Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (39 page)

Thren smiled sadly.  “And you must not place yourself in such danger again.”

Odestus rolled the stem of the glass between his fingers, setting the green liquid lapping up the sides.  The sticky liqueur left a thin translucent residue which only slowly slid down to join the rest of the measure.

The glass was half full, but it wasn’t enough.  He picked up the bottle and found it disappointingly empty.  The glass had been half full many times since he had sent Vesten scurrying away.

Odestus shut his eyes and then abruptly opened them again as an unwelcome image swam into the dark void of his vision.   It was no use, his befuddled mind seized the picture and tormented him with it once more.  His own feet tracing the path into the volcano’s heart.  There had been no sentry just a dark black smear against the rock.  The great cavern had been empty, an abandoned skiff drifted on the surface of the lake.  The mushroom fields were overgrown, the fluorescent lichen on the rock walls untrimmed.

Heavy with foreboding he had searched the empty village and then turned at last to the cemetery, where the worst horrors had awaited him.  Empty graves, dug open from within.  He’d dropped the chameleon, dropped even the precious vial as he had sunk to his knees in despair.  Empty graves, empty houses, and a torn shred of embroidered red cloth. The swirls of rich silver and gold thread bore testament to its owner’s monumental ego, the deathly emptiness of the cavern bore witness to his craft.

“Galen!”  Odestus had screamed the name over and over again until the walls resounded with his misery.  Then he had sobbed into the broken earth.

He remembered well Galen’s boast when the necromancer had first arrived in Listcairn with his ramshackle army.  En route, a whole caravan of fleeing refugees had succumbed to Galen’s force with not a single body left behind.  The tidy minded wizard had raised all the corpses, marching them to join in the battle by the Saeth. 

The cavern once filled with the guttural laughs and gentle chittering of the karib folk had been as empty as that caravan, devoid of both the living and the dead.

Odestus flung the glass of liquid down his throat.  That Galen had been there was clear, and that he had brought disaster with him could be no less certain.  But so far no enquiry from the master had come his way, no summons to account for how he had concealed Dema’s daughter.  Had she fallen unnoticed where the scuffed soil revealed the signs of battle? Did Maelgrum know nothing of her or did he know everything?  Was Odestus to be slyly tormented with doubt or ignored for his irrelevance?  All things were possible.  In that pit of uncertainty Odestus wallowed with just a bottle and his secretary’s well-meaning interference for company.  

There was a knock on the door.  “Piss off, Vesten,” Odestus slurred.

“It’s not Vesten,” a different voice answered.

“Piss off, Haselrig,” Odestus amended his instruction and then threw the bottle at the door for emphasis.

His aim was off, which was just as well, for Haselrig had opened the door anyway and stood in the intended path of the reed wrapped flagon. The mis-directed bottle shattered in a shower of glass fragments against the wall by the ex-antiquary’s head.

Haselrig blinked slowly and brushed a few of the larger shards of glass off his shoulder.  “Oh dear,” he said.  “You seem to have run out of drink, still, I brought some of my own.”  He brought a flask from within his cloak, liquid of a brackish brown, rather than the virulent green which the little wizard favoured.  He pulled out the stopper and offered it to Odestus. 

The wizard inhaled the coarse aroma.   “Filthy stuff, wouldn’t touch it.”

“I find it keeps the nightmares at bay,” Haselrig said.

Odestus lunged for the bottle with a speed that defied his state of inebriation.  Haselrig let him take it, but something in the ex-antiquary’s curious stare penetrated the little wizard’s fuddled brain.  He tipped the bottle over his glass with elaborate care, pouring out a modest measure and admitting, “it is time I tried a different beverage.  Dema always said I had too little variety in my drinking tastes.”

“Yes,” Haselrig said, his tongue flicking quickly across his lips.  “The Lady Dema.”

“What of her?” Odestus asked sharply.

“You were very close.  You must miss her.”

Odestus shrugged, and wrinkled his nose.  “What does the master intend by keeping her from rest?”

Haselrig smiled, “sadly I cannot enlighten you.  I am outside the inner circle of our master’s confidences.”

“As am I.”  He tossed back a draught of the brackish drink Haselrig had brought.  It lacked the thick sweetness of flavour of his green liqueur but it still kindled a pleasing heat in his belly.  “It seems we have little we can offer each other by way of information.”  He made the observation into an accusation, fixing the ex-antiquary with a steady if myopic glare.

The ex-antiquary simpered.  “You misjudge me, Odestus.  Cannot two old friends catch up on past times over a drink without each fearing that the other has some ulterior motivation?”

“I never misjudged you Haselrig, you were always after only thing, whatever it was that would best serve the interests of Haselrig nothing more nothing less.  And I’m not your friend, I had only one friend in this world and she’s dead.”  Odestus scowled.  “I have nothing to share with you and even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you if Maelgrum himself were clawing at my eyeballs.”  He drained his glass and wiped his sleeve across his mouth.  “So, to refer you to my original answer, you can piss off Haselrig.”

The ex-antiquary rose, eyes bright with anger.  He reached across the table but Odestus waved him away.   “You can leave the bottle,” the little wizard said. “It is better company than you, more honest and less self-serving at least.”

Haselrig paused in the doorway, anger fading to sadness as he watched Odestus pour another glass full, the liquid splashing out on to the table. “I thought we could help each other, Odestus.”

The wizard sniffed.  “No one can help me, and no one can help you, Haselrig.  We were doomed long ago.  Now piss off, I’ve got a bottle to finish.”  He raised the glass and nodded Haselrig towards the door.  The ex-antiquary retreated, drawing it closed and letting the iron latch fall softly into place.

Hepdida turned the book cover over in her hands.  One side blackened by the fire that had destroyed its pages, the other with its single word title and the strange illustration of the blue bloomed oval.   She shook her head puzzling at her own foolishness.  It might have been important once, it might have held some secret of the enemy’s, but what could she hope to decipher from just a word and a picture.  What could anyone decipher?

The ground was hard beneath her backside.  She had sat too long upon the broken rock pile of Quintala’s tower.  Jay was late.  She held the scorched binding up to catch the evening sun.  There was a sheen to the picture that scattered the light, it flashed across her eyes.  Then there was a shadow and the object was seized from her hand.

“What have we here?”  Jay laughed as he turned the single leaf back and forth.  “Is this what princesses read these days?”

“Give it back.”  She rose up, grabbing for it, irked by his taunt and the numbness of her behind.

He grinned and danced out of her reach, holding his prize aloft.  “You’ll have to catch me first.”

“You’re late, and that’s mine, give it back.”  She stumbled after him, knowing it to be foolishness but unable to stop herself.  He was small and fast in boots and breeches. The tightness of her gown shortened her stride and where the garment didn’t catch on the broken stone her soft shoes would slip between the crevices in the rock.

The boy was enjoying the chase, using his agility to hover just at the limit of her reach.  He held himself close enough that she might think a sudden lunge would bring her victory, yet always snatching the prize from her grasping fingers when she made the attempt.

“Bastard,” she spat as she stumbled in another mistimed swipe.

He frowned and pursed his lips. “It’s a short book,” he said.  “Have you finished it yet?”

“Bastard, give it here,” she repeated making a desperate grab that only served to steal her balance.  She fell and rolled onto her back and suddenly Jay was sitting on top of her, his knees either side of her waist, waving the disputed cover in her face.

“Give it!” she demanded.

“What’s it worth?” he grinned a question.

“It’s mine,” she said.  And at last he let her take it from her hand and then, just as she gave a sniff of grim satisfaction he lunged forward leaning over her to kiss her firmly on the lips, his face over hers, his hands on her scarred cheeks.

For a moment she was too surprised to react and then her body recoiled.  Him louring over her, pressing her into the ground, his mouth on hers in an uninvited kiss.  A deep panic seized her.  Her knee came up.  It caught him on the base of his spine with sufficient force to hurtle him face first onto the grass beyond her head.

She leaped to her feet, he rose more gingerly, rubbing his bruised posterior.

“What did you do that for?” The question sprang simultaneously from both their lips.

“You kissed me.”  She made it an accusation.

“I’ve kissed you before,” he replied sullenly. There was a scratch on his forehead too, where an edge of stone must have caught his face.

“That was different.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Then you’re an idiot boy. A very little idiot boy.”

He flushed scarlet.  “Well at least I can read books with more than one word in them.”  He drew an angry breath.  “And I know enough to make my own way in the world on my own talents, not being cousin to the queen.”

She slapped him. “Ogre breath”

He said something, a mumble of abuse.  She wasn’t sure she’d heard it right, couldn’t believe he would have said it, but the look of dark insolence the challenge in his glare told Hepdida she was not mistaken. “Say that again,” she breathed.

“You heard.”  There was a sullen defiance in his stance, one shoulder lifted jutting towards her, a sneer on his mouth.  His hooded gaze said he knew he’d overstepped the mark, his stance showed pride would not allow him to retract the words.

She stepped closer, her face inches from his. “Say it again.”

He looked to one side, shuffled his feet and looked back.  “You know what I said.”

“I can’t believe what you said.  Say it again.”  She was so close their noses were all but touching, she could count the lashes on his fast blinking eyelids.  They had barely been much closer when they had kissed, not the stolen kiss on the ground, but the consensual whisper of lips on lips a half dozen times since the castle had fallen.

He stiffened, suddenly resolute, as though absolved of blame by her intransigence.  “Orc whore,” he repeated with slow deliberation.

Niarmit tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair.  Pietrsen shuffled infront of her.  “So Quintala is at Listcairn then?” she said.

The Master of Horse nodded.  “That is the message we received from Prince Rugan’s court, your Majesty.”  He frowned in concentration.  “She must have been there nearly three weeks now. To what end no one seems sure. However, with summer coming, Sir Ambrose has been finding the enemy patrols more probing in their exploration of the Gap of Tandar.  It was from one set of overzealous skirmishers that he extracted the information about the half-elf’s arrival.”

Niarmit clenched a fist. “Despite her failures it seems Maelgrum still trusts her with high office and a position at the heart of his plans.  I do not like to think of her sitting unchallenged with an army on the border of her brother’s realm.”

“Sir Ambrose has Prince Rugan’s confidence,” Pietrsen assured her.  “He only bid me come here to ensure you were kept informed.”

Niarmit leant forward, scanning Pietrsen’s face.  The man shifted his weight a little from one foot to the other.  “He said that you were not to concern yourself,” the Master of Horse insisted.

“If Prince Rugan had wanted me unconcerned then he could have sent a simple rider from Lavisevre on a five day ride directly here.” She shook her head.  “Instead he uses the portal to send a message to you and Lady Isobel at Karlbad, just two days away, and he sets no mere lancer to the task of carrying his news but despatches the Master of Horse himself.”

“I wanted to come, your Majesty.”

Niarmit shook her head.  “And I need to go, Pietrsen, to Prince Rugan’s palace and then the Gap of Tandar.  I need to see for myself what the treacherous witch is up to.”

The door burst open and Hepdida tumbled into the room.  She was breathing heavily from some exertion and the scars on her face showed white against a red flush across her cheeks.  “Niarmit,” she cried out then bit off the rest of what she had been about to say at the sight of Pietrsen.

“I’m going to The Gap of Tandar,” Niarmit announced without ceremony.  “I can’t leave you behind,” she added, spotting an opportunity to remove her cousin to a place of greater safety.  “You’ll have to come with me, at least as far as Laviserve that is.”

“Lavisevre?” Hepdida echoed dully.

The door opened again and the boy Jay slipped in, wiping at his face.

“If you like,” Niarmit offered a hasty carrot.  “You could bring someone with you, someone to keep you company on the journey.”

“Someone for company?” Hepdida looked towards the boy.  He stood a little taller, a little straighter, anxious for her approbation.  “Yes,” she went on.  “I’d like that.”

Niarmit nodded, happy at the easy victory.  Let her cousin by all means chose a companion and think herself empowered by that option, to the point of overlooking the fact she had been given no choice as to where she would go or when.

“I choose Thom, he’ll keep me amused.”

“Thom? Are you sure?” Niarmit could not keep the surprise from her voice.

“Yes,” Hepdida assured her, calm and confident, smoothing the skirt of her dress with her palms.  “I’ll go and tell him myself and then I’ll pack.  I take it we are leaving immediately?”

Niarmit nodded dumbly as Hepdida shouldered her way out of the room, so oblivious to Jay that the boy had to step quickly out of her way.  He looked at the queen and then she saw the darkening bruise on his head and the line of thin bleeding scratches on one cheek.  Her eyes widened, her mouth opened to ask a question she had not yet formulated. Before she could find the words, or an order to put them in, the boy ducked his head in a quick bow of obeisance and then fled from the room.