The Wizard King (26 page)

“The Sage of Sare wants you dead,” the man said, but his answer came a shade too quickly, a shade too rehearsed.

Athaya’s eyes narrowed.
Kyria, lord of the fourth circle, one year
… “That wasn’t my question.”

“If the Sage wanted us killed,” Jaren observed, “then he would have taken the pleasure of doing it himself.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Athaya saw thin tendrils of smoke beginning to curl up from the ruined pillowcase. “
Kahnil
on the blade,” she remarked evenly, even as her belly twisted itself into a fleshy knot. “You wanted to be sure.”

Jaren glanced to the knife with newfound caution; the weapon was dangerous enough as it was, but the
kahnil
made it doubly so. “Hardly the sort of weapon the Sage would have selected, is it?”

Silently realizing the prearranged ruse wasn’t going to hold, the intruder’s eyes flickered covertly to the doorway to the outer chamber. Athaya and Jaren were blocking his route of escape, but his stony expression revealed that escape was not his sole intent; he had not yet forsaken the bloody service he had come to render. In a blur of pale flesh, gleaming silver, and grubby wool, the man’s hands darted to the purse at his belt and, not bothering with the laces, sliced it open like the belly of a dove, cupping one palm so that the treasure spilled into it like innards. Grinning now, he dangled his prize just above the oil lamp on the bedstand. It was a delicate lady’s necklace worked in silver, bearing one large crystal in the center and two smaller stones on each side—a vaguely familiar design, but one that Athaya had neither the time nor resources to place. The lamplight lent them strength enough, but that gentle glow added to the flare of her witchlight made the crystals inflict twice their power. And now, neither Jaren nor Athaya held the power to snuff the witchlight out.

Sacret, lord of the fifth…

“No, no—please! Put it away!”

Jaren’s performance was so well acted that for a moment Athaya almost believed it herself; believed that the sealing spell she had set upon him had somehow failed. Crying out in pain and begging his attacker to lay aside the crippling weapon, Jaren collapsed to his knees on the floor, catching his balance on the rack of iron tools near the hearth and sending them spilling onto the floor. Then, as the intruder dared a step closer, his grin inching wider, Jaren sprang to his feet, fully lucid and armed with a sharp iron poker, ready to strike the gems from the man’s grasp.

The ruse was over in mere seconds—though to Athaya’s deadened perceptions it seemed to take far longer. The assassin was startled at Jaren’s unexpected immunity to the crystals, but was well trained in his base art; as Jaren lunged forward, the man’s wrist jerked once, sending the
kahnil
-streaked blade flying from his hand to bite the flesh of Jaren’s bared shoulder. Jaren let out a low-pitched grunt of pain and stumbled backward, the iron rod clattering uselessly to the flagstones. Hissing in pain—none of it feigned this time—he hurriedly worked out the blade so that its remaining stripes of poison would not leach into his blood.

The shock of the blow was enough to set Athaya’s focus badly off balance—had the assassin had another second to perfect his aim, the knife would have gone home in Jaren’s heart. She fought to regain control, turning her eyes from the sticky red liquid trickling down Jaren’s arm and coldly instructing herself not to be distracted by the wound, aware that her own presence of mind was the best hope for both of them.
Where was I, then?
she thought through gritted teeth.
Yes, yes… Kyria, lord of the fourth Circle, one year; Sacret, lord of the fifth
… But even in her trancelike state, Athaya could tell that Jaren’s pupils were wide and swelling still, proof that what little poison had tainted his blood was already doing its work.

Satisfied that Jaren would be no further hindrance, the assassin turned to his true prey. Athaya ignored the smug look of success on his face and glared at the necklace as if it were a trio of snarling dogs threatening to bite.
I feel nothing from you—
any
of you!
she declared, masking her fear with the forcefulness of the assertion.
You cannot harm me now. I know your secrets and you have no power over me
.

Light danced across the jewels’ myriad facets, beautiful in their deadliness, imbuing them with the power to lure her from her fragile sanctuary of control. The crystals called to her in trio, the center stone’s voice the loudest while the smaller two murmured in dreadful consonance.
Pain, pain, pain!
they cried in their wordless language of emotion.
Flee from the danger!
Athaya stood her ground against them, but knew she could not do so for very long. She had never tried to resist so many at a time before, and their clamor was frighteningly powerful. Honing her focus further, she gave full attention to the largest stone and began to scry its center—the source of its magiclike power—but the other two corbals remained to niggle at her brain, distracting her with urgent whispers.

The assassin betrayed no surprise at her own immunity to the gems; someone had clearly warned him what to expect. “Looks as if you don’t have any tricks left, wizard,” he said, inching closer. He ran a lazy tongue over the few teeth he had, as if debating how good a meal she might make once dead. “You’re just like the rest of us now… and only a woman at that.” He looped the necklace over his wrist and produced a short strip of cord from his tunic. “And you’re the one I really came for.”

Athaya’s throat constricted; she tried to cry out, but as if held in the grip of nightmares, nothing emerged. Aside from wrestling in the dirt with Nicolas as a girl, she knew nothing of hand-to-hand combat; chances were good that if she did not run
now
, her attacker would kill her with relative ease; not only did he outweigh her by no small margin, but most of her concentration was focused on repelling the corbals’ lure, making her physical reactions as slow as her mental ones… and slow enough to be fatal.

“Athaya, go!” came Jaren’s halting call. His breathing grew labored; the poison was taxing him badly. “Don’t stay for me!” He made a painfully useless attempt to shove Athaya from the room, but the assassin merely twisted his lips into a scornful smile and kicked him aside with a well-placed boot to his already injured shoulder.

That done, the man crept closer with a telltale gleam of triumph in his eyes, backing Athaya against the wall. He coiled the slender cord around his hands, ready to snag it around her throat and pull it taut. Just like…

She stiffened, remembering; remembering the last night she saw her father alive. In his mad rage, he had tried to strangle her with magic—an invisible rope of thorns and nettles—just as this man wished to do with a twopenny scrap of twine. Then she had called deadly coils of green fire to her rescue, not knowing what she did or how to use them; now she had the mastery of the deadly spell but it resided far beyond her, trapped in paths her divided concentration could not reach.

The man’s arms were thick with muscle; the cord would be as tight as Kelwyn’s spell had been, draining her of consciousness as quickly as the corbal, did she falter in her guard, would drain her of magic strength. What was she to do? Her mind floundered, torn between two equally urgent tasks. She could not stop fighting the crystals; if she did, she would succumb to their crippling power and be a pathetically easy victim for the man looming before her. Nor could she break away and flee, leaving Jaren vulnerable to further attack. So, not knowing what else to do, Athaya pushed back even harder against the corbals, focusing desperate rage upon them, knowing their power was at least a thing she could control until she thought of something better. Perhaps, she reasoned, if she could quiet their clamor a bit further, it would dispel enough of the sluggishness to allow her mind to slip her a solution… preferably in the next few seconds.

“This won’t take long,” the man said. Briefly, his gaze skimmed the length of her body, barely concealed by the thin gown of white gauze, his eyes reflecting indifferent regret at having to rob the life from it. “And then you’ll be back at the Devil’s side where you belong.”

Swallowing audibly, Athaya turned all of her energies onto the larger center crystal, turning aside the ceaseless but softer murmurs of the other two. She surrounded the crystal with her presence, fiercely smothering its influences with her own.
I feel nothing from you. You cannot harm me now. I know your secrets and you have no power over me.
The words were fueled with dreadful purpose as she pushed beyond the crystal’s voice, forcing her way closer and closer to the heart of the gem itself. The voice grew more frantic and insistent the nearer she came, but she shunted it aside with equal earnestness, refusing to heed its false warnings of pain.

She did not know what to expect when she reached her destination, but when she forced her way past the crystal’s defenses, past the barricades of deceit it thrust up to block her, and invaded the core with her presence, the din in her ears fell abruptly silent, the corbal’s center tranquil as a crypt. The cobwebs fouling her thoughts and actions were suddenly swept aside, like the lifting of a sealing spell to free congested magic. The corbal’s voice was gone, and here in its heart, as long as she held the vision steady in her mind, Athaya did not have to push back at all; did not have to shout defiances. The pulse of power still flowed, but it went around and past her, unaware of her existence. It was as if she had slipped past a castle’s tight defenses to stand in the king’s own chamber, none of the shouting guardsmen in the courtyard thinking to look for the intruder so deep within their midst.

From this place of seeming peace, the world had shifted just
so;
offering her a new perspective, like the first time one sees a city from its highest
spire
rather than its cobbled streets. The corbal seemed tilted to a new angle, allowing her to glimpse aspects thus far hidden, though they had been there all along. Now she saw not walls of purple stone, solid and unyielding as ice, but myriad tunnels branching this way and that—a maze of veinlike runnels through which the corbal’s power flowed. And without its frenzied voice, Athaya felt nothing from the gem but a curious sensation of communion. Of alignment. Of potential, barely bound.

She had known that the corbal bore a source of power, just as she did. But that was not all.

It had more than simple facets… it had paths. The corbal had
paths…

Deep inside, she felt her own power tingle in response, sensing affinity. Like reached out to like, poised for release to whatever purpose she saw fit and eagerly awaiting her will.

Paths, she echoed, through which power could be sent.
Her
power. She gasped as the last curtain was pulled aside to show a vista of frightening and unlimited potential.
You can do it. It can be done…

The realization came none too soon. Her assailant took her sharp intake of breath as a sign of surrender and decided that the moment to strike had come. But in the same instant he sprang for her, the cord pulled tight between his hands, Athaya lifted her hands and cried: “
Ignis confestim sit!
”

At her command, raw magic surged like floodwaters through her paths. Then, at her direction, she aimed her power at the corbal’s heart, from which it coursed through the crystal’s labyrinthine tunnels like blood pumping through living veins. Its power was magnified a hundredfold by the glittering facets, like a single candle in a room of mirrors, growing with intensity as it surged from the center crystal to the smaller two beside it, flooding their paths as well.

Bright fountains of green-tinted fire leaped from her fingertips, embracing the strip of cord. The rope was consumed in seconds, leaving a living line of fire in the man’s fists, glowing green and turning his sallow and astonished face the color of moss. The necklace looped around his wrist began to pulse and glow with milky white light and, stunned by spells he had been told she could not cast in the gems’ presence, the intruder flung the necklace to the ground in fright and bolted for freedom. But the fire-coils snaked down his body to snag his ankles, dropping him hard to the floor. Then the single coil became two, then four, then six… until the man was trapped in a writhing cocoon of fiery ropes, crackling and searing, smelling of smoke and the acrid stench of cooking flesh.

The corbal isn’t just a barrier to magic
, she thought drunkenly, in the midst of a miracle,
it’s a conduit…

She felt the spell’s power swell and grow as she pumped more magic through the crystals, and then felt a subtle jolt of transference as control shifted to the gems themselves; vaguely, she was aware that she was no longer feeding them power, but that the corbals were taking it on their own. Without her conscious bidding, the coils took on the twisting forms of serpents with angry red eyes and flaming tongues, winding their fiery bodies around the assassin and squeezing the breath from him as he had tried to do to their mistress. Shrieking from both pain and mortal terror, the man jerked and writhed upon the floor, futilely trying to free himself from the net of flaming serpents.

“Athaya, what are you…?”

Jaren’s voice was the merest scrape of a whisper, barely audible, but even through pain his shock was unmistakable. Athaya did not think to answer, so enthralled was she. Paths, Jaren… can’t you
see
? Fatigue began to blacken the edges of her vision but she thought little of it; she was caught in the grip of a force far more powerful than herself—a force she could no more push aside than she could a lover in the heady moments before rhythmic bliss held dominion over her body.

Every spell at her command was open to her and at as many times its original force as there were facets in the stone. Her head spun wildly with the magnitude of what she knew could be done here, of the might that could be raised against her enemies, and for an instant she felt as if she’d been granted the powers of the angels to do with what she would.