The Sword of the South - eARC (58 page)

“And somehow—to this day I don’t know how—the Carnadosans committed the most heinous crime in Kontovar’s history. They stole the Crown of Ottovar and hid it so well that no living eye has seen it since. They couldn’t
destroy
it, for Ottovar had bound too much of the wild magic into its making. To destroy it would have released that magic, destroying not only those who released it but every wizard, warlock, and witch within thousands upon thousands of leagues. No one knew how many would have died, and no one dared find out.

“But they didn’t have to destroy it, for merely stealing it unleashed the Dark Lords in all their power. Cleres had named me Lord of the Council of Ottovar five years before the Crown was stolen, but that wasn’t long enough to repair our neglect, and we were handicapped by the Strictures. They weren’t, and they’d spent decades perfecting obscenely powerful offensive spells. We hadn’t, and it was all we could do to parry their arcane attacks, and we couldn’t—
wouldn’t
—recruit our armies as they recruited theirs: with spells of enslavement and summonings from the darkest corners of every hell. There seemed no end to the armies they could marshal and hurl against us, yet even then we might have held, but for the final treachery. I saw it coming. I knew it would happen, and I warned Cleres, but he refused to believe me.”

Wencit’s voice turned even softer, deeper.

“He had two sons, and the younger of them wanted the Gryphon Throne. He wanted it with a hunger that was a madness, and when the Crown was stolen, he joined the Carnadosans. He did more than join them. He was a great noble in his own right—Grand Duke of the Gryphon as his brother’s heir—and he took in his entire armed might to the side of the traitors. In the end, he sold his very name and soul to Carnadosa herself in return for the power of wild wizardry, and he—an Ottovaran, second in line for the throne—became the Lord of Carnadosa.”

Wencit rose slowly, standing like a dark, accusing silhouette against the fading light, and his flaming eyes burned down at Kenhodan.

“And so what had been a rebellion became a dynastic war between Ottovarans, each claiming the throne for his own. It weakened the imperial authority at the very moment when it needed its greatest strength, and the Empire of Ottovar crumbled. Not quickly, not overnight, but inexorably—unstoppably. And I watched it happen.”

He turned away in his pain, staring out into the night.

“You know how it ended, and what I did
after
the end. But the worst burden I bear, Kenhodan—the very worst burden of all—is to know that, faced with the same choices and the same knowledge, I would do it all—every single bitter, bloody, step of it—all over again.”

He stood very still, and Kenhodan shuddered inside as he finished in an agonized whisper.

“And knowing that, knowing you would kill millions yet again, allow those you loved as dearly as life itself to die yet again…that, my friend, is a weight to crush your very soul.”

Wencit walked away into the hum of night insects and the cries of night birds. He left Kenhodan alone, staring after him, humbled by the ancient wizard’s sorrow. The red-haired man longed to follow him, to comfort him, but what could ever comfort such pain?

The voices of the night twittered and buzzed about him, and Kenhodan could find no answer to that question.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Hidden Ways

Moonrise found the travelers once more on the move.

There wasn’t a great deal of conversation. Bahzell and Walsharno had the lead, moving well ahead of the others while their keener senses sought the easiest trail through the darkness in obedience to Wencit’s general directions. The two of them were too deeply linked as they focused on that responsibility to spend much time conversing with anyone else. Chernion, on the other hand, rode without speaking for reasons of her own, grimly resolved to avoid giving the wizard an opening for yet another of those disconcerting verbal jabs of his. Kenhodan rode in matching silence, but in his case, it was a silence born of compassion. Wencit seemed outwardly unaffected by their conversation, yet Kenhodan had come to know him too well. Somewhat to his own surprise, he realized he saw even deeper into the old wizard than Bahzell did, and he felt the pain lingering within him.

Eventually, however, they turned south once more and paused, resting the horses, as a heavy growth of trees loomed before them. The forest had risen slowly as they approached; now it was a dark, solid black mass like some ominous natural fortress entrenched across their path.

“I’m thinking we’d do better turning in and sleeping than traveling on in such as this, Wencit,” Bahzell said, gesturing at the trees while they listened to the wind-sigh and branch rustling of its nighttime breathing. “It’s not so very much even Walsharno and I could be seeing under those branches. We’ll likely break our necks—or a horse’s legs—if we’re after keeping on in the dark.”

“We won’t break anything,” Wencit retorted. “Unlike
some
people, I know where I’m going.”

“Which is more than I do,” Bahzell rumbled. “What about you, Border Warden? Would it happen you’re after knowing your way about these woods?”

“I’ve never traveled through them, but I’ve heard of them, and none of what I’ve heard is good,” Chernion replied shortly. “This is the Scarth Wood, and people who go into it don’t come out.”

“Nonsense,” Wencit said comfortably. “What you mean is that people who try to go
through
it don’t come out. The Dragon Ward lies right down its middle. That’s enough to provide all sorts of…accidents for anyone who tries to cross it, and the dragons tend to exterminate anyone who actually gets past it to intrude upon them.”

“This is the Scarth Wood?” Bahzell asked, gazing thoughtfully at the ancient trunks before them.

“It is. It’s also our path to Torfo. Follow us.”

He touched Byrchalka lightly on the neck and the courser pressed forward into the total blackness beneath the towering trees. Walsharno cocked his head, ears pricked, and gave his fellow courser a long, steady look, but Byrchalka never hesitated. He only glanced back with an unmistakable snort of amusement and shook his head hard enough to flap his mane. Then he turned back to the trees and Walsharno gave a snort of his own—this time an encouraging sort of snort to Glamhandro and the horses. Glamhandro moved out willingly enough at the touch of Kenhodan’s heel, followed by Chernion and the packhorses while Walsharno brought up the rear of their changed formation.

The tree cover wasn’t actually as heavy and complete as it had appeared from outside the woods. Moonlight penetrated patchily, pooling on drifts of long-undisturbed leaves, but Kenhodan felt uneasy, despite the better visibility, as he followed Wencit. If the wizard or Byrchalka felt the least apprehension, they hid it admirably, yet he seemed to feel a humming presence all about him—a sense of barely restrained power looming in the darkness, ready to pounce and entirely too near to hand for his comfort. Or was that simply his imagination, produced only because he knew the ward was near?

Somehow he didn’t think so as he watched the others. Neither Bahzell nor Chernion seemed eager to dispute with Wencit and Byrchalka for the honor of leading. Clearly, they, too, sensed that this forest was unnatural, a wood even their formidable skills were ill-suited to deal with, and they picked their way carefully, following their wizard guide without straying from the path he chose.

It was impossible to make much speed, despite the wide spacing of the trees and the absence of any underbrush. The leaf-covered ground was close enough to invisible, even where the moonlight broke through, that the horses—even the coursers—had to move cautiously. Still, they’d penetrated several slow miles before Wencit drew rein once more, and all of the others were relieved at the halt.

“We’ll not make much time this way, Wencit,” Bahzell said. He wasn’t protesting, simply stating a self-evident fact. “I’m thinking as we’d cover the same ground quicker with daylight.”

“We might,” Wencit agreed. “Except that I couldn’t see my guide marks then.”

“Guide marks, is it now? In this?” Bahzell sounded frankly doubtful.

“Watch.”

Wencit raised a hand and sketched a sign in the air, and his companions’ eyes widened as a line of flickering lights glowed suddenly. They burned like tiny beacons in a long line that arrowed under the trees and disappeared in the distance, lost among the trunks. Wencit let the others gaze at them for several seconds, then chuckled and closed his hand, and the lights vanished abruptly.

“You see? I could find them in daylight if I had to, but only by using more of the art than I’d like to so close to Wulfra. Block or no, some of it might leak through, especially if she’s laid out a network of kairsalhain charged with guard spells. Of course, it’s not likely she’d care to get close enough to the Dragon Ward for that, but there’s always the possibility.”

“B-But what—?” Chernion bit her lip.

“I beg your pardon, Elrytha?” Wencit asked courteously, and she glowered at him in the darkness before she accepted his challenge.

“Where did those come from?” she asked levelly.

“Why, I put them here, Border Warden,” the wizard said lightly. “At the same time I set the Dragon Ward. They lead straight to Castle Torfo.”

“So that’s how you’re after knowing what Wulfra’s about,” Bahzell mused. “You’ve a neat little secret highway right into her kitchen garden.”

“Perhaps I do, but I’ve never used it,” Wencit replied. “There was never any need to.”

Bahzell glanced at him strangely and started to speak, then stopped. Kenhodan wondered what the hradani had been about to say, and then felt his own eyes widen in sudden surmise. If Wencit had never used his “guide marks” before, why had he created them? For that matter, he’d set the Dragon Ward only a century or so after the Fall—over twelve hundred years ago. How could he have known he’d someday need a secret path through the Scarth Wood before Angthyr was even settled?

The questions burned in Kenhodan’s brain, and he longed to ask them. But, like Bahzell, he didn’t. The icicle moving up and down his spine suggested that the answers to those questions had entirely too much to do with their current mission and all those unanswered mysteries in his own past, and he discovered he was less eager to hear those answers than he’d thought he was. Not when they led into something like
this
. Besides, Wencit had reasons for everything he did, and if he chose not to volunteer them, it was probably better not to know them.

Wencit’s wildfire eyes glowed at his companions, and Kenhodan wondered whether he was amused or simply waiting. Like Bahzell, Kenhodan had come to recognize the wizard’s delight in confounding his audience with occasional, offhand displays of knowledge or power. But he’d also come to wonder how much of that was because it genuinely amused the old man and how much was carefully designed to serve an entirely different purpose. A wizard with a reputation for baffling others for the simple pleasure of it might find that a useful cover for the times he had to admit others to mysteries he normally preferred to hide.

Wencit brought Kenhodan’s musing to an end with a respectful tongue click to Byrchalka and the courser started off again, lifting his feet high and half-prancing. If the others wondered whether or not Wencit was truly amused, the coal black courser clearly didn’t, and he flirted his tail impudently at Walsharno as he forged back into motion.

Kenhodan and Bahzell exchanged baffled headshakes, then Glamhandro followed on Byrchalka’s heels while Walsharno fell back into his trailing position. Chernion rode at center of the small party, leading the pack horses, and her own. mind was busy assessing suspicions about the wizard which were very similar to Kenhodan’s, though considerably less charitable. She knew herself for a subtle web-spinner, but this sort of centuries-long deviousness brought home just how unlike anyone else she’d ever confronted Wencit truly was. If he had surprises like this one up his sleeve for Wulfra’s benefit—and if he’d known that long in advance that he’d
need
those surprises—who knew what he might hold in reserve for dealing with
her?

After another hour, they slithered down a steep bank into a ravine. At first Kenhodan thought it was natural, but then he noticed its absolutely uniform width and the fact that only moss grew along its level bottom. There were neither trees nor undergrowth, and the ravine’s floor was as firm and flat as most roads. In fact, the more he studied it, the more it took on the appearance of a highway. A
hidden
highway, for the tops of its banks soon rose well above even the coursers’ heads, and the growth crowning them was densely intertwined. It would be almost impossible for anyone to stumble across it, even if they’d dared come this close to the menace of the Dragon Ward.

“This is amazing,” he said tentatively, his voice low.

“What? The pathway?” Wencit shrugged. “I had to do quite a bit of local rearranging when I set the ward, Kenhodan. It struck me this might come in handy one day. It wasn’t much trouble to include it along with everything else, and the power of the working that set the ward was so great I could be confident no one would notice the energy I used to create it.”

“And that was important because it was obvious you’d need to sneak through the area unobserved one day. I can see that,” Kenhodan agreed just a touch too courteously.

His manner said plainly that Wencit could be as secretive as he liked, and the wizard glanced across at him, then chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder as they rode side by side. The genuineness of his humor made Kenhodan feel better about him, and Wencit gave him an affectionate shake.

“Kenhodan,” he murmured, “I begin to have hopes for you. I truly do.”

He gave the younger man another shake, and then Byrchalka stepped forward just a bit more briskly, as if some silent message had passed between him and his rider. The courser flowed away over the smooth ravine’s floor, leaving Kenhodan to ride thoughtfully at his heels.

* * *

They rode all night and all through the next day, pausing only to rest their mounts at regular intervals, and Wencit led them unerringly along the hidden road. It twisted and turned as evening drew on once again, clearly following the line of the most difficult terrain, but it never narrowed, and it never ended.

The moon had set and a second night crept toward a close as they edged endlessly along. They’d made good time once they entered the ravine, but even Glamhandro was beginning to droop by the time pewter-colored dawn seeped into the woods, and Kenhodan was about to suggest they all needed a longer rest badly when Wencit suddenly stopped unasked.

Kenhodan peered past him and saw that the ravine ended just ahead in a grove of beech and ash. Fresh-budded branches swayed and whispered overhead and the yellow streamers of dead beech leaves swirled about them in a gentle cloud as they eased up out of their sunken roadbed into the softly breathing sunrise, and as Kenhodan drew up beside him, Wencit touched his arm and then pointed to the east.

Dying stars twinkled in a deep blue sky, faint and infinitely distant as the sun stirred restlessly just below the horizon. The eastern sky was salmon and palest rose, and the world was cool and fresh, hushed under the soft sigh of wind and murmur of branches as Kenhodan followed the pointing finger with his eyes and stiffened.

A tall hill stood against the delicately streaked sky, dark and cold with dew. Bare slopes and tumbled rocks climbed up its flanks, barren and dreary in the gray light…and atop the hill, there brooded a fortress.

Battlements etched clean lines against the dawn, and a massive central keep thrust high above the inner curtain wall. Shadows hid the foot of the hill, but he saw the vague flicker and white smother of foam of a waterfall far beyond the castle, faint and hard to see with distance in the dimness, and realized the entire hill stood in the midst of a small lake. The fortress sat on its hill, waiting, yellow torches fuming on the battlements, shone through arrow slits, and reflected faintly from rippled lake water as day broke. Lanterns bobbed slowly and methodically along the walls to mark the weary beats of sentries, and light spilled through a barred portcullis in the heavily shadowed western wall to glow on a lowered drawbridge. He could just make out the dark shapes of a strong gate guard in full armor, and the land around the castle had been brushed back to the water’s edge, stripping away all cover along its approaches.

“Behold Castle Torfo,” Wencit said softly.

* * *

“Oh, I behold the castle,” Kenhodan said wearily. “What I
don’t
behold is how you plan to get inside it!”

“Aye,” Bahzell agreed. “I’m thinking the lad’s a point. It does seem to be a trifle heavily guarded.”

“It is,” Wencit agreed. “So we’ll simply have to avoid their guard posts, I suppose.”

“I see.” Kenhodan looked over at Bahzell and grinned. “I’m surprised at you, Bahzell! All we have to do is find the door Wulfra forgot to lock. Every evil sorceress in every story I ever heard forgot to lock the door before the intrepid heroes turned up.”

“Actually, you could say she did exactly that,” Wencit said calmly. “Not that she
knows
she left any of them unlocked. She’s not the most gracious of hostesses, and if she’d known about the door, she certainly
would
have locked it. Since she didn’t…”

He shrugged, and Chernion snorted harshly.