Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (66 page)

“She’s coming round,” Thom said, as the two ill matched orcs carried the girl out of the spiral stairway.

“You two look ridiculous,” Elise hissed more to vent the irritation at her own impotence, limping down the steps behind them.

“Nobody’s looking,” Haselrig told her and it was true.  The small courtyard was insufferably hot, blazing buildings on three sides turning the confined space into a furnace.  A few figures could be seen scurrying for the passage through the curtain wall that led to the relative safety of the outer bailey, none of them spared a glance for the trio of orcs carrying an unconscious girl

Hepdida struggled wide-eyed in the grip of the orcs.  “It’s all right,” Elise told her.  “You fell and hit your head.  We’re nearly out.”

“Rugan,” Hepdida gasped.  “He’s stuck in the tower.   We have to go back.”  The three orcs looked at the plume of flame roaring high from the huge stone chimney that had once been the castellan’s tower.

Elise shook her orcish head in the glare of the raging flames.  “We have to get ourselves out of here.  If we stay we’ll roast.”  There was a crispness to her clothes which were starting to smoulder.   A wisp of smoke rose from the cloak around Thom’s shoulders.  “Come on.”

They ran, half dragging the reluctant Hepdida towards the passageway.  Nobody tried to stop them.  The outer bailey was filled with leaderless orcs and outlanders standing staring helplessly at the inferno.  Every so often another burst of fire would send fragments of scorched timber or shattered tiles over the curtain wall and the spectating line would retreat a little further. 

No-one took any notice of a quartet of mismatched fleeing orcs and a girl outlander scout.

Giseanne rushed along the corridors of Lavisevre.  “Where is he?  Where is he?”

She met the stretcher party coming from the grand entrance. 

“He just appeared, my lady,” the lead guard was saying.  “He was at the gate, lying on the ground.”

“Rugan!” Giseanne wailed seeing the battered form of her husband lolling on the stretcher.  “Rugan, what has happened to you?” She lifted her head.  “Call for Deaconess Rhodra, call for all the priests.”

“Already done,” the guard assured her.

Rugan raised his uninjured hand.  Giseanne gripped it.  “Take me to my bed,” Rugan whispered hoarsely.  “And bring my son to me.”

Hepdida staggered through the eastern gate of Listcairn town.  “Stop,” she said.  And the four of them turned to look at the inferno illuminating the night sky.  Even at this distance, the light was bright enough to fling long shadows of their orcish shapes across the ground. 

“Shit,” Thom said.  “It’s caught the buildings in the outer bailey too.”

“Sparks do carry,” Haselrig said.  “And wood does burn.”

“I reckon that job is well and truly done,” Thom said as a thunderous roar reached them a couple of seconds after another bright flare from within the doomed castle. “That’ll be the main hall roof.”

“What in the Goddess’s name did you use to start that fire?” Elise asked.

“Quick oil,” Hepdida muttered.  “Quintala said it was quick oil.”

“Quintala was there?” Haselrig sharply curious.

“How much quick oil did you use?” Elise demanded.

“The whole flask.”

The admission drew a stare of disbelief from the sorceress.

Hepdida nodded.  “I didn’t mean too, it was an accident.”

“And Quintala is in there,” Haselrig nodded towards the inferno.

“Job definitely done,” Thom murmured.

They had made him comfortable.  The Prince of Medyrsalve lay in his bed beneath the covers.  They had used a blanket to cover his ruined right arm so that it should not distress the baby boy gurgling happily on the bed beneath his father’s tired and watchful eye.

Giseanne sat on the bed, holding her son as he reached out to grip his father’s finger.  The baby Andros was laughing at the entertainment of being roused from his bed for this sudden party.  Rugan smiled.

Giseanne looked past her husband to the robed deaconess standing on the far side of the bed. The Lady of Medyrsalve raised her eyebrows in an unspoken question. Rhodra gave the slightest twitch of her head, a barely perceptible shake. For a moment Giseanne’s face clouded with grief.  Then she composed herself before her son should see and assumed again the smiling visage of a mother at play with her child and his father.

Prince Andros’s nurse was not so controlled.  She turned away, shoulders heaving and a guard swiftly took her by the arm and led her from the room, himself in no hurry to witness this end game.

Rugan drew a deep breath, his face pale and drawn and looked at his wife.  “He is my son,” he said.  “Our son, watch him well, raise him true.”

Giseanne forced out a laugh.  “You will do that yourself, Rugan.”

The prince gave a slow shake of his head and spared his wife a thin smile.  “You made me better than I thought I could be, Giseanne.  You will do the same for him.”

Giseanne looked away, digging long nails into the palm of one clenched hand as she strove and failed to remain strong.   Rugan looked at the child playing at his side.  The baby raised his hands above his head and slapped the bed clothes with glee. He looked around at the many faces around the bed, for their usual smiling endorsement of his hilarious performance.    

Rugan smiled. His head fell against the pillow and the last half-elf closed his eyes.

A maidservant howled.  A guard began to blub.   Giseanne lifted her dismayed child and held him tight against her as the baby began to cry for a sadness he saw on the people around him, but which he could not understand.

Niarmit had found a horse a few hundred yards from the edge of the blazing forest.  She limped towards it careful not to scare the animal nor open her half-healed wounds.  It was unmarked by the attack of the trolls which must have carried away its former rider and had found a tasty clump of grass to soothe its ragged nerves.

She murmured soft reassuring noises until she was close enough to catch its bridle.  The horse skittered a little, jerking its head at the restraint, but Niarmit held tight. Just then, as Niarmit was shaping to get a foot in the stirrup, a great howl of anguish rolled across the plain as loud as thunder breaking from an overheard lightning strike. 

The horse reared and whinnied flicking its head back to try and loosen Niarmit’s grip as it high stepped away from her.  She held on hard.  She needed this horse.  Or rather she needed a horse and this was the only one she had found.  She had just got the animal steadied when the wave of cold burst over them. It was a sudden drop in the air temperature that had Niarmit shivering, her teeth chattering while the horse stamped restlessly on the ground, its breath misting in the arctic freeze.

But the abherration moved on quickly, rustling the grass with its passing before the warmth of a summer evening returned. As the horse settled, Niarmit was able to make a first tentative attempt to mount it.  Her side still hurt and she aborted the effort with her foot only a few inches from the ground.  A second attempt, more gingerly undertaken, and she was on the animal’s back. 

She hauled on the reins.  In a night of horrors, the great shout and the freezing blast were two mysteries too many to ponder.  The medusa was gone, the trolls too, but there was still a great army of the enemy advancing westwards, and a much smaller force of her own people that she had to find.  The defeat of Dema would not be the last battle she had to face.

Marvenna walked in Andril’s garden.  She knew it was a dream, a dream of comfortable familiarity.  Her steps were confident, certain that her actions would find her absent lord’s favour. 

Centuries of restless sleep had inurred her to the way that her own conscience would rise up and assume the mantle of Andril in order to chastise her unguarded sleeping mind.  Her angst, in the elf lord’s guise, would often berate her for some imperfection in her stewardship of his bequest.  It might be a failure to challenge some small act of disobedience, it could be some part of the forest realm she had not tended as properly as it deserved. Always there had been something, no-one could ever replace Lord Andril.  Every new day brought some new way that Marvenna had found to fall short of his perfection.

She knew this dream and this creature for a phantasm of her own invention, a means by which she tortured herself. But that did not lessen the terror his image could inspire.  He might lie in the Blessed Realm, beyond all reach of communication, but the simulacrum of Marvenna’s dreams had power enough. 

Except not tonight.  The best day’s work she had ever done lay behind her. She drew back her shoulders and held her head high as she closed on the familiar cloaked figure waiting beneath the arbour. 

The moonlight sliced through the trees, throwing broad lines of light and dark across the hooded form.  He stood so still, waiting to speak.  Usually it was his voice first, and then Marvenna’s apology.  But he had nothing to say and she had perfection to share with him.

“Well met, Lord Andril,” her dream-self greeted him.  “I bring great news that peace and obedience once more embrace your realm.”

The figure flung back its hood, long auburn hair flowed over shoulders and around a pale but perfect face.  It was not Lord Andril. The fine chin trembled and the green eyes blazed as her cousin Liessa demanded, “where are my children?”

Marvenna’s jaw dropped, she stumbled back.  This was a dream, she should wake, but she could not.  The apparition of her cousin pursued her, two steps forward to each one of Marvenna’s back, until the two elves were within a yard of each other.  “Where are my children?” Her cousin’s words gained ferocity with repetition.

Marvenna could only stammer syllables of incomprehension.

“The last charge I laid upon you,” Liessa’s gentle voice curled in a snarl around her words.  “The final vow you made to me, before my father took me away, do you remember it?”

“I…”  Marvenna shook her head.  Why could she not wake up?  She should be sitting upright in her bed in Malchion’s protection, sweating her fear at the terrors her conscience could subject her to.  She should not still be dreaming.

“For the ties of love and friendship and blood that we shared, you made an oath to me,” Liessa said.

Marvenna’s chin twitched to the side, but her gaze could not stray by the slightest degree from the paralysing fury of her cousin’s eyes.

“You swore you would protect my children and guard their interests as I would have done, if I could have stayed.”

The steward’s mouth opened and closed in mute despair.  The apparition seized her.  Marvenna winced and looked down where Liessa’s fine fingers pressed into her forearm.  She whimpered as her cousin shook her.

“Where are my children?  How have you honoured the vow you made to me?”

Marvenna clutched at the rock within her, the touchstone of certainty to which she always turned.  Lord Andril, who had drawn from Marvenna a vow of almost exactly contrary intent to his daughter’s, a demand that his steward should keep the Silverwood ever free of the taint of his daughter’s half-bred offspring.  Andril, the solution to any problem that Marvenna had ever set herself.  What would Andril do?  “Your father…”

Liessa thrust out with the hand that gripped Marvenna’s arm, pushing the steward so hard she staggered back and fell.  Liessa stepped forward bending down to close the distance between them.  Marvenna scrabbled backwards, fingers curling frantically through the dirt in her desperation to put distance between her and the half-elves’ vengeful mother.

“Do not speak of him,” she spat.  “Your adulation of my father served you ill while he walked the Silverwood, but I had thought and hoped you would find it in yourself to step beyond his shadow, once he left.”

“He…”

“He did not love you.”

The words hung between them. A dark hole was being opened in Marvenna’s mind, deep secrets she had never shared were blinking in the unwelcome light.  “I never asked, I never sought, we never.”  Marvenna shook her stammering head, her cousin’s ghost could not believe, must not believe any ill of Lord Andril.  “Liessa, please.  Your father never… not with me… he did not stray from the path of virtue.”

“He didn’t have to, did he,” Liessa shook her head.  “He controlled you always by the weight of admiration that you bore him.  His merest smile was enough to satisfy your hidden love, his scowl enough to darken your days for centuries at a time.”

“He never knew what I felt for him.  I never let him know, I never told him.”

“Of course he knew, you fool.  He always knew and he used that knowledge and he used you. He let you bind yourself to his will with ties of love and guilt, cords that you knotted yourself.”

“He never knew.  I never said.  I hid my feelings.”

“Nothing in the Silverwood was ever hidden from my father.”  The appartion of Liessa straightened, and glared around its old forest haunts. Marvenna drew in great lungfuls of damp air, the musk of the trees sweating in a summer’s evening.  She pushed herself up as Liessa shook her head. “How much more willingly and tightly do those enslave themselves, who think they are in love?”

Marvenna followed her cousin’s gaze around the familiar arbour. Branches hung heavy with leaves. Ferns lifted in the slight breeze along the forest floor.  A deer paused head raised, alert to the discussions of the elven cousins.  Why was this most dreadful of dreams so vivid and so stubbornly resistant to the blessing of wakefulness?

“Where are my children, Marvenna?”  Liessa’s voice was dull, devoid of hope as she asked for the third time.

The steward could only shake her head.  “I don’t know.”

“What promise did my father extract from you?” 

Marvenna bit her lip.  She opened her mouth but Liessa waved her silent before the first word could form. 

“I can guess,” she said.  “And it matters not, not anymore.”

For an instant Marvenna imagined the pair of them back in their carefree youth, bright with each other’s company and the unparalleled beauty of their world.  It was on a night such as this, all those centuries ago, that Andril had first come to tell them of the bargain he had struck with Maelgrum. A bargain which had bought peace but bound Liessa to a tortured captivity.  And there Liessa stood, head bowed, saner but sadder than Marvenna could ever remember.  “Where are your children, Liessa?” she asked.

Liessa shook her head.  “Gone.  They are gone.  Both gone. I felt their father’s pain.”

Marvenna frowned. “Those men are dead, the seneschal and the prince.  They feel no pain.”

Liessa looked at her cousin, sprawled on the ground. “They were born out of a dread darkness, but I loved them nonetheless and I wish you would have loved them as I did.”  There were no tears on Liessa’s face, just an expression of sorrow deep enough to drown in.

“I’m sorry.”  The words slipped from Marvenna’s mouth; with them went that inner certainty in the wisdom of Lord Andril.

Liessa bent down and stroked a hand along the steward’s cheek.  “There are no evil people, cousin, and certainly no evil children,” she said.  “Only evil choices.”

Marvenna blinked wordlessly as her cousin rose and walked away.  She tried to rise, but her limbs were leaden heavy.  She called after Liessa, but her words were lost in an enshrouding mist that rolled through the trees. She was screaming an apology as the grey whiteness enveloped her and then she was awake in her own bed in the heart of Malchion.  Voronyis was beyond the veil of twisted branches calling in, “Steward, are you well.  I heard you call.”

“It was just a dream,” she called back. “A bad dream.”

The captain murmured an apology and she heard the soft sounds of his retreat.  She reached for the sheet to pull it over herself, for in her writhings she had flung it aside.  As she did so she saw the forest dirt beneath her fingernails.  She turned her right hand in wonder and gasped.  There, on the inside nearer the wrist than the elbow were five round bruises; the marks of four fingers and a thumb pressed deep into her skin.  She gripped her forearm with her left hand, trying to fit her own fingers over the contusions to see if, in the torment of her dream, she could have inflicted the injury herself. 

They were of just a size and spacing to have been made by her own hand, save only that he or she who made these marks had used their right hand to do so.