Naked Empire (19 page)

There were rooms or even entire sections that were shielded and could not be entered, but often they could be circumvented. Even if a hall was shielded at both ends, so as to prevent anyone from getting to the rooms in that hall, you could still usually get around to the other end of the hall and make your way to whatever lay beyond. That was deliberate; while the rooms might have held dangerous items of magic that had to be kept contained, there needed to be ways to get to them, and get beyond to other rooms that might, from time to time, also have to be restricted. Most of the Keep was like that—a three-dimensional maze with almost endless possible routes.

For the unwary, it could also be a killing field of traps. There were places layered with warning barriers and other devices that would keep any innocent person away. Beyond those protective layers, the shields gave no warning before they killed. Trespassers would not know there were shields embedded beyond, and that they were stepping into a trap. Such shields were designed that way in order to kill invaders who penetrated that deep; the lack of warning was deliberate.

Zedd supposed it was possible for someone to bypass all the shields and work their way into the depths of the place in order to ring those particular bells, but for the life of him, he couldn’t trace all the steps necessary. But whoever it was, no matter how lucky they were, they would soon get themselves stuck in the labyrinth and then, if they weren’t killed by a shield, he could deal with them.

Zedd gazed out past towers, ramparts, bridges, and open stairs to rooms projecting from soaring walls, out on the city of Aydindril far below, now all dark and dead-looking. How had someone gotten past the stone bridge up to the Keep?

A Sister of the Dark, maybe. Maybe one of them had figured out how to use Subtractive Magic to take his shield down. But even if one had, the shields in the Keep were different. Most of them had been placed by the wizards in ancient times, wizards with both sides of the gift. A Sister of the Dark would not be able to breach such shields—they had been designed to withstand enemy wizards of that time. They were far more powerful than any mere Sister of the Dark.

And where was Adie? She should have been back. He wished now that he had gone and found her. She needed to know that there was someone in the Keep. Unless she already knew. Unless they had her.

Zedd turned and raced down the rampart. At the projecting bastion, he seized the railing to the side to halt his forward rush and spin himself around the corner. He raced down the dark steps as if he were running down a hill.

With his gift, he could sense that there was no one in the vicinity. Since there was no one near, that meant that he had managed to get behind them. He had them trapped.

At the bottom of the steps he threw open the door and flew into the hallway beyond.

He crashed into a man standing there, waiting.

Zedd’s momentum knocked the big man from his feet. They fell in a tangle, sliding together along the polished green and yellow marble floor, both grappling for control.

Zedd could not have been more surprised. His gifted sense told him the man was not there. His gifted sense was obviously wrong. The disorientation of encountering a man when he had sensed that the hall was empty was more jarring than the headlong tumble.

Even as he was rolling, Zedd was casting webs to tangle the man in a snare of magic. The man, in turn, lunged to tangle Zedd in meaty arms.

In desperation, despite the close range, Zedd pulled enough heat from the surrounding air to unleash a thunderous blast of lightning and cast it directly into the man. The blinding flash burned a lacing line through the stone block wall beyond him.

Only too late did Zedd realize that the discharge of deadly power had lanced through the man without effect. The hall filled with shards of stone whistling about, ricocheting from walls and ceiling, skipping along the floor.

The man landed on Zedd, driving the wind from him. Desperately yelling for help, the man wrestled Zedd on the slippery floor. Zedd concocted a weak and fumbling defense, to give the man a false sense of confidence, until he was able to suddenly land a knee sharply at the point of his attacker’s sternum. The man cried out in surprise as much as in pain as he flipped backward off Zedd, gasping to get his wind back.

Having sucked so much heat from the air had left it as frigid as a winter night. Clouds of their breath filled the cold air as both men panted with the effort of the struggle. The man again cried out for help, hoping to bring comrades to his aid.

Zedd would assume that anyone would fear to attack a wizard by muscle alone. This man, though, had no need to fear magic. Even if he hadn’t known that before, certainly the evidence was now all too clear. Yet, despite the man being at least twice the size of his opponent, less than a third his age, and having immunity from the conjuring being thrown at him, Zedd thought that he fought rather…squeamishly.

However timid the man was, he was determined. He scrambled to attack again. If he broke Zedd’s neck, it wouldn’t matter that he did so timidly.

As the man regained his feet and lunged, Zedd drew back his arms, elbows cocked, fingers spread, and cast more of the lightning, but this time he knew better than to waste his effort trying to cut down a man not touched by magic. Instead, Zedd sought to rake the floor with the conjured bolts of power. It slammed into the stone with unrestrained violence, ripping and splintering whole sections, throwing sharp jagged shards streaking through the air.

A fist-sized block of stone hurtling at tremendous speed crashed into the man’s shoulder. Above the boom of thunderous power, Zedd heard bones snap. The impact spun the man around and knocked him back against the wall. Since Zedd now knew that this intruder could not directly be harmed by magic, he instead filled the hall with a deafening storm of magic designed not to assail the man directly but to tear the place apart into a cloud of deadly flying fragments.

The man, as he recoiled from striking the wall, again threw himself at Zedd. He was met by a shower of deadly shards whistling through the air toward him. Blood splattered across the wall beyond as the man was ripped to shreds. In a blink, he was killed and dropped heavily to the floor.

From beyond the smoke and dust filling the hall, two more men suddenly flew at Zedd. His gifted sense told him that, like the first man, these men were not there, either.

Zedd threw yet more lightning to rip up the floor and unleash flying stone at the men, but they were already through the flares of power, diving onto him. He crashed to his back, the men atop him. They seized his arms.

Zedd struggled frantically to let loose a blast to bring down the ceiling. He began to whirl the air above the men to tear the hall to pieces, and them with it.

A beefy hand with a filthy white rag clamped down over Zedd’s face. He gasped, only to inhale a powerful smell that made his throat want to clench shut, but too late.

With the cloth and the big hand covering his whole face, Zedd couldn’t see. The world spun sickeningly.

Soft, silent blackness pressed in around him as he fought to resist it, until he lost consciousness.

Zedd woke, his head spinning, his stomach heaving with rippling waves of nausea. He didn’t think that in his entire life he had ever felt so sick. He hadn’t known it was possible to feel so intense an urge to vomit, without actually throwing up. He couldn’t lift his head. If he could just die right then, it would be a welcome release from such dizzying agony.

He started to put his hands over the light hurting his eyes, but found his wrists were tied behind his back.

“I think he’s waking,” a man said in a subservient voice.

Despite his nausea, Zedd instinctively tried to use his gift to sense how many people were around him. For some reason, his gift that ordinarily flowed as easily as thought, as simply as using his eyes to see, his ears to hear, felt thick and slow, as if mired in molasses. He reasoned that it was probably the result of whatever vile substance it was they had soaked the rag in to cause him to pass out when held over his face. Still, he managed to sense that there was only one person around him.

Powerful hands seized his robes and yanked him to his feet. Zedd gave himself permission to vomit. Against all expectation, it didn’t happen. The dark night swam before his blurred vision. He could make out trees against the sky, stars, and the looming black shape of the Keep.

Suddenly, a tongue of flame ignited in midair. Zedd blinked at the unexpected brightness. The small flame, wavering with a lazy motion, floated above the upturned palm of a woman with wiry gray hair. Zedd saw other people in the shadows; his gifted sense was wrong. Like the man who had attacked him, these, too, had to be people not affected by magic.

The woman standing before him peered at him intently. Her expression twisted with satisfied loathing.

“Well, well, well,” she said with patronizing delight. “The great wizard himself awakes.”

Zedd said nothing. It seemed to amuse her. Her fearsome scowl and humped nose, lit from the side by the flame she held above her palm, floated closer.

“You are ours, now,” she hissed.

Zedd, having waited patiently to gather his resolve, abruptly initiated the required mental twist to the gift all the way down to his soul in order to simultaneously call down lightning, focus air to slice this woman in two, and gather every stone and pebble from all around to crush her under an avalanche of rock. He expected the night to light with such power as he unlocked and sent forth.

Nothing happened.

Not waiting to waste the time to analyze what could be the difficulty, he was forced to abandon attempts at satisfying his emotional preferences, and to ignite wizard’s fire itself to consume her.

Nothing happened.

Not only did nothing happen, but it felt as if the attempt itself were but a pebble falling endlessly into a vast, dark well. The expectation withered in the face of what he found within himself: a kind of dreadful emptiness.

Zedd felt as if he couldn’t light a tongue of flame to match hers if his life depended on it. He was somehow cut off from forming his ability into much of anything useful other than to use it for a bit of dim awareness. Probably a lingering result of the foul-smelling substance they had pressed over his face to make him lose consciousness.

Since Zedd couldn’t muster any power, he did the only thing he could: he spit in her face.

With lightning speed, she backhanded him, knocking him from the arms of the men holding him. Unable to use his hands to break his fall, he hit the ground unexpectedly hard. He lay in the dirt for a time, his ears ringing in the aftereffect of the hit he’d taken, waiting for someone to lean over and kill him.

Instead, they hauled him to his feet again. One of the men seized his hair and pulled his head up, forcing him to look into the woman’s face. The scowl he saw there looked like it spent a great deal of time on her face.

She spit in his face.

Zedd smiled. “So, here we have a spoiled child playing the game of tit for tat.”

Zedd grunted with the sudden shock of a wallop of pain that twisted inside of his abdomen. Had the men not been holding him under his arms he would have doubled over and fallen to the ground. He wasn’t quite sure how she had done it—probably with a fist of air delivered with all the power of her gift behind it. She had left the gathered air loosely formed, rather than focusing it to a sharp edge, or it would have torn him in two. As it was, he knew it would leave his middle black and blue.

It was a long and desperate wait before he was able to at last draw a breath.

The men who his gift said weren’t there pulled him straight.

“I’m disappointed to discover I’m in the hands of a sorceress who can be no more inventive than that,” Zedd mocked.

That brought a smile to her scowl. “Don’t you worry, Wizard Zorander, His Excellency very much wants your scrawny hide. He will be playing a game of tit for tat that I believe you will find quite inventive. I have learned that when it comes to inventive cruelty, His Excellency is peerless. I’m sure he will not disappoint you.”

“Then what are we standing around for? I can’t wait to have a word with His Excellency.”

As the men held his head back for her, she ran a fingernail down the side of his face and across his throat, not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to hint at her own restrained cruelty. She leaned in again. One eyebrow lifted in a way that ran a chill up Zedd’s spine.

“I imagine you have grand ideas about such a visit, about what you think you will do or say.” She reached out and hooked a finger around something at his neck. When she gave it a firm tug, he realized that he was wearing a collar of some sort. By the way it dug into the flesh at the back of his neck, it had to be metal.

“Guess what this is,” she said. “Just guess.”

Zedd sighed. “You really are a tedious woman. But I imagine you’ve heard that ofttimes before.”

She ignored his gibe, eager to be the messenger of bad news. Her scowling smile widened. “It’s a Rada’Han.”

Zedd’s sense of alarm rose, but he kept any trace of it from his face.

“Really.” He paused for an extended, bored yawn. “Well, I’d not expect a woman of your limited intellect to think up something clever.”

She slammed a knee into his groin. Zedd doubled over in pain, unable to contain his groan. He hadn’t been expecting something so crude.

The men pulled him up straight, not allowing him pause to recover. Being pulled up straight brought a gasp of agony. His teeth were clenched, his eyes were watering, and his knees wanted to buckle, but the men held him upright.

Her smile was getting annoying. “You see, Wizard Zorander? Being clever isn’t necessary at all.”

Zedd saw her point but didn’t say so.

He was already preparing to unlock the cursed collar from his neck. He’d been “captured” before—by the Prelate herself—and had had a Rada’Han put around his neck, like some boy born with the gift who needed training. The Sisters of the Light put such a collar around those boys so that the gift wouldn’t harm them before they could learn to control their gift. Richard had been captured and put in such a Rada’Han right after his gift came to life in him.

The collar was also used to control the young wizard wearing it, to give pain, when the Sisters thought it necessary. Zedd understood the Prelate’s reasons for wanting Richard’s help, since they knew he had been born with both sides of the gift, and, too, they worried about the dark forces that pursued him, but he could never forgive her for putting Richard in a collar. A wizard needed to be trained by a wizard, not some misguided gaggle like the Sisters of the Light.

The Prelate, though, had harbored no delusion of actually training Richard to be a wizard. She had collared him in order to smoke out the traitors among her flock: the Sisters of the Dark.

Unlike Richard, though, Zedd knew how to get such a disgusting contrivance off his neck. In fact, he had done it before, when the Prelate had thought to collar him and thus force his cooperation.

Zedd used a thread of power to probe at the lock, not overtly, so as this woman might notice it, but just enough to find the twist in the spell where he would be able to focus his ability to snap the conjured lock.

When the time was right, when he had his feet solidly under him, when his head stopped spinning long enough, he would break the collar’s hold. In that same instant, before she knew what had happened, he would release wizard’s fire and incinerate this woman.

She hooked a finger under the collar again and gave it another tug.

“The thing is, my dear wizard, I would expect that a man of your renowned talent might know how to get such a device off.”

“Really? I’m renowned?” Zedd flashed her a grin. “That’s very gratifying.”

Her utter contempt brought her a smile of pure disdain. With her finger through the collar she pulled him close to her twisted expression. She ignored his words and went on.

“Since His Excellency would be extremely displeased should you get the collar off, I’ve taken measures to insure that such a thing would not happen. I used Subtractive Magic to weld it on.”

Now, that was a problem.

She nodded to the men. Zedd glanced to them at each side and noticed for the first time that their eyes were wet. It shocked him to realize they were weeping.

Weeping or not, they followed her orders, unceremoniously lifting him and heaving him in the back of a wagon as if he were firewood.

Zedd landed beside someone else.

“Glad to see you be alive, old man,” a soft voice rasped.

It was Adie. The side of her face was swollen and bleeding. It looked like they’d clubbed her nearly to death. Her wrists were tied behind her back as well. He saw, too, tears on her cheeks.

It broke his heart to see her hurt. “Adie, what did they do to you?”

She smiled. “Not as much as they intend to, I fear.”

In the dim light of a lantern, Zedd could see that she, too, wore one of the awful collars.

“Your stew was excellent,” he said.

Adie groaned. “Please, old man, do not mention food to me right now.”

Zedd cautiously turned his head and saw more men waiting in the darkness off to the side. They had been behind him, so he hadn’t noticed them before. His gift had not told him they were there.

“I think we’re in a great deal of trouble,” he whispered to no one in particular.

“Really?” Adie rasped. “What be your first clue?”

Zedd knew she was only trying to make him smile, but he could not even manage a small one.

“I be sorry, Zedd.”

He nodded, as best he could lying on his side with his wrists bound behind his back. “I thought I was so clever, laying every kind of trap I could think of. Unfortunately, such traps didn’t work for those who are not affected by magic.”

“You could not know of such a thing,” Adie said in a comforting tone.

His mood sank into bitter regret. “I should have taken it into account after we encountered that one down at the Confessors’ Palace, in the spring. I should have realized the danger.” He stared off into the darkness. “I served our cause no better than a fool.”

“But where did all of them come from?” She looked on the verge of losing herself to panic. “I have never encountered a single such person in my entire life, and now there be a whole gang of them standing there.”

Zedd hated to see Adie so distraught. Adie only knew there were a number of them by the telltale sounds they made. At least he could see the men with his eyes, if not his gift.

The men stood around, heads hanging, waiting to be commanded. They didn’t look pleased by what was happening. They all looked young, in their twenties. Some were crying. It seemed strange to see such big men weeping. Zedd almost regretted killing one of them. Almost.

“You three,” the woman growled to more of the men waiting in the shadows as she lifted another lantern from one of them and sent the flame she held into it, “get in there and start the search.”

Adie’s completely white eyes turned to Zedd, her expression grave. “Sister of the Dark,” she whispered.

And now they had the Keep.