties were mist and weather spells and potions. No matter what form the contest took, Mandes would be determined to win at any cost.

  “Will he try to harm Elicarno?” Miya asked. She appeared
ready to take on the sorcerer herself should that happen.

  “He won’t try that in front of the emperor,” Tol said, “but expect a low blow. Win or lose, Mandes will strike back, whether a day later or forty.”

  His sober warning cast a pall over the dinner. Elicarno withdrew to his room in the villa and spent the evening chalking calculations on a piece of slate. Miya stood watch over him at a distance, keeping interruptions to a minimum. As for Tol, he spent the night patrolling the grounds.

  The sun set and night spread over the capital. A crispness flavored the air. Autumn was coming on cool wings, bringing with it the promise of many changes.

  Despite the cool night, the day of the contest dawned sultry, with gray clouds clotting the morning sky. A heavy rain drenched the Field of Corij just before sunrise. Comprising several acres of flat meadow north of the city, the field served as a practice and training ground for the imperial army, and the heavy sod was much cut up by the hooves of thousands of horses.

  True to his promise, Elicarno arrived one mark past dawn with his forty-two apprentices. They brought with them six wagonloads of material-timbers, metal brackets, and a league of cordage neatly wound in heavy hanks.

  Under the master engineer’s watchful eye, the apprentices fell to assembling a great catapult of the type Elicarno referred to as a “two-armed ballista.” This proved to be a much larger version of the hand-held device he’d used to shatter Mandes’s crystal star. Two throwing arms installed sideways were set on a cross-shaped frame. This in turn was placed on a pedestal of stout timbers, so finely balanced a single man could pivot the heavy ballista in any direction.

  Although the catapult was of unusually high quality-the wood seasoned and smoothly planed, and with iron brackets on every joint-the true curiosity lay in Elicarno’s loading device. Attached to the rear of the ballista were a pair of tall levers that pivoted on the frame itself. Hooks on the levers grabbed the thick bowstring, drawing it back when long ropes attached to the levers were pulled by a gang of apprentices. When the trigger was tripped, the bowstring sprang forward, propelling the missile (in this case an oversized arrow). Springs pulled the levers forward, and a wooden cam caused the hooks on them to lift and snap over the bowstring again. With a loading team hauling smartly on the lever ropes, the machine could be swiftly cocked again and a fresh dart laid in the launching trough. Operated by a strong and smart company, the ballista could throw a storm of missiles in a very short time.