Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (16 page)

Vlyndor loped along body forward, tail out, three fingered hands brushing the rocky surface as he scurried along the path.  It was a gait for speed, or as much haste as his old limbs could muster.  Still it should not matter.  The others were looking elsewhere, down by the lakeside, over behind the scatter of huts that was the karib village.  A few hardy souls had even ventured along the tunnel that led to the world outside, the world of sand and dragons and worse.

But Vlyndor hurried alone certain that he had guessed correctly, certain that he needed no assistance. As he crested the rise he slowed, breathing a little easier at the sight before him; he had proved himself right on the first count, he hoped he was right on the second.  His tongue flicked out tasting the air, the scent of fear and shame filled up his senses.

The simple stone monuments of the graveyard stood in their ordered lines.  Generations of karib interred with respect within the hollow dead heart of their volcanic home. He saw her where he had expected to see her, kneeling at the far grave, the one overlooking the lake. Its mossy stones still brought a faster flutter to his double eyelids, a dart of his tongue, yearning for the hint of the soulmate he had lost.  But Lyndat was gone, long gone, and the girl was here still.

Her cloak was about her shoulders, the hood thrown over her head.  She was very still, like a statue.  He walked closer, carefully.  For all the inactivity of her body, the maelstrom of emotions about her quite saturated the air.  Vlyndor shut his mouth and half-closed his nostrils to try to filter out the heady aroma of her anguish.  Beneath the fear and the shame there were undercurrents of sadness and anger, and woven through it all despair of a depth that had no place in the heart of a child.

“Persapha,” he said.  “You know I’m here.”

The hood tilted as she nodded. The heady scent of grief faded as she wrestled her emotions under some control.   She said nothing at all until he had come and sat by her, and then only a mumbled “It’s all right, I’ve put the mask back on.”

Vlyndor sighed and reached for her shoulder.  He was never sure how to embrace her.  Soft human skin bruised so much more readily than reptilian scales, but he pulled her towards him gently and she let her head rest on his shoulder.  It was only when sitting down that they could now claim some equality of height.  Standing, Vlyndor’s short legs left him several inches shy of his long legged ward.  She was taller than all the karib now, not much shorter than Odestus, though in truth they had seen so little lately of the wizard that for all Vlyndor knew, she might have out grown him.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said with a sniff. “I’m sorry.”

“Traldor is sorry too,” he said.  “Or at least he will be when I have finished speaking to his father.”

“Is?” Her voice quivered.  “Will? Then he isn’t… I didn’t…”

“You scared him Persapha, you scared him a lot.”

She looked down at the dirt of the graveyard scratching it with a twig. “He called me a dirty mammal.”

Vlyndor’s tongue flicked out, still a little fire of anger burned within her.  He ignored it; starve a fire and it will die. “What matters is that you didn’t kill him, or stone him.  Chilled him maybe, chilled him to the bone.”

“He was so still,” she shook her head in wonderment at the recollection.  “I was sure I’d killed him, or something worse. I looked away straight away, the second I realised I’d looked at him, looked in his eyes, but I had been so angry.  He said such hurtful things.”

“Traldor is a child, Persapha, like you are.  He has not yet learnt to be a good karib, but he will.  As you will.”

“How can I Vlyndor?”  She dropped the stick and hugged her legs, chin resting on her knees.  “I’m a monster, everyone knows it.”

“You’re a child, Persapha.”  Vlyndor wrestled with a mental calculation to support his assertion. “If Odestus explained it well enough, to me then you’d be no more than eleven years old in his world.”

“Children can’t kill, not with their gaze.  Children don’t have to bind their hair to stop it squirming at night.”

“Children hurt other children however they can, some do it with sticks, some with cruel names, some bite.  Learning when not to do these things is what growing up is, Persapha.  The only thing difference for you is in the power to hurt, not the inclination.”

“I could kill with a look.”

“But you know you shouldn’t.  You know it was wrong.  I can taste your regret, Persapha.  Traldor will know that he should not have taunted you.  No harm is done.  You have both learned. Learned much.”

“They think I’m a monster, they’re all scared of me, the children.  Traldor just said what they were thinking.”   

“No child is born a monster, Persapha.  Such creatures are made and molded by time, not chosen by birth.”

A faint waft of her doubt and uncertainty drifted past his nose.  She shook her head.  “I have such dark thoughts Vlyndor, such cruel dreams.  I don’t where they come from.”

He patted her arm.  “They come from your fear, Persapha.  Conquer that and we will make a good karib of you yet.”   

Jay wasn’t afraid.  When you have had Maelgrum himself whispering sweet threats in your ear, when you have seen your parents butchered, heard your sisters scream, smelt your town burning and felt your own wet shame, then an audience with a queen and her court can induce no terror.  Nerves, maybe, but no terror. It was nerves made his voice crack beneath their watchful gaze.

“Forgive the boy his fearfulness, Your Majesty,” Johanssen spoke up.  “He has had a hard hike and a cold swim that nearly killed him.   This assembly is perhaps a little large for one so young.”

“I’m not afraid,” Jay snapped.  “And all these people need to hear my story.  I have not the time… you have not the time for me to tell it more than once.”

He watched their reactions to his petulant tone.  The short blond lady looked shocked, the boy at her side sat wide eyed.  The fat man with the hideously misguided effort to hide his baldness quivered like an outraged jelly.    The black bearded soldier with the gold earring sniffed disdainfully.  The bishop worked his hands in swift anxiety over a crescent symbol.

But it was the three in the centre of the tableau whose reaction interested Jay the most.  The soldier with that strange title of seneschal scowled. The red haired woman on the throne who looked too young to be a queen, too slight to be a warrior and too pretty to be a priestess, was unreadable.  Her lips pursed in tune with a frown of concentration, waiting for his words. Jay’s scan of the courtly faces settled at last on the girl at the queen’s side. Her coal black hair had a central azure streak, and her eyes crinkled with amusement above cheeks scored with twin pairs of scars, straight cruel white lines.  He held her gaze and she returned it unblinking for the few seconds it took to become uncomfortable, each as reluctant as the other to be the one who first broke and turned away. Then, with a smile she gave him a slow wink and suddenly his face was hot and he was looking at his borrowed boots.

“Well, Master Jay, you had better get on with your story and quickly.”  The queen’s voice was soft but commanding.

“It’s father Simeon’s story really.  He should be here to tell it, but he had to stay behind with the others.”

“How many of you are there?” The black bearded soldier spoke up drawing a flash of irritation from the queen.

“I only ever saw Robard, Travis and Father Simeon, but there are others.  Father Simeon said it was better we didn’t know who they were, said he didn’t know half of them himself, but that he knew people who knew people.”

“So is it ten? A hundred, a thousand?”

“Pietrsen, let the boy tell his tale.”

“There’s enough,” Jay snapped back.  “Father Simeon, says there are enough, so there’s enough… sir.”

“Enough for what?” 

“Pietrsen!”  At the queen’s second rebuke the black bearded soldier finally fell silent.  With a dip of her head, she urged Jay back to his telling.

“There’s a fortress being built, built on Colnhill where my father died.  It’s gone up awful fast, you wouldn’t credit it.  Nearly complete it is.”

“You don’t build a castle in weeks.”

“You do when you’ve got wizards working on it, working night and day.  They’re casting spells, moving earth, making stone.”

“Wizards can’t do that, it’s not possible,” the fat jelly wobbled his dismay.

“Well maybe you’d like to tell the wizards that… sir,” Jay ladled enough insolence into the courteous ‘sir’ to make the man blush.  “Thing is we saw them doing it, we watched the walls go up in days, not years.  After the next full moon there’ll be a castle standing there that no man will ever be able to tear down.  A castle full of orcs and outlanders and wizards.  We’ve killed dozens of orcs and quite a few wizards, but they’ll be safe behind those high walls, safe to ride out and murder and enslave and run home where no-one can ever unseat them.”

“Wizardstone,” the bishop mused.  “I read something of it once, it was written that the skill to cast that spell was lost in the ruins of the Monar Empire.”

“Well the wizards I saw must have read different books to you, your reverence.  There’s a thirty foot high curtain wall and a keep says the skill is definitely not lost.”

“Thirty foot?” The seneschal interjected and, unlike with Pietrsen, the queen made no look or gesture to restrain him.  “You said this fortress would not be complete for over a fortnight.  If the walls are so high already, then the job is done.  We are already too late to stop it.”

Jay’s tongue flicked across his lips as he shook his head.  This was the hard part to explain.  “It’s true, the walls are that high, but this spell they use it’s not permanent, not yet.  It needs a special light to seal it, to lock the rock for all time.”

“The light of the full moon!”  The Queen murmured.

Jay nodded eagerly, glad to see elements of his story anticipated.  “Yes, your Majesty.  That’s what sets it, sets it in stone if you like.  Until then, they need wooden scaffolding, poles and planks to hold it all in place. There’s a bit they were building by the gate house, some pitch caught fire and destroyed a section of the scaffolding and that whole piece of wall just crumbled into dust.”  His eyes were shining with excitement as he remembered the discovery which he and Robard had made, watching the dreadful fortress rising atop the hill and realising that, despite the labouring wizards, it had a weakness.  “The foundations and some of the lower walls were set last full moon, but most of the building above ground won’t be properly finished yet.”

“So this formidable fortress is just held up by bits of wood?”

“Yes your Majesty. We still have a chance to destroy it.”

“We?” The quivering lard bucket made another unwelcome observation, his scalp sweating between the thin stretched locks of overgrown neck hair. “If all it takes is setting a fire, why have you come all the way to Nordsalve?  Surely they have torches in Morsalve too.”

Jay scowled.  “We have torches a plenty.  But we also have orcs and outlanders.  There is an army camped inside the walls.”

The man was irritated by Jay’s tone, much as Jay had intended, but he squeaked a further note of dissent.  “I thought you said your clever priest had enough men at his command, even though you’d never seen more than two of them.”

“Margrave,” the queen commanded.  “Treat the boy with more courtesy.”

“We have enough,” Jay insisted wearily.  “Provided the bulk of the half-breed witch’s army can be drawn away.”

“Quintala is there? This is her work?” Again the seneschal interrupted, again the queen made no move to stop him

Jay frowned.  “We just call her the half-breed, or the witch.”  He screwed his face up in concentration.  “I think Simeon did say the name once, Quintala? That might have been it.”

“The bitch!” The seneschal spat out an invective and beside him the dark haired girl had gone so pale that her white scars almost disappeared.

Jay shrugged.  “We don’t much care for her either, and the few wizards we have caught have usually cursed her before they died.  But my message from father Simeon to you, your Majesty, is launch an attack, mount a diversion.  Get her marching away from the fortress and we will burn the scaffolding and turn her fortress into a monument of dust on my father’s grave.”

“You said she had wizards,” Margrave wobbled.

“Yes, but wizards so drained by casting stone spells that they have barely the strength to fall into bed.  However many she leaves, we can slaughter them.  There will never be a better time.  Her fortress vulnerable, her wizards exhausted, all we need is for you to draw her army away and we will deal a blow she will never recover from.  What say you, your Majesty?”  Jay finished with a flourish, confident he’d done Father Simeon proud and also done justice to the memory of Travis whom no search along the banks of the Derrach had yet discovered.

The audience waited on the queen’s reaction, looking to her to see if they should applaud or reject Jay’s proposal.  And the queen sat silent, eyes narrow, gazing at something Jay couldn’t see. “Your Majesty?” he asked at length, a timorous probe of her thinking.

She looked up at that, suddenly decisive, standing and striding across the room to pace out her thinking.  “I’ll not help you destroy this fortress, Master Jay.  Why destroy it, when we could capture it, hold it until the new moon and then it will be our force within the safety of its walls which drives the orcs the outlanders and the half-elf from that corner of Morsalve.”

“Your Majesty, there is a risk.”

This time, when the seneschal spoke up, the queen spun round on him.  “Think, Kimbolt, think.  If we hold a fortress here, then we will open a passage between Nordsalve and Medyrsalve, even without the Silverwood we can draw a net of steel around the land Maelgrum has stolen.  An unbroken encirclement, a chance to take the war back to him and to do so while his legion of undead are still frozen into winter lethargy.  There is a risk, maybe, but also a chance.  The Goddess would want us to take every chance she offers.”

Something of her enthusiasm was catching the others in the room and Jay looked from one face to another in confusion.  Capturing the fortress was not part of the plan, it was not the embassy he had been tasked with.  He caught the eye of the dark haired girl.  She was grinning at him, and before he knew it he found himself grinning back.