The Dragonstone (24 page)

This was the Mage whose ship Egil had boarded.

This was the Mage who had caused his defeat.

And now they stood in a room high atop the tower in the strongholt of the Mage, in the fortress where Egil and his crew had been dragged in fetters.

The Drôkha and the swart man had chained Egil to a ring in the floor and then had left him alone with his captor, and now Egil and the Mage faced one another—one silent, the other sneering.

“I am Ordrune, Captain. And your name…?”

Egil said nought.

“Your silence is of no moment,” said Ordrune. “I will have your name shortly. You will be eager to speak.” The Mage turned aside and made his way across the room.

The chamber itself was completely circular, perhaps thirty feet in diameter, and here and there stood tables laden with arcane devices: astrolabes and geared bronze wheels and alembics and clay vessels, mortars and pestles, clear glass jars filled with yellow and red and blue and green granules, braziers glowing red…with tools inserted among the ruddy coals. Small ingots of metal lay scattered here and there: red copper, yellow brass, white tin, gleaming gold, argent silver, and more. And ’round the walls there were casks and trunks and cabinets of drawers and a great, ironbound, triple-locked chest, and desks with pigeon holes above, jammed with scrolls and parchments and papers. And four tall windows equipped with drapes were set in the stone at the cardinal points.
Elsewhere, tomes rested on stands; books resided on shelves. Here and there were chairs, equipped with writing flats, with pens and inks and vellum sheets alongside.

This was Ordrune’s laboratory, his alchemistry, his arcane athenaeum. This was his lair. This was his den. This was the heart of the Wizardholt.

And here in the very core stood Egil, shackled to the floor, his own heart beating as Ordrune slipped a dark glove on a long-fingered hand and from among the fiery coals of a brazier he extracted a searing pair of tongs shimmering yellow with heat.

Ordrune turned and faced Egil. “Your name…?”

Egil paled, but said nought.

A smile played about the corners of Ordrune’s bloodless lips. “Fool.” With his free hand he took up an ampoule and released a drop of liquid onto the blazing pincers, then stepped toward the young man, the tongs sizzling, sputtering, tendrils of smoke rising up.

“What better lesson can you learn than the one I teach you today?”

Egil braced himself, ready to fight, for even though he was shackled to the floor he had the freedom of movement to the end of his chain.

And then the smoke from the sizzling tongs reached him, and his will to fight vanished.

Ordrune stepped before him, raising the burning pincers to Egil’s face. But suddenly Ordrune’s lashless eyes widened in delight, and a smile creased his hairless face. He lowered the tongs. “What better lesson? Oh, my. I do have a better one, indeed.”

*   *   *

Guards marched Egil down and out from the tower and across the courtyard to the main building, where he was allowed to bathe and groom himself and given clean clothes. Then, shackled once more, he was escorted down and through a labyrinth of passageways to a chamber. Circular it was, similar in dimension to the room atop Ordrune’s turret, and so he deemed he was in an underground hold directly below the tower. There he was again manacled to the floor, yet this time he was set at a table
piled with sumptuous foods and breads, with wines and pure water to drink.

Although round like the laboratory atop the spire, this room was no alchemistry, but a chamber of horror instead, for it held manacled tables and hanging, man-sized iron cages and fetters dangling down on chains and chairs equipped with leather straps, and tables aclutter with pincers and knives and mauls and screws and nails. There were slender, round wooden poles embedded in the floor, their upright sharp points and shafts stained rust red, as of dried blood. Braziers of burning coals, metal boots, wheeled racks, iron slabs like massive leaves of a book, and other such hideous instruments set ’round the walls. A large vat filled with a drifting liquid stood off to one side, and across the room, from behind an iron door barred with three massive iron beams there came the sound of slow monstrous breathing and the stench of carrion.

All this did Egil take in as he drank water and ate great chunks of bread and meat. “When at war, my boy,” had said his father, “eat your fill every chance you get, for you never know when the opportunity will come ’round again.” And so in spite of the putrid malodor, Egil, clean-bathed and -clothed, stuffed food down his gullet as he waited alone in silence.

*   *   *

Ordrune came first and then they dragged in filthy, disheveled Klaen, and the young man’s eyes widened at the sight of his well-groomed captain sitting at feast. They shackled the Fjordland raider to a dark, thick slant-board, and Ordrune turned to Egil. “Where shall we start first, Captain? The hands? Oh yes, let’s do.”

Ordrune sauntered to a table and took up a massive hammer, then stepped to Klaen’s side and held the spike-faced maul up before the young man’s gaze. “I use this…tool to make meat tender for my”—he glanced at the barred door—“pet.” Klaen’s eyes filled with terror and a moan escaped his lips, and he struggled against his bonds, to no avail.

Egil leapt to his feet and called out, “Egil! My name is Egil.”

Ordrune looked back at Egil and shook his head and
smiled. “Too late, I’m afraid, Captain Egil.” Then he turned and smashed the hammer down on Klaen’s shackled hand, the iron maul splintering bones as blood flew wide.
“No!”
shouted Egil, but his cry was lost under Klaen’s shrieks of agony, the screams slapping and echoing ’round the chamber. And from behind the iron door came a snarling wail, and the door thudded, the beams rattling, as something monstrous slammed against it from within.

Laughing, Ordrune moved to the other side of Klaen, and once more showed the heavy hammer to the shrieking man, the maul now stained with blood, bits of flesh clinging to the dull spikes. Klaen’s screams rang out hoarsely and again he struggled, and Egil shouted
“No!”
but Ordrune merely smiled and shattered the other hand. As the iron door thudded and rattled, Klaen’s shrieks climbed in pitch, and then stopped altogether. He had fainted, and only moans leaked from his lips.

“Fear not, Captain Egil,” said Ordrune as he moved toward a table, “for
this
”—he took up an ampoule—“will revive him, and then we, you and I, shall start on his feet.”

*   *   *

Egil wept and pled and lost all the food he had eaten, as Ordrune slowly destroyed Klaen, breaking bones with the iron meat-hammer, working inward from the extremities, the young man shrieking in agony, Ordrune’s vials keeping him awake and aware. And all the while something behind the iron door roared and smashed at it from within, as if some enormous caged monster were being driven mad with blood lust.

And when Klaen finally was dead, his broken body was carried by lackeys from the room, and moments later there came the grisly sound of something eating something behind the barred iron door.

*   *   *

If the top of the tower was the vile heart of the holt then the bottom of the tower was its foul soul, for over the next forty days, Egil witnessed the destruction of his entire crew: Bram, Argi, Ragnar, the others, all the young men who had followed him. By fire and knife and caustic potion, by rending and crushing and slow bleeding, by evisceration and impalement and other penetrations they
died. One by one. One each day. Always with Egil now forcibly bathed and groomed and dressed and sitting before an extravagant meal.

And though Egil begged and groveled and told everything he knew, and confessed to all his transgressions and peccadilloes and misdeeds and vices, and beseeched Ordrune to spare the crew and kill him instead, Ordrune merely laughed…and the laughter did not cease.

Finally there was only Egil left.

*   *   *

They stood once more in the top of the tower, did Egil and Ordrune: Egil again shackled to the floor, Ordrune smiling at him from across the width of the room—but strangely, Ordrune was now more youthful than when last he and Egil had met here.

Egil shifted, his chains rattling, and he growled, “What are you waiting for, Wizard? Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with?”

“Oh no, Captain Egil, would I waste all I have striven to teach you? Instead I intend to set you free, now that you have learned. Was that not a fine game we played…our pleasure enhanced by the power we gained? But wait, what is this? I see you are disappointed. Perhaps you believe the better lesson I promised you, the better lesson I gave you, will fade, will be forgotten.” Ordrune laughed and stroked his now-younger cheeks and hairless chin. “Fear not, Captain Egil, you will
never
forget for as long as I live”—again Ordrune laughed—“and Mages live forever.”

“Not if I have a say in it,” gritted Egil. “There will come a day when I’ll see you in the black fathoms below.”

“Well, my lad, you are welcome to try, can you find this place, this tower. Yet even though free, I think you will be incapable of coming again to my fortress. I will see to that.”

Ordrune turned to the table beside him and took up a vial, then looking at Egil he said, “Resist not, Captain Egil, for you cannot prevail.”

*   *   *

Egil found himself wandering along the shores of
Gelen. How he had gotten there, he did not know. There were gaps in his mind—thoughts, memories, experiences taken away by Ordrune. He did, however, remember setting forth from Mørkfjord in the
Sjøløper
, but not where he had sailed. He remembered each and every man of the crew he had named his Hawks and the gleams in their eyes as they had joined his venture, but he remembered no raids, no plunder, no booty, nothing to live up to the promise of riches and fame that had drawn the young men to him. And he remembered boarding a certain ship to capture its wealth, but neither its kind nor the waters wherein he and the Hawks had slipped alongside. He remembered the Wizardholt and all he had seen therein, but not its whereabouts. And he remembered Ordrune, vile Ordrune, and the crew the Wizard had slaughtered…and the manner of their deaths. Of this he could not forget, for Ordrune had cursed him, and each and every night, he relived the hideous slaughter of one of the men, a different man each night, and always he woke up screaming.

Ill dreams, indeed.

He finally took berth on a merchanter out of the port of Arbor in Gelen, and he worked his way from ship to ship until he came to Fjordland. And when he rowed into Mørkfjord on a midsummer’s day, four years had elapsed since he and the forty Hawks had set sail for glory and gold.

Yet none came home but him.

A
rin reached up to gently brush away Egil’s tears as his tale came to an end. But he turned his head aside and wiped the heel of his hand across his cheek.

Arin sighed but said nought.

“In Ryodo,” said Aiko, setting aside her sword, “we would have mounted a voyage of retribution.”

Huskily, Egil cleared his throat. “Just as would we.”

Arin frowned. “But thy memories of where thou had sailed were gone.”

Egil nodded.

“Your father knew where you were bound,” declared Aiko.

“My father died of the fever but a scant week after we left.”

Arin reached out. “I am sorry, Egil.”

Egil took her hand. “So am I…. So am I.”

“What of the map?” asked Aiko. “Do you yet have it?”

Egil shook his head.

“Then the sailor you bought it from, does he—”

“No,” interjected Egil. “I spent time in Havnstad searching for him, with no success. Some there thought he had died. Others said he sailed away and was never seen again. Still others placed him in the deep forests inland.”

They sat without speaking for long moments, the only sound that of someone in the yard below saddling a horse. Aiko stood and stepped to the window and observed the stable boy taking one of their mounts out for its daily round of exercise. As he rode away, she turned and said, “Mayhap the Mages in Black Mountain can restore your memory just as they did Dara Arin’s.”

Arin’s eyes widened. “Aye. Either there or in Rwn.”

Egil looked from one to the other, then said, “They would have to know how to lift a curse.”

*   *   *

The following day, with Healer Thar present, Arin again removed Egil’s bandages and, after examination, said, “The herbs have done their work. The wound is mending well. We can forgo the swathing.”

“Shall I remove the gut?” asked Thar.

“Aye.”

In a trice, all the fine stitches were nipped and extracted, Thar working his way down the ruddy scar running from forehead to cheek. When he was finished—“Where is my patch?” asked Egil, fumbling ’round on the bed.

“Here,” said Arin, taking the crimson leather from a pocket, the tiny golden image of Adon’s Hammer centered upon the eye piece.

Egil called for a mirror, and as Aiko held it steady, he tied the band ’round his head. He looked at his reflection and said, “Now I am truly Egil One-Eye.”

*   *   *

The next day Arin pronounced Egil fit to begin walking, and on that same day Egil moved out of the Blackstein Lodge and into the sod-roofed, stone house he had inherited from his father. A sevenday passed, with Arin and Thar monitoring his progress and treating Egil’s scar with herbal ointments, and Arin and Aiko walking with him as he regained his strength, each day the Ryodoan choosing more and more difficult paths as they trekked across the slopes.

During the seventh of these rambles, as they trudged up toward the crest of a tor overlooking the fjord, Arin said, “We must set out soon to find the mad monarch’s rutting peacock.”

On Ann’s left, Egil looked down at her diminutive form—she but four feet eight and he at five feet ten. “Then the time has come for us to sail for Jute, aye? To the court of the mad queen?”

Arin smiled up at him. “Then thou dost plan on going with us?”

Egil glanced out at the deep, black fjord. “Is it not so that I am one-eye in dark water?”