The Magic Kingdom of Landover , Volume 1 (113 page)

Breakfast was almost completed, however, before Kallendbor appeared, armored head to foot and bristling with weapons. In one gloved hand he carried a sack containing an object that was almost certainly the bottle. He greeted Questor perfunctorily and beckoned him to follow.

They went down to the main courtyard. Several hundred knights in full battle dress waited with their mounts. Kallendbor called for his own horse, saw to it that Questor was provided with his gray, mounted, and wheeled the knights into formation. Questor had to hurry to keep up. The gates opened, the portcullis rose with a screech of metal, and out the column rode.

Questor Thews was brought to the forefront to ride directly beside Kallendbor. Bunion raced off on his own, on foot as always, anxious to keep himself clear of the dust and noise of the horsemen. Questor looked once or twice to find him, but the kobold was as invisible as air. The wizard quickly gave up searching and directed his efforts instead to the task of discovering what Kallendbor was up to.

The Lord of Rhyndweir appeared to have no intention of disclosing that information, all but ignoring Questor as he led his men down the rutted roadway through the town. People appeared in the doors and windows of the
shops and cottages, and a few halfhearted calls and whistles trailed after. No one in the town had any idea what Kallendbor was about, or cared much, for that matter. They wanted to be kept safe—that was all that really mattered to them. Kallendbor had never been a popular ruler—just a strong one. Twenty Lords ruled the Greensward, but Kallendbor was the most powerful and his people knew it. He was the one Lord to whom the others all deferred. He was the Lord no one dared challenge.

Until now, it seemed.

“I am betrayed, Questor Thews!” Kallendbor was suddenly telling him. “I am beset at every turn in a way I would never have believed possible! Betrayed, mind you, not by my enemies, but by my fellow Lords! Stosyth, Harrandye, Wilse! Lords I thought I could trust—Lords who, at least, were too cowed to act if I did not approve!” Kallendbor’s face was scarlet. “But Strehan is the one who surprised and disappointed me most, Questor Thews—Strehan, the closest of them all to me! Like an ungrateful child who bites its father’s tending hand!”

He spit into the dirt as they rode, the column winding down across the bridge and out into the grasslands. Leather battle harnesses creaked, metal fastenings clanked, horses snorted and nickered, and men called out. Questor tried to picture the tall, shambling, dour Strehan as a child of any sort, ungrateful or otherwise, and found the task beyond him.

“They have built this … this tower, Questor Thews!” Kallendbor snapped in fury. “The four of them! Built it at the falls of the Syr, at the juncture of my lands! They tell me it is an outpost, nothing more. They apparently take me for a fool! It stands taller than the walls of Rhyndweir, and its battlements shadow the whole of my eastern borders! If they should choose, they could close off the river itself and dam up the waters that feed my fields! This tower offends me, wizard! It hurts me in ways I would not have thought I could be hurt!”

He bent close as they rode. “I would have destroyed it the moment I discovered it but for the fact that the combined armies of these four dogs guard it as one! I have not the strength to break them without so decimating my own armies as to leave me weakened and vulnerable to all! So I have been forced to endure this … this aberration!”

He jerked upright again, eyes bits of ice. “But no more!”

Questor saw it all instantly. “My Lord, the magic of the bottle is too dangerous …”

“Dangerous!” Kallendbor cut him short with a vicious chop of one hand. “Nothing is more dangerous than this tower! Nothing! It must be destroyed! If the magic can serve my needs, then I will chance whatever danger it poses and gladly!”

He wheeled ahead, and Questor was left with a mouthful of dust and a feeling of helplessness in the face of what was surely to come.

They rode northeast toward the Melchor through the remainder of the morning until at last, as the midday approached, the falls of the Syr came into view. There was the tower, a massive, stone-block fortress situated on the bluff at the edge of the falls where they spilled down into the valley. It was indeed a monstrous thing, all black and bristling with battlements and repelling devices. Armed men stalked its parapets, and riders patrolled its causeways. Trumpets and shouts sounded at the approach of Kallendbor’s knights, and the tower stirred to life as if a sluggish giant.

The Lord of Rhyndweir signaled for a halt, and the column pulled up at the river’s edge some several hundred yards beyond the base of the bluff and the fortress tower. Kallendbor sat looking at the tower for a moment, then called forward one of his knights.

“Tell those in the tower that they have until midday to leave,” he instructed. “Say to them, at midday the tower will be destroyed. Now, go.”

The knight rode off and Kallendbor had the column stand down. They waited. Questor considered once again saying something to Kallendbor about the danger of using the bottle’s magic, but decided against it. It was pointless to argue the matter further; Kallendbor’s mind was made up. The wiser course of action was to allow Rhyndweir’s Lord to have his way for the moment, but to get the bottle back from him immediately after this business was finished. Questor Thews was not happy with the prospect, but it seemed to him that he had no other reasonable choice.

He stood next to his gray, his tall frame stooped beneath his patchwork robes as he stared off into the distance and thought suddenly of the High Lord and of Abernathy. Thinking of them distressed him further. He certainly had not done much to help either of them in this matter so far, he thought dismally.

The messenger returned. The men in the tower would not be leaving, he reported. They had simply laughed at the ultimatum. They had suggested that Kallendbor leave instead. Kallendbor grinned like a wolf when he heard the messenger’s report, fixed his gaze on the tower, and did not look away again as he awaited the arrival of midday.

When it came, Rhyndweir’s Lord grunted in satisfaction, climbed back aboard his mount, and said, “Come with me, Questor Thews.”

Together, they rode forward along the river’s edge for about a hundred yards, then stopped and dismounted. Kallendbor stood so that the horses blocked what he was doing from his waiting men. Then he brought out the sack from a saddle pouch and produced the brightly painted bottle.

“Now, we shall see,” he whispered softly, cradling his treasure.

He pulled free the stopper and out climbed the Darkling, squinting its reddened eyes against the sunlight. “Master!” it hissed softly, stroking its hands along Kallendbor’s gloved fingers. “What is it you wish?”

Kallendbor pointed. “Destroy that tower!” He paused, glancing briefly at Questor. “If your magic is strong enough, that is!” he added in challenge.

“Master, my magic is as strong as your life!” The demon spit the words out with a curl of its lip.

It climbed down from the bottle and skittered off across the ground, over the river’s waters as if they were nothing more than a walkway, and out into the plains directly below the bluff where the fortress stood. There it stopped. It did nothing for a moment, gazing upward. Then it seemed to jump and whirl, to dance about in a sudden profusion of colored light, and a monstrous horn appeared out of nowhere. The demon darted away to a point another hundred yards along the base of the bluff, and a second horn appeared. It darted away again, and a third appeared.

The demon stood back then and pointed, and the horns began to sound—a long, deep, mournful howl like the wailing of some great wind through an empty canyon.

“See!” Kallendbor whispered in delight.

The wailing was causing the whole of the land about them to quake, but nowhere more so than atop the bluff where the offending tower sat. The tower shuddered as if it were a stricken beast. Cracks began to appear along its seams, and stone blocks began to loosen. Kallendbor and Questor Thews braced. The sound of the horns rose, and now the horses were stamping and rearing, and Kallendbor had to seize the reins of both and hold them fast to keep them from fleeing.

“Demon spawn!” the Lord of Rhyndweir cried with a howl.

The horns reached a new pitch, and the land split apart all about them in deep cracks and crevices. The bluff was shattered, and the tower was turned into an avalanche of crumbling rock. Men screamed from within. The walls exploded into rubble in an instant’s time, and the whole of the tower collapsed. Down it tumbled to the plains and the river’s waters and was gone.

Then the horns disappeared, and the sound of their wailing faded into silence. The land was still again, empty save for the awestruck men of Rhyndweir and the cloud of dust and silt that rose above the rubble of the shattered tower.

The Darkling skittered back across the river and bounded up once more onto the lip of the bottle, its grin wicked and sharp. “Done, master!” it hissed. “Done at your command!”

Kallendbor’s face was alive with excitement. “Yes, demon! Such power!”

“Your power!” the Darkling soothed. “Yours only, master!”

Questor Thews did not care one bit for the look that crossed Kallendbor’s face when he heard that. “Kallendbor …” he started to say.

But the big man waved him into silence. “Back into the bottle, little one,” he commanded.

The Darkling slipped obediently from view, and Kallendbor replaced the stopper.

“Remember your promise,” Questor tried again, stepping forward to claim the bottle.

But Kallendbor snatched it away. “Yes, yes, Questor Thews!” he snapped. “But only when I am finished! Only then. I may have … other uses yet.”

Without waiting for the wizard’s response, he mounted his horse and rode quickly away. Questor Thews stood there, staring after him. He turned back one final time to gaze up at the empty space where only moments earlier the tower had stood. All those men dead, he thought suddenly. And Kallendbor barely gave them a thought.

He shook his head worriedly and pulled himself back up on his frightened gray.

He knew already that Kallendbor was never going to return the bottle to him. He was going to have to take it back.

H
e returned to Rhyndweir lost in thought, the day slipping into evening almost before he knew it. He ate dinner in his room with the gnomes and Parsnip. Kallendbor left him there willingly, making no effort to insist on his presence in the dining hall. Kallendbor did not attend himself. There were clearly other matters of more pressing concern for the Lord of Rhyndweir.

Questor was halfway through his meal when he realized that Bunion had failed to return. He had no idea what had become of the little kobold. No one had seen anything of him since early morning.

When dinner was finished, Questor took a walk to clear his thoughts, found that they were too murky to do so, and returned to his bedchamber to sleep. He went to bed still wondering what had become of Bunion.

It was after midnight when the bedchamber door burst open and Kallendbor stalked through. “Where is it, Questor Thews?” he shouted in fury.

Questor looked up from his pillow, sleepy-eyed, and tried to figure out what was happening. Parsnip was already between him and the Lord of Rhyndweir, hissing in warning, teeth gleaming brightly. The G’home Gnomes were cowering under the bed. Torchlight cast a harsh glare from the hallway beyond and there were armed men milling about uncertainly.

Kallendbor loomed over him, an angry giant. “You will return it to me at once, old man!”

Questor rose, indignant now. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you …”

“The bottle, Questor Thews—what have you done with the bottle?”

“The bottle?”

“It is missing, wizard!” Kallendbor was livid. “Stolen from a room locked all around and guarded at every entrance! No ordinary man could have accomplished
that! It would have required someone who could enter and leave without being seen—someone like yourself!”

Bunion!
thought Questor instantly. A kobold could go where others could not and not be seen doing it! Bunion must have …

Kallendbor reached for Questor, and only the sight of Parsnip’s bared teeth kept him from seizing the wizard’s thin neck. “Give it to me, Questor Thews, or I’ll have you … !”

“I do not have the bottle, my Lord!” Questor snapped in reply, pushing forward bravely to confront the other. Kallendbor was as big as a wall.

“If you do not have it, then you know where it is!” the other rasped in fury. “Tell me!”

Questor took a deep breath. “My word is known to be good everywhere, my Lord,” he said evenly. “You know that to be so. I do not lie. The truth is exactly as I have told you. I do not have the bottle nor do I know where it is. I have seen nothing of it since this morning when you took it away.” He cleared his throat. “I warned you that the magic was dangerous and that—”

“Enough!” Kallendbor wheeled away and stalked back to the open door. When he reached it, he wheeled back again. “You will stay as my guest a few days more, Questor Thews!” he said. “I think you would do well to pray that the bottle reappears in that time—one way or the other!”