Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (24 page)

“Enough, Rugan. Stop now.”  Niarmit dragged the half-elf upright.

“It is not done yet,” Rugan whispered through pale lips, his usually swarthy skin as white as a Nordsalve warrior’s.  “I must finish it.”

“If you make the attempt, Rugan, it may finish you.”

The half-elf glanced down at his hands.  Dried blood was encrusted around the gash sliced across his left palm. He shook out the numbness in his fingers, then curled them into a weak fist which he held over the stone embrasure.  He waited fierce concentration on his face squeezing his wounded hand as hard as he could. After a moment’s fruitless effort, he muttered.  “Empty it seems. Still, I have another arm.”

He fumbled for the knife on his belt.

“No Rugan.”  She reached out an arm to stop him; her gesture and his weakness almost had him drop the blade.  “Stop this.”

He shrugged her off.  “The circle must be complete, your Majesty.” He scored a shaky line in his uninjured palm, the natural weakness of his left hand exacerbated by the blood he had shed.  Crimson beads welled up in the cut he had carved.  “If you are worried for my health, you should have refrained from capturing quite such a large fortress.”

He sheaved the blade and squeezed a few drops of blood from the fresh wound on to the gap between the merlons.  As he did so he muttered a few words, fingers twisting in time with the enchantment.

“There must be another way,” Niarmit said as the pale prince walked unsteadily to the next embrasure, leaning against the stone parapet for support.

“There is not, your Majesty.  Only blood is proof against blood, mine against hers.”  He slurred the reference to Quintala, weakness blurring the snarl he had intended.  “This is the only way to keep my witch of a sister safely beyond the walls, to keep your counsel and your people safe.” 

“I am sorry, Rugan.  I had not realised … not when I asked you to ward this Fortress as you had Laviserve.”

“You weren’t to know, your Majesty,” he whispered.  He stumbled unsteadily shoulder first against the wall.  “Bloody wizardstone,” he cursed. “So treacherous underfoot.”

Niarmit found the stone’s disquieting properties only showed when she tried to move in haste, and Rugan certainly wasn’t doing that.   “If you must do this, Rugan, take my arm.”  She would broke no protest, threading her arm through his.  Despite his determined assurances, the half-elf leant heavily against her, more needful of support than he dared admit.

“Not far now, your Majesty, I can see where we started this enchanting promenade.”

Niarmit looked a hundred yards along the battlements where the first of Rugan’s soldiers were taking up position. “You did well to get here when you did, Prince Rugan.  The sentries reported a dust cloud to the north-east. Quintala must be returning.”

Rugan halted for a moment, breathing heavily, and covered his exhaustion with a feigned interest in the castle’s design.  “By the Goddess, my sister’s ambition quite outreaches her sense.  Such an outrageous design. She should have built a smaller keep on its peak.  Nothing less than an army could hold this.”

“And I am glad you have brought me one.”

He smiled at her with bloodless lips.  “I owe you that, your Majesty.  I owe you many things, you and your father.”

“The past is done Rugan,” she squeezed his arm.  “The future is still to be fashioned.”

He nodded and shrugged his way off the wall.  “Then let’s seal this place, once and for all, and then, when that is done I think I may take to my bed – for a day or three.”

“Hello, my Princess.”

Hepdida spun round.  “Thom!” Before she knew it she had grabbed the illusionist in a ferocious bear hug.  “Thom, where have you been?”

He returned her embrace with slightly less force, patting her back after a long moment of having a fifteen year old girl crushing herself against him. Hepdida, stepped back but still holding his hands so she could look him up and down at a distance no greater than arms’ length.  “You’ve lost weight.”

“Well we have been eating well but not generously in Sir Ambrose’s camp. It is winter you know.”

“Oh Thom, I’ve missed you.”

“I only just heard you were here, I didn’t think Niarmit would have risked you joining this venture. How did you change her mind?”

Hepdida pulled him to her side, threading her arm through his.  “Come Thom, tell me of other absent friends.  What news from Kaylan, Elise and Prior Abroath?”

The illusionist frowned, head tilted waiting still for the answer to his side-stepped question.  Hepdida gave his arm an impatient squeeze as she led him across the bailey.  “Well?”

Thom shrugged.  “Things seem to be going well in Undersalve.  There are parts in the shadow of the Hadrans where orcs and the nomads have been quite driven out.  The people there look to the new triumvirate for justice and for protection.”

“Quite the little warlord then, our Kaylan.” 

“He is certainly giving the enemy a bloody nose, especially with the assistance of the ten clans.   It may not be a reconquest yet, but it has shown that the occupiers are vulnerable.  That is enough to breed belief and hope.  They are parents to freedom.”

Hepdida smiled. “I’m glad for Kaylan, glad there is someone that Niarmit can be pleased with.”

There was a shout from behind them. A voice calling Thom’s name.  Hepdida reluctantly released his arm so he could turn to meet the newcomer.

“Thom,” Elyas exclaimed slowing from a run to an elegant halt before them.  “You are needed at the gatehouse, by the queen’s command.”

The illusionist gave the princess a smiling nod of regret.  “The queen commands,” he said.

“And we all run,” she replied.  It wasn’t just Thom though, who took off in an ungainly tangle of limbs after the gently loping elf. There was a flurry of activity, soldiers running by the main gate, charging up onto the battlements.

She watched for a moment puzzled as to what it could mean, until a voice at her side asked, “What’s going on?”

She looked down at Jay, it wasn’t that he was much shorter than her, but in the company of soldiers and elves there were few people she could look down on, so she made the most of the opportunity. “Niarmit sent for Thom.”

“Who’s Thom?” 

“A friend.”

“Friend?” There was edgy doubt to Jay’s voice. 

“Were you watching us?”  She smiled, pleasantly surprised and surprisingly pleased that she might have kindled jealousy even if only in a boy and for so unlikely a rival as the unpreposessing illusionist.

“You weren’t exactly hiding.”

“Thom’s like a brother, a big older brother.  He disguised me as a zombie once.”

Jay glanced at her sideways.  “Looks like he’s done it again.”

“Bastard,” she said, aiming a blow with some force at his head, but laughing as she did so.

He ducked out of the way with a grin. But then there were more shouts and in the gathering by the gatehouse, she caught sight of Niarmit and Kimbolt at her side.

“What is going on?” Hepdida echoed Jay’s question, her feet taking her towards the commotion without any conscious thought on her part.

It was a bizarre sight.  An oval window hanging in space two yards or so beyond the gatehouse battlement, and through the suspended window a disconcerting sight of solid ground, even though the gate itself was thirty feet up in the air.  Niarmit blinked away the nausea inducing oddity and scanned through the opening to try to glean what shreds of information the enemy was foolish enough to part with. 

As a child, her father had once let her play with a piece of curved glass, a bauble he had brought back from the Eastern Lands.  Looking through it she had seen the crumbs and the grooves of the kitchen table suddenly and frighteningly magnified.  She had screamed when a spider had walked beneath the miraculous glass. It had taken a hurried look around the edge of the disc to satisfy herself that the creature was still, in reality, no longer than her thumb, rather than large enough to cover her entire hand.

Standing on the battlements she had the same sense of displacement.  Glancing round the edge of the oval window she could see the distant camp of the enemy, drawn up in columns a full mile beyond the castle walls.  Yet looking through the gate she was there in the midst of the enemy, orcs to the left, outlanders to the right, and taking centre stage before her stood ... Quintala.

“Where is my brother, bitch?” The half-elf demanded without preamble.

“The message I received was that you wished to treat with me, ex-Seneschal Quintala,” Niarmit replied.  “I am ready to accept your surrender.”

“Look at me when you talk to me!”

Niarmit adjusted her gaze carefully, fixing on a point just over the half-elf’s left shoulder.

“That’s better, bitch,” Quintala said.

“Quintala, you requested this audience.  If you cannot use better courtesy I will end it.”

“You won’t, you’re too curious for that.”

“I will hear what you have to say, but say it quickly.”

“Where is that bastard brother of mine?”

“He doesn’t want to see you, why would he come at your beck and call.  You killed his grandmother and tried to kill both him and his wife.  He has instead taken rooms in your house here.  Why don’t you cast a spell and visit him there?”

Quintala’s ill temper and the placement of this gate beyond the castle perimeter had been persuasive evidence of the effectiveness of Rugan’s blood charm.  But taunting his sister was another way for Niarmit to be sure, sure of their safety from her scrying eyes.

The black expression of hatred was proof enough.  If Quintala could have enchanted her way inside the curtain wall then they would not have been having a conversation across six feet of empty air, indeed they would not have been having a conversation at all.

The half-elf began pacing back and forth.  Niarmit followed her with her eyes, careful to lead when Quintala walked to the left and lag when she walked to the right. 

“Your friends, they will all die you know.  We will storm those walls and I will decorate them with the blood of everyone you love.”

Niarmit shivered at the venom her former seneschal had unleashed, not so much for the hatred but for the extent to which something so ferocious could have lain undetected in all the days and weeks she had known her.  “You’re not getting in here Quintala.  We have force enough to hold it for all eternity.”

“It is only wizardstone, a stray torch in the scaffolding is all it would take to bring the walls tumbling down.”

“But Quintala, the timber bracing is all inside the walls, how do you propose to get inside to cast that torch?  You seem to be a little troubled in the placing of your gate.”

The half-elf strayed out of sight, past the edge of the oval opening, and Niarmit was drawn to the little collection of individuals standing some yards back witnessing the unproductive parley.  She gasped as she recognised one thin harassed figure, standing between the red bearded sorcerer and the sour faced bald woman. “Haselrig,” she mouthed.

It was in that moment of distraction that Quintala reappeared, a spear in her hand, thrown with loathing through the oval opening, across the space between the wall and the gate and straight at Niarmit. The queen guessed the aim must have been true and it passed right through her, or at least that is what Quintala would have seen, for Niarmit felt the wind of its passing to her left.  She looked at the fast fading expression of triumph on the half-elf’s eyes. “Bitch,” she exclaimed.  “I didn’t miss.”

“I’m sure you hit what you aimed at,” Niarmit admitted.

“That shit of an illusionist!” Quintala cried. 

Niarmit danced a few steps left and right to give Thom a chance to reshuffle the ordering of her and the displaced image of her.  She had bid him create it as a precaution to misdirect Quintala’s aim. 

“Have you got every one of your fawning sycophants with you in there?”  The half-elf was incandescent with rage.

“Quintala, whoever I have here they are safe enough.  In five nights time the new moon will permanently set all this wizardstone you so kindly provided. Even a well-directed torch would do you no good in breaching our walls.  We are well supplied with food and water, you might as well go and start preparing your apologies to Maelgrum right now.  I don’t think sorry is a word he hears often, well not more than once from any one person.”

Quintala’s mouth worked in a fury.  “You think you’re so fucking clever don’t you.  You and your little friends.  You think your precious Goddess has protected you.  Well think again, bitch, you are forsaken.  Utterly forsaken.”

Beneath the slavering rage there was a sincerity of belief in the half-elf’s tone which had Niarmit frowning.

“Think bitch, five nights to the full moon, but only two days to the Day of the Dragon.”  Quintala nodded vigorously as Niarmit’s eyes widened in a sudden horrific realisation.  “Yes, Queen of the soon to be dead.  One day every month, the dragon serves our will.  I won’t need a bloody torch.  In two days’ time the dragon will descend on all those you have so conveniently gathered for me.  There’s nowhere to hide in there.  The huts will go up, your tents will go up, the scaffolding will go up.  Mazdurg’s orcs can just step over the remnants of the wall and find your precious peasants and my idiot brother’s soldiers all roasted to perfection.  You’re dead. You’re all dead, you just don’t know it yet.”

“You lie!” Niarmit’s voice was trembling, her face as pale as Rugan’s had been.

Quintala smiled through the gate.  “Well, your Majesty, I don’t care if you believe me or not, another two days and you’ll get to see what I already know.  That you are doomed, you are rats that have conveniently locked yourselves in a trap.”

“Fuck off!”

Quintala drew in a sharp breath.  “Oh, now I know you are rattled. Ogre piss, the look on your face, I’ve got to say, it’s worth far more than the pleasure of sticking you with a spear.  I’m actually glad that little shit made me miss.  Go on, tell him how he did me a favour, and while you are at it, tell him how he’s going to be ash before two sunsets have passed, him and every feeble living soul you have locked in there.”

Niarmit shook her head.  “It will not happen.”

“You just keep telling yourself that, bitch.  Tell yourself that right up to the moment dragon fire burns you from the inside out.”

Niarmit turned away from the gleeful image in the gate and walked to the edge of the crenelated roof of the gatehouse.  Thom stood there, out of Quintala’s eyeline, together with Elyas, Kimbolt and Sergeant Jolander.  They had heard everything and they looked at her expectantly.

“She lies,” Niarmit told them.  “It will not happen.”

“Of course not, your Majesty,” Jolander’s moustache bristled.  “She always lies, always has.  This isn’t any different.”

“What shall we tell the others?” Kimbolt asked.

“Tell them nothing,” Niarmit commanded, glancing back at the gate which even now was shrinking to a close.  “They have no need to worry on account of Quintala’s empty boasts.”