The Barrow (15 page)

He left her in silence, afterwards, as he always did, saying nothing to her as he dressed and left, clutching one of his satchels tightly to him. Alone in his chambers, she washed her face in the basin, and dried her skin with a fresh soft towel of cotton. It was only when she looked down into the basin and saw his semen there, mixing in the water with the rose petals, that she allowed revulsion to roll like a wave over her, and she dropped to the floor, shaking and dry-heaving. She would have wept and screamed until her voice was hoarse, but the tears had left her years ago and she knew the screams would only make her brother smile. On her knees she offered up silent prayers to any god that would listen.
Let me die, today, and bring an end to it. Let me be with him again, even if it is in Hell
, she asked.

But no one answered.

Annwyn struggled for long minutes to regain control, and rose finally when she did. She went and opened the door, where Malia, expressionless and silent, stood waiting in the darkness of the hall. Without saying anything to each other, they gathered up the basin and the accouterments of her brother's bath, and then went back downstairs, slowly closing the door behind them on the shadows of the empty room.

Leigh Myradim, son of Llew of Bainwell, had not been in the city of Therapoli for ten years. When he'd last left it, on his way into ignominious exile with his possessions piled high in an ox-drawn wagon, he had turned back to look at its sienna-colored walls and had screamed a curse down upon it, shaking his fist in the air. “Your bodies will be aged and bent. Your heads and brains will be crushed in iron vises. Your eyes will be put out with pokers burning white and your foreheads will be carved with my name. Your ears and noses will be filled with the shit straight from my bowels. Your fields and pastures will lie fallow and in ruin. Your mouths and throats will be filled with the jism of my loins, your chests and hearts with straw and needles, your stomachs with glass, your blood with urine and fire, your hands and feet and all of your members sawed from your bodies. You will be cursed going in and going out. You will be cursed in your city, in your towns, in your streets and your squares. You will be cursed when sleeping, where you will fall into nightmares from the Six Hells, and when awake, when you will see plague and ashes, boils and festers, fall upon your houses. Wrack and ruin will seize your ports and your markets, your temples and your courts. You will be cursed when eating and when drinking, when everything will taste of ash. You will speak nonsense to each other and hear screams when you are silent. You will pray for death, but the skies will be made of brass, so that the Divine King cannot receive you, and the earth will be made of iron, so that even the damned Underworld will be barred to you. You will be cursed in all places and at all times!”

Cursing an entire city was a tall order for one man, even for one as good a magician and enchanter as Leigh, and he had hardly expected the curse to take hold. Staring out across the broad city upon his return, he was nonetheless disappointed to note that none of those things had, in fact, yet come to pass, and that quite to the contrary, the city seemed to have thrived in his long absence.
Well, we'll just have to fix that
, he thought.

He'd spent the last ten years living, appropriately enough, in a tall haunted wizard's tower secreted in the Sare Wold along the western bank of the Dusabrae. It had been built six hundred years before by Ergedryd Eridaine, a magician from Therapoli who had fled north into the woods after he had been connected, rightly or wrongly, with the mysterious “Bacos Regis,” the pseudonymous author of four of the key books of magic and alchemy written during the Bronze Age in the Middle Kingdoms: the
Speculum Alchimiae
(
The Mirror of Alchemy
),
De Alchemia Mirabli
(
The Wonders of Alchemy
), the
Speculum Lapidium
(
The Mirror of Stones
), and the
Speculum Astrologiae
(
The Mirror of Star Signs
). Copies of those books were considered mandatory on the shelves of any Middle Kingdoms practitioner of the hermetic arts, but magical writing invariably attracted all of the wrong attention. A pedigreed and historic home at its start, then, even if no one knew whether Ergedryd had really been the Bacos Regis or not, and even if over the centuries his tower had fallen into disuse and then eventually some dark notoriety. The necromancer Pafeyr the Black had used it for a while, summoning up foul creatures into its highest chamber, and then a century later Doral Galdore had been caught dissecting missing children in its cellars by knights from the Duchy of Har Misal and its reputation had been sealed. Bandits and ghosts and mad
fae
spirits that had seeped up all the way from the Court of the Drowned Wood had occasionally made it their home, and then eventually it had fallen to Leigh to claim its cold and crumbling halls.

He hadn't actually set out to find a haunted wizard's tower, of course, but when a disgraced and exiled Magister is asking around for a quiet place to live and work, it was only natural that the people he asked would look him up and down, shrug, and then direct him toward a place like Ergedryd's tower. When he'd first seen it he'd sighed and shaken his head; the top of the tower was festooned with stone gargoyles, its roof half missing and filled with nesting crows, the uneven steps up to its great door flanked by a series of carved stone statues, most of them defaced into grotesqueness.
Ah, yes, of course, this will surely help my claims of innocence, to take up residence here
, he had thought glumly, and he had sworn to himself that he would only take shelter there for the night before pressing on, perhaps north to Juvic Pass and into the Highlands, where an exiled enchanter could expect a warm welcome.

But he'd stayed the next night, and the night after, and the night after that, finding slowly that the dark, ruined halls suited him. He had kindled hearth fires in its great fireplaces, hung dried rushes in its rooms, and installed his books and laboratory and his precious store of alchemical and herbal ingredients, all the while listening to the whispered secrets of its ghosts and shadow spirits. He had started a small herb and vegetable garden amongst the stone statues that circled the tower, and soon the local woodsmen—deeply superstitious Danians, still secretly worshipping the Old Religion—had discovered his presence there, and they had brought the fruit of their hunts and the tidings of his old world and past life to trade for his potents and tinctures. Missives from that past life would sometimes arrive, either brought by messenger through the woods, or borne in on beating wing, or sometimes even just the wind, which would come and sit by his worktables and whisper words intended for his ears.

In time he found he had made himself a home of sorts, and his thoughts began to turn back toward his exile and then, in turn, toward revenge. He had spent long hours mulling the comeuppance of those that had brought his estate so low, naming each of his fellow Magisters that had spoken against him and enumerating the disasters and tortures that would befall them for their temerity. It became almost a daily litany, whispered as he lay waking in his bed in the evening, or falling asleep as the Dawn Maiden rose; shouted into the wind from the highest parapets of his tower, or down into the echoing well in the cellars; enunciated, reworked, and rephrased while he measured off his potents and elixirs, prepared his meals, made notes in his grimoires.

“. . . Magister Fulric, holding the Chair of Argument; he shall be castrated with a dull spoon, then his skin shall be flayed from his body and he will be staked over a fire ant hill. Magister Clodarius, holding the Chair of Letters; he shall be locked naked into stocks, and force-fed the contents of his precious Library from both ends. Magister Harald Thorodor, holding the Chair of Arithmetic; he shall be broken upon the wheel, in the center of the Upper Quad, and there be left to feed the crows. Magister Arathon Lis Red, holding the Chair of Heraldry; he shall have his nose and ears cut off, his naked body shall be covered in pig shit and the ashes of the dead, and he shall be driven at spear point to wander the countryside, recounting the crimes of the noble rulers of each barony he travels through to any that will listen . . .”

He was terribly lonely, with none but mad shadows and hungry ghosts around him for long periods, for though they revealed many things in their whispers to him, they were terrible listeners. It was impossible to have a
conversation
with a shadow or ghost in their conditions; they had much to say, and sometimes quite urgently, but were incapable of having the slightest empathy or interest in his complaints. His occasional visitors, even from amongst his old friends from the city or his former students at the University, stayed only long enough to complete their business for the most part, and were ever eager to leave his presence as soon as possible. The only visitors who had seemed to enjoy his company and new home had been a few from amongst the Lords of Book and Street, the ferocious, angry young men who had burned so brightly in the years before his dismissal and had finally brought decades of University decorum and tradition crashing down around them in the process. That had been the first time he'd felt old, watching that lot rage against the rules that bound them.

But they came only infrequently, having grown a bit older, and a little less angry, with one or two exceptions. And so as the years had passed, he had found himself talking mostly to himself, reconstructing and constructing whole conversations from his past and his future, practicing the arguments that he would present upon his triumphant return from exile, the pronouncements of doom that he would recite to his enemies as they fell before him. He had realized he was quite mad one day when he found that he had been standing in front of a plaster-coated stone wall in the tower for some hours, lecturing it on the proper means of addressing him, egged on by the shadows of
fae
spirits from the Court of the Drowned Wood that clung to his back and made him feel like he was carrying a pack filled with stones.
Drown them all, they do not love you, they hate you, they deserve death, they deserve death
, went the thoughts that ran through his mind as he hectored the wall, but he had suddenly realized that it was the shadows that were saying that, not him. He had banished them from his presence with a word, and then had paused for a moment in the sudden silence, looking wild-eyed at the wall and ceiling above him; finally he had giggled.
If you're going to exile me, and brand me a madman, I will embrace it, and claim the birthright that comes with the name Myradim, as a descendant of one of the Hundred Sons of the Mad King, Myrad
, he had thought in that lucid moment.

And then he had started writing on the blank wall with black chalk:
drown them all, they do not love you, they hate you, they deserve death, they deserve death
.

The news that had arrived from Sequintus, the enchanter in the service of his old pupil, Gilgwyr, had made him the most excited he'd been in many years, though he was also possessed of many fears. He had not been back in Therapoli for a decade, and it was a city filled with his enemies. Would they know he had returned? Would they seize him, and imprison him, and condemn him to death for violating his exile? He had paced and worried for a long and sleepless day, shouting and screaming with the ghosts and spirits of his household; for naturally they hadn't wanted him to leave. And he had almost not made the journey, until he had remembered that he had in fact been working and planning for this moment every day for years.
If I don't go now, I will have failed myself and all those that matter in the end
, had been the thought that finally appeared in his mind, and that was an even bigger fear than getting caught. And so finally his certainty had returned to him, driven on a spear of fear, and he had drawn about his person his wards and protections, and armed himself against his enemies, and had left the dark, haunted tower that was his home with determined footsteps.

Overcoming his disappointment that Therapoli was still standing, he had intended to make straight for Gilgwyr's with all due haste once he was inside the city, to hide himself from the many enemies that might still remain vigilant for his return. His one-time pupil was now the owner of a brothel, apparently, and some small part of him remembered that once upon a time that would have been exciting news. But Leigh had lost any real interest in the actual act of sex long ago, and when his thoughts turned to sex now it was for purely academic reasons. He was too concerned with much graver matters and grander schemes to have the time, energy, or inclination to worry about his member. Indeed, if he'd been asked, he would have hard put upon to remember his last erection.

Once inside the city gates, however, his determination and purpose fled his mind and body and he faltered. The city streets were overwhelming at first, and he found it difficult to put one foot in front of another. The sights and sounds, the hustle and bustle, the tumult of the crowd, it all came rushing over him in a wave of confusion and bewilderment after a decade of near solitude. And he could see warden and watcher spirits bound into the forms of birds and hovering by the gates of the city. He was certain there were other magical wards and eyes that rested upon the city's entrances—set there by the Magisters at the University, or magicians from the Hermetic Guild, magi in the service of a cult or a great family, or any of a dozen wizards and warlocks that called the city home. He did not think the watchers saw him for who he was, but for long moments he was certain that at his very next step he would be seized and arrested. As each step passed unmolested, and finally the gate receded far behind him, his breathing started to relax, his heart's pounding grew less urgent, and his steps once again became confident and measured.