The Starfollowers of Coramonde (9 page)

“Legion-Marshal,
you and your men fought unjustly against me. Yet you may win back your honor by
reverting to the sworn duty that is yours.”

Midwis looked
up hopefully. Springbuck went on, “The Highlands Province suffers from
depredations of the wildmen and the Druids. They are undermanned in the
Highlands; it is in my mind to dispatch a Legion there. It will be a long,
cold, perilous task. If the Druids use their polar magic again, despite the
enchanters I’ve sent against them at Andre deCourteney’s suggestion, it may
come a disaster. But there must be armed units to check the wildmen.”

Midwis was on
his feet. “Give me your let to go there! Naive and wrongful in statecraft
though I have been, no man can say Midwis is unschooled in conflict.”

The solution
had advantages. Springbuck hadn’t enough loyal men to reinforce the Highlands
Province and, left near Earthfast, Midwis’ host was potentially dangerous. If
he would renew his allegiance in truth, he would be a great help, and his
powerful family and friends would be well disposed toward the
Ku-Mor-Mai.

“You are
dispatched with these provisos. Your host goes with its colors cased, and all
blazonry covered. Until you reach the Highlands Province you march with arms
reversed, without trump, drum or cymbal. Silent will be your route. When you
unfurl your standard in combat it will show the bar sinister. If you do well by
Coramonde, that will be revoked when you are come again to Earthfast. Do you
agree?”

“Without
qualm,
Ku-Mor-Mai.”
Midwis bowed, then squared his shoulders, and
retreated from the throne room.

It had been a
long morning, beginning with the departure of Andre and his companions.
Springbuck decided to take his midday meal. Courtiers rose, and servitors. He
waved them away; having foregone his formal robes of state and taken to wearing
Bar at his side again, he wasn’t inclined to be pestered and indulged like a
wealthy aunt.

Passing alone
through an empty gallery, he heard low voices to one side, in a window-seat
booth. Its curtains had been drawn, but had fallen back a bit. He squinted,
crinkling his face, and made out a glimpse of brilliant red hair and milky
skin. He went over, thinking to speak to Gabrielle. Then something blocked his
partial view of her pale, perfect face. It was a mass of white hair and a
black, chain-mailed shoulder.

The shoulder
moved away. Gabrielle’s eye, fluttering open from what could only have been a
kiss, fell on him. She said something softly; the curtain was thrown back.
There stood Hightower, hand on his broadsword hilt.

The Warlord stopped
in surprise. His hand instantly dropped from the weapon. Springbuck, too, was
immobilized; only Gabrielle’s calm was unfailing.

“Yes,
Springbuck?” Her eyes didn’t avoid his.

He condemned
himself for not having seen it sooner. On several occasions now, she and
Hightower had been absent at the same time. She’d always made it quite clear
that she was her own woman.

“You did not
bid good-bye to Andre,” he reminded her lamely.

“We made our
farewells last evening. I mislike partings.”

He turned to
go. “My Lord,” called the old warrior, halting Springbuck, “for what it may
mean, Gabrielle and I had been—close, in times far back. We never did this to
wound your feelings, and indeed, denied one another so long as we could. But
there are ties that may not be gainsaid.”

Springbuck
resolved to be as ungrudging as Van Duyn had been when the scholar had lost
Gabrielle to him. “Neither of you owe me explanations, my Lord. We are all free
souls,” Gabrielle’s expression, hearing that, was satisfied. It made him feel no
better.

“There are
matters of policy that need advice from both of you,” he continued, drawing a
shaky breath. “Until later, then, good day.”

He went his
solitary way. She faced the Warlord. “I said as much; he is an older man in a
young one’s skin. He understands.”

Hightower
disagreed. “He accepts. I doubt he understands. Be that as it may, all courses
turn toward Salamá, as in days long gone. Will they hold as much tragedy as
they did then?” His arm went around her. “It begins anew.”

Within the
ironclad circle, she leaned against his chest. “For us, it never ceased.”

On an
occasion of rare self-indulgence, in the Hour of the Drug, Yardiff Bey,
satisfied with his revivified plans, drifted in reverie back across the
centuries.

He saw a
small boy squatting in the dust of a teeming marketplace, scene of variegated
color, bewildering sounds. A wandering illusionist was playing with tongues of
flame and momentary flowers plucked from the air. The watching boy’s father was
the Bey, regional governor, Prince in his own right, but the boy had crept away
from his manor house and teachers to watch this small magic.

The boy was
fine-featured, destined to be aristocratically handsome. His cheekbones were
high, lips full and dark. His eyes, watching minor enchantments with consuming
interest—though he knew these were barely magics at all—were black, liquid with
fascination.

It had been
his misfortune or accidental lot to be born under ominous stars. The portents
had spoken of disorder, ruin, cataclysm. His name would dominate the mightiest
struggles. His mother had grieved for that, but the boy found it intriguing.
His father discounted any words that didn’t lend themselves to his own will. It
was to occur to the boy, Yardiff, later in life, to speculate whether he’d made
those prophesies come true by accepting them.

The boy,
being groomed for his father’s lofty station, had already decided he would
never assume it. There were no magicians in his background, so it was hard to
say from whence his preoccupation had come. His forebears and father were
lordly, arrogant men, subtle warriors, merciless in battle. But in this
generation, in this boy, under dire signs, the union of cold intellect and
imperial pride had taken a new bent.

The nomadic
magician was leaping and capering, half the fool, half the prestidigitator. He
skipped around the circle of watching people, offering flowers that faded
instantly away. He extended his fingers with tiny spits of flame that didn’t
burn. Most onlookers were afraid to touch them; those brave souls who did found
that the flames evaporated at once.

Until he came
to the boy.

A hand
extended, and the clown-magician waited, scoffing. Yardiff's wide eyes shifted
from the man to his pyrotechnic fingers, and back to the man. He put his hand
forth calmly; uncertainty and apprehension had long since been driven out of
him.

Tongues of
fire were somehow transferred; it wasn’t clear to the crowd just how. Now he
held them, but the fires didn’t disappear as they had for others. Instead they
burned high, higher than for the magician himself. They flickered brightly in
colors, then Yardiff waved his hand, dismissing them with a gesture of
impatience. The crowd murmured. Some few dropped coins in the dust. Others
covertly thrust forefinger and little finger at the wanderer, to fend off any
evil he might harbor. The magician scrambled in unseemly haste again, to gather
meager pickings. People went their various ways, except the boy. When they were
alone, the wanderer came to him. There was, in his features, the joy of a miner
who’s found a rich gemstone. He took the small hand that had so recently
accepted his fire, pressed it for a moment, left something there. Then he
twirled to go, once more the capering fool.

Yardiff
didn’t move, watching him until he was out of sight. Only then did he open
dark, delicate fingers to see what was there. It was a plaque of malachite;
picked out on it in silvery material was a flaming wheel, a mandala. The thing
he’d so vaguely longed for had now found him. He tucked the token into his
safest inner pocket and set out for his father’s manor house. There were
deceptions to work, lip service to pay, eventual disengagement to be made from
the career being forced upon him. His destiny had made itself known; he
embraced it fervently.

Centuries
before the Great Blow, Yardiff’s thin brown legs carried him home tiredly
through sun-baked streets.

Sorcery was
his contagion.

His delights
were the coruscating spells that bent men and the world to his will. He
rejoiced in them as viands, as he thought, for some inner hunger.

It was
inevitable from the start that he should enter the service of the darker
influences, the more terrible forces.

As
journeyman, he’d roamed the world, contesting, learning, along the hidden
orbits of enchanters. He faced spells, demons, strange beasts, and hostile men
and women. He grew from each incident.

He heard of a
mountain bandit who’d devised a clever means of binding men to him. Disguised, he
went to spy it out for himself. The outlaw would slip a prospective follower
food drugged with Earnai, then have him borne into a secret garden. There the
initiate would awaken, in seeming paradise, to eat and drink his fill and take
his way with compliant women. Drugged again, he’d be returned to the “mortal
plane” and made the simple offer of eternal joy in exchange for unquestioning
loyalty. The technique seldom failed to produce a fanatically willing vassal.

Revealing his
puissance to the bandit, Yardiff Bey showed him true sorcery: The
bandit—Ibn-al-Yed, who later became Bey’s mask-slave—threw himself at the
magician’s feet. His burgeoning realm of criminals and murderers became a
keystone in Yardiff Bey’s own concealed empire.

Bey had gone
from task to task, always climbing in the dangerous favors of his Liege, the
demon Amon, until the mighty attempt of the Great Blow. Then, the Masters had
uprooted the Lifetree and made their fearsome effort to open the way between
mortal plane and infernal, to summon up hordes from Hell. But it had been
despoiled, though the world had been transformed forever in the disaster, and
the Unity ended.

In the wake
of that failure, with the darker forces harried closely by their opponents,
Yardiff Bey had risen in perilous, opportunistic service; he’d kept the
Crescent Lands from driving out every vestige of the Masters’ influence.
Eventually, the Five had solidified their power, and foremost among their
agents stood Yardiff Bey. They’d revealed to him a fragment of his destiny,
that his hope for ultimate success lay in three children he would beget, the
first a girl, the second a boychild, and the third both, yet neither.

He’d
subverted the many Southwasteland tribes, forging them into True Believers for
his Masters. He’d brought down the vengeance of the Bright Lady on Glyffa by
encouraging its king in the suppression of women. He’d distorted matters to
Springbuck’s greatgrandfather, so that Blazetongue was wrongly taken from
Veganá in a battle that should never have been fought. In disguise, he’d
prompted Hightower into that defiance that had left him blinded, hateful and
disillusioned for decades. Bey had raised the great fortress at Death’s Hold,
on the westernmost shore of the Crescent Lands, and filled it with vicious armsmen,
only to see it fall once it had served its purpose.

A great
challenge had come, when the Deep-Rock Folk, the clans of tiny subterraneans,
had cried out for protection. His name had long gone abroad; he’d answered
their plea, for few heroes had survived.

The Deep-Rock
Folk had been set upon by a creature from the lower Depths. Bey fought it in a
lone combat through the strata of the earth, he and his adversary stalking and
attacking one another in a series of duels that had lasted weeks.

Yardiff Bey’s
hand came up to the silver-and-malachite ocular he wore where his own left eye
had been. The price of victory had been that eye. As replacement, he’d taken
the single eye of his monstrous antagonist, confining its terrible energies and
making it his own with the eyepiece he’d fashioned.

Then he’d
stated his price. The Deep-Rock Folk had labored for twelve years to build a
vessel, an adamantine shell in which he could imprison a fire-elemental and
harness it. In the end he’d had
Cloud Ruler,
his flying ship.

He’d
insinuated his way into the confidence of generations of the
Ku-Mor-Mai.
At last, he put his own bastard son, Strongblade, on the throne.

Then things
had begun to go wrong. First the madman Van Duyn had appeared. Next, Springbuck
had escaped house arrest at Earthfast. The Five had lifted their attention from
darkling meditations to a premonition of
divergence.
But Bey had
convinced them he still controlled events, and thought he did.

Gil MacDonald
had come, summoned by the deCourteneys and Van Duyn, to shake the whole network
of ordinations. Bey’s plans had been destroyed before his eyes in Court at
Earthfast, by magic and force of arms. Compelled to flee, he had seen his world
unravel.

Yardiff Bey
thought about that, in the Hour of the Drug. He recalled those last moments,
striking down Dunstan and abducting him, escaping in
Cloud Ruler,
seeking sanctuary among his remaining supporters. At last he’d sought refuge in
Death’s Hold, gathering a few loyal adherents. But exile had held no
fulfillment; he literally would rather have been dead. He’d come at last to
Salamá, to the Five, and been granted another chance, a reprieve. Who else but
Yardiff Bey was suited to ferret out the secret of the ancient mage Rydolomo?

His plans
were meshing again. It had been unfortunate that the deCourteneys hadn’t been
lured north together, but at least they were separated; their whole was greater
than the sum of its parts.

Better, the
Heir of Veganá and the sword Blazetongue were on the move, occupying the
attention of Andre deCourteney, permitting Bey to hunt out the secret he needed
so badly. Once he’d secured it, no opposition would matter.