The Malmillard Codex (22 page)

A slave.

He should have killed her on one of the many
occasions when he'd had the chance, Val decided. Broken her neck
with his own hands, as he'd done to his late mistress, or run her
through with the sword she'd been idiot enough to give him. Giving
an escaped slave, a gladiator, a sword? What sort of fool was she?
And the way he had caught her watching him, many a time. Watching
him, calculating just what use she could make of him, leading him
on to do her bidding, making use of his own desires to enslave him
anew…

Val's eyes narrowed in contemplation. Those
eyes had changed in the last few moments, changed in this odd,
uncanny light from their usual chestnut color…to a dull and ugly
black, a black that seemed to draw light into them and reflect
nothing back.

"Look, Master Val," whispered Garet,
thrusting a sharp elbow into Val's ribs.

Receiving no answer, Garet looked up at his
master's face, but instead came into range of those flat, black
eyes. The boy gave a gasp and shrank away, raising his hands above
his face in a protective gesture.

Val ignored the suddenly frightened boy;
instead, he looked up at the tower.

One of the beasts that had been lounging
beside the door was moving away, off to the right, disappearing
around the bulge of the white tower. The beast shrank too quickly
for something of its enormity, lessening in size as if it had gone
a league away, instead of merely a few steps. Soon the creature was
out of their sight, hidden by the round side of the spire.

Guard duty?
Val gazed at the other
beast in hazy wonder. Did the things walk some preordained course,
protection for the tower? Was there another entrance on the
opposite side? Did some other creature hold guard there, if so?

But Val knew what guarded this tower. Had
known it for years…

Val stood up from behind the pyramidal stone
behind which he and Garet were crouching, his body exposed from the
waist up to any viewer that cared to look.

"Master!" Garet whispered urgently.
"Master?"

Val reached down a long arm and seized the
boy.

Garet stifled a shriek as strong fingers
trained to kill encircled his bony arm and dragged him from behind
the rock. Garet's boots scrabbled in the thick mud as he tried to
gain purchase, tried to get away. But the boy was helpless in that
strong, suddenly savage grip.

Val plucked the boy clear of the mud, clear
of the rock, and tossed him over one shoulder.

Garet swung head down. With desperate
squeaks and squawks, he protested this treatment and his
undignified position.

Val ignored him. He lay a massive hand on
the struggling boy's back, and began a slow but purposeful stride
towards the tower at the top of the hill.

***

The single remaining guardian watched Val's
approach with a benign, almost loving regard. It licked its scaly
lips as if it could already taste the toothsome morsel walking
toward it on determined—and, it decided, delicious—sturdy legs.

Val paused just out of the reach of a pair
of man-length claws. He gazed up—and up—into the creature's golden
eyes. Since there were three of these orbs to choose from, Val's
flat, ebony eyes locked onto the one in the middle.

Val grinned.

The creature, which had opened its enormous
mouth in a threatening snarl as Val approached, appeared a bit
nonplussed as to how to react to a grin. It shut its toothy mouth
with a snap, and a disappointed and sulfuric snort of overheated
air rushed from all five of its nostrils.

Garet's squirming, which had been ongoing
since he'd found himself suspended over Val's shoulder, stopped as
a cloud of rank, disgusting breath enveloped him in his
uncomfortable perch. The boy choked and coughed against Val's
cloaked back, then twisted his shorn head at an awkward angle and
was just able to see what was happening.

"Get out of my way," he heard Val snarl.

The creature that towered over them, its
scabrous head held thoughtfully to one side, looked to be
considering just where to bite Val—and, due to his unpleasant
position, Garet—first. The boy gave a preparatory wiggle, desiring
more than anything to escape from his untenable location; but a
huge hand tightened painfully on his legs, and Garet stilled at
once.

"Get out of my way," Val repeated, his tone
no more pleasant than the first time he had so commanded the
beast.

But this time, he punctuated his words with
the slither of a sword leaving its scabbard.

The creature eyed the shining length of
steel with one eye, which then turned upward to take counsel with
the two other orbs that shown from sockets above it. Apparently,
all three were in agreement.

With a snort of ponderous dignity, the beast
shuffled away from the doorway.

Val, sword in one hand and Garet across his
shoulder, still offering wistful albeit hopeless wiggles, marched
across the bridge and through the unguarded tower door.

"What is the
meaning of this travesty, brother?" spat the cold voice. "The large
one is inside our home already, and we have not prepared a suitable
greeting."

An elongated figure of outlandish emaciation
stalked back and forth across the round tower room; its emaciated
bare feet appeared and disappeared like flickering ghosts beneath a
flowing crimson robe.

In the center of the room, the mist-filled
brass bowl that had once held a floating globe stood empty on its
tripod, a shimmering pentagram etched in the dust on the floor
beneath it. The globe itself, dull and flat now, its images lost,
hung imprisoned between skeletal fingers. These bony fingers threw
the globe like a child's toy from one pale hand to the other,
petulant irritation evident in each quick, short toss.

Against the wall, the long stone table had
been swept clear of its esoteric rubble. Gone were skulls and
skin-bound books; gone were enchained ravens and glass jars with
grinning, pickled heads; gone were piles of manuscripts covered in
arcane symbols.

Now, the only burden the table bore…was
Madryn.

Stretched across the icy stone, her wrists
and ankles bound to the tops of the table legs with manacles of
rusty iron, Madryn gazed up through slitted eyes, counting the
arching stones that supported the ceiling of the tower…to keep from
screaming.

"Let him go, Valaren," Madryn said, her tone
weak but controlled. "He's done nothing to you. Let him go."

A shambling figure dressed in dingy,
colorless rags stumbled from the doorway towards the table, and
stood looking down at Madryn's supine, defenseless form. One
claw-like hand jerked the chain that held one of her ankles bound
to the table—then smirked at the gasp of pain it drew forth from
the prisoner.

"I'm very sorry to deny you this boon, my
dear," drawled Valaren Starseeker.

But this was not the stylish courtier, toast
of her majesty's court, dressed in foppish silks of rainbow hues.
No, this Valaren was a scarecrow of a man, his wasted face drawn
and pasty, the skin of his hands wrinkled and sere. A thick scar
circumnavigated his reedy neck, and his overlarge head jerked and
bobbled on its unsteady perch, like a loose button hanging from a
single thread.

"Very sorry indeed. But how else can I
return to my former glory, without his necessary assistance?"
continued Valaren, with a smile that split his ashen face in two
uneven segments. "Surely you cannot expect me to remain trapped in
this body—that you condemned me to, as you recall—forever?"

Madryn turned her head to glare at the
creature that stood beside the table. His scanty hair grew in
patches on his leprous skin, and his eyes were sunken black lesions
in his pale flesh.

"Oh, I don't know," she said, considering.
"I think that body rather suits your nature."

Valaren Starseeker gave a vicious tweak to a
dangling chain, and was rewarded by another gasp of pain.

"I have a far better body on its way to me
now," he grinned down at Madryn, a thin trickle of spittle drooling
from his slack mouth. "A body trained and tempered and honed for
strength and endurance. Why, it's almost as strong and as beautiful
as the one you tried to destroy, my dear. My mind is already half
inside its new host, you know. The rest of the procedure will take
but a short time. And then…and then, my darling Madryn, I shall
have the pleasure of seeing you lust after me once more, as you
have lusted after this burly slave of yours for these last days and
weeks. What a jest, Madryn! What a deliciously unholy jest! I, whom
you struggled to refuse again and again—aye, and succeeded more
than once, I will admit—I shall be inside a body from which you
cannot keep away. Won't it be a pretty sight?"

Madryn twisted arms and legs against the
restraining iron, adding to the blood that already trickled down
each table leg in a slow, lazy stream. On the dusty stone floor
beneath her rested four tiny onyx bowls, one set at each table leg;
each was nearly half full of scarlet fluid, beginning to congeal
already in the frigid atmosphere.

The elongated form dressed in flowing
crimson stalked toward the table where Madryn lay, stopped short
beside the ravaged form of Valaren.

"You need not wait much longer to see your
friends, my dear," said a cold, clear voice. A skeletal hand rose
up and pushed back a deep ruddy hood.

Billows of hair, as chalk white as the stony
walls, poured out of the hood to hang down the back of the crimson
robe.

"My dearest brother Valaren and I have
waited long for our revenge against you," said the woman thus
exposed, her fiery eyes burning down on Madryn from a milk-pale
face. "Now that our time has finally arrived, I would have it last
as long as possible." The tip of a pink tongue jutted out through
alabaster lips, was captured for an instant between snowy teeth and
then released. The woman's scarlet eyes caressed her brother's
shaking form. "My beloved Valaren will be grateful to me for this
boon I bring him," she whispered as she ran one gaunt finger around
Valaren's slack, drooling lips. "Will you not, my darling
brother?"

"Isole, you know that I will worship you
forever, as I have always done," promised her brother, his head
wagging on its damaged stalk. "You and I, my dearest sister, with
these two fine, new bodies, will take our rightful place in the
warm world on the other side…and leave this empty place to our
father and all his ilk."

Isole shrugged out of her enveloping ruby
robe; it dropped to the dusty floor to puddle in a carmine pool
about her bare bony feet. Her meager frame was wrapped and wound in
thin strips of silk, ivory as her skin and hair. Her face gaunt,
her cheeks hollow, her fierce burning eyes glaring out of shadowy
pits, she lifted thin lips in a snarl of a smile.

"My most beautiful sister," whispered
Valaren.

The door to the tower study burst open.

Val stood in
the doorway to the tower room.

His burly arms were bare to the shoulders;
the muscles stood out across those shoulders like twining ropes of
sinewy steel. His coarse linen shirt was torn to remnants, and the
leather jerkin that he wore over it was open down to his flat
belly, exposing his broad chest scattered with ruddy curls. His
legs, long and thick with muscle, were widespread, and his feet
planted firmly on the cold stone floor.

There was a time when he would have been a
formidable sight. But now, that heavy muscular body was oddly
unthreatening. Val's arms hung loose at his side, his hands empty
and slack. No blade dangled from about his lean waist, no dagger
peeked from the top of a high boot.

"There, Madryn, you see what a beauty I
shall be?" crowed Valaren as he rubbed his pallid hands together in
delight; narrow strips of ashen skin peeled from them and fell to
the floor. "Even better than my last body, is it not, my dear? It
is a pity about all those scars, though."

Madryn twisted her head painfully to one
side.

Val walked with slow, measured steps into
the center of the study, his dull black eyes blank, his face empty.
By the shallow brass bowl on its tripod he stopped, as rigid and
lifeless as a statue.

"Valerik," breathed Madryn, straining to
read some familiar expression in those blank, barren eyes.

Isole laughed. That laugh slithered about
the room like a viper, venomous and deadly. "He's almost gone, your
Valerik. Soon he will be only what we have made him."

Valaren Starseeker shuffled toward the rigid
statue of flesh that stood so silent and still in the center of the
lofty room. He stared up in incredulous, delighted wonder at this
fresh new creature he had almost made his own, his diseased gaze
crawling like maggots across the muscular form, lingering in
pleasure on the vacant face.

"What delights I shall enjoy with this body,
my sister," said Valaren. "What spirits I shall crush, what souls I
shall abuse. I will be greater—far, far greater—than ever
before."

"We must finish the spell before you are all
these things, my brother," Isole said. She had remained by the
stone table that held Madryn imprisoned on its surface, and now she
bent down to collect the tiny onyx bowls, each almost full of its
burden of ruby blood.

Isole scooped the thimble-sized containers
up on one bony hand.

"As usual, I see, I must do all the work
while you have all the pleasure," Isole continued, her voice harsh
and irritated and cold, so cold.

She set the four bowls in a square pattern
on the top of a carved, slender, three-legged stool that sat before
the single open window, tweaking them until she was satisfied with
their position.

"Bring him here, brother," Isole ordered.
"Your blood must mingle with his for the transference to be
properly accomplished."