Master of Whitestorm (39 page)

Shackles had been set into rings in the paving. Pinned spreadeagled in black iron, the Master of Whitestorm struggled with his muscles knotted and his head thrown violently back. The fetters of the demons held him fast; against their powers he never had a chance. Above his staring, wild eyes towered a post set with a hook like a butcher’s stall. There a figure of delicate proportions sagged naked and half unconscious from a rope twist. Auburn hair clung damply around her face, and shoulders the color of new pearl were striped and running with blood.

Ithariel gasped in shock. She had expected to look upon horrors, but no nightmare apprehension could prepare for the vision of herself being flogged until her flesh split by a perfect replication of Haldeth.

The lash fell with a crack. The demon-formed Ithariel whimpered. Drops of shed blood pattered down on the man who flinched and thrashed and quivered against his chains. For the Master of Whitestorm, pain and death were no match for the crueler agony of helplessness. His protest pealed out like a war cry, but the fury in the sound could not last. Inevitably, his strength would spend itself in useless struggle. Logic could not distinguish the creation of demons from truth, for the chains were genuine iron, and the woman under torture was real. The heart must eventually burst before what was no dream, but the uttermost ruin of hope.

The whip fell again, wielded by an arm toughened by the drive of a blacksmith’s hammer. On the ridgetop, the boy made a sound and slapped his palms over his mouth. Pale as death, the old man knelt to intercede as his grandson crumpled over in dry heaves. He supported the traumatized boy and glanced in appeal to Ithariel.

“Demons,” she gasped. “They deform the nature of Aerith to shape Korendir’s worst fear.” Wrenched with sickness herself, the enchantress averted her face and strove to rally her nerve. She must not pity her double, but only the plight of the man. “This has to be stopped.”

“How?” The grandfather squinted through a drift of blown smoke. “Where are the demons?”

“All about you.” Ithariel raked back sweaty hair. “Look for ripples, something like heat waves in dry air.”

The old man turned a shade whiter. He had noticed such disturbances, patches that seemed to shimmer across his vision, but he had presumed the distortion to be a natural effect born of smoke. “How can you fight a creature which lacks form?”

Ithariel shook her head. “Impossible, as Morien proved at Alathir.” She qualified as much to focus her own thoughts. “The demons are beings from Alhaerie. While the stuff of our Aerith is malleable to their will, our forms are likewise their chaos. Rocks and stones and clouds lie beyond their understanding.” She gestured at the recreated fortress walls. “Our emotions alone lend these meaning.”

She flinched as the next scream harrowed the air. “I’m going to attempt a counter illusion. Better you don’t try to watch. But if you must, understand this. Not all you see will be fashioned in malice by demons. Some of the work will be mine. Wait here. I’ll return with the man. If not, when darkness falls you must flee for your lives and sail. Stop for nothing, even the rescue of your loved ones, for all of this isle will be doomed.”

The grandfather grimaced as if he thought to protest; instead, he bent to check the boy who huddled unmoving under his hands. “We should help. Or do you have a way to cut chains and drag a grown man up sheer battlements?”

A ripple shivered the air; the grandfather’s query received no answer at all. Except for himself and the boy, the hillside stood empty, as if the enchantress had been less solid than the lies wrought of earth by the demons.

The grandfather strove to find stability amid chaos. “She’s fey, Oleg,” he said to the boy at his feet. “How is a man to understand the ways of enchanters? We must be strong and bide here until she returns with her lord.”

The smoke thickened. Clouds lowered, and the wind blew, strong gusts that buffeted the heights. The towers of the fortress gained a sickly violet halo. Though the whip still struck with a fiendish and unbroken rhythm, and the woman’s cries cut the air, Korendir lay slack in his chains. His eyes stayed anguished and open, while blood more cherished than his own striped like tears down his cheeks. No sign appeared of the enchantress who embarked upon his salvation.

Minutes passed without change. Then a ripple passed over his form. Momentarily, Korendir seemed bathed by a lightless tongue of flame. He recoiled as if stabbed, and his chains clanged hard against their fastenings.

Listening until his ears ached over the ceaseless moan of wind, the old man heard. Despite Ithariel’s warnings, he dared a look down from the walls.

He saw no dramatic rescue. Korendir’s head sagged to one side, expressionless against blood-slicked cobbles. Shimmers that may have been demons whirled round his form on all sides. Only the fists dragged hard against his fetters revealed any life remained in him.

The smoke coiled thicker. Something seemed to flutter, half-veiled, on the wind. Then a billow like refraction passed over the object, and the grandfather’s sight became obscured behind curtains of mist.

The lash fell and the screams continued, and the fisherman understood the White Circle enchantress had failed.

He sat in despair on cold stone. “She must be in trouble, Oleg. If not, she’d be back by now.”

A brown wren appeared out of nowhere. Perhaps blown off course by the winds, it arrowed through the fog, wings stretched and closing in beat after beat of frantic flight. The leaf of a thorn tree fluttered in its beak. The weather harried it, bent its feathers at odd angles, and thrashed its tiny bones and frail sinews. It struggled, pumped harder, and clawed to reach a landing on the ridge.

The gusts were too strong for it.

Moved by a sailor’s sympathy for storm-driven birds, the grandfather arose and stripped off his smock. As the wind howled and the little wren pitched sideways, he cast his garment like a net and scooped the struggling body in its folds.

An unexpected and totally unnatural weight dragged at his wrists. He staggered, caught his foot, and pitched to his knees on sharp rock. The smock and its contents tore from his grasp and unfurled; and the wren tumbled out in a tangle of light and blurred feathers. Its legs kicked once. It tossed aside the twig, and the next instant its form expanded with a lash of spell-heated air into the body of an enchantress, now naked; beside her lay no bit of greenery, but a blood-splashed, unconscious Korendir.

The enchantress panted as if her lungs might burst. She could not speak her thanks. Unmindful of the open-mouthed boy, she struggled to rise, and managed, with the help of the old man. She leaned on him, shaking, while he bundled his fishy-smelling garment over her shoulders.

Speech remained beyond her, but her eyes beseeched haste. The grandfather spoke sharply to Oleg, who scrambled up in dazed amazement and drew Ithariel’s arm over his back. The enchantress stumbled forward in his childishly awkward embrace, while the elder attended to the man. He lifted Korendir as he had slung countless barrels of baitfish, then hurried downslope toward the forest.

Dangerously burdened, the party fled over terrain that could kill if a mistep caused a fall. Turbulence laced the air on all sides, distorting the eyesight, and shedding an odor like burned sawdust. Now mindful that these perturbations masked demons, the old man trembled with fear.

Ithariel began slowly to recover. Mindful of the grandfather’s dread, she whispered hoarsely through her gasps, “To the enemy we appear as falling pebbles. Keep on, for the wardspells I set will not last. Our sole hope of safety is the sea.”

Yet speed proved impossible to maintain. Though strong, the old man had limited stamina. Long before they reached the forest, he had to pause and share his burden with the boy. Of necessity, Ithariel struggled on alone. Taxed to exhaustion by her enchantments, she reeled forward, the smock trailed haphazardly across her shoulders. Her bare soles tore on the stones. She could not stop to wrap them, for the demons pressed close on all sides.

The land at last leveled off. Gray and tired, the old man pressed ahead with bowed shoulders; he no longer spoke to his grandson. Korendir showed no sign of returning life, but hung slack in the grasp of his rescuers as the party labored to take cover in the wood.

The shimmers followed. Inside the treeline, Ithariel paused with a whimper of dismay, then gritted her teeth and shifted magic. The effort cost her sorely. She spent the dregs of her powers to turn her protective illusion from pebbles to the form of blown leaves. Weary, unsteady as drunks, the four wove their way through forest silence. Though the clouds that had hemmed them on the heights gave way in time to bright sunlight, the encouragement came too late. All were too tired to take notice, and Korendir was yet beyond feeling. Concerned that he showed no trace of recovery, Ithariel contemplated a restorative, then put the thought firmly aside. Only if their straits became desperate would she tap the ward in his marriage ring. The powers it contained were likely too small to offer much merit anyway.

They plowed on, through brush that endlessly hampered movement, and roots and hollows that treacherously tripped the feet.

At the charcoal burner’s cabin, they delayed for precious minutes to steal a blanket and poles and make a litter. Korendir never felt the hands that bundled his body inside. Slack as a gutted trout, he remained dead weight as the boy and the old man raised the poles to aching shoulders. Forward they pressed, while the louring energies of demons flanked and wove along their course.

They crossed the lane, and this time the boy passed the corpses with blindly indifferent eyes.

Ithariel moved now on reflex. Her braids had torn loose, and the ends curled damp with sweat. She strove to mind spells that burned and lacerated concentration; at any moment, her control was going to fail. Wards would unravel like shadows before light, and the demons would know her for the enemy.

Better than the rest, the enchantress understood her progress so far had been possible through surprise. Morien had defended Alathir with all the bright force of a White Circle Council Major; she, by herself, had sought only to mask and conceal. The linchpin of her plan had been the false image of the man left behind in chains upon the ridge; to spirit the real flesh away she had needed to wait until Korendir had exhausted himself to stillness. That necessity by itself had sapped her. Now, clothed in the thinnest of spellcraft, she shadowed them all in forms unobtrusively common. That the horrors which had desecrated Alathir so far did not question the semblance of a sparrow, or small stones, or a rustling drift of dry leaves offered scant margin for safety. The demons’ continued pursuit indicated suspicion; once they chose to react, no last-ditch tactic would avail. Ithariel clung to spells that tattered under her mastery; she lagged behind, fighting, while the final wellspring of reserves burned to emptiness within her. The ruse she had spun to protect could hold not a minute longer.

Sea wind whispered through pine trees. Beyond flashed the white foam of breakers. A dozen steps completed in racking weariness, and the spongy blanket of shed needles gave way to dune grass and sand. The shimmery blots that were demons spun doubtfully, then lingered at the edge of the beach. They sensed the presence of water and natural caution made them hesitate.

There, with respite most cruelly in sight, Ithariel’s failing wardspell sputtered out.

“Run!” Her shout split to hoarseness with fear, but the grandfather and youngest son heard. They struggled to bear up the litter and cross the last yards to the sea. Dry sand mired their strides. Their burden swayed dangerously, and Korendir came near to spilling out.

“Run!” screamed Ithariel a second time. If she could overtake them, there remained the chip of crystal in the marriage ring. But her legs trembled beneath her, each stride more labored than the last.

The roils of churned air arrowed out from the forest’s edge. Demons converged in a rush toward three fleeing humans and what they now perceived as the bronzehaired son of the enchanter they had trapped to torment to his death.

The burned smell intensified upon the breeze. It stung the throats and lungs of Ithariel and her companions, and seared their eyes blurry with tears. The boy and the grandfather sprinted ahead with no thought except to reach the sea. There, outlined against shining water, a boat waited already launched. Steadfast and ready for action, two brothers stood braced at her thwarts.

The demons closed. Barely a yard from the ruffled edge of the surf, a canyon opened in the sand. The old man gallantly jumped with the litter poles still on his shoulders. Behind him, the boy wailed in panic. He threw off his burden and leaped after, and Korendir tumbled outward into air.

Ithariel hurled her body over the brink. While the earth ripped in twain underneath her, she collided with her husband. Entangled in his unconscious limbs, she tumbled in a sickening fall. Sand grains pattered her clothing, then bounced off and vanished into dark. Light and shimmers laced her flesh, and her overtaxed lungs choked on fumes. The demons encompassed her presence, exulting in the recapture of her mercenary. Down from the sunlit world above filtered shouts, growing rapidly fainter.

Enveloped by demons, all but lost, Ithariel thrashed against wind and gravity and caught her husband’s hand. Still on his finger was the marriage ring with its contained glimmer of wards. Ithariel cupped her palm over the tallix setting. She tapped the energy within, borrowed strength, and spun spells.

Magelight ripped out like lightning, wove a net to arrest their plunge. But the virtues of the ward were limited. She might preserve and defend for a short while, but the ring had not been endowed with the power for aggressive attack.

Spent past all effort at guile, Ithariel clung to her husband. Their chance was forfeit, even had she been fresh, for the demons were aware. The moment she tapped magic in their presence, her antagonists recognized her for an enchantress, an enemy like other ones vanquished in fury at Alathir. Helpless, plunging in a rush of dark down a cleft toward the depths of the earth, Ithariel could do nothing but scream in frustration as the entities which had annihilated High Morien closed in a ring of disturbed air.