Master of Whitestorm (44 page)

“Then send for your secretary.” Korendir’s hand flexed on the bleak black hilt of his sword. “The grave must be opened.”

“My good man!” The mayor choked and dropped his pastry. “Would you have us all laid under curse? Brings about ill fortune, it does, to cross a wizard’s ghost. Forget Orame. I’ll send for my personal physician.”

“Tell me the name of your secretary instead,” Korendir demanded.

But the mayor feared spells worse than sword steel; undone by terror, he refused. Rather than waste more time, Korendir turned sharply on his heel and departed. A coin in the servant’s wing bought the name he desired; additional gold in the secretary’s palm revealed that Orame had been buried in a suicide’s grave at the crossroads beyond the town walls.

“If his ghost is going to walk, let it do so without disturbing the rest of the decent,” the servant ended nervously. He glanced aside to see how the mercenary who waited with hairtrigger impatience might handle this flimsy excuse. But to his mortified relief, the mayor’s senior secretary discovered his justifications had been delivered to an empty corridor.

XXIV

BANE OF THE WHITE CIRCLE

SPRING
constellations glittered icy as frost over the suicide’s cairn which marked the crossroads beyond Heddenton’s wall. Deep in its shadow, Korendir of Whitestorm knelt and thrust his hands into the new-turned earth of a grave. His fingers grazed cloth, the coarsely woven sort used to wrap corpses appointed a pauper’s burial. In spite of braced nerves, the Master of Whitestorm shivered. He could see nothing in the pitch dark. The sweat of exertion chilled on his shoulders as he scraped away dirt and loose stones. The mayor’s fears were not founded on superstition; sorcerer’s bones were best left unmolested by mortal hands. But Korendir held to his conviction that Orame had not been dead at the hour of his burial.

The rented gelding chinked its bit and stamped once. It showed no alarm as Korendir raised the bundled body from the earth, drew his knife, and slashed through damp burlap.

A slack hand brushed his wrist. The Master of Whitestorm started, fist clenched on his dagger haft. Then reason caught up with his racing heart. Orame yet survived; his illness had spared him from suffocation, for a corpse three days in the earth should be bloated and beginning to putrefy.

Korendir twisted away the shroud and clasped at the wrist inside. Orame’s bones were as fine as his own, but frightfully chilly to the touch. The wizard wore no rings; if his robe had been richly adorned, the one left on him for burial was mean enough to shame a beggar.

Korendir wished the torment of Mhurgai slavery on the mayor’s thieving secretary. A lonely minute passed as he searched for a pulse in the flesh beneath his touch. Even so basic a life sign took an eternity to manifest. Korendir settled back on his heels with a mildness that deceived; beneath his still demeanor surged a rage of shattering proportions, that Heddenton’s pompous officials had caused Orame to be interred alive.

Stung by fresh fear for his lady, Korendir raised the enchanter clear of the shroud and carried him over to the gelding. The horse sidled as the lax body settled across its saddle. Korendir eased the beast with a word, then mounted up behind. Already the stars had faded; the east showed a lit streak of rose, heralding sunrise and the prospect of rain yet to come. By day the roads would swarm with couriers and merchants bound for Northport. The first drover who stopped behind the cairn to relieve himself would discover the wizard’s plundered grave; Heddenton’s populace would panic. Orame must be locked safe inside his tower before a mob of vigilantes could assemble and seek to overtake him.

Wearily, Korendir gathered the reins. No wizard’s gate might speed him to Dethmark now; a thousand leagues of ocean lay between Heddenton and the Archmaster, two months’ sail on a fair wind. More than one life depended upon his appeal to a council who grudged to grant favors to mortals. Korendir kicked the gelding to a canter, aware that he needed a miracle.

* * *

Sixty days later, with salt-stained boots and a deck hand’s callus, and nerves that had not snapped through brute willpower, Korendir reached the western strands of Dethmark. Lowering sunlight brightened the triple spire of the Archmaster’s tower; behind long shadows, the oarsmen who had delivered him ashore pulled rapidly back to their ship. Wizards were distrusted by crews who plied blue water. Although the ports were alive with rumors of towers whose inhabitants had lapsed into silence, sailors across the kingdoms interpreted the news with threat. Korendir’s apprehension was no less. If White Circle enchanters across two continents were all falling tranced by sorcery, Telvallind Archmaster and his vaunted Council Major must be aware of the fact. Yet not a power among them had acted.

Korendir strode away from the beachhead. There remained only direst conjecture, and worries that harried like the tireless circling of carrion birds.

The possibility existed that no wizard remained to aid his cause at all.

The stronghold at Dethmark was built of rose quartz, and roofed by the gleam of leaded slate. The lawns grew rank between garden plots choked over with weed. Melons rotted in the sun. The outer gatehouse proved untenanted, and spikewort thrust brown, untidy stalks through the flags of the courtyard beyond. The mercenary’s solitary footsteps reverberated back from baked stone, until he seemed to walk amid a legion of marching ghosts. The door to the main tower was closed, but not barred. Defense sigils glowed on panels cross-hatched with ivy, and the gargoyle boss beneath the latch lay twined in runners like a festival maiden.

Korendir’s knock went unanswered. Whatever had subdued the most powerful enchanters on Aerith might only be pursued across portals spell-warded against intrusion. A mortal’s only means to test whether the tower’s defenses still functioned was to challenge by crossing the threshold.

The Master of Whitestorm blotted damp palms on his tunic. Whipped on by purest pain, he drew his knife, slashed away the ivy, then thumbed the latch and pushed with both hands.

The portal swung wide to reveal an anteroom dusty with neglect. A tracery of disturbed motes winnowed inward. The boom as the panel struck the stops echoed and re-echoed, disrupting silence within a well of dank stone. Shadow hung dense past the stoop, oppressive with the miasma of something dead.

Korendir sheathed his knife. He spoke his wife’s name like a talisman and stepped through.

His consciousness spun like a dowel on a lathe. A whine grazed his ears, and his skin encountered a vicious sting of heat. Then his foot met the floor inside. Dizziness and discomfort disappeared.

Korendir recovered a shaking breath. He stared in disbelief at his boots, now wreathed in whorls of stirred dust. Morien’s paternity perhaps had permitted him entrance; but bloodline was all that he had, and Telvallind’s tower held peril for the unenlightened mind.

* * *

In the topmost chamber of the stronghold, Korendir found a pentagram traced in faint light upon boards whose symbols recalled another day; but the Archmaster who had refused his inheritance in cold anger was no longer a threat to be argued with. Telvallind’s remains sprawled inside the spell circle. His flesh had shrivelled to his bones; the eye sockets tipped toward the doorway gaped empty. He had been dead for quite some time. Around his corpse in its midnight and gold-sewn robes lay all of his Council Major, passive as discarded puppets, and filmed with the same fine dust that layered the furnishings.

Still winded from his tour of the living quarters, Korendir braced his shoulders against the lintel. He breathed shallowly as a man with a fever, pent nerves making him shake. Behind countless closed doors, he had found only mice and old parchments. Here, sorcery was still active, and dangerous to the unversed trespasser.

Knowledge, wisdom, and spellcraft had failed to save the enchanters from whatever had stolen their consciousness; the only weapon left was simple human force. Korendir shoved off from the doorway. He strode into a chamber that rang with magic before helplessness and resurgence of past fears could master him and annihilate rational resolve.

The pentagram crackled static as the mercenary neared the perimeter. When he crossed its glimmering border, it dealt him a jolting shock and snapped out. Shadows swelled, heavily spiked with ozone. Uneasiness prickled Korendir’s spine. He advanced another step, felt his heels scrape the sigils carved into ancient floorboards. No magics flashed to restrict him. A beetle scuttled from the cuff of Telvallind’s crumpled sleeve; everything else remained still.

Korendir knelt by the nearest enchanter. The body was still living, but grown grotesquely thin. Ithariel might have wasted in similar fashion. Dread crashed through self-control and raised the specter of horror, of pearl-clear skin webbed over with creases, and hands crabbed like claws by sickness. The nightmare intensified, recurred in a dozen pernicious forms, until Korendir trembled outright. He thwarted the screams that battered to escape him through a mindless frenzy of action. He made eighteen unconscious bodies comfortable, then wrapped up the corpse of the Archmaster. He interred Telvallind’s remains beyond the walls. Past sundown, sweating more than physical labor should warrant, the Master of Whitestorm fetched wine and smoked sausage from the cellars and ensconced himself in the library.

The silence weighed oppressively there, as though the air with its scents of ink and parchments lay impossibly more still than elsewhere. Stoneworked gryphons supported shelves of scrolls and books; most lacked titles, and the few that did not were stamped in gleaming runes. Ringed by mounting inner terrors, Korendir reminded himself that he offered his lady’s only hope. He had pursued obscure knowledge all his life, and since marriage to Ithariel, had spent his winters in study. Only those texts defended by spells lay outside his means to decipher. By morning, surrounded by a jumbled mass of volumes and the sockets of spent candles, he had unravelled what caused the enchanters’ affliction. One of the Six Great Banes had slipped its guardian ward. The White Circle had no written name for the evil, as if to assign it identity might lend power to augment its threat. Common language held less scruple. Herb witches called the thing Valjir, intelligence spawned from the void, and given form by a composite mass of purloined souls. One of them was Ithariel.

Korendir shrank from the implications. His madness knotted back on itself like the dreams of the priest-oracles who used drugs to induce ritual insanity. Arisen from the netherspace between existence, the Valjir’s recent thefts enabled an emergence into the otherworld of Alhaerie. White Circle enchanters were vulnerable to its call because their craft attuned and directed forces counter to Aerith’s reality. Alhaerie afforded the wellspring for their powers, and established within that environment, the Valjir overcame safe-wards and the minds which shaped them with the mundane ease of a hunter trapping sparrows with birdlime.

Korendir pinched out the last candle. He stretched his cramped back and ground his knuckles into stinging eyes. Behind him lay a lifetime of survival against the most dangerous hazards on Aerith; in Alhaerie, that store of experience might make him a powerful wizard, or else a target for destruction. By every account, the untrained mind could not survive without a sorcerer to shield the awareness. Grimly, Korendir arose. He left the library knowing the fact could only be questioned by the attempt.

The Master of Whitestorm assumed position on the central array of sigils where the bones of Telvallind Archmaster had lain unattended in death. Here, a wizard’s gate had once opened to rescue three lives cast adrift into Alhaerie. Prepared with no more than a phrase purloined from a spell book, Korendir prayed he could duplicate the feat. Overtop his tunic he wore the blue-black robe of an adept, filched from Telvallind’s wardrobe. On a chain at his neck hung the tallix signet borrowed from the fallen wizard’s hand. Denied the particulars of his heritage, the swordsman could not guess that ring and stone had once belonged to High Morien.

The sentiment would hardly have comforted.

All the achievements of his life shrank to insignificance before the deed he presently contemplated; the risk he assumed was unconscionable. But Ithariel’s peril eclipsed reason. The jewel held the key to access the otherworld; the clothing, Korendir had added as bait for the Valjir, hoping to lure it with belief that one sorcerer still eluded its control. The only flaw in his masquerade was the lefthand pocket, which he had stripped of its lining to free the blade strapped beneath.

Korendir raised the ring, discarding acknowledgment of the disasters he courted by his actions. A brother he had never met had loosed demons upon Alathir through the opening of an unsanctioned wizard’s gate. Korendir could only hope that the sigils beneath his feet held some residual power of warding. Not for the living peace of Aerith could he accept that Ithariel was lost beyond recovery. She was his lady; guilt for her peril whipped him steadily back toward the deep, mindless silence that had engulfed him those early years after the burning and sack of Shan Rannok. For the wife he had unforgivably failed to safeguard, Korendir spoke the phrase of opening. He raised the Archmaster’s tallix and brought the ring downward through the dust-still air.

A line scribed through shadow where the crystal passed. Then light flared from the edges and a rift became visible between. Korendir released the jewel to its tether of silver chain. He extended his fingers toward the gap, braced for pain.

Nothing met his touch. His hand encountered no sensation at all, but vanished clean to the wrist.

The wizard’s gate was opened through the void. Stripped of protection, woefully short of wisdom, Korendir contemplated the scope of his handiwork. A step would send him across the netherspace into the alter-reality of Alhaerie, perhaps never to return. He could become no more frightened; never again since the moment he had wakened to a spring morning, and his beloved had not.

Nothing else in Aerith held meaning for him.

Korendir framed the memory of Ithariel in his mind. For the first time since she had been stolen into thrall by the Valjir, he set fully free the emotions that harrowed his being. If by the bonds of marriage his spirit would follow hers across the barrier of death, perhaps the same attraction would guide him to the horror that imprisoned her. The thinnest smile of irony curved his lips as he made the irrevocable step through the gateway. He would find his lady, either way.