Brotherhood of the Wolf (43 page)

She struggled, and found herself falling from regions of darkness, into the perfect obscurity of the moat.

A great sturgeon swam beside her, skimmed her hand and whipped away through the water. She felt the wash of its wake as it departed, but it returned again a moment later. The big fish swam around her lazily, creating an intricate pattern, like a dance.

“Hello,” Myrrima mouthed. “I'm dying.”

Myrrima closed her eyes and lay for a long time, letting the water numb her. The frigid water soothed her muscles, drew the pain even from her bones.

It's lovely here, she thought. Ah, if I could only stay for tea.

She found herself dozing for a moment, and woke with a start.

Some light had returned, enough to see by. She lay in the muck at the bottom of the moat.

A sturgeon floated through the water, drew near, and then held steady, one huge eye the color of beaten silver staring at her. The great sturgeon, longer than she, merely parted its bony lips, its feelers drooping like a moustache, opening and closing its mouth minutely with each opening and closing of its gills.

She felt amazed to find herself alive. Her mind was clearing, and now her lungs ached for air. Two more great sturgeons whipped past her in a frenzy, swirling in dance.

She remembered the runes they'd drawn.

Protection, healing. Over and over for days. Protection, healing. The water wizards were powerful.

With the recognition that she would live, Myrrima suddenly felt concern for others. She looked up from the bottom of the moat. The surface was thirty feet up. Darkness still covered half the sky.

She pushed her toes into the muck, feeling freshwater mussels beneath her feet, and swam upward, bursting from the surface.

She began to cough, clearing water from her lungs.

Lying weightless in the water had seemed easy. Now she
found that swimming in her clothes was hard. She churned through icy water, slogged toward shore so that she could climb up through the cattails along the moat's bank.

The water weighted down her riding clothes so that she felt as if she were swimming in chain mail. She saw her bow and quiver floating nearby. Half of her arrows had spilled from the quiver.

Grabbing the weapons, she swam to the cattails and climbed up, sank wearily to the grass. The frigid water left her numb, trembling from cold. Hail began to pelt her.

There on the green grass, she looked up into the gloom. Darkness reigned all around, but mostly it centered uphill, over the King's Keep.

Myrrima crawled to her knees. Her horse was sloshing up out of the moat. She felt astonished to see it alive, for she was sure that a lightning bolt had pierced it. Yet she'd known a man in Bannisferre who had been struck by lightning on three different occasions and only had a couple of burn scars and a numb face to show for it. Either the horse had been lucky or the water wizard's spells had healed it.

Farther afield, Sir Donnor and his mount lay dead. Myrrima did not need to check them to know. Sir Donnor was hewn in more than one piece, and his mount lay so twisted and broken that it might never have been a horse.

Myrrima struggled to stand, strung her bow and nocked an arrow.

Her mount neighed in fear, managed to churn a path up the bank, then it raced away from the castle, heading back across the valley toward the hills where Jureem hid. In the gloom, Myrrima turned and ran over the drawbridge, uphill, into Castle Sylvarresta.

The clubfooted boy gazed at the wizard's room, at the bundles of herbs tied in the rafters, at the baskets made of coiled rope that held dry herbs above the mantel. Iome recalled how Binnesman had gone in search of herbs this morning, glanced about desperately for something the wizard might have used to fight with. She hoped that Binnes
man might have left his staff, but it was nowhere to be seen.

She saw a bag sitting on a low stool, ran to it. It was the bag Binnesman had been hauling herbs in this morning. She turned it inside out. Dozens of goldenbay leaves, bits of root and bark, and flower petals fell out—the odds-and-ends of his craft.

Iome scooped them up, held them protectively. She cringed, listening. Her heart thudded in her ears. The clubfooted boy moaned in terror, gasping for breath. Wind whirled about the castle, making the fire sputter in the hearth.

Upstairs in my room are opals, Iome thought, recalling the light that had blazed from them under Binnesman's hand. They were of low quality compared to the ones that she'd given the wizard, but at the moment, Iome wanted anything to protect her.

Above her she heard footsteps, a heavy foot landing on the floorboards. Her heart hammered.

Binnesman? she wondered. Could Binnesman be in the keep? Or is it the Darkling Glory?

Whoever it was, he was on the first floor.

It couldn't be the Glory, Iome told herself. Such a creature would fly up to the roof. It would land there like a graak and sit shifting its wings. It wouldn't land by the front door, enter like a common cleaning wench.

“It comes for you,” Gaborn's warning echoed in her mind.

The beast stalked across the floor. She heard claws scratching the wooden planks as it reached the door above. She heard it sniff, testing for a scent.

Then the sound of splintering wood filled the air as the door at the top of the stairs exploded inward.

Iron hinges and bolts clanked as they rolled down the rough flagstone steps. Wooden planks clattered.

The Darkling Glory drew near, kicking the remains of the door aside, sniffing as it came.

Outside, the wind had been shrieking, storming.

The winds suddenly died. Everything went quiet. Yet Iome could still feel the storm; there was a suffocating heaviness to the air.

On the far side of the door, a deep, inhuman voice whispered, “I smell you, woman.”

Iome fought back the urge to cry out. She desperately searched for a weapon. Binnesman did not have much in the room—no sword or mace, no bow or javelin. He was not a warrior.

He had only his magic.

She heard snuffling at the door. “Can you understand me?” the creature asked.

“I smell you, too,” she answered. The beast carried the heavy ordors of putrefaction and hair and wind and lightning.

She glanced about. Earth Wardens used magic soils for many spells. She recalled how Binnesman had curled up in the corner, pulling topsoil over himself like a blanket.

She grabbed a handful of the dry soil, cast it into the air.

“Come to me,” the Darkling Glory said.

“You can't come in here!” Iome shouted, hoping it was true. She'd sensed the earth power in this room. Suddenly she recalled Binnesman's words: the Darkling Glory was a creature of Air and Darkness. The wizard had drawn runes of warding and earth power on the floor of this room.

And earth was ever the bane of air. Outside, the Darkling Glory had used wind to lift her horse the way a cat might use a paw. But now the winds had gone silent. The beast was crippled down here, weakened. She said again, with more certainty: “You can't come in.”

The Darkling Glory snarled like some fell beast. “I
can
come for you. And I will, if I must.”

Iome threw another handful of dust toward the door, hoping to drive the beast away.

“Come to me,” the Darkling Glory whispered. “Come out to me, and I will let you live.”

“No,” Iome said.

“Give me the King's son,” the Darkling Glory said. “I smell a son.”

Iome's heart pounded. She backed into the corner. The clubfooted boy whimpered. “The King has no son,” Iome answered, voice quavering. “There is only a young boy.”

“I smell a son,” the Darkling Glory assured her. “In your womb.”

Myrrima ran with her bow, panting hard from the effort, racing up the streets of Sylvarresta toward the King's Keep. She could not see the keep. The Darkling Glory had wrapped it in veils of night.

Hail pelted the cobblestones all around, bounced noisily from the leaded roofs of the merchants' quarter.

A tornado of flames seemed to hover above the keep, and the fire whirled and was lost in a haze of darkness. Myrrima knew that Iome must be in the keep. She'd glimpsed Iome racing toward it only moments before.

The sky above remained black as the Darkling Glory drew light from the heavens. Yet everywhere, at the limit of vision on the horizon, beams of light shone down, as if silver fires burned in the distance. By this dim reflected light she found her footing over the uneven cobblestones.

As she ran, heart racing, she considered how she might shoot this beast, this Darkling Glory.

She had been practicing the bow for only a couple of hours over the past two days. All her arrows were shot from a range of eighty yards. She didn't trust herself to try for a longer shot.

By the Powers, she thought, I don't trust myself to try for any shot at all!

She'd do best if she got close, if she got within a comfortable shooting range. Her heart hammered, her breathing came ragged.

If I miss, I'm dead, she realized. One shot is all I'll ever get.

The Darkling Glory would hurl bolts of lightning in return.

She reached the Black Corner. Ahead, the portcullis that
led to the King's Gate rose, a darker monolith against an almost perfect black.

Hidden beneath the portcullis stood the wizard Binnesman.

He held his staff overhead, swirling it in wide motions as he chanted softly, fearfully, words that she could not hear. A dim green light issued from his staff, as if it were a flaming ember, and Myrrima could see him clearly, limned by the light. His steadfast gaze was fixed upon the orb of darkness that surrounded the King's Keep.

Something strange had happened. No winds screamed about the keep, no lightning flashed.

The Darkling Glory seemed to have fallen silent.

It's in there with Iome, Myrrima realized. The thought made her faint, and she staggered on the cobblestones.

Myrrima ran softly, afraid that the Darkling Glory might hear her footsteps.

Suddenly an inhuman cry rang from the heart of the darkness around the King's Keep. It split the night and echoed from the stone walls of the castle.

Binnesman whirled his staff and chanted in triumph.

“Eagle of the netherworld,
now I
curse you.
By the Power of the Earth I seal your doom.
Let the lair of stone become your tomb!”

The Darkling Glory touched the door to the room where Iome hid, so that it swung open on squeaky hinges.

The hallway behind the beast was darker than any night. A finger of blackness stole over the room. The coals in the fire began to die.

“Milady!” the clubfooted boy cried, lurching toward the fire.

In the shadows, the Darkling Glory snarled. A lightning bolt sizzled through the air, past Iome's head, and exploded against the ancient wooden walls.

Iome held up her little pouch of leaves and roots, hoping it would ward the beast away.

The Darkling Glory roared as if in pain.

Suddenly the Keep shuddered as if an earthquake had struck. Everywhere the walls rocked. The sound of splintering wood and of stone grinding upon stone filled the air. Baskets dropped from shelves. Overhead the heavy oaken beams of the rafters shrieked in protest as they shattered.

In total darkness, six stories of stone collapsed in on itself.

Gaborn lay asleep in a faint while his troops regrouped. Though men tried, none could rouse him. After listening to his heartbeat for a moment, Sir Langley merely said, “Prop him on his horse and let him sleep, if that's what he has a mind to do. I'll whip any man among you who dares disturb his slumber.”

In his dreams, Gaborn hovered above some great and spacious building.

It might have been the Blue Tower, near the Courts of Tide, he thought, though Gaborn had never been inside.

But no, this building seemed more begrimed and sinister than any proper building should have. No tapestries adorned the walls, no lanterns hung from wall hooks. The stonework was old, the interior plaster all worn away.

The building was as cold as a dungeon. Many of its gray stones were worn or broken loose from the wall. But it was not exactly a dungeon; it was a ruin, a maze of walls without a roof.

In this dank old building, Myrrima and Iome ran from Raj Ahten with blindfolds over their eyes. Gaborn was imprisoned in a metal cage that hung from a huge tree. He gazed down over the maze, through gaping holes in the roof.

He heard the Wolf Lord's wet feet slap against stones, could hear what sounded like claws scraping the floor. He could sometimes glimpse Raj Ahten's hulking black shape. Yet Iome and Myrrima were at a disadvantage and seemed not to recognize the danger. He had to warn them.

“Hide! Hide!” Gaborn pleaded. Yet each time they tried to conceal themselves in a corner, the dark creature of dream plodded unerringly toward them.

“Hide!” he warned.

Binnesman finished chanting his spell, twirled his staff. A green bolt of light, like a touch of summer bursting through leaves, shot from his staff and raced toward the keep.

The light penetrated the darkness, and was lost.

Stones cracked and splintered in the keep as rocks toppled by the ton.

The fiery tornado above the King's Keep swirled and shattered.

Brilliant sunlight suddenly filled the sky. Dust swirled in the air, and Myrrima raced through the portcullis to stand beside Binnesman.

The wizard gazed in triumph.

Myrrima stared in horror.

The King's Keep had collapsed in utter ruin. A pile of stones fifteen feet tall littered the ground, dust rising around them. Bits of furniture and tapestries added color to the wreckage, and a stone gargoyle that had decorated the upper reaches of the keep sat tilted on the pile of broken stones, grinning as if in mockery.

Myrrima stared in shock, her mind numb.

Binnesman glanced at her. “I've imprisoned the beast,” Binnesman said, his voice weary, “sealed him in the Earth.” With finality he leaned on his staff and said, “Let us only hope that I can hold him!”