Stormwarden (10 page)

* * *

... Fog, wind, and the icy sting of spray. Surf hammered into rocks scant yards below the ledge where Jaric huddled, arms clasped tightly around his knees. The elements battered his unprotected body with cruel force. Though soaked and chilled, he did not care. His face remained hidden behind hands rigid as carved ivory, even when he sensed he was no longer alone. The sorcerer from his earlier vision stepped out of the mist and paused on the ledge before him. But Jaric did not look up.

"I call you, Firelord's Son." The sorcerer gazed down at the boy. The wind tossed his silver hair, his staff glowed with a brilliant aura of power, and the air tingled with the resonance of terrible forces held in check.

Yet Jaric made no move. If he acknowledged the sorcerer's existence, he might forfeit control of his destiny forever. His will would be crushed, scattered like the ashes of the dead, and he would lose all that was dear to him.

"In the name of Anskiere you are summoned," said the sorcerer, and he raised the staff over the stiff figure of the boy.

Jaric felt the power around him shift, align like a spear to pierce his innermost self. Dread locked his limbs. His thoughts raced, and something, no,
someone
jabbed him with the realization that he
would
die, should he continue to reject the fate the sorcerer had decreed for him. But Jaric ignored the warning. Heedless as the moth which flies into candleflame, he chose oblivion; and was blocked. Two slit-pupiled eyes appeared, etched like coals against his retinas.

Jaric screamed.
His own eyes were closed.
Yet hotly as Kor's Fires, the demonic gaze trapped him. His mind was possessed by a nightmare vision of shame and guilt and the horrid certainty that his denial would eventually condemn his entire race. "Let me be!" shouted Jaric. But the eyes melted into smoke, replaced by an image of Master Iveg chained amid a blazing pyre of books while demon forms danced in silhouette. Their shapes were black as ink, pooling into darkness. Jaric found himself thrust into the streets of Morbrith Keep, a torch clutched in sweating hands; and the bleached skeletons of dead men snapped like sticks under his feet as he walked.

Then out of the shadowed sockets of a skull, the demon's red eyes reappeared and focused accusingly upon him.

'You alone can prevent this.'

He cried aloud in denial, but his heart betrayed him. He could never let Morbrith be destroyed.

The demon's dream rippled like fabric and left him.

Beaten to his knees, Jaric looked up at last, beheld the weather mage who had called him. He had no spirit left to resist. Empty of passion, he stared into features troubled as storm sea. Just then the staff descended in a blistering arc of light.

It struck with a blast of energy. Gale wind screamed. The sea rose, towered into boiling crests which broke over the ledge with a roar. Foam-laced tons of water hurled Jaric from his perch.

He shouted in panic as he tumbled over and over. Then darkness drowned him in yet another dream. Ice snapped and sang like harpstrings in his ears, overlaid by the cries of creatures imprisoned, yet lusting hotly for blood and killing. Jaric shivered, shaken by the knowledge that those cries would echo for centuries yet to come were nothing done. Then an arching flare of sunlight struck his face. He squinted, saw a cliff armored with prisms of ice. Waves boomed beneath, splintered into diamond drops of spray and the wind crooned in a minor key. Tragedy had occurred here, Jaric understood, and he knew unconsolable grief. Tears traced his cheeks. Then the scene upended, replaced by the stinging prod of Anskiere's geas. Direction aligned like a compass within his mind; he knew he must travel southeast. The sorcerer's command intensified, became a compulsion no protest could deny.

Then Jaric knew only darkness, threaded by a far-off echo of voices. Fuzzily, he attempted to orient himself. His eyes seemed clotted with shadow and his limbs weighed like lead. Confused by the return of his senses, Jaric stirred in the Llondel's embrace, then sighed and lifted his head. An elderly man with rumpled hair lifted a freshly lit torch from a bracket in the wall. Jaric recognized the Master Seer of Morbrith but the chamber was unfamiliar, decidedly not part of the castle. The walls were strangely polished and incised with geometrical carvings. Jaric blinked, confused, and the voice which droned in his ears slowly resolved into speech.

"... Must be Ivain Firelord's son," said the seer in a tone of misgiving. No sorcerer's name was more feared, except that of Anskiere, who had leveled Tierl Enneth; and Anskiere himself had called the boy into thrall.

"Kor's Blessed Fires!" The Earl leaned sharply forward, clenched both hands into fists, and crossed his wrists in a gesture to avert malign sorcery.

Jaric felt someone's arms tighten around him. He looked up, startled by the creature who held him, surely a demon with hideous glowing eyes. The boy gasped in fear.
This was the sender of images who had forced his submission to Anskiere.

He appealed at once to the Earl. "Have mercy. My Lord, I beg you. Have the demon release me."

But the Earl acted as though Jaric had never spoken. He stared at the Llondel, his expression like iron in the torchlight. When he spoke, his reply was for the demon alone. "I'm sorry. I cannot permit the boy to live."

* * *

The Llondel hissed. Paralyzed with terror, Jaric saw the Earl draw his knife. The seer shouted, and dropped the torch. Flame streaked as it tumbled to the floor. Amid a mad whirl of shadows, Jaric saw a blade flash, quickly eclipsed by the Llondel's body. The creature rolled, bearing Jaric with it. The boy heard a thump, felt the quiver as steel struck flesh. He knew no pain. The Llondel had taken the thrust intended for him just below the shoulder.

The Earl cursed. Jaric gasped as the demon's good arm tightened around him. His face was crushed into cloth which smelled of sweetgrass. He struggled but could not break loose. The Llondel lifted him, fumbled the door open, and dragged him into the landing beyond. Jounced and half suffocated by blood-soaked fabric, Jaric fought to tear free. But the Llondel bundled him toward the stairway with a grip like wire. Jaric panicked. He wrenched against this captor, pulled clear long enough to manage a glance behind.

The Earl had not pursued. He crouched, bloodied to the elbow, over the sprawled body of a boy with pale hair. With a jolt, Jaric recognized himself. The handle of the knife stuck through the blankets, piercing his heart.

Jaric screamed. The Llondel yanked him forward, sent him crashing down the stairs. Stone risers bruised his bare heels. They were solid,
real,
as the corpse in the room could not be.

'Image,'
assured the demon, picking up his distress. It jabbed him between the shoulderblades with a spurred palm, driving him downward.
'I
show your kind what would happen should they kill you.'

Jaric tripped, caught the railing to prevent himself falling. "Why do you care?" His voice cracked with emotion. Already he could feel Anskiere's geas tug at his mind, urging him southeast with the wretched persistence of a headache.

Calmly the Llondel framed a reply.
'I
act for the sorcerer.'
A steel crossguard gleamed beyond the curve of the cloak hood; the Earl's knife was embedded still in the demon's back. Jaric felt his skin crawl. Surely the creature was in agony. A man had wounded it, yet it stood patiently, its luminous gaze unpleasantly dispassionate.

"You're hurt." Jaric pointed to the weapon, wrung by revulsion. "Why should you suffer for the sorcerer who massacred all of Tierl Enneth?"

The demon hissed in anger. It grabbed the boy's wrist, tore him away from the railing, then spun him, reeling downward.
'Fool,'
it sent.
"T
ierl Enneth fell at Tathagres' hand. And now, in ignorance, she seeks to free the Mharg-spawn as well.'

But fear and trauma, and the ache of Anskiere's geas, had driven Jaric far beyond rational understanding. Half blinded by tears, he stumbled across the anteroom and struck the door with such force the breath slammed from his lungs. The Llondel arrived just behind him. Spurs clicked like dice against metal as it raised the bolt. The portal swung, pitching Jaric headlong into the night. He fell, tumbling over and over, clawed by weedstalks and dew-drenched grass. But the Llondel permitted no respite. It jabbed an image into his mind. Flat on his back, Jaric saw the stars obliterated by a clearly focused scene outside the gates of Koridan's Shrine. Six of the Earl's guardsmen lay asleep in the scrub. A horse browsed in their midst, saddled, bridled, and equipped with a sword in a sheath beneath the stirrup.

'Now go,'
sent the Llondel.
"T
ake the animal and flee, for your own kind will surely take your life.'

Cornered by Anskiere's geas and the Earl's intent to murder, Jaric had no other option. Horses intimidated him. A sword in his hands was so much dead weight. Yet with a throat tight with grief, he rose to his feet and ran.

* * *

The Llondel watched him go with burning eyes. Satisfied the boy would not turn back, it clutched its hurt shoulder and sank slowly to the floor. There it lay still. Warm blood pooled, darkening the mosaic in a widening puddle. Aware its wound was mortal, the Llondian shunned communication with its own kind. Instead it clung to consciousness, spent its last strength spinning thought-forms; and images bloomed like opium dreams in the minds of the humans in the chamber above.

* * *

In the baleful flicker of torchlight, the Earl watched the blood he believed to be Jaric's drip down his wrists. Prisoned by the Llondel's imaging, he felt as if the knife he just used for murder had also severed the threads of natural progression. Chaos remained. Violence echoed on the air with the dissonance of a snapped harpstring, and the stains on his hands darkened, dried, and blew away as dust. A woman's face appeared, circled by braided coils of hair the color of frost. She was lovely beyond description, but behind amethyst eyes shone an inhuman lust for power. The Earl felt his stomach tighten in recognition of evil. The image shifted, showed the woman kneeling while the occupant of a jeweled throne handed her a cube of black stone which contained Keys to a sorcerer's ward. A smile touched her lips; and the Llondel's vision of the future shattered into nightmare.

The woman rose,
uncontested because Jaric had died of a knife thrust,
and armies marched. Towns blazed like festival lanterns, and corpses bloated in the parched soil of ruined fields. The woman laughed. The cube in her hand went molten, blazed whitely and became a wheel of fire. A sorcerer's defenses burst with a white-hot snap of energy and winds rose, smashing maddened waves upon a desolate stretch of shoreline. Nearby a tower of granite tumbled and fell. Demonkind spewed forth, hideous beyond any the Earl had ever known. Fanged, taloned and patterned with iridescent scales, they swept skyward with a thunder of membranous wings. Where they passed, their breath withered flesh, curdled the fruit on the trees, and left the stripped veins of leaves blowing like cobwebs in the breeze. The earth rotted and knew no spring. The oceans spewed up dead fish. And at Morbrith Keep the streets lay reeking with a tangle of human remains.

"No!" the Earl's scream tore from his throat in near physical agony, but the images kept coming. He saw a forest dell tangled with the white flowering vine which often grew on gravesites. There a black-haired fisherman's daughter dragged a silvery object which contained a wardspell to stay the escaped demons. But she was slain, cut down by a brother's sword, and soldiers turned the box's powers against their own kind. The snow-haired woman whispered praise, and her voice became the croak of ravens feasting on dead flesh.

Weeping now, the Earl beheld a headland scabbed with dirtied drifts of ice. A ragged band of survivors set fire to stacked logs, while other men chipped through the resulting slush with swords and shovels. They hoped to release a weather mage believed to be trapped inside, for legend held his powers might subdue the horrors which blighted the land. But where the sorcerer had been, they discovered bones wrapped loosely in a bundle of rags. Exhausted from their labor, the men abandoned the place in despair; and through a rift in the ice, a quavering whistle echoed across the lonely face of the sea. The snow-haired woman laughed. And the Earl saw his civilization plunge into a well of darkness, all for the murder of a Morbrith boy in the sanctuary tower at midsummer.

"No! Koridan's Fires,
no!"
With his throat still raw from screaming, the Earl opened his eyes. Daylight spilled brightly through the casement. The seer crouched trembling in the sunlight, his white head familiary rumpled. No bloodied corpse marred the floor.

The Earl buried his face in his hands.
He had only dreamed the boy's death.
But the Llondel's prescient images left a deep and lingering warning of danger. Preoccupied, the Earl did not notice the rich blue robes of the men who arrived in the doorway until after the Archpriest had addressed him.

"My Lord, it is unavoidable. You must be tried for heresy."

The Earl swore tiredly and leaned back against the wall. He did not immediately respond. The seer watched him in naked alarm, but said nothing.

The priest mistook his silence for regret. "Perhaps you may not burn for the crime. Your men claim the knife which killed the Llondian demon is your Lordship's. If you can prove you dealt the death blow, you may be judged more leniently."

From the doorway, the healer broke in with vindictive satisfaction. "Jaric has escaped. He stole your horse."

"Don't pursue him," the Earl said quickly. He stared down at the floor, stung to a flurry of thought. Jaric must not be stopped. He added in a hoarse whisper, "The horse was a gift." The Earl did not resist as the priests drew him to his feet and placed fetters on his wrists. His own dilemma seemed of small importance beside the warning of the Llondel's death image. For it appeared the fate of Morbrith rested on the shoulders of a small sickly apprentice whose sole talent was penmanship.

"Kor protect him," muttered the seer, and the priests, misinterpreting, bowed their heads in earnest prayer for the man they had taken into custody.