Dangerous Games (25 page)

Painfully, his clumsy hands and feet almost useless, Sunbright rolled to his knees to rise.

A huge foot almost kicked his head off.

The barbarian heard the scuff of a bare sole, saw the flicker of motion by firelight, and ducked just in time. Still, the kick creased his shaved temple and stunned him. Flopping on his rump, he heard the tribe howl with glee. His crippled hands and feet cramped, but he had to rise or be stomped to death. Gasping, he rolled to one side, felt the earth shake as Wulgreth crash-landed with both feet where Sunbright had just lain. Mutants cheered.

Hobbling, Sunbright crouched on numb feet barely in time to meet Wulgreth’s charge.

Screaming, the giant ran at the barbarian with both fists locked. Sunbright limped aside, flung up both hands to deflect the blow. Uselessly. Fists like rocks hammered his shoulder, almost broke his collarbone. He was knocked aside like a doll to bite dust again.

This wasn’t a fair fight, he reflected bitterly, it was a massacre, a savage beating such as Karsus’s city guards might inflict. And it was Karsus’s magical mistake that had turned Wulgreth into this hideous form. The arms of the Netherese Empire were long, grasping, callous, and cruel.

Sunbright spit dust, rolled to all fours. Some feeling had returned to his hands and feet. If Wulgreth could fight dirty….

The giant had been crowing, arms in the air, calling his own name as a battle cry, exulting in wild applause and shrieks. Now he marched across the dirty arena and reached for the barbarian’s horsetail to yank him upright.

Stooping, Sunbright clutched a double handful of dirt and ash, threw them into Wulgreth’s dead stone eyes.

To no avail. The giant barely blinked, snagged Sunbright’s hair and dragged him close. His scalp burning, Sunbright crowded the giant, bunched his fingers and rammed them into the brute’s throat. The jab would have killed a normal man, crushed his windpipe, made him strangle.

Ignoring the blow, Wulgreth waded in, smashed a forearm across Sunbright’s throat, and snatched the back of his neck. Choking, the barbarian struggled, beat Wulgreth’s head, kicked his knees and groin and instep. Nothing worked. The undead man couldn’t feel pain. Meanwhile, Sunbright would either be strangled or have his neck snapped.

Yet Wulgreth didn’t want to kill his plaything. Instead, he shifted his grip, locked Sunbright’s wrist, sucked wind, and shoved.

Sunbright’s arm snapped at the elbow. A double bone in his forearm jutted through the skin. Blood spurted. But the magically infused Wulgreth jammed a horny thumb against the wound and sealed it, though the bone still bent crookedly. Sunbright was oblivious to the details. Electric pain coursed through his body and blotted out everything else.

Enjoying the torment of his victim and the cheering of the tribe, Wulgreth stamped on Sunbright’s foot to pin it, then wrenched the broken arm high overhead. Grinding bones broke anew, then Sunbright’s ankle popped.

Released, the barbarian collapsed to jeers from the crowd. Wulgreth’s stony hand crashed down on Sunbright’s chest and broke ribs. More blows pulped other bones.

Shock and pain flooded Sunbright’s mind like a tide, and he blacked out.

He awoke to a buzzing, like bees. A whole hive, it seemed, crawled over him with red-hot stingers.

Then a stick pried at his eyelids. He fought it, but couldn’t move his head, which was tied in place. When his eyelid was finally dragged up, he saw a child holding a smoldering stick. Other children swarmed around him. He was staked on the ground, spread-eagled, near the fire. Urged on by adults, the children picked up coals and burning brands to tentatively scorch Sunbright’s flesh. It was a lesson in torture. Sunbright smelled his own flesh burning, gargled a cry at this unending nightmare. At least the pain couldn’t get much worse, he thought vaguely.

Then a boy dropped a red coal on his eyelid, and he learned about pain.

Hours later, Sunbright, or what was left of him, was dumped in a hut alongside Knucklebones.

The thief started from a near trance. So far she’d been ignored, left as a plaything—or supper—for Wulgreth. With her shredded foot, bitten deep by the raptor, she could hardly stand, let alone flee, even if she weren’t surrounded by enemies. She’d merely hunkered with her arms around her knees, head down, trying to ignore Sunbright’s torture, wishing she were elsewhere. Once, when a scream had ripped out, she’d uncurled and bolted from the hut. But a man and woman guarded her, and she’d been clubbed flat, kicked savagely, and booted back into the hut. Since then she’d blanked out the world.

Now it was back, in the form of a bleeding and burned Sunbright. The savages had given up, unable to keep him conscious. Now they sat around the fire and crowed of their triumphs. They laughed in their cruel recitations, and promises of more to come.

Toughened by a hard and harsh life, Knucklebones could stand almost anything, but this wreck of her companion was beyond endurance. His bones were broken, hair singed off, body seared in half a hundred places.

Yet he was alive, croaking, “Knuck … ?”

“Yes, yes!,” she sobbed, “I’m here!” She cried real tears for the first time in her life. “But there’s nothing I can do!”

“Water … please …”

Weeping, Knucklebones crawled to the hut door. On her knees, she begged her guards for water, using hand gestures. They both laughed, and when she came closer, kicked her in the face. Tearfully she told Sunbright of her failure.

“S’aright … Not to blame … Harmed you?” His words were mushy, for even his tongue had been burned, and he stared at the roof of the hut as if blind. Probably he was.

“No, no, they haven’t, but…”

She couldn’t believe he, tortured and abused, thought of her safety. Oh, she thought, how cruel the gods were to send her such a man and then snatch him away! Or how cruel were people.

These last few hours had wrought wonderful and awful changes in Knucklebones’s breast. Of course she’d had friends in the sewers of the city: Ox and Lothar and Mother, other unlucky souls like herself. And she’d had lovers too. Too many to count when your life was measured in days. Men who’d enjoyed her body but never touched her heart, and then Sunbright had literally dropped upon her like something from a dream. A tall, bronzed man, hard and tough as an oak tree, tough as she was, yet with a gentle and kind spirit even the city couldn’t crush. He’d followed her everywhere, looked after her, cared about her, and she hadn’t shown him a jot of gratitude or sympathy, for the iron that protected her heart was the hardest part, and she was afraid to open up lest it crack and leave her helpless, snuffed out by the cruelty of the city.

But in the hours she’d hunkered here, she’d prayed to every god she knew, but mostly Mystryl, Lady of Mysteries, Mother of All Magic. Mystryl was the goddess of lovers, and the poor, and those in dire strife. Never had Knucklebones been in worse trouble, nor cared so much to see someone else helped, and been herself so helpless.

And worse than useless, for she had no comfort for him.

She touched his singed scalp, recoiled at the clammy feel of his skin, hot and cold and wet and dry at the same time. He raged with fever while shivering with chills. For lack of anything better, she peeled off her leather vest and laid it gently on his scorched breast. “I don’t… What can—”

“Try to …” his voice rasped, “… find knife or stick. Kill… yourself… before start on you …”

“Yes, I will,” she whimpered. “I promise. I will, Sunbright.”

“Oh!”

She flinched in sympathy with his new pain, but he was shaking his head in wonder.

“Wha—What is it?”

“Never … said my name … before …”

Then he sighed and blacked out again.

It was true. She’d only called him by nicknames. All this time, even “Country Mouse,” which she’d never even thought of before meeting him. In her own way, she’d been cruel, for he was as lonely as she was, homesick and far from his home.

He lay still, barely breathing, just a trace of husky whistling.

“I promise you, Sunbright.”

She would kill herself, and take Wulgreth with her, though she doubted it was possible. He was a zombie king, a wizard lich, undead, and how to kill one of them? But she’d try. She’d keep herself alive to try. And remain alive while Sunbright lived.

Which wouldn’t be long, she sobbed. It was clear Sunbright was dying.

“Now, watch!” yelled Karsus. “This is one of the cleverest uses of all!”

The mages, Candlemas among them, stood on the balcony of a mansion overlooking a bridge that spanned a canal. A lesser mage waited with a bucket. Karsus waved a hand, and the mage walked onto the bridge, then chanted as she upended the pail. Candlemas didn’t see anything happen. The bridge was slate flagstones on a stone foundation, and the bucket’s “water” actually super heavy magic, but it left no wetness. The magic just seemed to disappear. Still, the mage crept gingerly along the bridge’s railing until she reached solid ground. Candlemas scratched his bald head. He didn’t see any effect.

Yet Karsus almost danced with glee, rubbing his hands, giggling. Other mages waited patiently. Karsus gave a call, and down the path from the opposite side a stable boy led a white horse. Karsus waved him on and the boy stopped at the edge, pointed the horse to the bridge, cooing and patting it, then slapped its rump.

The horse tripped across the bridge, got about halfway, and plunged down through the center. It vanished for only a second, then reappeared underneath whinnying in fright, then crashed, half in and half out of the canal. It thrashed and kicked its back legs, shrilling. One of its front legs was bent at an acute angle.

Karsus howled with delight, “See? It’s one thing to create a phantom bridge. It’s another to pour heavy magic on a real bridge that dissolves the stone and instantly takes its place! You could use it anywhere: a staircase, a street. You could fashion half an acre of a phantom plaza, say, and stampede people into it and drop them right off the enclave! And once you’d made up the magic, you could hurl it in catapults so it dropped out of the sky and mimicked whatever it hit. You’d have invisible potholes and death traps all over the enemy city! Or put it in the privy. Wouldn’t that make a rare joke, a phantom toilet seat! Oh, think what you could do!”

Candlemas thought of a few applications, and wanted to apply some to Karsus. That horse had a broken leg. And although he knew horse leeches could do much with magic, repairing a horse’s complicated, delicate leg was out of the question. That animal would be destroyed, its throat cut for no reason other than for Karsus’s egomaniacal demonstration.

Yet one of Karsus’s crawlers offered a more insidious way of killing with heavy magic. Insinuate heavy magic into someone’s ear, then call a charm to flip the “magic dagger” at a right angle, tearing a great channel through the brain. Candlemas couldn’t help wonder if someone hadn’t tested that one already.

There were more deadly tricks in days to follow. One apprentice drew praise when he constructed a block of heavy magic a foot high and six feet long. For the demonstration, the block was colored a very pale yellow, like a box full of sunshine. The block was infused with Aksa’s disintegrate spell. The eager youngster picked up a wooden stick and swiped it at the block. At the end of the swipe, he’d lost a foot of wood. This trap, he explained, could be laid across any narrow street or sidewalk. With the yellow dye removed, it would be almost invisible, impossible to see at night by gasglobe. And just lying there would do its work.

“I know,” Karsus crowed. “I know how it would work! Only a genius of my stature could discern this. If someone walks into it, his foot would be instantly disintegrated! He’d lose a limb, fall down, and bleed to death. Even someone with working wards might miss it because it’s so low to the ground. Oh, and think! You could make two layers, with a dimensional door behind them. If his foot is snipped off and he falls, he’d tumble in and vanish entirely! Oh, very clever, Krikor, very clever! You may sit at my right hand at dinner tonight!”

The youngster beamed. Candlemas rubbed his bald head.

More mayhem was created: incendiary clouds like slow billowing fireballs, masses of bright lights that pulsated fast and slow, able to hypnotize, or blind, or induce seizures. There was a transportable Proctiv’s rock-mud transmution spell that could dissolve a whole hillside. “Mice mines”: Karsus’s green mice, released with tiny packets of heavy magic to infiltrate houses and cause random explosions. Even pointed slivers of heavy magic that could be inserted into fruits and vegetables. Overnight they would convert sugars into natural poisons like arsenic, nightshade, or belladonna.

It was too much for Candlemas. Once, when Karsus was striding down a corridor babbling about the success of the latest experiment, he blurted out, “By Jergal’s Quill, Karsus, what is all this destruction for?”

The wild-haired mage stopped capering and stared with golden eyes.

“Who are you?” he asked blankly. “Oh, Candlemas! Yes, you were my special friend. Well, since it’s you, I’ll tell. But you must promise to keep it a secret.”

The pudgy mage wanted to swear, but refrained. Fifteen mages trailed Karsus with an equal number within earshot. Beaming, the archwizard forgot about the oath of secrecy and stage-whispered, “This is something the city council has been toying with. You know them, always busy.” Catering to Karsus’s whims, Candlemas knew, but he leaned forward as if enthralled. “Anyway, and don’t tell a soul, they’re thinking of starting a war.”

“War?”

“Shhh!” Karsus waggled a finger. “Don’t be a blabbermouth! Yes. I asked them if we might use these war machines on the borders, but we’re at peace with everyone, drat it, and our neighbors would take offense if we attacked. Soooo, we’re going to stage a war between cities!

“Ioulaum has agreed to partake, and one other, as yet to be named. It shall be a battle between the first and greatest. The first city, that’s Ioulaum, since he was the first to float one, and Karsus, which is the greatest city because it’s named after me!”

Despite Karsus’s shushing, the mages in the corridor were buzzing, and others leaned out of doors and windows for the news. Candlemas rubbed his scalp and found it sweaty.