Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (54 page)

  Odestus’s legs gave way.  He slumped to the floor, his fall cushioned by a layer of troll filth.  He was shaking his head from side to side, lips framing a denial as Dema strode across the room with that familiar languid elegance.

“It can’t be, it’s not possible,” he said, despite the living breathing evidence that it was.  “How?”

Dema smiled beneath her mask, her sorrow displaced by amusment at his discomfort.  He’d seen that smile a thousand times. The infallible medusa, the equal of any challenge, grinning at another failure of action or comprehension by her creator.

“I don’t know all the details,” she said.  “He wouldn’t tell me.”  She was level with him now, the blue sparkle behind her gauze mask, stilling his blood as she looked down at him.

“Who? Maelgrum!”

She nodded at Odestus’s answer to his own question and extended her hand to pull him up.  He took it.  Her grip was firm and real.  Her skin, in testament to her part reptilian part human physiognomy, was cool to the touch.

“Tell me what you do know, Dema, please,” he begged.  “Help me to understand.”

She shrugged.  “I’m not supposed to tell.”  Then she frowned, the creasing of her brow ruffling the mask.  “Or is that I’m not supposed to hear?”  She swept the back of her hand across his robe, brushing off some detritus of troll bedding.  “Come, my quarters are marginally more salubrious than here.  I am glad of the company, it’s been a long five years.”

“Five years?” 

She put a finger to her lips and led him out onto the landing and through the door to the left.  It was a spartan chamber sparsely furnished.  A simple cot bed, a chair and desk, a chest.  Her chainmail surcoat hung from a stand in the corner.  He well remembered the day when Maelgrum had given it to her and the many battles in which she had worn it.  There was now no rent in its front, where the links had been forced apart by the cowardly thrust from behind which had killed her.  There was no scar on her cheek where Rugan’s blade had marked her at the battle of the Saeth.   Odestus remembered the blood washed by the rain into a red curtain down her cheek as she had raged at the imperfection of her victory.

“Five years?”

She didn’t answer, merely taking a seat on the bed and waving him towards the chair.

“Dema,” he struggled to frame a relevant question.  “What is the last victory that you won?”

Her eyebrows arched, her lips pouted.  “You catch on fast little wizard.”  He worked his fingers over themselves, waiting in silence for her answer.  At last it came.  “I have captured the fortress of Listcairn from an idiot constable called Kircadden.”  She smiled, a broad grin of pleasurable recollection. “That was barely a week after I slaughtered Hetwith and repulsed the army of Nordsalve with a mere five hundred. Then I rode half way across the Petred Isle to take Listcairn.”

She paused to wag a finger at him.  “Mind, little wizard, it was your fault.  Listcairn was your task once you had pushed through Hershwood.  Your failure snatched me from the prospect of the greatest battle that the Salved Empire has seen since the Kinslaying wars. It should have been me riding against King Gregor, not that worm Xander who is doubtless still glorying in his overpriced ad unworthy triumph.”

Xander was dead, seven months dead.  Odestus thought it, but stopped himself short of saying it.  “How long ago was that, Dema?  How long ago did you take Listcairn?”

Again a frown.  “A month ago,” she admitted.  “I have been here a month.  I came here the night of my triumph at Listcairn.”

“How?” His voice was a dry croak.

She didn’t answer.  She looked at the floor and the walls.  “Of course,” she began.  “I know it’s been longer than a month for you.  A year and a half maybe? Perhaps two and a half?”  There was an edge to her voice as she went on quickly.  “It can’t really have been any longer than that.  Maelgrum wouldn’t have let the war go on any longer, and I can’t see the likes of Rugan stretching it out.  But maybe a year and a half?”

She was looking at him, her head still, her body tense with a longing he had not seen since their first meeting.  That dark alleyway two decades earlier, where she had first entreated his aid, making the request that had precipitated them both along this dark path of accident, exile and infernal service.  Then, as now, behind the fearsome warrior had been a supplicant desperate for an answer.

He opened his mouth to give it.  “Dema,” he said.  “It’s been…”

“No!” she held up a hand to stop him.  “Don’t say. You mustn’t.  He said I mustn’t ask, must not be told.  You shouldn’t even be here.  He will be furious.”  She rose from the bed, pacing the room in some agitation.

“Why?”

“I’m not to know anything of what has happened, what will happen to me.  He was most insistent.  He would tell me nothing, let me see no-one, no-one who might have known anything about me.”  She grinned and huffed a half-laugh.  “It has been so very dull.  Trolls are not great conversationalists, even the orcs are more entertaining, when they aren’t too scared to come down off their high walls.  Oh I have missed you little wizard.”  She looked at him appraisingly.  “And you have grown old I see, much more than five years older since we parted.”  Again a smile.  “And I will have to take what clue I can about the passage of time from your battered appearance.”

“Dema, I…”

She stopped him again.  “No.  It is good to see you.  Let’s not spoil it.”

“How?” He repeated dry mouthed.  “How did Maelgrum pluck you from that night of triumph to this place and to this time?”

“He called me, I was sleeping in my new claimed quarters and he called me.  There was a blue gate an oval filled with opaque swirls of colour and there was Maelgrum.  I…”  She hesitated.  “I was not alone, but my companion, he slept on.  Maelgrum took me through the gate and when I looked back, I could see my chamber still.  The man still sleeping, though everything was still, even the flame of the torch had ceased to flicker.”

“Then Maelgrum led me into the room next door, the castellan’s chamber and he showed me.”  She stopped, lips thinned as though in pain. “He showed me…”

“What did he show you, Dema?”

She looked at him, her masked eyes glaring a chilling sparkle at him.  “You know what he showed me little wizard?”

“Your own dead body.”

She nodded and then shook her head.  “Though how did I come to be human again?”

Odestus opened his mouth to answer but with a chop of her hand she bid him silent again.  “I must not know.  This magic, this strange magic that Maelgrum used, he said I must not know.  That knowing would make it all go wrong, get worse.”  She laughed.  “Though what could be worse than knowing I’m dead?  I don’t even know how, I just know I’m dead.  Somewhere between our two nows, somewhere in my future and in your past I am going to have died.”  She looked at him sharply.  “Did you weep for me, little wizard?”

“I’m weeping still,” he said and it was true for his eyes were full.

“Did anyone else, was there anyone else, another perhaps who mourned my passing?”  She cut off the question with a slice of her hand across her throat.  “No, I must trust Maelgrum.  I must hear nothing.”

“Why?” Odestus asked.  “Why did he bring you here and now?”

She accepted the less perilous question with a quick nod.  “There are two reasons.  You have met the master’s new allies, not exactly native to this plane and slightly more quarrelsome than orcs.  An orc argument ends with one survivor and a lot of dead bodies.  A troll argument never ends, the dead and injured heal so fast.  Maelgrum wanted someone to bring order and purpose to their ferocity. So they could serve his will.”

“And he reached into the past to pluck you forth to be their general?”

Dema nodded.  “Even in death I am still his greatest warrior.  He has promised me a colossal battle a conflagration of conflict that will make Xander’s incompetent triumph look like a squabble between street urchins.  I will be his general then, and I will win a victory that will be heard and sung of in the furthest reaches of the Eastern Lands.”  There was a brightening to the sparkle behind her mask as she gazed through the wall into a glorious martial future.  She looked away from whatever mental image had captured her attention and gave a wry grin.  “There are also advantages to being technically dead, particularly when training trolls.”

Odestus shivered, the room suddenly seemed colder as he contemplated the bizarre reality of his dearest dead friend seized from a moment before her death and transported here.  “You said there were two reasons,” he reminded her, his breath misting in front of his face.  “Two reasons why Maelgrum brought you from then and there to here and now.  What was the second?”

“Becaussse ssshe herssself hasss told me that I would cassst the blue gate ssspell to sssummon her, or at leassst ssshe will tell me,” a familiar sibilant voice hissed at Odestus’s back.  The little wizard tried to turn to face his master, but found he could not move.

As though posed for a sculpture, the occupants of Rugan’s throne room held their positions for a long stretched moment.  White faced Hepdida clung to Thom.  The illusionist glared at the unmasked Haselrig.  Maelgrum’s former lieutenant hung slumped between the shoulders of his enormous guards. Elise sat gripping her staff with enough force to break either its slender timber or her own wizened fingers.  Giseanne held her arms high, imploring some sense to descend and calm the raging emotions of her kith and kin.  Rugan and Kimbolt glowered at each other, unsure why the same questions should be passing both their lips. 

It was Kimbolt who spoke first, unsure whether prince or traitor should be the target of his question.  “What do you know of a blue gate?”

“I’ve seen just one, Captain Kimbolt,” Haselrig answered.  “And I’ve seen you through it.”

“Do you know what it is, traitor?” Rugan barked.

“I saw a picture of one before,” Haselrig admitted.  “But I did not know what I was seeing then, not until I saw the real thing and realised what it was and how it worked and what my ma…  what Maelgrum had done.”

“You’re saying that Maelgrum opened a blue gate.” Rugan circled the prisoner with lupine intensity as he took the lead in the questioning.

Haselrig nodded.

“A gate between the present and the past?”

Again the prisoner nodded, while the air hummed with collective gasps of astonishment from the assembled company.

“Where is this gate?” Kimbolt’s voice was thick.  “Where did you see it?”

Haselrig’s mouth twitched.  “It is in the castellan’s bedchamber at Listcairn, Captain.” He bowed his head averting his gaze as he added, “I saw you through it, sleeping there.”

Kimbolt felt the heat of Rugan’s glance in his direction.  His past mis-service was known to all, but still he blushed to be reminded in such company of how close had been his companionship with the medusa.  He shook his head.  “That gate was blue, but you could not see through it.  You cannot have seen me there, Haselrig, you lie.”

The prisoner frowned. “You must have woken while the gate still endured and seen it then.”  He took his turn to shake his head in refutation. “But what you saw was the past side of the gate, from which one cannot see into the future.  Looking from the present into the past it is a barely tinted window. I saw you sleeping, Captain.”

Rugan looked from seneschal to prisoner and back again.  “You have seen the other end of this gate, Kimbolt?  You can endorse that this traitor speaks some truth, that the Dark Lord did open a cursed path across the stream of time?”

“Husband,” Giseanne’s voice was thin, trembling with confusion. “Explain. What are these blue gates? How come you have not spoken to me of them before?”

“My grandfather Lord Andril told me of them when I was young and still allowed to come to his court in Malchion.  He cited the blue gate as an example, the greatest example, of the weakness of human nature and of their unsuitability for being granted the art and dignity of magic use.”

“That doesn’t answer the lady’s question.” Elise ground out her own inquiry through clenched teeth.

“It is not so hard to know what they are,” Rugan replied.  “Believing they exist is the more challenging task.  The Monar Empire was destroyed by idiot mages using these gates between the present and the past to try and travel back in time and change history.  Every meddling interference only served to confound the wishes and aspirations of he who meddled.  Time is not to be trifled with. It will destroy those who try to pervert it.”  

“So Maelgrum has travelled into the past and tried to change what has already happened,” Thom murmured.  “And if Prince Rugan is right in his understanding of these gates, then the Dark Lord has already failed.  Maybe that is why he did not win the battle of the Saeth, well not as clearly as he had hoped.”

Haselrig shook his head.  “Maelgrum knows the dangers of the blue gates, if any could bend that enchantment to his advantage then it is Maelgrum.  He would not, he did not, use it to try to tamper with the past.”

“Then what purpose could it serve?” Thom demanded.  “To go back and change nothing?  Why only a student of history would find merit in that.”

“I was not alone that night,” Kimbolt mumbled.  “Not at first.”

“Where was the medusa?” Rugan closed on Haselrig and gripped the prisoner by the jaw.  “Where was the abomination, when you looked through the gate?”

Despite the half-elf’s iron grip, Haselrig managed a marginal shake of his head from side to side and a stifled admission. “She was not there, she was not in the past.”

“She has come here?”  Rugan gripped a little tighter.  Haselrig went a little paler.  “He has seized her from the past to plague our present?”

“Just because she was not in the room when Haselrig looked through the gate, it does not mean she has been brought into our time.”  Giesanne was trembling as she tried to dispel the dread which had consumed her husband.  “She might have been anywhere in the past, rather than here in our own time.”

“I’m sorry, your Highness.” Kimbolt was assailed by memories he had once thought just part of an old nightmare but whose true menace he only now understood.  “I have seen the other side of this gate, I have seen how it ends.”

“It ends?” Giseanne said hopefully.  “The gate is broken, or it will be?”

“And when it broke, when the shimmering oval was dispelled,” Kimbolt’s voice was strained as he remembered that moment in the castellan’s bedchamber. “What stood in its place was Dema, summoned in mid-fury from some distant battlefield.  Her sword was bloodied, her mask was off, and as she rose she looked at me.”

“She looked at you?”  Giseanne’s eyes widened. “She looked at you unmasked?”

Kimbolt was shivering as he recalled that moment. The mere memory of her gaze was enough to chill his blood and paralyse his lungs.  He swung away and found a seat.  “Aye, your Highness,” he gasped.  “I have served my time as a stone monument to Dema’s power, though I remember none of it.  The little wizard restored me to flesh, though at the time both he and she let me believe I had merely been rescued from some deep fever.”

“What does the Dark Lord mean by this insanity?” Rugan demanded of their prisoner.  “What is his aim in bringing the medusa beyond her own span of years?”

“Release him husband,” Giseanne said.  “Give the man breath to speak if you want him to answer your questions.”

With a last vice like compression of Haselrig’s neck, Rugan strutted away and the prisoner slumped sputtering between his guards.  “I do not know, but I think I may guess,” he said when he had found his voice again.

“We can all guess,” Rugan snorted.

“I have discovered that the Vanquisher’s enchantments of protection, so potent against orcs and humans alike, are blind to the undead.”

“That’s right,” Hepdida emerged from the shadow of Thom’s arms.  “There was a time Niarmit was nearly killed by zombies despite her wearing the Helm.”

Kimbolt spun round, face pale, an alarm of questions bursting to be asked.  Hepdida saw his expression and gave a quick smile.  “She is well, Torsden came to her aid and the zombies were destroyed.  But the Helm could not protect her from them.”

Rugan nodded heavily. “And the medusa is already dead, but now she is here? What power would the Vanquisher’s charms have against her?”

“I do not know,” Haselrig admitted.  “But I came to warn the queen, to warn you all.”

“Thank you.”

Rugan swung round at his wife’s expression of gratitude.  She met his rage with a glare of icy defiance.  “Take the traitor away,” Rugan commanded.  “There is a cell that should be strong enough to hold him.”

“Wait,” Haselrig cried.  “There is more that I must tell you.”

“You have told us enough for now,” Rugan insisted.  “We must consider this news I would rather have no treacherous ears listening in on our deliberations.”

“I can tell the Dark Lord nothing, I have discarded the black medallion through which we communicated.  He knows not where I am.”  Haselrig ended with a plaintiff cry, “you can trust me.”

The snort of contempt was ripped from the half-elf’s throat.  “I trust no-one beyond my wife and the queen,” Rugan assured him.  “And in my roll call of mistrust you and your foul master lie at the very bottom, together with that bitch sister of mine.  Be thankful for the moment that I leave you with your miserable life.  You should use the time to think on what you owe and how you might persuade me to let you see another dawn or two before an axe of retribution falls for all your sins.”

The assembled company quailed at the ferocity of Rugan’s scorn, but the prisoner simply lowered his head and allowed the guards to march him briskly from the chamber. 

With its object gone, the fury seemed to relinquish its hold on Rugan too.  The half-elf slumped into his throne with a weary sight, muttering darkly of blue gates.

“You think this is bad, your Highness?” Kimbolt asked, trying not to smart at Rugan’s public declaration that he, along with the rest of the world, lay outside the prince’s circle of trust.

The half-elf sniffed.  “Maelgrum has cast a blue gate spell, and the abomination walks the Earth months after her own death.  Such arrogant interference in the natural order is beyond belief, beyond experience, beyond sufferance.  It will surely raise a storm with strength enough to sweep us all aside; that may be the only way to cleanse this pollution from the stream of time.”