Michael A. Stackpole (18 page)

I bolted for it, trying to peer into the darkness at what awaited me there. Realizing I was unarmed, I plucked a jeweled Dwarven shortsword from a scabbard half-buried in treasure. Longer and heavier than my dagger, it was the perfect weapon for the sort of chop and thrust butchery I anticipated beyond the hole.

The stink filling the treasury left no doubt that the hole led to the sewers. I had visions of a dank tunnel with catwalks on either side of a flowing ribbon of water, for that’s how one of my father’s books described the marvels of the capital’s sewer system. Clearly the sewers beneath the palace would handle wastewater and storm-water drainage, but I had never given much thought to what the palace’s being on a hill would portend for the sewers. Nor did I take into account the effect of the winter and the cold weather on the dank tunnels.

The first thing I hit on the other side of the treasury wall was ice. My right leg slipped forward and out in front of me as I flew across the sewer tunnel and collided with the far wall. 1 rebounded, filling the air with shattered icicles that had previously hung from an arch.

1 tried to get my feet under me, but the smooth ice coating the far catwalk made that impossible. With both feet flailing and flying up toward the top of the tunnel, I landed on my back in the sewer channel.

if ice is slick, wet ice is yet slicker, and being on a wet icy slope in the dark with enemies lurking about is not where I had envisioned being to greet the new year. The cold soaked straight through to my bones faster than a tax collector appears after a windfall Having been momentarily stunned by my fall, I could do nothing to stop my slide down the sewer channel. I tightened my grip on the Dwarven sword but abandoned any hope I could use it to stop my descent.

1 brought my heels down, but as they touched the ice, they immediately kicked up a cloud of stinging ice needles that prickled my face before melting. My right heel remained down a half second longer than the other and started me spinning around to the left. My left shoulder crunched into the edge of the stone channel, and i started back in the other direction. Quick application of my right heel to the ice straightened me back out at the cost of another ice-scourge across my face.

I raced along swiftly as the sewers arced through a gentle curve toward the sea. 1 knew I was descending, and fairly rapidly, but 1 could only guess at how close I was to the level of the sewer tunnels running through the rest of the capital. As it was I braced myself a good three heartbeats before I actually splashed into a sluggish river topped with floating chunks of ice.

I went under the water like a rock tossed from a cliff, but I found solid footing as my momentum died and shot to the surface. 1 whipped my head around to clear my eyes and yelped aloud at the aching cold of the water. My shout echoed up and down the main tunnel and shocked those waiting there enough to give me a chance against them.

My slide had actually carried me beyond the two thieves who had fled the treasury when we entered. They stood like twin sentinels on either side of the flow, with a torch in one hand and a knife in the other. Being groin-deep in an ice-river did nothing to make them swift or sure as they struck, while I had enough fear in me to inspire whole Imperial Legions.

I spun to my right, turgid water being churned by my thighs, and chopped through the flank of the man nearest me. The Dwarven blade bit through him as if it actually enjoyed the frigid surroundings. It popped free of his rib cage and dropped him into the water. His torch sizzled out and 1 dove forward.

I did not like going under the water again, but I preferred that to the prospect of getting a poke in the back with a torch. I rolled to my back and came up again as the other thief stalked toward me. He brought the torch around for another swipe at me and, in doing so, let his dagger hand fall to his side.

I blocked the torch with a solid chop, then whipped the blade free and twisted it through a slash at his midsection. He jumped back away from that cut, but being waist-deep in water meant he didn’t get far enough away to avoid my backhanded return slash. The shortsword caught him over the right ear. His leather cap stopped the blade from splitting his scalp, but 1 heard bone crack and saw the man’s eyes roll up in his head. He half grunted a surprised sigh, then sat back down in the water. He sank slowly, bobbing like a piece of ice, then vanished, leaving only bubbles to mark his grave.

Before his left hand went under, 1 freed the torch from it and spun to face further down the tunnel. There, trying to flee from the torch’s weak circle of light, I saw the Chademon. I held the torch high to get a good look at him.

From his dripping mane I knew he had preceded me down the channel, but his long legs had taken him well away from where the palace tunnel played out. Even so, the distance between us could not hide the misery in his expression. He was no more comfortable in the frigid water than 1 was, and i wasn’t hundreds of leagues from my home, lurking in the darkness beneath an enemy stronghold.

1 started after him. “1 can’t let you get away,
Bfiarasfiadi!”

The Chademon glanced fearfully over his shoulder at me, then turned to face me. As he did this I realized I was very much alone. The Chademon seemed to come to the same conclusion because his head came up bravely, his gold eyes narrowed, and his lips peeled back in a feral grin.

1 was in serious trouble.

With the same casual, contemptuous motion 1 saw in my dream, the Chademon flicked a gesture toward me with his free hand. An incendiary red spark leaped from his fingers and shot at me like the coin I had thrown earlier. His spell started small, but it grew quickly, allowing its increasing brilliance to fill the tunnel. The spell became a scarlet triangle of light with a circular hole in the middle sizzling in toward me. I felt its intense heat from the moment he sent it spinning toward me and knew nothing my grandfather had drilled into me was of much help in this situation.

I did the only thing it occurred to me to do. I parried the spell with my shortsword.

The blade shattered as if it were glass. The triangle, slightly diminished, whirled on through my forearm, turning my sleeve into a torch. I screamed as it burned into my right shoulder. Nerveless fingers dropped the sword hilt, but I never heard it splash into the water because black agonies swallowed my consciousness whole.

14

I sputtered and snorted back to consciousness the second after the freezing sewer water forced its way up my nose. Struggling my way back to the surface succeeded in dousing the torch and left me in utter darkness. Echoes of my thrashing about drowned out any noise the Chademon made escaping.

If he
is
escaping.

1 crouched up to my neck in the water in case the Chademon was lurking around to finish me off. Floating chunks of ice bumped into me, and 1 spun this way and that in reaction to them. Because of the darkness, I had no way to detect any sign of the Chademon. 1 kept facing in what I hoped, but had no way of knowing, was the direction in which i had last seen him.

1 steeled myself to submerge if I saw another flash of red. Trying to stay hidden seemed like a good idea, but I realized the cold would finish me off a lot faster than the Chademon would. If he wanted to find me, all he had to do was listen for the chattering of my teeth. Deciding that what I needed to warm me up was another of his spells, 1 rose to my feet and got my torso up and out of the sewage.

My right arm hung limp at my side and felt numb, except where someone had poured molten iron into my marrow. 1 gently probed the wound on my wrist with the fingers of my left hand, but the cold had completely numbed them. Even so, as I moved them over my arm and jacket, I could feel them catch and tug in the holes the spell had burned in the jacket. From the weight at my right elbow and the way the cold cut through my upper arm, I had to assume my garment had been similarly burned through at the shoulder, allowing the soaking sleeve to catch at my elbow.

In the darkness, with sewer water still in my nostrils and my body rapidly losing all feeling, I knew I was not going to last long. It did not matter that I could not see my wounds. I knew that my arm had not fallen completely off, but it might as well have for all the use it seemed to be. I could have easily been bleeding, but I had no way of telling, which scared me. I realized that my survival now depended more upon my ability to find warmth and help than it did on anything I could do alone.

Trying to be as quiet as possible, I waded back through the icy water toward where I heard the stream from the palace flowing in. I climbed out of the channel and onto a narrow walkway. I wanted to rest against it, but that would have meant leaning on my right shoulder, which 1 didn’t think was a good idea. Setting one foot before the other, I worked my way up on the stairway serving as catwalk along the palace tunnel. I quickly learned that every dozen steps I had to duck my head to avoid the arches with which the tunnel had been strengthened at those points. Having icicles rain down upon my shoulders was a torment 1 could do without.

1 focused myself on one thing: walking. It was both surprising and terrifying to realize how difficult such a simple and vital task had become. I had no way to judge how far up I had gone or had yet to go, but I knew I would see the hole in the treasury wall when I reached my goal. The possibility that the Emperor had immediately summoned a sorcerer to seal it again did occur to me, but I couldn’t see Thetys doing that without first sending rescuers out for me. I clung to that hope because if he had magickally repaired the wall, I was dead, and dying struck me as the last thing I wanted to do to greet the new year.

Four arches from the hole I met Kit and the Warlord on their way down. “Is that you, Locke?”

“Y-yes, my lord.”

Drustorn shouted back up the tunnel. “We have him!”

The expression on Kit’s face when I entered the circle of light cast by the torch he carried told me I looked as bad as I felt or worse. It seemed that the light from his torch increased the burning sensation in my arm. The resultant pain caused my fingers to jerk and twitch, which let me know I’d not lost use of them, and let me feel the weight of the ring again.

“Locke! What did you run into down there?”

“The thing that killed your wolves. A Chademon. Here. In Herakopolis.” I reached up with my left hand, batted away icicles, and steadied myself on an arch. “It stole something. It got away. I’m sorry.” My knees buckled.

The Warlord caught me with surprising ease and looped my left arm over his shoulders. “Easy, Locke, easy. No reason to be sorry. We have troops scouring the city, and the squads have magickers with them. We will find him.” He glanced at Kit. “Head back up and get a litter and some bearers.”

“Yes, sir.” Kit winked at me. “Be back in a heartbeat.”

I tried to return the wink, but my eyelids didn’t seem to want to work right. “Thanks.”

Garn Drustorn brought his right arm around my back and got a good grip on the waistband of my pants over by my right hip. “Let me take some of your weight. It’s not too far now.”

“Sorry about the wet.” 1 frowned as we started forward, and the Warlord ducked the arch. “Would have gotten the demon but for the other two thieves. They slowed me down.”

“Not thieves, Locke, but Black Churchers. Three or four are still alive.” He grunted as I slipped, and he held me up. “Surprisingly enough, even one of yours lived.”

1 wanted to ask him what he meant by that remark, but I had no chance before we arrived at the hole and stepped through into the treasury. The Emperor and his brother looked at me with a hint of terror in their eyes, and i knew it came from more than just my appearance. The second 1 focused on the scene and was able to sort out what the flickering shadows gave me in tantalizing glimpses, 1 understood both the Warlord’s comment and their incredulous stares.

The three men I had killed lay sprawled out in most unnatural positions. The first lay on his side with his left hand jammed in his right armpit, but the torchlight washed gold into the wet slickness on his right flank. The second man had fallen backward over a chest. His arms flung wide and his head lolling toward the ground accentuated the dark slice through his throat. The third man had ended up on his belly, with his head cranked back abnormally far as it rested on the hilt of the dagger protruding like a steel beard from his chin.

My mouth went dry.
Oh, Grandfather, look what you did. You trained me to be a swordsman, but I have become a butcher.

As I looked at the dead men, two parts of me started to battle. I had been raised on heroic tales of my father, my uncle, and others who had won fame by defeating the enemies of the Empire. Storytellers were able to paint gorgeous and glowing accounts of epic battles with their poems and songs, yet none of them carried with them the dark side of having killed. I had, with one casual cut, reduced a person from being human to being a lump of meat. The fact that any one of these men might have had friends and lovers and children and family to mourn him meant little in comparison with the transmogrification I had caused to happen.

By the same token I knew that I had only consigned their souls to the Deathbird. There they would be beaten clean by the hammer Purifier until the Sunbird would again bring them to the world. 1 had not so much ended their lives as 1 had started them on a journey that would avail them of a better fate. What I had done was not a tragedy at all, but a continuation of life.

Pain pulsed in from my arm, and 1 realized that both views were weights on the ends of a balance pole. 1 sought the fulcrum upon which the pole rested and saw that the latter view made life worthless, while the former made it so sacred that death could be seen as preferable to action that might prevent the deaths of others. Pacifism for the sake of pacifism in the face of tyranny became the utmost in selfishness and arrogance, which made it just as evil as inciting or committing wanton slaughter.

These men had embarked on a mission that quite probably would bring horror and death to the Empire.

They had attacked me, and 1 had defended myself. Members of the Church of Chaos Encroaching, they willfully plotted against the Empire and had been placed under a ban that would kill them if they were caught. 1 had every moral, legal, and ethical reason to kill them. I still did not like what I had done, and felt pleased that it made me uneasy, but 1 also knew there were times that conflicts could be solved by no other method.

To my right the massive bronze doors to the treasury had been opened, letting light from the marbled hall outside flood the room. The Chamberlain stood guard at the doorway, a dark frown marking his displeasure at the scene he surveyed. Squads of soldiers entered the vault beneath his baleful gaze and escorted the wounded Black Churchers away to the palace dungeons.

Another group of soldiers came in with a litter and set it down next to me. I started to wave them off, but my right arm barely moved at all, and, for the first time, the growing pain made me dizzy. The Warlord eased me down onto the white canvas, and his image split into two.

Then my head hit the canvas and blackness again shrouded my sight.

1 came back to consciousness with the tingle of a spell rippling over me. An old man, with bald pate and craggy wrinkles on his face, slowly straightened up, then smiled at the Emperor. “He’s back with us, Majesty, as 1 said he would be.”

“I did not doubt you, Sava, but merely wondered at how long Locke’s return would take.” Good-natured sarcasm underscored Thetys’s words.

“Haste is not the handmaiden of efficacy, Highness.”

“Nor is sloth, Sava.”

Their verbal sparring gave me a moment or two to collect myself. I was not cold, and, in fact, the roaring blaze in the fireplace to my left was making me feel downright hot. I twisted around and pulled myself up into a sitting position on the daybed, then tried out a smile. It seemed to work, as did the rest of my body, including my gauze-wrapped right arm—a vast improvement over the state of affairs I last remembered.

The Emperor gave me a warm smile. “I was worried when you collapsed in the treasury. Sava says you will recover fully.”

1 looked over at the old man and saw he wore the rank badge of a full Mage, as well as the badges of the Healing and Construction schools of magick. “Thank you for your work.” 1 smiled and flexed the fingers of my right hand. “1 feel no pain.”

“Which does not mean you are healed yet.” Sava clasped his hands together tightly. “You were very lucky, young man.”

“You would not say that had you been the one down in the sewers, Master Sava.”

“Ah, but knowing what I know of magick, Master Lachlan, 1 would.” The Mage lifted the lower-sleeve portion of my jacket from a spindly-legged table. “If there is a luckier man in the capital today, more than one gambler will be bankrupt before tomorrow.”

The sleeve, as 1 had guessed down in the sewers, had been burned away, but I had not been prepared for the scorched brown of the unburned portions. The spell that hit me had been incredibly hot because it had managed to scorch fabric that had been sopping wet. I moved my right arm around gingerly and didn’t even want to think about what it must have looked like before Sava worked his magick.

“It was bad, yes?”

“Suckling pigs on a spit have been less roasted.” A wry grin twisted the old man’s lips. “The spell used on you was quite powerful and should have burned right through you. I am not sufficiently versed in combat magick, and certainly not in any varieties used by the Black Church, but I would guess your foe used an energy focus. What did you see?”

1 sensed from Sava’s use of the term “Black Church” that he had not been told the thing I had been chasing was a Chademon. I decided the Emperor had determined the man did not need to know everything, and I respected Thetys’s wishes on that score. “He gestured at me with his right hand. I saw a spark, then it grew into a red triangle about a foot on each side. It spun through the air at me. I parried it with a shortsword, but the blade fragmented. The spell then hit me. It did feel hot as it came toward me and burned when it hit.”

The Mage nodded slowly. “As I thought. He focused the energy of his magick down into a physical manifestation: the triangle. That was his mistake. The sword, which was cold from the water, and your clothing, soaked in cold water, bled off enough of the heat energy to mute its effects on you. The fact that you were able to parry it suggests it was hastily cast and not as strong as it should have been. You are luckier yet that he was lazy.”

I reached up and touched the gauze wrapped around my shoulder. “What have you done to me? I assume your magick is the reason I feel no more pain “

“True. The burns were serious but treatable. There was blistering, and the burns were all deep enough to weep, but you had very little charred tissue to clean away.” Sava rubbed his jaw. “I used one spell to sterilize and cleanse the wound, then another to numb it. I also did something to speed up healing and lessen the chances of a scar. You will have to change the bandages on the wound and pack it with salve to finish the healing process. In two weeks your arm should be back to normal.”

I gave Sava a big smile. “Again, you have my thanks.”

“And you are most welcome, Master Lachlan. One caution, however.”

“Yes?”

“Do not fall into the trap of thinking yourself invulnerable to magick because you survived this attack. By rights you should not have survived at all.” The old man’s voice turned hard, and I heard bitterness in it. “The person you faced did an inexact casting down there. With a second or two more taken in his spell-work, he could have focused the spell on you, foregoing the triangle. He would have roasted you from the inside out, and the last thing you would ever have done was vomit fire. This is not a horse that threw you or a dueler who drew first blood. He should have killed you outright, and might well do that if you meet again.”