The demon was approaching Suthra's tower from the northwest, where Agathom was said to be waging war against the crumbling Karthasian Empire. Around its neck was a collar of black and gold, the colors of Agathom's tent. When it reached the tower, it spoke only its name—Waithrae—in a soft, seductive whisper which mingled with the sonorous rustlings of its wings. It circled the tower, dipping up and down, a sickly sweet odor spreading in its wake. The two thorts in the shack whinnied with terror, and the flailing of their pounding hoofs against the doors was like the distant sound of war drums calling legions to battle. But the pounding ceased as the demon's scent settled over the shack, and only the thunder claps were left to echo the animals' fearful rappings. Still Waithrae circled, tightening the circumference of its flight, until Akyeetha emerged from a trap door on the tower's roof. She held Wyden's Fang in her hand and she was draped in a gown and cape of black silk. At the sight of her, the demon shuddered and widened its path around the tower.
"Who?" whispered Waithrae, whose voice was heard as if the listener were in a dream.
"Akyeetha," the woman answered, shouting defiantly. The accent was strange to this part of the world. Her tongue was uncertain, dragging the name out as if it were a novelty to her. "Why are you here?"
"I answer a call."
"I have not summoned you."
"Yet you have, by your power. Across the world, your awakening was felt by my master. You have returned from the dead. He has sent me to give you back to the dead."
"I am from the dead, but I have never died. Your sending was an error. Who is your master?"
The soft rustling of unseen creatures scurrying in the brush signified the demon's laughter.
"Why should I name him, when you have not named yours?"
Waithrae then circled closer, and its scent thickened into a yellow fog. With every pass the demon came nearer, until it was within a spear cast. Akyeetha's hair and robe waved in the wind.
"Why do you not sleep, as every living mortal must when my scent hangs in the air? Are you a demon, or are you rotting flesh?"
"Neither, as I have told you."
"Your words are empty. Master or servant, it does not matter. I shall give you the peace of your ancestors." Waithrae climbed into the air, fighting the alien environment to gain altitude. Then it wheeled about and dove, its limbs stretching to snatch Akyeetha.
"I have only just given my ancestors peace. It is too soon for me to join them."
The sword came up in her hands. The trap door behind her opened a crack. Waithrae did not take notice and closed in on her. The demon's limbs reached for her as Waithrae came upon the tower. Tralane sprang from the trap door and took the sword from Akyeetha, as she withdrew back into the tower.
As each tentacle whipped around him, he drew her sword's edge across the demon's flesh and opened a gaping wound. He never stabbed or sank his sword so deeply into the demon that he could not pull it out. His movements were precise and unhurried, following a prescribed pattern of swordsmanship that created a sphere of flashing edges. When Waithrae had finished his first pass. Tralane turned to meet the demon's return.
The creature stopped and hovered above him, the wind from its wings almost knocking him off balance. The demon came closer as Tralane's sword found the wounds he had already inflicted and completed the work by severing the loosened limbs. Waithrae screamed, in a high-pitched whine that could be heard above the thunderclaps breaking overhead.
Tralane's arms ached from the strain of maintaining a defensive perimeter while not losing the sword in a hasty thrust or having it knocked out of his hands. Then, at last, the poison that was the death of immortals reached the demon's main body. The wings faltered in their rhythm. The demon's hovering became erratic.
The door behind him opened once again, and Tralane's name was called out. He turned and scrambled into the tower, even as Waithrae fell. The trap door slammed shut just as the demon crashed onto the roof. The walls of the tower shook, the beams groaned, and dust was shaken loose from joints. Yet the structure held, supported by Suthra's spells. As the demon gave its last death throes above them, three figures climbed down the tower's winding stairs.
"Tralane the Demon Slayer," Tralane said, breathless but laughing.
"Tralane the Healer," Akyeetha chimed in.
"Suthra is bored with the praises of unseasoned years," Suthra commented, as he led them down to the tower's main gate. "True, my son healed your voice, but it was I who taught him the rudiments of magic many years ago, which he barely remembers now that he has need of them. I would have done the task myself if my death-shadowed touch would not have cursed the words you sought to speak."
"And it was I," Tralane said, mocking and challenging his old teacher good naturedly, "who made the old wizard stay long enough for him kindly to offer his help."
A silent moment followed. Then Tralane spoke again, lightly but with respect, "The weight of years always seeks to make itself felt."
A bolt of lightning struck a nearby hill, flashing through a window and illuminating the three figures with garish, electric light. Suthra's face was lax and expressionless, while Akyeetha's was frozen with a fear she refused to feel. Tralane's face was also a mask, which he knew mirrored Akyeetha's visage.
"Another demon will come," Suthra asserted as they reached the base of the tower. "We will wait here, and Tralane will face it when it comes. But the poison sword cannot work to our advantage; it will be expected. I will help deal with the demon in my own way."
Tralane nodded, agreeing once more to the plan they had fashioned the night before. The three then sat at the entrance to the tower, while the storm broke outside, lashing the building with rain.
"There should not be a storm," Suthra whispered as they waited. "My spells weaken before the onslaught." The statement died in the air.
The living slept briefly, ate, wandered among the ground floor rooms, and explored without interest. The dead merely sat, unmoved by the relentless rain and steady gloom that was broken only by lurid flashes of lightning. Dawn and dusk were mere gradations of gray.
Then the sound of trees snapping at the base brought Suthra to his feet. Akyeetha and Tralane came to his side.
"You know what must be done," Suthra said to his son before opening the door. Tralane nodded, then left, while Suthra and Akyeetha climbed the tower back to its highest chamber. They watched through Waithrae's mangled limbs, dangling in front of the window, as Tralane walked out into the open.
Outside, the wind drove the rain like a many-handed demon hurling daggers. The ground was soft and muddy, the air filled with a senses-dampening curtain. But Tralane could see the form of his foe breaking from the cover of the trees, and he froze the creature in motion in a spear of light issuing from his hand, a spell Mathi had taught him and Suthra had refreshed for him. A demon was revealed; a thousand spindly, triple jointed legs of black bone jutted from its hard-shelled body. Four diaphanous wings protruded from its back, vibrating with insistent fury yet impotent to raise the massive body of the demon into the air. A short, pale-gray tube squeezed through an opening at the front of the shell, displaying a black and gold band around its middle. Two stalks grew from the tube and wavered like serpents studying victims before striking. They watched an illusion, as Suthra cast his own image on Tralane from the tower.
"Stay, demon," Tralane commanded. "You trespass on guarded lands. What is your business?"
The sound of clicking stones fought with the wind for command of the air. In the battle, a series of sounds became distinguishable as words.
"I shall stay, light-wielder, to challenge the guardian of this land and avenge my brother."
"Is that your brother?" Tralane asked, swinging the beam to the top of the tower upon which Waithrae lay transfixed.
The clicking stones momentarily won the battle with the wind, and the earth shook with the clamor.
"Is that all you have come to do?" Tralane asked when the din subsided, swinging the beam back
to the demon. "To see your brother and join him?"
"Kalkilyn has questions."
"Yours or your master's?"
"I would answer such a question from your master."
"I am the one you seek, the one who was dead and now lives."
"My brother sought you, to know who brought you back and why. The woman commands you?"
"No one has brought me back. I was waiting."
"For what?"
Tralane laughed, though he was not amused by the game of deceit being played.
"For what has come. And now I must wait again, for what is yet to be."
"Then you wait for another death."
Kalkilyn charged from the line of trees, trailing branches and shattered wood caught between its pounding appendages. Tralane did not retreat, though the distance between them diminished with alarming rapidity. Instead, the intensity of the spear of light issuing from his hand increased as Suthra added his power to Tralane's. A cloud of steam formed along its length as the rain hissed into vapor at its touch. The spear's point was focused on the demon's shell; where the point rested, a fiery red eye burned in response.
Tralane fell before the demon's charge, and was lost in the trampling of clawed hoofs.
Akyeetha screamed, and Suthra cursed. The wizard raised his arms and cried out with agony as he wove and cast spells of protection to accompany the power of the burning light he was sending to Tralane. He staggered forward to the window, then leaned out and dangled precipitously over the sill. Tralane, amid the flailing limbs and flying earth, gasped with the effort of focusing the burning light as its power coursed through his body.
Akyeetha rushed forward, grabbing the wizard's shoulders. The clouds lowered, booming around them, while arcs of lightning rushed through vents and cracks in the clouds and wracked the demon's back. The wizard looked over his shoulder to Akyeetha. She cried out, but her words were lost in the torrents of rain and sounds. But Suthra understood, as did Tralane when he felt the strength of a third spirit, a third will, scream through his veins and his mind.
The light did not waver, springing from his hand like an indomitable pillar of fire, opening a seam in the demon's shell that ran from the shoulder to the belly. Kalkilyn's furious assault made the earth beneath it splash away, forming a deepening crater. Suthra's tower, its walls sagging from the burden on its roof, swayed.
At last, the spear of light pierced the demon's core. Kalkilyn froze in mid-motion, as if its case had suddenly come to contain something far larger than its fleshy aspect. The wind blew away the sound of clicking stones. In a last desperate fit of motion, the demon clambered out of the crater it had dug and staggered toward Suthra's tower, as if it sensed that the source of its demise lay behind the stone walls.
But before the demon could reach the tower, its legs began to collapse. Kalkilyn stumbled, then slowly settled to the ground as the strength drained from its legs. The earth beneath the demon became black with a spreading pool of thick liquid. The cracking of bones was dimly heard as the mass of the demon's torso crushed the legs that had supported it. With a final sigh and rush of clicks, Kalkilyn followed Waithrae into annihilation.
When the battle was over, the storm subsided to a gentle rain and a rumbling of clouds. The crater dug by Kalkilyn's attack was still.
The door to Suthra's tower opened and Akyeetha came out. She walked to the lip of the crater, avoiding Kalkilyn's corpse and blood, and waited. She carried two black swords, one in each hand, and her face was barred by soaked strands of hair clinging to her skin. The vigor that had filled out her face and body since her arrival in Tralane's world had faded, and she resembled her former emaciated self in the Emperor's dungeons.
Her vigil ended with the stirring of the earth at the bottom of the crater. A hand pushed through the mud, followed by an arm. A leg flailed out, flinging more mud into the air. Finally a figure stood, dripping earth and water. It climbed the crater's walls, slipped, fell back, but regained the ground tenaciously, until it was at Akyeetha's feet. She pulled the figure onto level ground.
"Now, I am also a demon slayer," Suthra said without amusement behind her. Tralane wiped the dirt from his eyes, then looked. He saw Akyeetha and was shocked. Fear hit him, however, only when he first glanced and then fixed on his father's frail, near-skeletal form.
"So much power, for only his demons?" Tralane asked, bringing himself up to his knees.
"He is curious," Suthra said, "and more than ever, he is cautious. Your Sorcerer King will come, but now he is less sure than ever what waits for him. The plan is going well."
"I'm glad. Though, if this is success, I'd hate to see failure."
Akyeetha helped Tralane to stand, and they helped each other walk to the top of a hill overlooking the tower and its grounds. Suthra, following them, touched Tralane's arm.
"It is time to go back," the wizard said. "He is near, and you must finish what has been started."
Tralane let go of Akyeetha. He considered the two swords she still carried slung over her shoulders, but decided against bringing them. His best—his only—weapons he carried already in his mind and in the pouch hanging from his neck.
"Remember, he must not suspect," Suthra said to him in parting.
Tralane spread his arms, displaying the tattered remnants of his clothing, the bruises and welts covering his arms and chest, and the gash along his thigh where a talon had pushed mightily against the protective shields raised by Suthra and strengthened by Akyeetha's life force.
"Would you be threatened by this?" he asked, and smiled as he left for the tower.
Tralane entered the tower and sat on a stool in the antechamber. He listened to the rain. After a while it stopped, and a cold wind blew through the room. The chill air kept him from becoming drowsy, but added an edge to the hunger in his belly. He ate a few fruits with detached, mechanical interest, and allowed his mind to become absorbed by the counting of volumes on Suthra's shelves. Occasionally his thoughts would touch upon his solitude, or on his disarmament. The doom under which he moved would peer at him from lofty, shadowed corners. A stranger's eye was glimpsed in a mirror. At such times, Tralane was careful not to allow his thoughts to elaborate on his fears. He dwelt only in the moment, content to be aimless. His courage was an armed ring around his consciousness, giving him the space for patience while shutting out extraneous emotions.
Then, in the utter silence that had befallen the land around Suthra's tower since the storm's abatement, Tralane heard a dim rushing of wind, like a breeze ruffling the uppermost branches of a dense forest. He tilted his head up slightly, giving up the peacefulness of his contemplation, and closed his eyes. He shivered in the frigid air, and recalled the Emperor's dead world. Another Emperor was coming. Tralane was not afraid.
He went to a window facing the direction from which the two demons had arrived. There were two exits from the forest, marking the parallel paths the demons had taken to arrive at Suthra's tower. As Tralane watched, a third exit appeared, revealing a path that pointed towards the northwest.
The trees yielded their space without a sound, bending to the side as if of their own will, without snapping or breaking. The branches trembled, and leaves were torn from their stems by the invisible hands of the wind. A dark point appeared where the path met the horizon on the crests of distant hills, and rapidly grew into a gray-skinned flying demon. Its flesh was wrinkled over its wide wings and long, bony torso. The eyes on the sides of its triangular head, set above its short beak, strained to see what lay behind instead of what was before it. The demon flew low. Around its neck was a band of black and gold. On its back, wearing the same scarlet, rune-covered robe Tralane had seen him in at the camp, sat Agathom, the Sorcerer King. The wind raised from the speed of his slave-demon hardly ruffled his white hair.
Within moments of his appearance on the horizon, Agathom had cleared the forest. The demon circled the tower, then slowed until it finally settled to the ground by the exit of the road it had beaten. Aga
thom descended and walked towards the tower, oblivious to the demon's cold, severe scrutiny. The Sorcerer King stopped for a moment and stared up at the top of the tower, where Waithrae was blackening against the misty sky. He went further, until he was next to Kalkilyn's corpse, and he surveyed the remains of his servant without any betraying expression. He then continued until he stood not far from the tower's entrance. Tralane kept the door closed, and watched his enemy through a slit window. Agathom spoke, in the quiet, intense manner that had once made Tralane's will crumble, but which now only caused him mild uneasiness.
"Who has dared to challenge the Sorcerer King?" Agathom asked, looking halfway up the tower, as if his eyes could pierce the walls in their search for the identity of his enemy. "Who has slain my demons, those whose might alone has crushed the mortal armies of many kingdoms?"
"I have returned," replied Tralane.
Agathom started slightly and fixed his gaze on the slit through which Tralane was looking. He could not penetrate the spells with which Suthra had enveloped the tower.
"What are you playing at? I felt the presence of the Eye in this world, though I never expected to see it again. But who brings it, and from where?"
"From the dead, though I have never quite died."
"Always death, yet never in the same form. A woman, an old man, and now a stranger hiding in shadow. Are you all one?"
Tralane laughed. "Do you expect me to reveal my power to you?"
"Your power and that of your allies cannot stop me. Surrender."
"I will not surrender."
"Your will is of no concern to me."
"But my presence is. I have destroyed two demons. One more is surely not too much of a burden on my strength."
Agathom spoke softly, in an ominous tone. "Perhaps if I were another demon that would be true. But I am the Demon Master, the Sorcerer King. They were but my slaves. Now you face their master."
The Bard of Sorcery Page 27