Lescari Revolution 03: Banners In The Wind (37 page)

Golden radiance flowed from Jilseth's hands; tendrils weaving the mingled smoke and steam into an insubstantial mass of light and shadow. Reflections sparkled in the magewoman's eyes. A miniature vista formed in the hollow heart of the magic.

'What is that?' Yadres' wonder overcame his revulsion.

'Come closer, if you wish to see.' Jilseth's hands didn't slow.

Despite herself, Branca was intrigued. Charoleia rose to her feet and they all moved to stand around the table. Only Gren stayed stubbornly hunched on his seat.

The necromantic vision reminded Branca of the ceramic dioramas fashionable among the wealthy Vanamese. As she had helped her mother clean and polish their houses, she was fascinated by the hunts and dances, peopled by figures no taller than her finger, motionless in their domes of glass.

This was a wholly different scene. Branca guessed they were seeing Duchess Sherista's bedchamber. It was an eerie sight, a night-time picture painted from glints and shadows hanging in the ensorcelled air, defying this brightly lit room.

A spark flared in the darkness. A lamp had been lit beside the seductively canopied bed. It showed two people roused from sleep by a servant rushing through a doorway at the fraying edge of the magic.

Jilseth gestured and the sphere expanded. Tathrin would have been hard put to encompass it with his arms now. The threads of grey and gold drew the merest veil over the figures hastily dragging dressing gowns over their nakedness.

The duke was silver-haired and bearded, heavyset, his paunch dark with body hair. The duchess was still slender despite her dutiful childbearing though no corsets disguised her sagging belly or her drooping breasts in the intimacy of this bedchamber.

Despite all she knew of Orlin's brutality, the persistent rumours that he had poisoned his father, Branca couldn't help but pity them. Her eyes were irresistibly drawn to the dead duke's head, lying disregarded on the top of the sack. No one deserved to be reduced to such carrion.

'Can we hear what's going on?' Yadres forced the request through clenched teeth.

Jilseth shot Sorgrad a venomous glance. 'You never asked for that.'

'If you can't do it . . .' The Mountain mage shrugged.

'Don't insult me.' Colour rose on Jilseth's cheekbones as she thrust her fingers into the margins of the swirling magic.

Faintly at first, then strengthening, warning shouts stumbled over each other. The castle was under attack. A mob had taken the gates. The battle at Pannal was lost and the Soluran's army was coming to kill them.

More figures rushed through the doorway, more voices shouting at once. These newcomers were guardsmen not servants. Branca saw several were wounded and all carried bloodied weapons.

Duke Orlin was demanding a sword. Duchess Sherista clutched his arm, heedless of her disordered clothing, her night plait unravelling around her shoulders. Her hysterical shrieks were unintelligible.

Branca shivered, intensely grateful that this elemental magic couldn't carry the emotional burdens of aetheric enchantments. It was bad enough seeing all this without feeling the woman's terror as well.

Was that why Gren was so wary of the
sheltya
? Could they raise such visions complete with every sensation and emotion with their unknown Artifice? That was a truly appalling prospect. She thrust it hastily away.

The duke silenced the clamouring guards with a commanding sweep of his hand. He kissed Sherista with fierce passion before shoving her into the merciless grasp of an armoured man.

'There's a passageway,' Tathrin breathed.

'Parnilesse Castle's riddled with them,' murmured Charoleia.

Branca saw a second guardsman wrench open a wooden panel half-hidden by the duchess's dressing table, a wondrous confection of angled mirrors in gilded frames. The armoured man dragged Sherista towards it. Even through the muffling magic, her piercing screams clawed at Branca's ears.

One guardsman gave the duke his sword, drawing a dagger instead. Another was struggling out of his hauberk, desperate to offer his lord some armour. It was too late. A man fell backwards through the doorway, blood spraying from a gaping wound in his neck.

Four followed. No, seven. More. Branca couldn't tell. The room was filled with fighting men, swords flashing in the lamplight. A guard died, a blade thrust through his eye. Another plunged his own weapon deep into an invader's chest, only to lose his head to a halberd's scything stroke.

More invaders carried blazing torches. One threw his burning brand onto the rumpled quilts. Flames shot upwards to devour the lacy canopy.

'There's Reniack!' Tathrin jabbed a finger at the elemental vision.

Abruptly, the magic wavered, the figures obscured by smoke. Voices dissolved into meaningless snarls.

'What did he do?' Yadres demanded.

'Nothing!' Tathrin looked horrified.

'Wait!' Jilseth's face was remote in the amber magelight. 'The magic can only reflect what Sherista experienced herself.'

The smoke cleared and they now saw a fraction of the bedchamber framed in the passage's doorway.

Duke Orlin was on his knees, disarmed, his hands raised in supplication. Reniack stood over him, grinning with frenzied delight. All they could hear was Sherista's hysterical screaming as her desperate guardian dragged her down the passage.

Reniack kicked Orlin hard in the chest. The grey-headed man fell awkwardly, his gown tangled around his legs, his nakedness exposed. Reniack stamped hard on his groin, grinding his boot down. As the duke writhed in agony, the rabble-rouser bent to grab his dishevelled hair.

He spat in the nobleman's face before shaking him as viciously as a dog shakes a rat. But even Reniack's unreasoning hatred didn't lend him the strength to snap Orlin's neck, so he shouted at one of his cohort. The man slapped a sword into Reniack's open hand.

The rabble-rouser thrust it deep between Orlin's throat and his shoulder. Blood gushed from the wound. Reniack still had hold of Orlin's hair. He hauled the dying man upwards, sawing clumsily with the unsuitable blade. Orlin thrashed violently with his failing strength. Blood poured down his naked chest to soak his brocade gown, pooling around his pale thighs.

Branca turned away with Sherista's despairing, disbelieving screams still ringing in her ears.

'So that's the guilty man?' Yadres swallowed hard and stepped back from the table.

'Wait,' Jilseth ordered. 'We must see this through to the end. Once the spell is done, there's no recalling it.'

Yadres looked revolted. 'There's more?'

'Sherista isn't dead yet,' Jilseth said, strained.

Reluctant, Branca turned back. Swirling blackness obscured the heart of the spell. The guards were dragging Sherista along an unlit tunnel, the woman's panic-stricken sobbing reverberating in the confined space. Then a door opened in the darkness and they were in another room.

'Where's this?' demanded Tathrin.

Charoleia replied with measured sorrow. 'It's the nursery wing.'

Branca saw a schoolroom filled with servants, already dressed for travel. They clustered around a bevy of noble children: a youth on the verge of manhood, two girls separated from him and each other by a year or so and then, markedly smaller than the rest, a little boy wailing in the arms of his nurse.

The toddler struggled to reach his mother. She shoved away the maids desperately forcing clothes upon her. The room was all confusion, everyone shouting or crying. Only the guards who had followed Sherista had any idea what to do. They began barricading the door they had come through and rushed to the windows to assess the chaos below. Firelight outside flickered on the leaded glass.

Urgently beckoning, liveried lackeys threw open double doors at the end of the room. Branca glimpsed a long hallway and a stairwell, lanterns glowing in the depths.

Then those hapless servants recoiled with horror, desperately slamming the doors. The guardsmen rushed to help. One man smashed a table, to wedge broken pieces under the doors. He died on his knees as a halberd crashed through the panel and ripped into his head.

As soon as the doors gave way, the guardsmen were hacked to bloody pieces. The servants fought heroically but bare hands, flailing cloaks and lengths of broken wood were no match for swords and halberds.

Duchess Sherista and her children stood huddled, ringed by loyal corpses.

Branca could barely breathe as the rebels paused, merely attacking with obscene taunts.

'Jettin . . .' Yet somehow she had expected this.

He strode into the schoolroom at the head of a bloodstained phalanx. His face shone with savage fervour, as brightly as Reniack's had. At his gesture, his men ripped the terrified family apart. Two held the frantically struggling duchess while a single brute subdued each weeping child.

One man grinned with evil intent and tore open the elder daughter's hastily laced bodice. As Sherista screamed, Jettin threw up his hand, not at her, but at the would-be rapist. The man collapsed, clutching his head. Blood spilled from his eyes and choking mouth.

Branca's heart thudded in her chest. Jettin had learned how to kill with his Artifice. The enchantments threaded through with all the savagery of the Storm rune truly had swept away all his principles.

The rebels looked awestruck at their dead comrade and warily at the youthful Vanamese. The duke's daughter stood paralysed by fear as another man grabbed her shrinking shoulders. Terror held her siblings in thrall. Only Sherista was still fighting to break free of her captors.

'Kill them all!' Jettin's command cut through her hoarse curses.

Branca found no consolation in the swiftness of the children's executions. Each was turned to face the wall and dispatched with a blade to the heart before their heads were severed with brisk butchers' strokes.

Sherista was still struggling. In some vain hope of saving herself or simply to embrace her slaughtered family? It hardly mattered. The invaders hacked her to pieces. She fell amid their booted feet, blades scything down, and blood spraying up. The elemental vision dissolved into red-tainted blackness.

The stinking smoke stung Branca's eyes and made her stomach roil. She did her very best not to vomit.

'Madam mage!' Tathrin stepped quickly around the table as Jilseth wavered on her feet.

Ashen-faced, the magewoman continued shaping the spell with her hands. 'Once the spell is broken, none of this can be recalled.' The first vision reappeared: the sleeping duke and duchess, all unknowing in their peaceful bedchamber. 'If you wish to see anything more, I must sustain it.'

'Must we, now we know the guilty men?' Revolted, Yadres looked to Charoleia. 'You can identify them for His Majesty?'

She nodded. 'Reniack Ragged-Ear of the Carifate and Jettin Aniseth of Vanam.'

'This was not justice, whatever Orlin's crimes. Their lives are forfeit, along with any others we can tie to this slaughter.' Yadres' implacable expression looked incongruous above his fussy, fashionable garb. 'We'll see their heads stuck on spikes above Parnilesse Town's gates. You have my word on that.'

Now the duke and duchess were roused once again.

Branca wished she could protest or offer some plea for the young adept's life. But there could be no excuse for Jettin. Not even Kerith could argue that now. Even if Reniack's warped passions had infected the youth all unawares as they communicated across the aether, Jettin had been master of his own decisions, as much as Reniack had been of his.

Duke Orlin's brutal death reappeared in the magic.

Branca was still more troubled. Just how grievously had Jettin abused his knowledge of Artifice? Had he used aetheric enchantments to tip these men's hatred and resentment for their duke into the madness that sanctioned this wholesale murder and so many noble deaths besides? Branca feared so. She struggled to believe even Reniack's eloquence could stir Parnilesse's men to such wickedness.

She glanced at Jilseth, doggedly sustaining the gruesome spell. Sherista and her guards burst into the schoolroom, desperation on every face.

Fear soured Branca's throat. The Archmage forbade elemental magic's use in Lescar's wars, for fear of the unbounded damage it might do. No one had paid much heed to aetheric enchantment, a mere curiosity for harmless scholars. What might the wizards of Hadrumal do now, once they learned these insidious evils had been wrought with Artifice?

Tathrin turned to Yadres. 'We believe Lescar's army can bring these men to answer for their crimes. We believe we have that right. We ask the Emperor to respect it. Please, let us prove to the noble houses of Tormalin and all of Caladhria's barons that such murder was never our intent.'

'Will punishing these few end all this madness?' Yadres was torn between hope and doubt.

'It'll be a start,' growled Gren from his seat.

'Won't some other agitator jump up to take Reniack's place?' Yadres was still dubious. 'He has allies clear across Parnilesse.'

'No more than one man in a hundred,' Charoleia said firmly. 'I can offer proof of that.'

'If Tormalin's legions march in, as Reniack has long sworn they would, to chain us all under the Emperor's yoke, then yes,' acknowledged Tathrin, 'his allies could well rally opposition, in the name of their martyred leaders.'