Black Wizards (30 page)

The sight of the man sent waves of terror through Robyn, and she stood mutely, staring at his approach. Now she could see his face—he was grinning with demonic glee.

She shook her head suddenly and remembered Genna’s command. Inhaling deeply, she forced herself to be calm. And she thought of the new body, the one she would change into. She felt herself fall forward,
landing lightly on strong forepaws. A snarl—an instinctive mixture of fear and anger—curled her lip. The sleek body of the gray wolf felt fast and powerful.

Genna looked back and saw that Robyn had changed. The great druid closed her eyes quickly in concentration, but then she staggered under the impact of a zombie attack. The creature slashed at her again, and she fell to the ground.

Robyn was horrified to see the zombie lunging at Genna. Several others were moving in with stilted eagerness.

The body of the gray wolf crouched, and a deep growl rumbled from its chest. The Great Druid kicked at the zombie but turned her head toward her student.

“Flee, Robyn! While you still can!”

But Robyn sprang instead, and the force of her leap knocked the zombie to its side. Burning with canine rage, Robyn felt no revulsion as her teeth sank into the creature’s arm. With a savage bite, she pulled the limb off and tossed it to the side.

Other zombies closed in, but Robyn heard a growl behind her, and she knew that Genna had changed. Whirling, Robyn raced to the side of another wolf, larger and more grizzled, but still very swift.

Like two gray ghosts, they darted among the clumsy creatures until they had passed from the ranks of the army. But even as the enemy fell far behind, the two wolves kept racing to the north toward the grove.

“Kralax withyss, torral.”

Space shimmered suddenly under the combined influence of Kryphon’s and Cyndre’s spells. And then the younger man, with Doric, was instantly transported from the chamber in Caer Callidyrr to a place many miles to the south. Kryphon transported himself, but Cyndre’s spell had been necessary to move Doric, for she did not have the power of teleportation yet.

The pair arrived in a small stable. Their appearance startled the assassin into wakefulness. Razfallow’s hand darted to his dagger, but Kryphon was ready.

“Dothax, mylax heeroz,” he said softly, gesturing swiftly at the
assassin. Razfallow relaxed and stood.

“It is good to see you again, my friend,” he said.

“And you,” Kryphon replied. He smiled thinly, not from any pleasure at the greeting, but from this evidence that his spell had worked.

“Now, go back to sleep,” Kryphon ordered. I will tell you what I need later.”

He turned to Doric, who stood silently at his side. The master was gone. Alexei had been dealt with. Finally, he had the woman all to himself. He reached out and threw back her hood, his thin smile growing into a crooked leer.

Doric smiled back at him. Her black hair framed her thin face, and her green eyes glittered with excitement. She was nearly as tall as Kryphon, and very thin. Most men would have described her as gaunt, but the wizard thought that she was the most desirable thing in the world—at least, for the moment.

“My pretty one, you shall serve me now—and only me. I will see that untold power is yours.”

Doric narrowed her eyes and gazed coolly at him. He sensed, with disappointment, that the charm spell he had used to beguile her earlier had worn off. Still, she did not look unhappy.

“You don’t have that power to offer, yet,” she said, with a trace of a sneer. “But perhaps my desires are not so different from yours.” She came easily into his arms, and the heat of her body was like a furnace.

Their mission could wait.

“It’s not the grandest place on the isles, but we like it here,’ said Hugh O’Roarke modestly, gesturing into the deep valley before them.

“I don’t understand,” said Tristan. “Where’s Doncastle?”

“Right there,” grinned the bandit, pointing to the center of the valley. Tristan saw an expanse of green treetops, covering the entire valley floor except for the course of a bright and winding riverway that meandered through the forest.

O’Roarke had claimed that his town was large—and that it lay in the heart of this deep, forested valley. Yet there was no sign of anything but energetic nature.

“In fact, many of our houses are in the treetops,” boasted the bandit chief.

“I’ve never heard of dwellings in the trees before. Isn’t it a little inconvenient?” asked the prince.

“Perhaps inconvenient when staggering home from a night at the tavern, yes, but we find it very convenient when the troops of the king come to attack.”

“You have stood against the army of the High King?” asked Pontswain, surprised.

“Certainly! His legions swarmed from the woods, but we were ready. The battle was a slaughter—for the king’s troops! He has never bothered us again!”

Something about the bandit’s bravado sounded empty, and the prince doubted he was telling the whole truth—at least, the unexaggerated truth. He wondered if the bandits had fought more than a small detachment.

“Legions, eh?” said Pontswain, echoing Tristan’s doubts.

Hugh scowled, but then shrugged. He didn’t say anything else, and Tristan didn’t want to risk antagonizing their host any further. Instead, he surveyed the countryside as they neared the outskirts of Doncastle.

They rode along an open path that wound through a green-domed forest of towering oaks. All of the undergrowth between the trees had been cleared, creating a woods of quiet beauty and easy travel. Only when he looked closely did the prince see that a hundred yards off the path on either side the underbrush not only had not been removed, but it had been encouraged to grow into a high tangle of impenetrable branches, Anyone approaching the city would be nearly compelled to do so through the wide corridor.

“The Swanmay River,” said the bandit, pointing to the placid waterway as they rode along its bank for a short distance. Expanding circles of ripples marked the surface where trout rose to strike at careless flies. The path twisted away from the river, back into the forest. “And this is Druid’s Gate.”

Tristan suddenly noticed that there were dwellings among the trees here. He saw a plank wall and several vine-covered roofs. Smoke emerged from several stumps, and he realized that these were cleverly
disguised chimneys. Now he saw numerous round houses, roofed over with grassy sod. He also saw buildings of wood, built against the trunks of the oaks. So cleverly were they shaped that, at a distance, they looked like part of the tree itself.

Before he knew it they were in the town, yet the place still felt like a wilderness. Tristan saw people moving about on the ground, dressed in leather or simple woolen garments. Some of them looked at the travelers, nodding to Hugh without speaking. He saw few women and children, though somewhere he heard a baby crying. It felt as though he had entered any normal, if slightly impoverished, community of the Ffolk.

When he looked up he saw large shapes in the trees and long limbs extending throughout the canopy. He realized that these were bridges and that they connected many of the trees to each other.

Hugh led them to a clump of white aspens. The silvery leaves shimmered in a light breeze, and the trunks grew so close together that a small man would have had difficulty moving through the wood.

“The stables,” announced Hugh, turning to the prince.

Several of the aspen trunks suddenly moved to the side, startling them. They saw that the trunks were actually lashed together to form a gate, though they looked like living, rooted trees. Beyond, the companions could see into the cleverly disguised corral. A man, dressed as the other bandits in brown and green leather, held the gate while Hugh’s horse and the six steeds of the companions were herded inside.

“We must remain ever alert,” proclaimed O’Roarke. “We never know when an attack will come again.”

“Why does the king attack you?” asked the prince.

“You mean, of course, why am I a bandit here in the forest?” Hugh snapped. Tristan shrugged.

“I was not always. Once, I was a lord—a loyal lord—of Callidyrr. My holdings were not great but prosperous enough. But the king decided my lands could be better administrated by one of his lackeys, a fellow his wizard had brought to him, I believe. He took my lands, my family—everything. It was only good fortune that I was out hunting at the time and did not fall into his net.

“I returned to find the king’s troops in my house, and to learn that he had declared me an outlaw. My sister had been taken to Caer
Callidyrr—I do not know even now if she is still alive—and I had no one else to care for but myself.

“If the king would brand me an outlaw, I decided that an outlaw I would be. So here I am.”

“How many lords has the king forced from their lands?” asked Tristan.

“Who knows?” shrugged Hugh. “Some have just disappeared; others have been murdered in the night. It is said that his assassins range across all the lands of the Ffolk, not just on Callidyrr.”

“I have heard … about that too,” said the prince. Then he decided to say more. Perhaps O’Roarke, in his apparent desire for vengeance, would help them.

“That is what brings us to Callidyrr. We seek to challenge the king and demand an explanation for what he has done!”

“You’ll never get it,” said Hugh. “The assassins are not the worst of the king’s defenses.”

“What do you mean?” said Pawldo, alarmed.

“Seven wizards have sworn loyalty to him. The mightiest of them, Cyndre, is a sorcerer with awesome powers.”

“Nevertheless, we intend to try,” said the prince.

O’Roarke looked at him with a strange intensity. Tristan could not read the emotions in the man’s inscrutable face.

“Well,” said Hugh O’Roarke, sounding vaguely amused, “We shall see about that, won’t we?”

The gray wolves loped steadily through the long night. At last, panting and limping, they reached the stream that marked the border of the Great Druid’s grove. Wearily, they flopped to the grassy bank. First Genna, then Robyn, changed shape.

The young druid lay on her back, enjoying the cushion of the soft grass. She felt better; her weariness, and the pain in her paws and haunches, had vanished with the canine body.

“Come, girl, there is much to be done,” said Genna, quickly climbing to her feet. She stopped suddenly and turned to the younger woman.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “That was very brave of you. And you
made the change more smoothly than any initiate I have ever taught. You have the capacity to do great work for the goddess—and I fear we shall need all of your strength now, and mine as well. Even then, I don’t know if we can prevail.”

Genna stepped into the stream and Robyn followed. She had to hurry to match her teacher’s purposeful stride.

“That man,” Robyn began. “Who, or what, was he? Why was he with the dead?”

“I don’t know who he is. He must be a cleric of some powerful and very evil god, judging by his might.”

“You mean that is his army?” Robyn suppressed a shudder.

“I think so. It was certainly his magic that dispelled my ring of fire. And he did that very easily.”