Nor Iron Bars A Cage (35 page)

“Lyon! Lyon!” Tobin’s voice cut through the sound. “Look at me. Lyon.”

I opened eyes I’d obviously shut. Tobin squatted in his familiar pose, just outside the limit of the circle. “What’s wrong? Is it the wraith?”

I’d have nodded, but I thought that moving might make my head fall off. “Yes! It’s shouting.”

“Attacking you?”

I turned my attention inward for a moment. Closed my eyes, looked for… for Xan. On that grey plane in my head, Meldov slumped on the ground, his head burrowed in his arms, shaking like a man taking a fit. Beside him the wraith stood, head thrown back in a wholly inhuman posture, its mouth open in that scream. The sound was worse here, so loud it rang in my bones. But Xan was still on his feet, a short knife in his hand pointed at the wraith. He glanced at me and said,
“Hurry. I can hold him yet a while. Go back, now!”

I opened my streaming eyes, and wiped them on my arm. Tobin’s teeth were bared in a grimace but he kept his gaze fixed on me and didn’t move. His face relaxed slightly as I shook my head. “Not physically attacking.”

“You can do this. Keep going. I want the chance to be with you without an audience of three dead men.”

If this failed, the three would be more than just an audience. But I tried to smile. And he had distracted me a little from the scream knifing through me. I said, “Keep talking to me. Tell me things. Tell me about your horses. Or the ocean. Something.” I fumbled to pick up the knife. My fingers shook, and I was clumsy and slow, but I set it again at my arm. “Talk a lot.”

It was far harder to do this with the wraith shrieking in my head. My hand trembled, and the knife slipped. I couldn’t find my quiet place, couldn’t make the pain and blood feel good. It just hurt. Like the first time. But I kept cutting and kept listening to Tobin, and when the wraith gave up wailing and began threatening, describing tortures, maiming and burning and rape, I tried to fill my head with Tobin saying, “He was the most willful colt I ever had. Dumped me in the mud five times before he ever let me ride the full length of the arena.”

I touched something hard under my skin, and dropped the knife again. Tobin said, “Lyon? Doing all right?”

“Keep talking.” I pried under the thing in there, cutting, reckless now. It was in me. Something in me, a piece of the wraith, of the presence I thought I’d scoured and douched from my body over and over and over, day after day. IT WAS STILL IN ME! I cut deep, uncaring that the blood welled faster, flowing to the floor.

Tobin said, “Lyon, be careful. Don’t kill yourself, after all this. Lyon, please.”

I didn’t care. I could feel it coming loose. One more slice, my hand shaking, ears near to bleeding, wrist on fire. Then it came free. A small, small flap of skin for so much pain. And as it hit the floor, it flipped to show, embedded in its underside, a thin sliver of metal, fire-warped out of shape, but still recognizably, once upon a time, a circle with a feathered plume.

I sat and stared at it. So many years. So many nightmares and it had been festering inside me after all. I stared at it.

A loud scream pulled me out of that contemplation. Not from the wraith, but outside the circle. I looked up slowly, to see Tobin on his feet, yelling at me. “Lyon! Damn you, son of a weasel, listen to me! Lyon!”

“What?” I said slowly. The dark metal, the red blood, the white dead skin, drew my eye back down.

“Lyon! Keep your eyes on me, you mother-fecking bastard.”

I glanced back up. Oh, yes. Tobin. His face was flushed and red, his eyes snapping with heat.

“Good. Look away again and I’ll beat you. Now listen. You have to pick up that thing and put it in the balance point.”

I cleared my throat, twice. “I don’t want to touch it.” I swayed tiredly, started to look at down it again, but Tobin’s voice whipped at me.

“Look
up!
”

I did. He was paler now, but he gave me a nod. “Secondmage says pick it up with the tip of the knife. Bring it to the boundary. Cut the way through. Drop it out. Do it now.”

“I’m tired,” I said. My head felt thick. There were voices in there, but I’d stopped listening. Nothing much mattered, but Tobin’s voice was worth hearing. I kept my eyes on him.

“You’re bleeding,” Tobin said. “A lot. You need to do this now. You can rest afterward.”

“Promise?” I tried to smile.

“You can do nothing but sleep and eat for a week. I’ll cook for you myself.”

He looked so worried. I said, “Is that a threat?”

He snorted. “There’s my Lyon. Get that thing and get up. Now.”

It was hard but I picked up the knife, and then used it to scoop that obscene lump of flesh and metal off the stone. Two shaky steps, and I stood at the boundary of the circle. I set the thing on the floor there, and almost touched the tip of the blade to the energy. At the last minute, I paused and wiped it as clean as I could on my thigh first. Blood mixes oddly with sorcery sometimes.

Then I knelt. Tobin said, “Lyon? Keep going.”

“I am.” I cut into the barrier with the knife, not a dramatic slice at face level, but a little mousehole, right at the floor. And then with the tip of the knife, I pushed the wraith’s token to it. The thickness of the admagnium cable stopped it for a moment, the braided metal shining balefully at me, keeping the wraith inside me.
Not this time. Never again.
I lifted that scrap with the knife, flipped it through and into the balance point.

It burned me, as the focus passed through. My whole body felt dipped in fire, stretched, pulled apart. But Tobin said, “Yes!” And when I could turn my head to look over my shoulder, the wraith stood behind me, translucent and circle-trapped, with Meldov’s ghost stretched out on the floor beside it.

I fell over, turning around so fast.
Not behind me, never behind me!
The wraith smiled at me, as if it knew what I was thinking. In my head, I heard Xan say,
-Well done.

From off to my left, Secondmage said, “Now the necklace. Quickly.”

I slid the chain of the flamestone from around my neck, and put it behind me, pushing it toward the barrier. It slid and stopped. I could feel the circle energy buzzing against my fingers. The edge of the cable marked the space. I forced my fingers along it, seeking. The hole had to be somewhere. The wraith took a step toward me and stretched out its hand. “Still a good-looking boy. We could do so much together.”

I shivered, pushing at the necklace behind my back, unable to take my eyes off that
thing.
It was Meldov, and yet not. Features like his, stretched and elongated, thin hands, long legs, burning eyes. A smile like a trapspider’s lair.

“Swiftly! Get it through.” Secondmage repeated. “I can’t hold the binding much longer.”

Tobin said fiercely, “Hurry, Lyon!”

My wrist throbbed. I laid my useless hand in my lap, and I could feel the sticky wetness of blood soaking my legs. Behind me the barrier buzzed and hummed. The opening should have been right there, right
there
, but I couldn’t feel it. The wraith’s gaze burned into me, making dark promises.

-Let me.
Xan’s voice was cool wind off a glacier, dry as a stone cliff

-What?

-If you can’t turn and look, then give me leave to guide you to the opening. Though I see only with your eyes, I can feel the energy of it, better than you do, I think.

-Guide me how?
I was NOT turning around.

-As we did on that cliff. Give me trust and listen to me.

Could I? Did I trust that he actually wanted his time in the living world to be over and done with? Would he guide my hand away from the opening instead of to it? If the working collapsed now, I might be free of Meldov and the wraith, and Xan could have me forever.

I should just turn and look. Just for a moment. That’s all it would take.

The wraith took another step closer. I couldn’t look away.
-All right.

I tried to relax enough to feel his whisper in my bones. That sense of rightness and wrongness as I moved.
-Left. More left. Back a bit. There. Lift it and push now.

My hand slid, fumbled, and then found the opening. The necklace slipped through. For a moment the big gem caught on the lip, and then I gave it a firm push, and it slid out on the stone point.

This pain was familiar, welcome, the flesh-rending rip and pull as Xan left me. For just a moment I saw him, faded and thin, his lined face drawn with effort. He gave me a nod, and stepped between me and the wraith. I smelled the dank wool of his shirt and the leather of his trews. The wraith stared at him, and shouted, “What have you done?”

And then the world fell.

It filled my eyes and ears with rushing tumbling darkness, threaded through with chanted words and whips of flame. There was pressure that dropped me flat to the floor, the buffets of strong winds, coming impossibly from all directions. The wraith screamed again, vicious and shrill, but fading into an impossible distance. Meldov’s voice whispered, more human than he’d sounded in a long time. “Oh? This?” And then softly, “Oh.” There was one more blast of sound, but clean sound, like a waterfall crashing to the rocks below. Then the chanting stopped. There was blessed silence, cool stone against my cheek, and the smell of fresh blood, candlewax, and dry dust. Someone with a hoarse, low voice said, “All right. Now.”

Tobin grabbed me and rolled me over, searching my eyes with an intense gaze. I tried to smile. For a second he returned it, and then swiftly he jerked me around like a puppet against his chest, closing his hand hard over the most agonizing part of my wrist.

“Ouch! Damn you!” I tried feebly to get free.

“Stop, you fool. I’m holding off the bleeding. Only you would open a vein like that and think nothing of it. Hold still.” He glanced up. “The bandages! Quickly!”

It was too much work to fight him. Too much work to keep my eyes open. But I had to ask, “Is it over? Done?”

“I think so.”

Thirdmage leaned down to look at me over Tobin’s shoulder. “We performed the banishment. We saw three spirits leave, and felt them pass out of the working. You should be free of them now.”

Should be.
I knew that was just his way. No sorcerer ever claimed absolute certainty. It was part of the practice of sorcery, to perform the work as if you had no doubts, while holding to the knowledge that we could never encompass all of it. There was always a risk. For now I tried to take
‘should be’
as enough, as I fell into the darkness.

****

CHAPTER TEN

I woke slowly, to an unfamiliar sound. There was a cat, purring in my ear. A different rumble somewhere in the vicinity of my chest was deeper, far less melodic, and beautifully familiar. I’d know Tobin’s snore anywhere. I opened my eyes.

I was lying on a comfortable bed, in a small stone room flooded with afternoon sun from a narrow window. There was a brazier in one corner, but it was unlit, and the room held a slight chill. I was loaded down with something soft and heavy. I turned my head, and the cat beside me made a
hmph
sound and jumped away off the bed. I caught just a glimpse of orange fur as she went, and then Tobin grunted and snuffled against my chest, and leaned over me into view. “Hey, you’re awake.” His smile was soft and fond. “There you are.”

I licked my dry lips.

Tobin said, “Wait.” He raised me with an arm at my back and held a cup to my lips. I took a sip. The water was the best thing I’d ever tasted, cool with a hint of bitter herbs.

“How long did I, um, sleep?”

“Two days. I know I said you could rest, but you were becoming really boring.”

“I’ll try to do better.”

He smiled, and bent to kiss me, persisting even when I tried to keep my something-died-in-my-mouth breath to myself. “I was just a little worried,” he whispered against my mouth.

“Sorry.”

He sat back. “Here. Drink some more.” He held the cup for me again, and its astringency rinsed the foul fuzz from my mouth. I drained the cup.

“Well done.” Tobin set the cup aside, shoved more pillows behind my back, and settled himself more comfortably on the bed beside my hip.

I wanted to talk, but exhaustion sucked me under. I closed my eyes, aware of his steady solidity against me, and dozed. It might have been a few minutes, or an hour. When I woke, he was still there. For a while, I just looked at him, which was never a hardship, while I tried to get the past events ordered in my mind. I still felt light, floaty, cotton-cloudy. I blinked, and touched his hip with my fingers, trying to anchor myself in the present. “Am I on some kind of medicine?”

“The medic had us giving you poppy, for your wrist. When you could be roused enough to swallow it.”

At his words, my hand gave a hard throb, pain lancing from my finger through my wrist. I winced. “Damn. Don’t remind me.”

“Sorry.”

I raised my arm, with difficulty, to look at it. My broken finger was once again padded and wrapped. Above that, bulky bandages encased my forearm from knuckles to elbow. It was a mess, but… “Is it my imagination, or does my wrist look straighter than it was?”

“The king sent his best medic to put you back together. Once the bleeding had stopped, the medic said, since you weren’t stirring, he might as well see what could be done to improve the healing. He cut some things, pulled the skin around. You’ve got more stitches than a wedding gown under there. But he said you might have a bit more use of it, now that the scar tissue is eased somewhat. He gave me detailed instructions for how you’re to exercise and stretch it, once the real healing begins.”

“Truly?” I tried to move my fingers. The middle ones twitched a bit. Which was more than I’d had in a decade. “It might be better?”

“He said it’ll never be much use to you. The tendons are badly damaged. But yes, he thought it might get a bit better.” Tobin gave me a steady look. “He asked me how long you’d been trying to kill yourself. I told him the best part of fifteen years. He said it was a good thing you were such a poor hand at it, although this last effort wasn’t bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

Tobin laughed roughly. “Shall we apologize back and forth a dozen times and have done with it?”