Master of Whitestorm (30 page)

“Good man,” Korendir crooned. He steadied his mount with a touch and sought after whatever threat the stud had sensed before him.

The wereleopard shot from a cover of briar. Its diamond-spotted pelt gleamed like gilt; green eyes turned in its tufted face and fixed on horse and vulnerable rider.

Korendir leveled the sword. Startled by a balance that seemed at one with the sinews of his hand, he revised his initial defense and decided to impale the fey killer as it sprang. But the stallion curvetted sideways. Muscle bunched under Korendir’s thighs; the stud’s quarters thrust like a battering ram and catapulted into a gallop.

The wereleopard swerved and matched pace. It charged at the stallion’s shoulder, its fangs dripping venom.

Korendir attempted a cut. The leopard twisted sinuously aside and lost ground with a snarl.

Rain fell harder.

They raced, rider and horse in the lead, and one stride behind, the hunter coursing with narrowed eyes and a tail that streamed through clods gouged up by flying hooves. Korendir let his mount choose direction. He gripped the sword with his breath grown tight in his chest, and his concentration fixed on the killer that skimmed on his trail.

A gully yawned underfoot. The horse broke stride to gather its hocks and jump. Given warning, the wereleopard negotiated the obstacle more smoothly. The grace of its leap closed the gap, and immediately on landing it sprang.

Korendir raised the sword and rammed the point down the gaping mouth. Teeth clicked on steel and venom sprayed droplets in the wind. Claws raked the mail-clad wrist behind the quillons, and sound became swallowed by the wereleopard’s near-human scream. The beast fell back, cleared the obsidian length of the blade, and tumbled in spasms upon the ground, spotted fur dulled by clinging dirt. Blood soaked into thirsty soil until only stains remained.

Korendir soothed his mount to a trot. He did not circle back, but waited with his blade angled for the inevitable retaliation that must come from the slain killer’s mate.

The sky opened. Rain streamed down in torrents that filled his eyes and drenched him. The storm closed down in opaque curtains that interwove and shifted, and then spun to a texture that more resembled the flickering of candleflames.

Without warning Korendir found himself gone from the gray’s soaked saddle. Restored to the enchantress’s chamber, he shivered and realized the wax lights no longer whirled in circles. As their flames steaded and lengthened, he made out the form of Ithariel standing still by the candlestand, her eyes all secretive shadows.

Yet not everything remained as before. Korendir still wore the dwarf-mail, and a cloak that shed rainwater in pools onto polished agate. His grip stayed glued to a black hilted sword by runnels of his own hot blood; between the twining of realities, the wereleopard’s dewclaw had carved a gash in his wrist.

“Your experience in the wastes was quite genuine,” Ithariel ventured across silence. “Give me your service, and the fine things you sampled shall be yours.”

Korendir’s head jerked up. His look went flat as drenched slate and his manner radiated fury. “I’ve already refused. Did you think if you toyed with me I’d submit?”

Ithariel sighed. She spun precipitously away, and something about her seemed to shrink. At first Korendir assumed she wrought another spell; but when she looked back to him, she showed a face very human with chagrin. Immediately he realized she had dispensed with the glamour that made her irresistible.

Small things became visible that the potency of magic had obscured. She was small, fine-boned to the edge of fragility. Her chin had a dimple. The hair folded into its braid gleamed russet, too heavy for the constraint of jewelled pins; and the skin like perfect pearls was rosy now, as if touched to a blush by wind. Korendir stared, lost in admiration that no amount of spellcraft could achieve. Ithariel in her natural state was stunningly, immediately real, and he found himself challenged on a front he had no resource left to guard.

His breath bound up in his throat. Desperation warred with longing, and his mind tangled in a morass of ancient fears.

Yet the enchantress failed to detect his turmoil. Caught up in embarrassment of her own, she said, “Regretfully, I seem to have misjudged. By the accounts, I would have thought the reputation matched the man.” She ended with a glance that searched in a manner quite terrifying for its mildness.

Korendir blocked her by turning aside. Prepared to lash back in self-defense, he was set off balance by the presence of a being who perhaps might consent to be reasoned with. Afraid to expose his vulnerability, he sought the ordinary and raised his arm to sheath his weapon.

Ithariel noticed his bleeding. “Oh, Neth, what a nuisance, you seem to have gotten yourself hurt.” She crossed to his side, confidently prepared to have a look.

Korendir’s uncertainty coalesced to immediate reflex. The black sword whipped up to fend her off.

Ithariel stopped. She went very suddenly white and her brows gathered into a frown. “Put that up, foolish man. Do it fast, or I’ll be forced to consign a very treasured artifact to oblivion.”

Korendir turned the hand that held the sword. His eyes mirrored the reflections that skittered like sparks down the blade. “Does that matter, since I’ve refused your offer?”

The enchantress repressed an obvious impulse to stamp her foot. “It matters,” she said, and then qualified. “You seem more particular than most, but find the right price, and all men can be bought.”

“After I’ve finished my contract with the duke,” Korendir snapped. “Then, only then, we’ll talk price.”

“Your contract with the duke will kill you.” Daunted by what seemed blind obstinacy, Ithariel showed exasperation. “The blade is yours for blood debt, if you like. But only if you care for that gash.”

To a swordless man who harbored an extreme aversion for being touched, the offer meant safety. Korendir stepped back. He perched upon the far cushion of the divan, propped the weapon at his elbow, and tried to peel back the mail. The cuff proved too snug and the setback left him strained. He needed to strip off the armor, and that could not be accomplished without staining a surcoat that at all costs must be returned.

The surly glance he directed toward Ithariel made her laugh in genuine delight. She might have restored his worn tunic, yet chose not to on feminine principle. If he wished to stand on pride, let him continue on penalty of extreme inconvenience. While Korendir slipped the cloak fastenings and wrestled one-handed with laces, she seated herself on his far side, the sword like a warning between.

Her bribe of fine velvets presently lay discarded on the floor. Shimmering dwarf-mail joined them, jingling unceremoniously in a heap that left the fabric crushed flat with wet. Korendir wormed free of the linen gambeson beneath, then shredded the quilted sleeve to use for bandaging. Seeing he would wrap his hurt in damp rags without doctoring, Ithariel fetched him the ewer of water and an herb paste from her chest for a poultice.

Korendir fought back apprehension as she resumed her place beyond the sword. Stripped to the waist, with the brand and the whip marks from the Mhurgai and all of the wounds from past forays written in scars on his flesh, he felt the enchantress’s scrutiny like an unwanted physical caress.

“You’ve led a harsh existence,” she observed critically.

Korendir knotted the linen with a savagery held back from his speech. “If you’re sorry, don’t burden me further.”

Absorbed and edgy, his bronze hair left sleeked by the rain, Korendir finished his field bandage. While his attention was marred by the discomfort of his wound, Ithariel stole the interval for study. Her findings startled her. Absent was the reckless ego of the mercenary adventurer she had pictured. In their place, the enchantress read intelligence, sensitivity, and yearning overlaid by desperate control. Though his flesh told a history of strife, nothing else about the man who named himself Whitestorm confirmed the destruction and death that shaped his trade.

As if he sensed her probe, Korendir looked up. He caught her moment of unschooled surprise, then the sharp calculation which followed. Plainly she would set her next snare to find what in the spectrum of human desires might move him.

That above everything he must keep from her. The survival of his integrity depended upon it.

A smile like a twist of bitter iron touched his lips. He owned no defense against magic, trapped without recourse, he resorted to viciousness and tried an unthinkable countermove. When her enchantments reached to pry out his inner secrets, Korendir abandoned resistance.

Ithariel attacked with every power at her disposal sharpened for a fight that never happened.

His barriers against her parted with little else but irony for warning. Backed by full measure of her White Circle powers, her consciousness flung downward into Korendir’s mind far deeper than she intended. The spell that should have framed his surface thoughts to reveal what motivated his stubbornness turned like a snare against her.

Instead the conflicts which comprised the man closed like a shackle around her.

Lost beyond all self-awareness, Ithariel plunged into emotional mazes for which magic held no remedy. Lost beyond escape, she cried out; and her scream became that of a boy hammered down by the flat of a bloodcrusted cutlass...

* * *

Smoke scorched his nostrils; helplessly he struggled and kicked, but the hands of his enemies dragged him upright. Yapping, guttural victory cries rang in his ears as Mhurgai raiders shoved him between the shoulderblades. He skidded, weeping curses, and sprawled on a carpet sodden scarlet from the slaughter of Shan Rannok’s men at arms.

The same hands that had butchered them tied him there, with silken cords torn from the draperies.

“That one’s the son, yes?” snapped a swarthy man with slit eyes. He wore diamond earrings, and a robe sewn with peacock’s plumes and belted with a crimson sash.

Korendir choked as a kick slammed his belly. Retching, half-killed with misery, he spat bile and found his voice. “Don’t listen to what they say. I’m not. Her heir is buried behind the orchard.” Another blow smashed his mouth. Through split lips he continued. “Read the stone. Says husband’s firstborn. Son.”

The man in the sash scowled sourly. “Listen to him, thou!”

But the raider captain was not cowed. He pressed his boot on the boy’s face to crush back the words that discredited him before his overlord. “This is the heir, Lord Exalted. A bastard, to the widow’s shame. We tortured a serving maid to find out.”

The boy wrenched his head to one side. He coughed blood. “Della lies.”

“Not with her belly slit open and the first marshal raping her silly, she would not.” The Mhurga captain grinned. “She screamed plenty, and she talked, while he spilled her soft guts round her thighs.”

“She did not speak truth,” said a clear woman’s voice from one corner. An aged lady sat there, with straight features and a straighter back, and eyes that stared only ahead. She was blind. “The boy you abuse is no bastard of mine, but a fosterling.”

Korendir groaned. He tried weakly to push to his feet, but the seamen who had beaten him pinioned his wrists.

The man with the crimson sash regarded the lady and smiled. “Bastard or not, pretty grandmother, we’re going to make him watch. Thine heir must learn what thy husband would not: Mhurgai never fail to exact reprisal for attacks upon our homeland.”

Korendir screamed in animal rage and tried to rise from the floor. His captors called more men to hold him, and though he closed his eyes and threw up and bit the fingers which forced his bleeding head straight, still he failed to escape.

The sounds of shredding cloth and the screams of the widow who had raised him tore into his ears and brought madness...

Madness which had no ending, only memories like doors that opened on unmitigated horror.

* * *

Korendir’s intent had been that the violence in his past would repulse the enchantress’s invasion of his mind. For that he had yielded to insanity, and for that purpose only had he unleashed his recall of the obliterating defeat at Shan Rannok. But the effort backlashed, frighteningly; the event served only to wrench Ithariel’s spellcraft from control. Overwhelmed, unable to separate herself from her victim’s awareness, she became helplessly entangled in memories that savaged her like nightmares...

* * *

Korendir was ten. He punched a rough boy who called the lady street names, and claimed that a stablehand was her lover,
his father,
and his birth a shame that a lady’s charitable ways could never absolve. The brute said this of the widow, faded to gentleness by her sorrows, who grew flowers in a hothouse for the grave of her departed husband; the same lord who left to fight Mhurgai and returned to Shan Rannok within a sack, in pieces.

While Korendir and his tormentor pummelled each other with brute determination, the enspelled spark of consciousness that was Ithariel twisted this way and that, blind as a fish in a net. She lashed out and evaded the episode but did not recover herself.

Instead she reeled on to another place of black leaves and moonlight; felt
his
hand on a knife, while hot blood coursed in a gush that meant death over
his
knuckles that must not shake. The victim beneath the blade was a gut-wounded farmer whose family would not see him home from the woods. Three daughters named Mallie, Nessie, and Tesh; and Korendir’s tearing anguish and awe of a dead man’s courage that humbled him helplessly to tears.
He
could not do as Vwern, not ever in life risk
his
safety with pretty young children dependent...

And yet he killed; fast and ugly, mostly, because he could not endure to witness pain.

The Mhurgai had scarred him that way:
the widow who had raised him, tormented to her death in old age, forced by an evil sea raider to partner an act shared only in love with her husband. And then that same act repeated, with the blade of a Mhurga knife.
Her screams and her agony, and the flames and the screams of ten thousand warriors tortured Korendir’s days, unrelenting. Because suffering itself was unthinkable; thumbless, tongueless slaves and babies feeding vultures on battlements were unthinkable,
and so the Datha burned. Perhaps the widows who survived after conquest might raise sons who would never again inflict atrocities upon others.