Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (42 page)

Sun Wolf remembered it. He could not explain that that had been before the pit and the ordeal of the anzid; he could not explain, could not make the Eagle understand, the monstrousness of what Altiokis was. He only said, “How could a mind that trivial achieve this kind of power?”

The Dark Eagle laughed. “Whoa! Teach him a few tricks and he knows all about wizardry and power, does he?”

Sun Wolf was silent. He could not say how he knew what he knew, or why it seemed inconceivable to him that a man with a mind whose greatest ambitions rose no higher than dirty statues and silk rugs could have gained the power to become deathless, could have made himself the last, most powerful wizard on the earth. He understood, then, Yirth’s anger at his frightened rejection of his power; he felt it reflected in his own outrage at a man who would not only so waste his own vast potential but destroy everyone else’s as well.

Doors of white jade and crystal swung open. The room beyond them was black—black marble floor and walls, pillars of black marble supporting a vaulted ceiling of shadow. A ball of pale bluish light hung over the head of the man who overflowed the huge chair of carved ebony between the columns at the far end of the room, and the light picked out the details of the sculpted dragons and gargoyles, of the writhing sea life and shining insects, that covered the chair, the pillars, and the wall. The incense-reeking darkness seemed filled with magic; but with a curious clarity of the senses, Sun Wolf saw how flawed it was, like a prostitute’s makeup seen in the light of day. Whatever Altiokis had been, as the Dark Eagle had said, he was slipping now. Having destroyed everyone else’s power, he was letting his own run to seed as well.

Looking at him as he squatted, obscenely gross, in his ebony chair, for a moment the Wolf felt, not fear, but angry disgust. Not even unlimited evil could give this man dignity. Sun Wolf’s captors pushed him forward until he stood alone before the Wizard King, his shoulders dragged down by the weight of his chains.

Altiokis belched and scratched his jewel-encrusted belly. “So,” he said, in a voice thick with brandy, “you think the palace of Altiokis, the greatest prince this world has known, looks like a whorehouse?”

His wizard’s senses had spread throughout that tawdry palace; he had heard every word that they had said. The Dark Eagle looked frightened, but Sun Wolf knew how it was done, though he himself could not do it. He only looked at the Wizard King, trying to understand what unlimited life, unlimited power, and unlimited boredom had done to this man, this last and most powerful wizard.

“You poor ass, did you really think you could get away from me that easily?” Altiokis asked. “Did you really have any idea of what you’d be up against when you accepted the commission of that fool, whatever his name was—the man who hired you? One of the Thanes, I think we said. Not that it matters, of course. I know who my enemies are. We’ll have them gathered in . . . ”

The Dark Eagle’s bright blue eyes widened with alarm. “My lord, we don’t know—”

“Oh, be silent,” Altiokis snapped pettishly. “Cowards—I am surrounded by cowards.”

“My lord,” the Dark Eagle grated, “if you arrest without proof, there’ll be trouble among the Thanes . . . ”

“Oh, there’s always trouble among the Thanes,” the Wizard King retorted angrily. “And there always has been—we needed only the excuse to put them down. Let them come against me—if they dare. I will crush them . . . ” The dark, little eyes glittered unnaturally bright in the gloom. “ . . . as I will crush this slave.”

He had risen from his chair, his eyes holding Sun Wolf’s, and the Wolf saw in the wizard what had struck him before. There was very little that was human left of the man. The fire within was eating it away, his soul literally rotting, like the minds of the nuuwa. Like them, the Wolf realized, Altiokis existed almost solely to devour.

Sun Wolf fell back a step as the Wizard King raised the staff with its evil, gleaming head. At a distance of several feet, he could already feel the searing pain that radiated like waves of heat from the metal. Altiokis raised it, and the Wolf retreated until he felt the sword points of the guards press his back.

“Are you stupid,” the Wizard King whispered, “or only a nerveless animal? Or don’t you believe what could happen to you here?”

“I believe you,” Sun Wolf said, keeping a wary eye on the staff, which hovered a foot or so in front of his throat. His voice was a dry rasp, the only sound in that hushed darkness of perfume and sweat. “I just don’t believe that anything I can say will stop you from doing what you choose.”

It was as polite a way as any he could think of to say that he made it a policy never to argue with a crazy man.

A sneer contorted the greasy face. “So it has wisdom, after all,” the wizard said. “Pity you did not exercise it sooner. I have lived longer than you know. I am versed in the art of crushing the soul from the body, while leaving the brain time for—reflection. I could put the blood worms on you, until a month from now you would be nothing but a crawling mass of maggots, begging me for the mercy of death. Or I could blind and cripple you with drugs and find a job for you hauling bath water for my mercenaries—eh? Or I could wall you into a stone room, with only a cup of water, and that water filled with anzid, and leave you to choose between slow death from poison and slower from thirst.”

Sun Wolf fought to keep his expression impassive, knowing full well that the fat man had both the power and the inclination to mete out any one of those fates, merely for the entertainment of seeing him die. But, sickened as he was by horror, two things remained very clear in the back of his brain.

The first was that Altiokis had never passed the Great Trial. He clearly had no idea that anzid was anything other than a particularly loathsome poison. And that meant that he had derived his power from some other source.

It would explain some things,
the Wolf thought, his mind struggling to grasp that awareness. The power that pervaded the lower level of the tower and that filled the mines was then not entirely from Altiokis’ attenuated personality. It was something else, something foul and filthy, not like Yirth’s academic sorcery, nor what the Wolf felt of the wild magic that seemed to fill his own soul. Was the power only channeled through the Wizard King from the darkness that the Eagle had spoken of, the darkness that dwelt in the innermost room of the tower? A power that had no ambitions, but that Altiokis had seized upon to fulfill his own?

The second thing Sun Wolf realized was that, like a cruel child, Altiokis was simply telling him this, not to learn any information, but in order to see him break. He knew from his own experience that a screaming victim was more satisfactory to watch. He did not doubt for a moment that they would get down to the screaming sooner or later, but he was damned to the Cold Hells if he’d give the Wizard King that pleasure now.

Altiokis’ face changed. “Or I could give you worse,” he snarled. He snapped his fingers for the Dark Eagle and his men. “Downstairs,” he ordered. “With me.”

The mercenaries closed in around Sun Wolf, dragging at his wrist chains, thrusting from behind with their swords. A door opened in the wall, where no door had been; the blue brimfire that floated over Altiokis’ head illuminated the first steps of a stair that curved down into darkness. The Wolf balked in sudden terror at the power, the evil, that rose like a nauseating stench from the pit below. The blackness seemed filled with an alien, hideous chill, like that from the demons he had seen in the marshes of his childhood—a sensation of seeing something that had risen from unknowable gulfs of nothingness, a sensing of something that was not of this earth.

Someone shoved a blade against his ribs, pushing him through the door. The soldiers seemed unaware of what lay below; they could not know what he knew and still be willing to go that way themselves. He almost turned to fight them in the doorway, but Altiokis reached forward with his staff and used the glowing head of it to drive the Wolf forward down the stairs. The men surrounded him again, and the eldritch cold rose about them as they descended.

The descent was less far than he had thought. The stair made one circle, then leveled out; the floor, he saw, was rock and dirt. They must be at ground level, at what had been the top of the crag, close to the cliff’s edge. At the end of the short, lightless vault of the hallway was a small door. Even as his soul shrank from it, he thought, I have done this before.

The room beyond was like the one Derroug Dru had shown him in the prison below the Records Office in Mandrigyn. It was small and dank, furnished with a huge, carved chair whose black velvet cushions boasted bullion tassels. The white glow of the witchlight gleamed oilily on the wall of glass before the chair. The only difference from that other chamber was that there was a door beside the wide window that looked into darkness.

Something like a restless flake of fire moved in that dark beyond the glass.

Sun Wolf had known this was coming to him, all the long road up the mountain. In a way, he had known it since Derroug Dru had first shown the abominations that Altiokis had given him, in the cell beneath the Records Offices. Horror went through the Wolf like a sword of ice; horror and despair and the terrified consciousness that in that room, not in the fat man chuckling throatily beside him, lay the center point of the evil power that pervaded the Citadel. Whatever was in there, it was the source, not only of the creatures that turned men into nuuwa, but of the power that had let Altiokis become the swollen and abominable thing that he was.

Behind the glass, the bright flake of fire zagged idly in the air, leaving a thin fire trail in the stygian dark. It was waiting for him, waiting to devour his brain, to make him one of the mewing, slobbering things that were filled, like the dead stones of the Citadel, with Altiokis’ perverted will.

Swords pressed into Sun Wolf’s back, forcing him toward the narrow door. All of his senses seemed to have dulled and concentrated; he was conscious of no sound but the frantic hammering of his own heart and of no sensation but the cold of sweat pouring down his face and breast and arms. The sharpness of the steel was driving him forward. His vision had shrunk to that idle flake of fire, to the dark door, triple-barred with iron, and to the hands of the men unbarring it.

Cold and evil seemed to flow forth from the black slot of the opening. With curious, instantaneous clarity, he saw the round stone walls of Altiokis’ original hut, the weeds that lay dead and tangled about the edges, and the scuffed, fouled dirt within. But all that was peripheral to the awareness of that black pit at the center, a boundaryless, anomalous, and utterly hideous vortex of absolute darkness that seemed to open in the air of the room’s center. It was a Hole, a gap of nothingness that led into a universe beyond the ken of humankind. Through it flowed the power that filled the Citadel, filled the nuuwa, and filled Altiokis’ corrupted, deathless flesh and rotting brain.

But worse than the awareness of the power was the knowledge of the mind of the Entity that lived within the Hole, of the Thing that was trapped there, its thoughts reaching out to him, as shocking as ice water flowing over his naked brain.

Not human, nor demon . . . demons were of this world, and quite ordinary and comforting compared with that ice-cold, streaming black fire. Yet it was alive, and it reached to fill him.

Hands thrust him, unresisting, forward to the threshold of that tiny room. Unaware that he spoke aloud, he said, “It’s alive . . . ” And in the last second, as the guards shoved him in, he turned his head, meeting Altiokis’ startled, dilating eyes with a sudden knowledge of where he had seen that Thing before. He said, “It gave you your power.”

The Wizard King was on his feet, shrieking. “Bring him out of there! Shut the door!” His voice was frenzied, almost in panic.

The guards wavered, uncertain whether they had heard aright. The Dark Eagle grabbed Sun Wolf by the arm and pulled him backward, slamming the door to with a kick; Sun Wolf staggered, as if he had been released from a chain that held him upright, and found there was no strength left in him. He clutched the door bolts for support.

Altiokis was screaming, “Get him out of here! Get him away from here! He sees it! He’s a wizard! Get him away!”

“Him?” the Eagle said, rather unwisely. “He’s no wizard, my lord . . . ”

Altiokis strode forward, swinging his staff to knock Sun Wolf’s hands from the door bolts, as if he feared the Wolf would throw the door open and fling himself inside. Ignoring his captain of mercenaries, Altiokis clutched with his fat, jeweled hands at the grubby rags of what remained of Sun Wolf’s tunic, his face white with hatred and fear.

“Did you see it?” he demanded in a stinking blast of liquor and rich food.

Exhausted, leaning against the stone wall at his back for support, Sun Wolf whispered, “Yes, I did. I see it now, in your eyes.”

“It might choose to call another wizard,” the fat man gasped hoarsely, as if he had not heard. “It could give him its power, if he were lucky, as I was lucky . . . ”

“I wouldn’t touch that power!” the Wolf cried, the thought more sickening to him than the horror of that flake of fire boring steadily through his eye.

Again the Wizard King appeared not to have heard him. “It could even give him immortality.” The black, lifeless eyes stared at Sun Wolf, desperate with jealousy and terror. Then Altiokis whirled back to his guards, screaming, “Get him out of here! Throw him to the nuuwa. Get him out!”

Like the tug of a fine wire embedded in his flesh. Sun Wolf felt the touch of that black Entity in the Hole, whispering to his brain.

Furiously, he thrust it aside, more frightened of it than of anything he had yet seen, in the Citadel of Altiokis or out of it. He fought like a tiger as they half dragged, half carried him along the maze of corridors to where a shallow flight of steps led downward to a broad double door. Altiokis strode at their heels, screaming incoherently, reviling the Eagle for bringing this upon him, and cursing his own means of divination that had not shown him this new threat. One of the guards ran ahead to peer through the judas in the door, and the faint yellow bar of light from the westering sun picked out the scars on his face as he looked. He called, “There are few of them out there now, me lord. They’re mostly gone in their dens.”