Reave the Just and Other Tales (54 page)

I contemplated screaming. I considered flight. Neither alternative seemed likely to procure Sher Abener’s defeat. With an effort of will, I held my tongue and stood my ground.

Partway down the stair, the figure paused. “Who are you?” a man’s voice demanded. “Why are you here? I have seen you—” His tones faded into uncertainty, then returned. “Where have I seen you before?”

Apparently the stranger’s glamour shielded me yet. In contrast, my own recollection was precise. I recognized the voice, and knew the man.
Rowel!
I had heard him shout. Scut!
Aid me!
He was the disguised theurgist who had labored with Bandonire to bring about my usurper’s death.

On impulse, I ducked my head and replied in a frightened gibber, “If it please your worship. Your mightiness. I am a mate of Rowel’s. Not that fool Scut. Maybe you saw me when we were employed, Rowel and Scut to slaughter that fop Urmeny, me to watch their backs.” In a show of deference, I dropped my staff. Hunching abjectly to conceal what I did, I put one hand into the pouch at my belt. With the other, I gripped my dirk. “I would have done the deed myself, but pikemen prevented me,” I whimpered abjectly. “I came when the way was safe—to ask how I can serve—”

“Be silent, fellow!” snapped the theurgist. “You lie. Such ruffians as you do not force entry to their master’s homes. And that is not where I have seen you.

“Come to the light,” he commanded. As though by incantation he produced a lamp from the darkness and set it alight. “I will look at your face.”

The sudden illumination dazzled me. For a moment, I could scarcely discern my boots, or distinguish the stair. Fortunately, I did not need to see my hands. Touch alone sufficed.

In Bandonire’s pouch, I had found a sackette of rough powder like grains of sand—white, rough to the touch, and faintly malodorous. I could not for my life recall the powder’s proper use. However, I remembered clearly one of the lessons it had taught me in my youth.

Cringing and shuffling, and blinking furiously as I did so, I approached the theurgist. At the same time, I withdrew the sackette from Bandonire’s pouch and secreted it in my fist.

“If it please your worship,” I whined repeatedly. “If it please you.”

“But it does not,” retorted my antagonist. “Lift your head, you cowering fool. I will see your face.”

As an inattentive youth exasperating my tutor, I had once—and only once—inadvertently sneezed a similar powder into my own eyes. For an hour afterward, I had believed myself blinded by fire. Nearly a week had passed before my sight was fully restored.

When the theurgist had fixed his gaze on my features, I fumbled open the sackette and flung its contents into his face.

At once, he stumbled backward, roaring in pain. As he did so, his heel struck against a tread, and he fell. His hands slapped at his eyes in a belated attempt to protect them.

His lamp dropped to the stair. Fortunately, it continued to burn.

Before he could restore his sight with theurgy, or heal his eyes by any other means, I snatched out my dirk and aimed its butt at the side of his forehead.

Groaning, he slumped aside.

Tears streamed from his eyes as though he dreamed of grief. By that sign, I knew I had not struck too hard. Despite my fears, I did not wish to do murder.

But I was no nearer to discovering my enemy’s whereabouts. I could not begin to guess how long the stranger might withstand Sher Abener’s arts—or how extremely the necromancer might wish to protract my usurper’s death—but I believed that I could afford neither uncertainty nor delay.

Since the theurgist had approached me from above, I chose to think that my goal lay there. Retrieving the lamp, I ascended the stair and cast about me for some sight or sound of habitation.

At first, I saw and heard nothing. The gloom was deeper here. Despite the lamp, I could scarcely discern the walls which enclosed the wide chamber at the head of the stair. My own unsteady respiration seemed to baffle my hearing, so that no other noise reached me. To left and right, hallways held featureless midnight. Sher Abener’s dwelling was apt for fiends and bloodshed. I felt sure now that he did not drink the blood of sheep when he broke his fast. He quenched his thirst with darker fluids.

Holding the lamp before me, I ventured toward the nearer hallway. My small flame revealed only blunt stone and bare walls. When I had advanced a few steps, however, I heard a sound that might have been a human cry, stifled as it issued from the throat of the hall.

As if involuntarily, I quickened my pace. I had never known a man less likely to scream than the stranger. Independent of my mind, my limbs and flesh believed that no pain sufficient to draw a wail from his lips should be suffered to continue.

That hall ended in another perpendicular to the first. Apparently these passages followed the outer wall of some large chamber or suite. Yet no door gave admittance inward, just as no window offered any view beyond the manor.

Striding ahead, I rounded another corner—and lurched to a frightened halt so suddenly that I nearly dropped my lamp. In the hallway before me stood Tep Longeur. Although shadows muffled his features, I was certain of him. I had known his hardened cheeks and forthright gaze all my life.

He showed no surprise—indeed, he appeared to expect me. One arm cocked its fist grimly on his hip. His other hand rested on the hilt of a saber with its point braced on the stone at his feet. Lamplight gleamed along the blade, implying bloodshed. Clearly he had been set to guard his master.

“Come no farther,” he commanded me. Authority and desolation complicated his tone. “You have committed crime enough by trespassing in Sher Abener’s home. Do not compound your offense.”

In response, I gazed my misery at him and wondered how I could dream of freeing him.

By what means was possession broken? I did not know. I was a fool, indolent and compliant, and I had neither weapon nor art which might accomplish my purpose. Truth to tell, I did not understand my overseer’s plight. How then could I hope to restore that which had been reft from him?

He had served me, and my father before me, faithfully through all the years of his life. I should not have imperiled him for the sake of my efforts to appease the necromancer.

I required aid.

In this place, there was no one who might help me except my usurper. He did not
condone possession
. And he was a man of strange strengths—as well as of unwavering determination. He might perhaps know what was needed.

Therefore my first task was to reach him, despite Tep Longeur’s—and Sher Abener’s—opposition.

That
was an endeavor which might lie within my compass.

Clearing my throat uncomfortably, I asked, “Tep Longeur, do you know me?”

He answered without hesitation. “Well enough.” Bleak intent left his voice as parched as a wilderland. “You’re a fool in Sher Urmeny’s service. You’re trying to aid your condemned master.

“But you won’t. You will not pass here.”

At his reply, my heart lifted against its burden of dread. While the stranger retained my name and station, no one knew me for who I was. His glamour baffled even the overseer of my merchantry. Sher Abener himself might not discern the truth—

“You are mistaken,” I countered more strongly. “Grievously mistaken. I serve the necromancer. And I must give him warning. Why otherwise was I admitted this far?”

Apparently the condition of Tep Longeur’s mind permitted doubt. “What warning?” he demanded.

My circumstances inspired shameless invention. “The Thal has recanted his earlier submission,” I explained in haste. “He means to expel Sher Abener from Benedic. Even now he marches on the manor with all his pikemen. If he is not met and halted, he will drive our master away, and tear this dwelling to the ground.”

The overseer raised his saber. His jaws worked as though he were disgusted by the taste of my words—or of his own. “You lie.”

That I could answer. Holding my lamp beside my face to aid his sight, I repeated imperiously, “
Do
you know me? Look well.”

He leaned slightly forward to peer at me. The doubt I invoked troubled him despite his weapon—and his subjugation to Sher Abener’s will. After some consideration, he shook his head. “No.”

“Then,” I snorted, feigning scorn, “you do not know that I lie.

“Escort me to the necromancer,” I instructed him. “He will distinguish truth from falsehood.”

Tep Longeur deliberated within himself a moment longer. However, my suggestion proved too plausible to be dismissed. “Very well,” he muttered abruptly. Brandishing his saber, he stepped aside. “Go ahead of me. Give me cause, and I’ll hack you down where you stand.”

I obeyed. In a few steps, I passed him cautiously to advance along the hall. Involuntarily I held my breath, fearing that he would strike me from behind—that his acquiescence was like my prevarication, a ruse. But he did me no harm, although I was entirely defenseless.

Guided by the threat of sharp steel, I led him to another corner, beyond which I finally saw an entry to the region enclosed by the passages I had traversed. The entry had no door. In fact, I had yet to encounter any door within the manor. Every hall and chamber I had visited opened on the next without restriction. Apparently Sher Abener wished his fiends to roam freely, his forces to expand without hindrance. Or perhaps his manor served as the body, the flesh, of his arts, through which necromancy flowed as though it were blood, and the passages and rooms were veins.

I did not doubt that beyond this entry I would encounter Sher Abener himself. From it, illumination reflected outward, ruddy as fire, unsteady as flame. And muffled gasping emerged at intervals, choked groans of a sort that suggested torment.

There I faltered, hampered by old terrors and new alarms, until Tep Longeur gestured with his blade, instructing me forward. Even then I could scarcely place one step ahead of the other. If he had not set a hand on my shoulder to thrust me along, I might have fled screaming rather than enter there.

I had no wish in the world to witness the pain which wrung those gasps and groans from any human throat.

I seemed to have no choice, however. Once Tep Longeur had set me in motion, the light drew me toward it. I felt the grasp of its heat and horror before I reached the chamber of its source—the heart of the manor, where my enemy exercised his arts.

Ahead of me, extracted anguish rose to a wail, then fell silent as though it had been stifled or strangled.

The room was large—more hall than chamber—but at first my sight failed to receive its details. After the gloom of the outer passages, the intensity of the light dazzled me. A pyre would not have blazed more brightly. Perhaps, I thought with the oblique concentration of the truly mad, this explained the absence of doors. Flame on such a scale must require vast quantities of air.

To my sun-cooked flesh, the heat might have been the direct touch of coals. Within my cloak, sweat squeezed from my ribs and back. I felt slick moisture upon my face.

Yet I heard no roar of devoured wood. And I smelled no smoke. Instead the bitter reek of a charnel assailed my senses. Soon the odor seemed to sting the dazzlement from my sight. I found now that I could see—and wished that I could not.

The chamber was round, encircled by walls of blunt stone. It held no lamps or torches. None were needed. Larger fires provided illumination. The fitted granite of the floor sloped somewhat downward from the walls to the center of the circle, where a blaze nearly the height of a man capered and spat from what appeared to be a shallow pit. At first, I could not guess how the flame was fed, if not with wood. But then I observed four servants around the chamber, at the points of the compass near the walls. Each had a look of possession in his eyes. And each attended a piled mess of flesh and bone, sinew and offal. I feared to imagine the slaughter which had produced so much hacked and bloody tissue. With the slow regularity of half-wits, the four bent in unison to their piles, lifted up gobbets of dripping meat or bone, and tossed them ponderously into the fiery pit.

Butchered animals fueled the conflagration. Or butchered men.

I might have stared at the necromancer’s servants longer, transfixed by the nature of their task. However, another choked outcry snatched my attention away.

A quarter turn of the circle beyond my entrance stood a rude trestle table like the one at which Sher Abener had broken his fast during our earlier encounter. There the light was augmented by four iron braziers braced on tri-stands and set to brighten the corners of the table without interrupting movement. On the sides of the braziers, a bloody glow described the flames within them.

Stunned by the stench and the heat, I made no sound—either of surprise or of protest—when I saw my usurper outstretched upon the table.

He lay on his back, chin jutting fiercely at the ceiling. Leather thongs bound his wrists and ankles to rings of black iron set into the edges of the table. Pain corded his muscles and strained his limbs as though he lay upon a rack.

His shirt had been torn open, exposing his chest. And over his bared skin hunched Sher Abener. Like his servants, the necromancer had not noted my arrival. Fervor lit his eyes, echoing the braziers. In one hand, he held a thin blade, curved and cruel—an arthane. While I watched, aghast, he bent to his victim and drew a fine, precise cut across the helpless flesh. Anguish clenched the stranger’s frame, but Sher Abener paid no heed to it. Instead he slowly lowered his head to lick up the welling blood.

The action of his tongue forced me to see that he had already cut his victim a number of times—too many to count. Wounds wove a tapestry of pain across the stranger’s chest.

When the blood was gone, Sher Abener whispered avidly, “Endure, Urmeny.” Husky passion rasped in his tone. “Endure if you can. I will teach you to fear death.”

“This is no true death,” the stranger gasped. The touch of Sher Abener’s lips and tongue appeared to cause him more hurt than the arthane. “With every use of your arts, you slay yourself, necromancer.”