Dangerous Games (32 page)

To complete the spell, he needed to be touching the star. Before that he had to find Sunbright, and talk to Aquesita, to ask her the most important question of his life. But before that, he needed another look. Mages tinkered with the fallen star day and night. He needed to know its current makeup, size, potency. Or perhaps he was just avoiding Sita. He wished he knew what to do or say, but he wasn’t a strong-jawed hero from a chivalric romance, just a tired old mage, awkward with women. There was no magic for knowing the way to a woman’s heart. Or perhaps they possessed their own magic. Certainly they were entrancing….

But he was drifting, and here was the chamber, and Karsus’s gleeful, manic giggling.

Rounding the corner, Candlemas stopped cold.

Karsus was surrounded by apprentices, as usual, but also a trio of tailors with needles and thread in their mouths. The mad mage wore a startling white gown embroidered with silver thread. Someone had cleaned his face, scrubbed his neck, even combed and trimmed his hair. He stood with arms out as the tailors closed seams and smoothed pleats. Karsus giggled all the while.

“It’s not often you dress a god, is it? You’ll have something to tell your friends. How you served Great Karsus when he was still human!”

The tailors smiled weakly, but averted their eyes. Their usually nimble fingers shook, and they dropped pins and scissors. Lesser mages and apprentices, some twenty, puttered at the tables or else halfheartedly tapped the gray lump of star-metal with silver hammers. Everyone was uneasy, not giggling and chuckling at Karsus’s every remark. It was the first time Candlemas had seen quiet around Karsus.

The pudgy mage was sweating suddenly, his mouth dry, his knees trembling. He was surprised at his calm voice. “Great Karsus, might you enlighten me, who would learn from the Highest of the High? What exactly are you planning to do? And when?”

“Oh, I decided now’s as good a time as any.” Karsus waved vaguely toward the fallen star as he said, “My helpers think all is ready—not that they really understand what I plan. And the war goes badly, a maid said.

“And I’m tired of being human. So I’ll become an avatar, which is a being created from a god’s body, in case you don’t know. Karsus’s avatar, named after myself. I figure to sit on the star, imagine myself ascending to godhood, and draw all the remaining energy through my spine into my brain. I’ll use the same spell that temporarily disrupted the magic of this room, for I’ll want every iota drawn into my body. But I’ll steal it so quickly you’ll hardly notice. And who knows what will happen then? I might grow huge, or move to another plane—don’t worry, I’ll come back to visit—or find myself taking tea with Mystryl and the other gods. We’ll talk about how to better tap the Weave, so that privileged individuals—new godlings!—can use it directly! It should be fun! All done there? Good!”

The tailors weren’t done, but Karsus pulled away, so one undone sleeve trailed needles and thread. Pushing past his timid apprentices, he climbed on a stool, then up onto the table, circling the fallen star like a child stealing sweets from a cupboard. Spreading his trailing robes like a clown, he perched on the star, smoothed back his hair, and began to chant.

Candlemas stood paralyzed. This was insanity of the purest form. Idiot toadies standing by while their master made ready to tear down a dam holding unfathomable magic. Karsus could unleash a firestorm that could sear the world from horizon to horizon, and everyone just stood gape-mouthed and watched him.

Somehow Candlemas knew this would end in disaster. And at the very least, the magic of the fallen star would be dispelled, and he and Sunbright (and Aquesita?) would be stuck in the self-consuming kingdom of an idiot genius—or mad god. Yet what to do? He couldn’t attack Karsus personally. Shields would reduce him to cinders. He couldn’t block Karsus’s spell. He couldn’t—

Karsus raised bis voice, chanting in earnest now. The air in the room began to shimmer, like heat waves over a blacksmith’s forge. Jars and pots on tables began to jiggle. One shattered into redware shards.

Candlemas stopped thinking, and reacted.

Charging, he bowled mages aside and scrambled onto the table. In his panic, he never noticed that he dropped his smeary, crumpled scroll. Diving, he shoved Karsus off the star with both arms.

The little madman squawked as he crashed on his back on the tabletop. Toadies shouted Karsus’s name. Three of them grabbed Candlemas’s red-striped robe and jerked him back off the table. Frowning, dazed, Karsus lay and shook his head.

It was the first time Candlemas had ever seen him angry. The great archwizard pointed a bony finger and snarled.

Candlemas’s world exploded in red fire.

As the odd pair, big barbarian and tiny thief, threaded the nobles’ district, they saw increasing signs of devastation and chaos, and a complete breakdown of city authority.

Whole buildings had collapsed, some into cellars and some into the street. Streets had in turn collapsed under the weight of the fallen buildings, so craters revealed sewers. Broken water lines gushed, and Knucklebones whiffed effluvia, the deadly gas piped into homes for heating and cooking. Horse skeletons lay in their traces, stripped of flesh by the starving poor. Garbage was strewn about, and rats feasted. In alleys and behind bushes were glimpsed riddled skeletons of humans while nonhumans—half-elves, gnomes, dwarves—were lynched or nailed to walls and left to rot. Time and again they saw humans wandering in a daze, vacant, haunted looks etched in their faces.

“By the Earthmother,” muttered Sunbright. “You wouldn’t know where to start to help. Where are the guards? The body haulers? The dung shovelers?”

Knucklebones crouched, pointed one way, then shoved Sunbright the other. In a street of shops, most closed, he saw blue and silver guards looting a goldsmith’s shop. The owner lay dead on her own threshold. The thief whispered, “It looks like the end of the end. What the sages have threatened for centuries.”

“I hope we can enter Karsus’s compound.” Sunbright said, reaching over his shoulder to loosen Harvester in its scabbard and adjusting Dorlas’s warhammer riding on his hip. “I hope your little charges there, Aba and Zykta and Rolon, keep their heads down. I once promised Rolon I’d take him to the ground—”

“He’s there now.”

Knucklebones hunted a certain alley. She knew them all, but many were blocked by rubble or abandoned carriages or garbage.

She answered Sunbright’s surprised look by telling him, “That’s why I sent them to Sleeping Gunn. He lives over the warehouses at the docks because he’s a smuggler. Since I’ve disappeared and there’s been war here, he’ll have ferried the children to a stronghold on the ground.” Her voice sounded wistful, missing them. Sunbright gave her thin shoulder a squeeze, and she touched his broad, scarred hand.

“Come on.” She said choosing an alley. “We’ll go over ground a while, then underground. I know a back way into Karsus’s mansions, if it’s still open.”

They were blocked repeatedly, and often had to hunker for guards or refugees to pass, but backtracking and retracing eventually brought them into the garden beneath Candlemas’s suite. Sunbright boosted Knucklebones, who pronounced a short word and fractured all the glass in one window. Sunbright used Harvester’s hook to drag the lead frame down like a gray metal spiderweb. Then they were inside.

Knucklebones signaled to wait while she listened. Then she dashed from the room quick as a hare. A bleat was stifled, and Sunbright tramped after.

The thief sat atop a plump maid jackknifed over the bed. Candlemas’s bed was bare to the striped ticking. Fresh silk sheets and blankets awaited. Piled by the door like rubbish lay the mage’s plain wool smock, rope belt, and warped sandals that retained the imprint of his broad feet.

Sunbright was in a hurry, but told the terrified maid, “No harm if you answer. What happened to the mage who dwelt here? Why do you discard his things?”

“He-he’s locked in the cellars, sir! He’s wounded horrible! They’ve left him to die! He—I don’t know what he did exactly, but he defied Great Karsus and they’ve—”

Knucklebones tweaked her ear to silence her, said, “Tell us how to get there!”

“No time!” Sunbright countermanded. He grabbed up fresh sheets, tossed them to Knucklebones, and swaddled himself like a servant buried in laundry. “Take us!”

Trained to stay out of sight, the gasping maid brought them down servants’ stairwells to the cellars. With a quivering finger she pointed along a dim corridor lined with stone and lit only by a distant window. Four city guards idled, pitching coins against a stout wooden door, grousing at the boring duty.

“Wait here.” Knucklebones told Sunbright. “I’ll circle around to take them from behind.” Towing the trembling maid, she backed away and down the corridor.

But the barbarian couldn’t wait. Something impelled him to move quickly, as if he smelled doom in the wind. Drawing Harvester, he stepped full into the corridor. Knucklebones could catch up.

“You guards! Stand away from that door! We’ve no quarrel with you, we only want Candlemas!”

At his first words, the guards cinched helmet straps and snatched swords from scabbards. Now they assessed their enemy: a barbarian, a big one, armed with a huge scythe of a sword. They knew too that the prisoner Candlemas was important. They didn’t know why, but anyone who’d come to rescue him might fetch a large bonus. One of them growled and two guards—a man and a woman—trotted off to circle behind Sunbright, where they’d run smack into Knucklebones.

The guard called, “You can’t get out. You’d best lay down your sword quietly.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

Sunbright advanced slowly, sword tilted across his chest but ready to sweep down and around.

“I need the man you hold. It’s not worth your lives to protect him, so begone.”

The guard puffed, shifted to let his partner join him, and both drew silver tipped clubs in their left hands as makeshift shields. They were brawny men, but nothing to compare with Sunbright’s height and breadth. The first one, with a yellow beard, craned over his shoulder where the other two guards had gone. A scuffle sounded. The guard muttered something to his partner, then growled, “Rush!”

They charged low, clubs outthrust, swords ready. Sunbright dropped his right foot and shoulder back, cocked Harvester, and waited.

Obviously practiced, the guards swung clubs at the same time, one high, one low, to trap and block Harvester so their short swords could stab for guts. But the barbarian was faster with his trusty weapon. As the right-hand guard struck with ironwood, Sunbright flicked out the barbed tip of Harvester, snagged the man’s wrist, and tugged. Razor steel split skin and severed a tendon. Instantly the man’s hand went limp, and the club fell. Within a second, the great blade spanked to bat the other club down. So hard was the rap that the guard staggered at the blow. But he lunged on, jabbing with his sword.

Sunbright hadn’t time to disarm them. Flicking sideways, he smacked the guard alongside the head just below the helmet. Skin split along his jaw as the strap was cut. Blood spouted from under his chin and he stumbled.

Dismissing that foe, dragging Harvester back quickly, sideways across his gut, the barbarian banged down the upthrusting blade of the other guard. At the same time, he kicked savagely, either for thigh or crotch. His moosehide boot knocked the man’s knee out from under him. Two-handed, Sunbright helped him fall by bashing Harvester’s pommel on the back of his helmet. The man’s face hit the floor, helmet clanging. Sunbright recovered his footing and kicked the man’s head, not caring if he snapped his neck or not. The man lay still.

The bleeding guard clutched his neck with both hands. Blood spurted between his fingers, gradually slowed, and the red hands fell away.

Chest heaving, wiping his sword on a dead man’s sleeve and then sheathing it, Sunbright toed over the guards until he found a key on a rawhide thong on a belt. Ripping it loose, he strode to the door, unlocked it, slammed it back.

Inside was dark, but before his eyes adjusted he heard a scrape and gurgle. Stepping into cool darkness, Sunbright latched onto a hairy, thick arm and towed the prisoner out. Knucklebones came, bosom puffing and blood on both hands and her dark elven blade. Sunbright laid his burden down for a look.

Candlemas was a mess. His face was red and blistered, his eyebrows and beard and mustache singed to stubble, his bald head scabbed and seeping fluid. The yellow-red robe was spattered with his own blood.

“Forest of Fire!” rumbled Sunbright. “What happened to you?”

“I tried to … stop Karsus.” The mage’s voice wheezed, husky, for his mouth and lungs were scorched. “I was lucky. Someone pulled me … over backward … just before th-the … burning hands got me. But Karsus is spelling… to be a god!”

“Be a god?” asked Sunbright. “Become a god?”

“Can he do that?” Knucklebones gasped.

“He can … do anything.”

Wincing, Candlemas plied blistered hands to lever himself up, but fell back, coughing and gagging, strangling on fluid gumming his seared lungs. Blood burbled at the corners of his mouth.

“Oh, it hurts! He’s using the … the star … stealing its power. Anything could happen.”

Squatting, Sunbright touched Candlemas on both sides of his face, cooed to him as if to a child. The mage stared as if hypnotized. Then his eyes widened in surprise and he took a deep breath without coughing.

“My!” snorted Candlemas. He hawked and spat, with no trace of blood in the phlegm. “Where have you been studying?”

Sunbright helped him rise and told him, “I’m finally a shaman. I’ve learned the secrets of nature magic. But I had to die, or almost, to gain the knowledge.”

“Great knowledge indeed.” Candlemas snorted. But his knees buckled and he fell. “Oh, I’m weak as a kitten.”

Stooping, Sunbright grabbed a seared wrist and ankle. There was no time to heal all the mage’s wounds, only the internal, dangerous ones. Grunting, the barbarian hoisted the heavy man across his shoulders.

“No, I’m too fat,” Candlemas protested. “And your sword gouges my ribs.”

Shifting, shoving, Sunbright ignored the protests and slid Candlemas behind his neck. But the barbarian suddenly weaved sideways and struck the wall. “Whoa! You are heavy!”