Michael A. Stackpole (32 page)

All of these things I saw, but they dwindled to insignificance in comparison with the central feature of the domed room. A massive crystal ball, polished to perfection, hung suspended by invisible forces barely a foot above floor level. Directly beneath it I saw a hole in the floor that I had no doubt extended all the way through to the open air below. Surrounding it a hollow golden disc rested on eight gold pillars four feet tall. The pillars clutched the floor with dragon’s talons, and arcane symbols twisted through a bizarre dance on the disc itself.

In the crystal globe I saw shifting scenes of Chaos. Rainbow cyclones whirled across the landscape, leaving disruption and altered terrain in their wake. Somewhere a black lake bubbled and burned, yet I saw huge stone ships sailing through it with impunity. Strange creatures, the like of which I had never heard of, stalked through jungles, and somewhere else two tribes of Chademons battled in the middle of a raging lightning storm.

Beyond it, staring into it, Fialchar leaned on the golden disc. I could see the hunch of his shoulders and top of his head outside the sphere’s horizon. The sleeves of his robe hid his hands, but I took the twitching cloth to be a sign of his concentration on the sphere’s visions. That was why he paid me no attention, and probably why I had gotten that far.

1 swallowed my heart back down from my throat and clasped my hands behind my back. In my deepest voice I broke the silence. “I am Lachlan, son of Cardew. 1 am come on a mission for his Imperial Majesty, Thetys V. He has charged me with the duty of . .”

Fialchar looked up, his black-emptiness stare skewering my brain, la a second I felt fear, then incredible agony, as if I had been torn into a million million pieces. Hellfire cauterized each of the shreds, then something else jammed us back together again. I felt myself falling, then landed on a strangely soft, squishy stone.

I found myself in a small room completely constructed out of the milky stone i had seen in the Grand Hallway. 1 pushed down with my right hand and found the stone gave beneath the pressure. It resisted me somewhat, but flowed away from my fingers as if it were some sort of molten pillow. It did not quite feel like living flesh, except in that it was warm, but came close enough to make me uncomfortable.

All but instantly I realized I had been trapped inside one of the blocks in the walls of the Grand Hallway. I shifted my shoulders to ease the residual aches of having been banished to this prison. “If that is how much it hurts to be teleported, no wonder Fialchar was so rude at the ball.”

I laughed at my own joke and took a little pleasure in hearing it echoed mutely by the prison walls. I looked toward the front of the little box and saw a clear view of the Grand Hallway. Scrambling to my feet, and steadying myself against the shifting of the floor, I walked forward. 1 reached out with my right hand and, even though I saw nothing, I could feel the same sort of resistance that I got with the walls or floor.

Having seen, from the outside, the inability of various people to break through the wall, I drew my sword. I pressed the edge against the transparent panel and tried to shave away a thin layer. The blade skittered off the surface with no damage to it or the wall.

Shifting the weapon around, I tried to stab it into the clear panel. It met resistance, and the edge appeared not to cut the invisible barrier. I felt the wall pushing back against me and realized that 1 would be unable to maintain my pressure on it for very long. Dropping to one knee, I tilted the sword down and jammed the pommel into the floor. Trapping the blade between the floor and the wall, I let my prison push my sword against the clear wall.

Uncertain what to expect, but rather pleased with my effort, I tucked myself back in the corner of my prison. If the pressure proved too much, I knew it was possible my sword would shatter and spray the small room with metal fragments. Drawing myself up into a ball, 1 kept my right hand across the top of my knees and hunkered down so my armor protected my face.

Looking out between my thumb and forefinger, I could see no real change in my sword’s position, but I did notice that the Grand Hallway seemed to be lightening. As sunlight poured down its length, 1 saw shadows shift faster than they should have. It occurred to me that Fialchar’s prisons probably operated as slow zones, preserving the lives of his captives.

This did nothing to make me feel better, especially when I remembered some of the torture scenes immortalized in the castle’s building blocks. Still, Fialchar had imprisoned me when he could have killed me, which meant he would be dealing with me eventually. Absent any means of escape, all I could do was wait.

Wait, as Roarke was waiting.
The image of my friend being consumed by a fireball slammed into me. Part of me wondered if his death had been any easier than that of Nagrendra or Xoayya. I couldn’t imagine what it must have felt like to be pulverized as the top of the tower contracted so violently. With any luck, or if the gods had any mercy, they all died so quickly they had no idea what was happening.

It struck me that could have been the case with Nagrendra and Roarke, but for Xoayya the situation had to be different Had a vision of her future come to her a second or two before the stones ground her bones and flesh into paste? Or had she seen nothing and realized, as the red-gold tendrils snaked their way around the tower, that she had no future at all?

I snorted angrily, remembering all the times she told me that whatever happened to her was fate, fate for which I was not responsible. With a laugh and a comment she had absolved me of any complicity in her death, but that was easy to do. She was dead, and 1 survived. if not for me, she never would have been in a position to be killed the way she was. It might have been her destiny to die in Chaos, but I was left certain that she didn’t have to die.

I wondered how things would have been different if Geoff had gone to Herakopolis, or if even Dalt had made the trip. Would they have let Xoayya come along? Would they have allowed her to be in the tower? How many of my slain companions would still be alive had someone else been making decisions?

As my thoughts took me further down into a dark spiral, piling up errors and compounding guilt, I realized 1 was finding I had failed in a test that had no right answers. As much as I could imagine my brothers doing different things, some of them with better results, I also had to acknowledge that other errors could have had more dire consequences. My frustration was not with what 1 had done or failed to do, but with my inability to control every little factor in the world. 1 wanted everything to be perfect and go my way, but 1 also knew that was impossible.

I needed to escape that black cloud of self-recrimination, so I forced myself to think about something else. As I had long ago learned to do, I cleared my mind and visualized a chessboard. 1 arranged the pieces in their proper places. 1 remembered Geoff’s demand that I at least look at the board when 1 played him, and that brought a smile to my face. I slowly started to work my way through that last game with my brother, correcting his mistakes to make it last longer.

1 found concentrating difficult and thought it might have been some enchantment placed on the prisons to prevent magickers from spelling their way out again. I closed my eyes, forced myself to focus, and even recited the rhyme that had saved me from Fialchar at the ball, but it had no effect. Then I realized that what was giving me trouble was that the last game I had with Nob kept bleeding over into the game with Geoff.

As I let those two games meld together 1 found myself returning to a board configuration I knew I had never played to, but I had seen before. I shook my head as I remembered where I had seen it. I
n Lord Disaster’s library! It’s a wonder you have gotten this far, Locke.

That game, I decided, was boring. The Imperial player, who, according to the position of the movestone had the next move, would win. All he had to do was advance his Empress two squares forward and he had Fialchar in checkmate. 1 felt fairly certain the game that had gotten the board to that point had been spectacular, but now the game only awaited the coup de grace to finish it. Were I playing Chaos, I would have resigned.

A sudden blast of heat from the front of my prison brought my head up and opened my eyes. A blue glow suffused with red lightning oozed over the transparent panel. The energy in it crackled, and I felt a tingle run through me. The square panel began to dissolve as if being nibbled away at all edges. Abruptly it shrank to a circle, a red-gold sheen coated it, then compressed it into a pinpoint sphere which vanished in a burst of white light.

I blinked my eyes in the aftermath of the flash and heard my sword clatter to the ground. I saw someone standing there in half profile, then rubbed at my eyes. “Roarke? You’re dead!”

The Chaos Rider shook his head, keeping the left side of his face hidden in shadow. “I feel dead, but I am not—not by half. Let’s get you out of there.”

Something struck me as wrong about him. “Your eye patch. Where is it?”

He turned to face me. “I no longer need it.”

His right eye, as always, was an arctic blue tinged with C
haosfire.
His left, which had remained hidden beneath the eye patch for as long as I had known him, was a golden orb the like of which I had only seen in
Bharasfiadi
faces. “Your eye? What happened?” I slid from my prison and stood beside him. “How did you free me?”

“There are a number of things for which 1 must apologize, Locke, and deceiving you is one of them.” He rested both his hands on my shoulders. “I didn’t want to, but 1 had no choice, for reasons that will become apparent. As for what happened to my eye, well, I was with your father on his last expedition to Chaos. 1 have carried this eye with me since that time.”

“You were with my father? What happened to him?”

“The story is too long for the telling now, Locke, and we have other things to do.” He pointed down toward the end of the hallway. “Let us get the staff and get out of here. Think of it as what your father would have done.”

I shivered, unable to decide if I could trust him or not. A wave of anger surged through me, but in its wake I realized he didn’t have to come to Castel Payne, nor did he have to free me from my prison. T
he mission comes first, which he’s certainly kept in mind.
Just
as my father would.

I picked up my sword and followed him toward Fialchar’s library. “Roarke, at least tell me how my father died.”

“I can’t, Locke, because I don’t know.” 1 saw him shudder. “I never saw your father go down. All I remember is that we faced hundreds of B
harashadi,
and I cast spell after spell after spell to defeat them. It was the last great crusade against Kothvir, and I cast spells until 1 was exhausted.”

We marched into Lord Disaster’s sanctum. “At battle’s end I found myself pitted against a mortally wounded Kothvir. Your father had killed him, but the
bharashadi
didn’t know that yet. 1 shoved a dagger into him, and he tore my left eye out.” Roarke raised his left hand to touch the scars on his cheek. “Kothvir collapsed on top of me, and I was ready to die happily, knowing he was finally dead.”

“But it amused me to deny you that surcease!” Ralchar stood between us and the crystal globe. His hands hung at his side, holding the Staff of Emeterio across the front of his thighs and parallel to the floor.

Roarke stopped and regarded the bone-and-metal-faced sorcerer without fear. “Our host here found it funny to pluck for me Kothvir’s eye and stuff it into my head.”

“It has been a long time, Zephaniah. 1 always wondered what had become of you since you never deigned to visit my realm again.”

“I take great comfort in knowing you were concerned for me.” Roarke folded his arms across his chest. “Giving me Kothvir’s eye meant my brethren in the City of Sorcerers were not very happy about me wielding magick.”

“It pains me to think you were inconvenienced.”

“lust as it pained you to know my possessing Kothvir’s eye on the other side of the Ward Walls would mean your enemy would never trouble you again.”

The ancient sorcerer nodded slowly. “1 did find that an interesting side benefit to my act of charity.”

“1 know of another act of charity that should interest you, then.” Roarke glanced at me. “Locke has come for the Staff of Emeterio. Give it to him.”

Lord Disaster slowly shook his head. “Even a sorcerer of your paltry skills could understand why I will not give this staff over to him. Mind you, I believe Cardew’s son had begun to state his request in a much more mannerly way than you. Have the years soured you so?”

“I will not play games with you, Fialchar, because this charade is beneath the both of us. You know I know of the
Bharashadi
Necroleum. You should also know the
Bharashadi
are preparing to resurrect their dead.”

Lord Disaster barked out his maggot laughter. “Vrasha has long sought after a way to fulfill the
Bharashadi
bargain with their dark god, Kinruquel. As he has not the ability to pierce the Ward Walls, and as those of my Black Churchers it amuses me to grant him are incompetent, he will forever remain frustrated.”

“Perhaps, then, it would
amuse
you to learn that while you were dancing with the ladies of the Empire, this Vrasha stole the Fistfire Sceptre from beneath your feet!” Roarke mimicked Fialchar’s pronunciation perfectly. “While you threatened the Emperor and laughed to yourself here, he has brought the sceptre to Chaos.”