His Majesty's Elephant (16 page)

Gisela had the Talisman again. But Gisela belonged to the sorcerer, in body if not in soul. And he was stepping away from her, out of his circle, and bending, and sinking his knife in the earth and closing the wall that was made of magic, with Gisela inside.

Rowan had seen enough and more than enough. And so, it seemed, had Kerrec. Even before she moved, he was ahead of her, running, crying something in Breton.

“Bloody idiot," she said. It no longer mattered whether the sorcerer could hear her. He must know that where Kerrec was, there was Rowan.

She ran forward a step or two, but she was not as fast as Kerrec, especially in skirts; and one rash fool was enough for any army. She could feel as well as hear him, calling in his magic as he ran, but he could hardly summon it all before he blundered into the sorcerer's circle.

Easily, almost contemptuously, the sorcerer drew back the hand that held the knife and let it fly.

Rowan gasped and cursed herself for not running after all. But though Kerrec might be an idiot, he was a keen-eyed idiot. He ducked, slid, stumbled on a hummock in the grass, went down to one knee.

The knife passed harmlessly overhead and buried itself in earth. Rowan could hear it hissing like a snake cheated of its prey.

Kerrec spoke, this time in Frankish. “You must be weak, Greekling, to forget your subtlety.”

“With you I need none,” said Michael Phokias. He raised his hand again, flung again. Rowan had seen him reach for no weapon, but one was there, black like the knife he had flung before, narrow and wickedly pointed, aiming straight for Kerrec's heart.

Kerrec was not so lucky this time. He threw himself flat. The dart of magic followed him down. His hand flew up. The dart glanced off it and fell as the knife had, biting deep in the grass.

His gasp was distinct. There was no darkness of blood on his palm, but there was pain—it was written in his face.

“Twice you have escaped me,” Michael Phokias said. “Who would have thought it?”

With no more warning than that, he grasped a shaft of moonlight that slanted through the boughs, and hefted it like a spear.

Kerrec, helpless on the ground, could do no more than scramble backward, away from the terrible, impossible weapon. The sorcerer did not even grant him the honor of laughter, only shortened the spear and stabbed, as a man does with a wounded beast.

oOo

As the dart flew, Rowan's feet untangled at last. She stretched into a run. When the spear thrust down, she caught hold of it—gasping, for it was cold, colder than ice—and bent the whole of her weight and her speed into hurling it aside.

It was almost not enough. The cold of the spear was so terrible, the sorcerer's strength so great, that she seemed a shape of air against them.

But Michael Phokias was taken thoroughly by surprise. So, almost, was Rowan. She had been sure that he knew she was there.

Startlement and the shock of being thwarted where he had thought himself invincible came together to slow his hand when he should have turned the spear on her. But she still had hold of it; her hands were locked on it, frozen. She wrenched the thing out of his grip.

As soon as he let go, the spear melted into moonlight. Rowan, braced for weight and for agony, stumbled back and nearly fell.

Her hands clenched shut in a spasm, then sprang open. She stared at them wildly, looking for the fingers to stiffen and drop off, or for the palms to be blackened and blistered with cold. But they bore no mark, not even a hint of the pain that had tormented them.

That pause might have been her downfall, if Michael Phokias had mustered wits and magic in time. By God's good grace, he seemed as fuddled as she.

Kerrec was up in a crouch, gathered to spring. Rowan blocked his path. “What are you doing with my sister?” she demanded of the sorcerer.

He should have known to expect something of the sort, instead of gaping at her like a man caught napping in the middle of a battle.

Maybe that was a trap. Byzantines were subtle. Michael Phokias might be trying to make her scorn him, so that she would weaken, and be ripe for the kill.

He looked thoroughly nonplussed. Still he answered boldly, with no fear of her at all. “Your sister is... assisting me in a matter of magic.”

“Does she know she's doing it?”

Kerrec was hissing. He would be thinking that Rowan was infinitely stupid, giving the sorcerer time to work new sorceries while he bandied words with her.

But Rowan knew that the sorcerer could not talk and chant spells at the same time. Michael Phokias' magic was word-magic. Not like Kerrec's, that was of the eye and the mind, or Rowan's, that was of the heart.

So she kept him talking until she could think of a way to disarm him. His eyes were fixed on her.

She wished there were a way to tell Kerrec to break the circle, step into it, take the Talisman from Gisela. Frantic waving behind her back was no use at all.

The sorcerer was saying something. Rowan made herself listen. “Your sister knows that I have need of her. She gave herself without demur.”

“Because you laid a spell on her,” Rowan said. “You can't use the Talisman without her, can you? Not as well as you want to. Otherwise my father would be dead.”

“Your father is old. He was struck ill on the hunt.”

Rowan wanted to spit. “Don't tell lies, sorcerer. I was there. I know what you did. Took you all night and most of the day, didn't it? And laid you out flat for days.”

If she alarmed him with the accuracy of her guess, he did not show it. “You are a perceptive child. You are also a meddlesome one. What if I told you that I need your sister's blood to complete the working?”

Rowan's ears buzzed. She had not heard that. No. She had not.

Idiot. Of course she had. “You're trying to scare me.”

“Why should I trouble myself? Yes, the first working was insufficient, and taxed me far more than I expected. I had thought—hoped—to perform my task without resort to extreme measures.”

“Such as cutting out my sister's heart?”

“No, no,” said the sorcerer, and he honestly seemed appalled. “That is barbaric. I would open the veins of her arms, and give her blood to the earth, and grant her the easiest death of all, a death of slow and deepening sleep.”

“Still,” said Rowan, “death is death. And blood is blood. Does it have to be Gisela?”

“She is of your father's blood.”

Rowan nodded slowly. Kerrec, she noticed, had not moved. She could just see him out of the corner of her eye, white shocked face, absolute stillness. Why in the world could he not see what she was trying to do, and help her?

Then he shifted infinitesimally. Rowan almost exclaimed aloud. He was closer to the circle than he had been. He had been moving, but by degrees, as a hunter does when he stalks his prey.

She wished that he would find a way to go faster. Though she had the sorcerer's attention now, who knew how long that would last?

Her mind wrenched back to what the sorcerer had said. Gisela's blood. Her father's blood. The Talisman, meant for the Emperor, accepting the touch of his daughter, but serving a stranger only by force.

“Does it have to be Gisela?” Rowan asked again. “Only Gisela? Not any other child of the Emperor?”

Behind her, Kerrec gasped. He was almost beside the circle. The sorcerer said, “Give it up, witch-lad. Even should you pierce the circle, you can never touch the Talisman.”

“But I can,” said Rowan. “Can't I?”

“You can,” said Michael Phokias. It was hard to see in the moonlight, but his eyes seemed to gleam on her. “Are you offering yourself?”

“Would it set Gisela free?”

“Rowan,” said Kerrec. “Rowan, for God's sake—”

“So that is what they call you,” the sorcerer said. “Rowan. The tree that guards against magic. Do they know how appropriate that is?”

So, thought Rowan, shivering. He knew about names, too, and the magic that was in names. She pressed the little advantage it gave her. “Would it set Gisela free if I offered myself in her place?”

“Why do you offer? You think little enough of her, from all that I can see.”

“She's family,” Rowan said. “Would it?”

“You are obstinate,” said Michael Phokias, not without approval. “Yes, it would. Splendidly. She has no magic whatsoever. You have enough to make matters interesting. And yet,” he said as if the thought had just occurred to him, which Rowan very much doubted, “if you give your blood to the spell, your father dies. Is your beautiful brainless sister worth the life of the Emperor of the West?”

“Gisela isn't brainless,” said Rowan, “and you don't believe for a minute that Father deserves that title.”

And not for a moment did she intend to give her blood to the spell. She would fight with everything she had, and hope that once she had the Talisman in her hand—as surely she must, or the spell would not be complete—it would help her to turn the sorcery against the sorcerer.

It was desperate, and it hardly counted as a plan, but it was the best she could think of.

Michael Phokias was staring at her. If he could read what she was thinking, then she was lost, and everything else, too.

“You believe,” he said, “that you have some hope.”

“What do you want?” she asked him sharply. “What do you gain from this?”

“The so-called Emperor of the West dies,” he answered, “and the one and true and only Emperor of the Romans rules unchallenged.”

“My father really is a threat to Byzantium, then. You wouldn't bother with him if he weren't.”

“Say rather that we prefer to live untormented by gnats who call themselves emperors.”

Rowan refused to be stung by the insult. “Set my sister free, and I'll give myself into your hands.”

She held out her own, offering what she had to give. Magic, too. She tried to think it into a shape that would tempt him; not easy when she had no idea what that might be.

Kerrec growled. He sounded so much like one of the Emperor's boarhounds that Rowan nearly forgot herself and laughed. But all urge to laughter died as he sprang past her, toward the circle.

His body jerked as he touched it, and visibly slowed; his face contorted with effort or with pain. But he thrust himself through. He fell to hands and knees beside Gisela, who slept on, with the Talisman on her breast.

Once more Michael Phokias was taken by surprise. Kerrec's leap had broken the circle. The magic dissipated even as they all paused: Rowan sensed it as a fading stink, something like a long-dead fish, and something like a bog in summer.

Kerrec scrambled away from Gisela. Rowan drew breath to shout at him. But she held her tongue when she saw what he was doing.

He should not have been able to efface the knife's deep track in the earth, yet as his hands pressed over the place where the circle had been, the earth healed, the grass closed where it had been cut apart.

Rowan scraped together her wits. “Kerrec,” she said, “it's no use. He's still stronger than either of us. Go away while his patience holds, and leave me to the bargain I've made.”

The last of the circle vanished under Kerrec's hands. His path had brought him level with Rowan; he looked up into her face.

His eyes were enormous, and seemed half blind. She felt something groping toward her like a hand, but his hands were flat on the ground, holding it together. He wanted something, was trying to tell her something.

She could not hear it. The sorcerer was gathering his power; that too she felt, a scorching on her skin, though he seemed to be standing mute and amazed. His lips moved without sound, making his magic of the word and the will.

Sweet saints, she thought, or prayed. Where is Abul Abbas?

No answer came. There was only herself to trust, then, and nothing else in the world. She breathed deep and sprang; flung herself at the sorcerer, wrapped arms around him, fastened her lips on his.

It would have worked better if she had had any practice. Hrotrud would have known how. As it was, she just missed getting a mouthful of beard, and her lips ground on his teeth. There was nothing pleasant about it at all.

But it did stop his spellcasting, however briefly. What she had not bargained on was that he would give in to it. She did not even know what he was doing until he did it, it happened so fast. Suddenly his arms were around her, and he was fastened on her like a leech, bending her back till she felt as if she would snap in two.

His breath whuffed in her throat. He was laughing at her. She gagged and fought, but he was too strong.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.

It was monotonous, even for a litany, but it was dreadfully, horridly true.

Her magic struggled as fiercely as she did, but it had another focus: not to get away but to get closer. She tried to pull it back, but it was as strong as the Byzantine was. It had turned on her. It had betrayed her.

She sagged in despair. To her astonishment, she found an inch of yielding where none had been before. She worked her fist into it and thrust herself free.

She had no time to gasp, rub her bruised mouth, spit, gag, curse, do anything that would leave her vulnerable. She lunged toward the broken circle and the ruined Talisman.

Michael Phokias caught her arm and wrenched her about. Her shoulder screamed, almost twisting out of its socket. She made no sound. He was chanting, this time aloud, words that made the flesh shudder on her bones.

She flailed, but he held her too far away from him, and too firmly, for a blow to land. His chanting went on. She could not see Kerrec; the sorcerer was in the way.

Then she heard him. Kerrec had a clear voice when he sang, matching word to word of the sorcerer's chant.

The chant was a sequence of jarring discords. The song wove with them, shaping them into a rough harmony.

Rowan could sing, but not like this. She tried to pull the sorcerer off balance, to make him lose his place in the chant.