The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) (14 page)

Iolo had rushed out to meet them. Now he stood fuming, with his fists clenched at his sides. “Cuss’t blockheads didn’t even bring any wagons with them!” he muttered to a Dahai chieftain who stood beside him.

“Maybe they’re expecting us to hold a banquet for them,” said the chief, in Tribe-talk.

The mardar riding proudly at the head of his army, on a wiry little spotted horse, wore the Zephite horns but had the top half of his face painted black—mardar war paint, proclaiming his intention to go into battle: where, who could say? He halted his following with an upraised hand and reined in just in front of Iolo.

“Greetings in the name of the Thunder King our master, the terror of the gods,” he said, in thickly accented Tribe-talk.

Iolo spat on the ground. “There’s no food here!” he said. “I don’t suppose you brought some.”

“I am Khaggin, a mardar of King Thunder. Who are you?”

“I’m Iolo, and I command the army here.”

Khaggin’s eyes narrowed. “You are not a mardar. How is it that you command anything?”

“The last mardar we had got himself killed on a tomfool expedition to the forest,” Iolo said. “Goryk Gillow, First Prester of Obann by the order of the Thunder King, has put me in command of the army. If you don’t like it, march on.”

This was no way to speak to a mardar. Had Zo been there, he would have intervened. But Zo and Goryk, anticipating trouble, were busy in the chamber house.

“Beware!” Khaggin said. “You may find yourself on the sacrificial altar.”

Before Iolo could think of a satisfactorily disrespectful reply, the Dahai chief spoke.

“I am Tamur Golk, son of Agbar, chief of the Dahai. We take no orders from an ignorant Zephite whose speech sounds like the lowing of a cow!” The Dahai and the Zephites were hereditary enemies going back a thousand years. “We already have a commander. It’s food we do not have! Take your open mouths and go.”

Khaggin glared at him. “You have all been in this place too long!” he said. “You have forgotten how to behave yourselves. But my men and I will teach you.”

Iolo answered with a string of profanities unintelligible to any Zephite. But his tone made his meaning unmistakable, and it was more than Khaggin would tolerate. The mardar raised his hand again, and a thousand men reached for short swords and heavy axes.

At that moment, Zo and Goryk came at a run, Zo in the lead with a small square box in his hands. Distracted, Khaggin stared at him, his hand still raised to unleash his men to violence.

Zo halted in front of him, cradling the box.

“In the name of our master, the Thunder King!” he cried.

And suddenly the Zephite’s face was bathed in light, white light brighter by far than the light of the afternoon sun: it leaped at him from out of the box. And Khaggin shrieked and toppled from his horse. The nearest men behind him cried out, too.

They rolled on the ground, clutching at their eyes. And suddenly there was no light. Zo called out in the language of the Zeph.

“Warriors of the Zeph, be still! I am Mardar Zo, the servant of King Thunder. I hold his wrath in my hands. As it has struck your chieftain blind, so shall it strike you—all of you! Obey me, or you die!”

Their mardar and a dozen of his best men lay wallowing and groaning on the ground, without a blow having been struck against them. What else could the Zephites do? They sank to their knees and held up their palms in submission.

Goryk’s men were gathering, their weapons at the ready. Goryk waved them back, and they stopped in their tracks. They had no way of knowing what had happened, but they were afraid.

“There is not enough food in Silvertown to feed you,” Zo said. “Therefore you will pitch your camp outside the city walls, and in the morning, march back the way you came. Take your mardar with you, and send him under guard to Kara Karram. He is a mardar no more—in the name of our lord the Thunder King, I have deposed him. Nor will his eyes ever see again: for our master has taken his sight from him. There is more of our master’s power here, in my own hands, should you care to feel it. I have spoken. Go!”

Timorously, some of the warriors raised the fallen men. Khaggin and the others groped the air, gasping and whimpering. They wiped their eyes, but could not wipe any sight back into them. Zo and Goryk and Iolo remained in

place until the Zephites had all gone back outside the walls. Iolo and Tamur Golk had the presence of mind to close the gates after them and post a guard. The defenders went to their stations like men in a trance.

“That was a near thing!” Zo said softly. “In another instant there would have been fighting inside these walls, but for the power of the demon.”

“What power it is!” said Goryk. It had all happened right in front of him, but he was still trying to take it in.

“I let out only the merest fraction of it, and only for an instant,” Zo said. “There is enough here to destroy an army. Now you have seen it for yourself.”

Goryk felt slightly dizzy. His knees almost buckled under him. The demonstration of the demon’s power had been overwhelming. He realized that, up until now, he hadn’t truly believed in the power that Zo claimed was imprisoned in the ancient box.

“I have seen,” said Goryk, “and now I have decided. We shall go to Obann, you and I, and take this power with us.”

Jack missed it all. He was still locked up in his room, somewhere deep enough inside the chamber house that he couldn’t hear anything that was happening outside. But when a slave brought him his supper that evening, he learned something.

“An army came today.” The slave was a girl a little older than Ellayne, underfed and pale. “You should have seen them—men with horns, like bulls. And then the prester used sorcery against them!”

“What kind of sorcery?” Jack asked.

“Nobody knows! But those men turned right around and left the city. I didn’t see what happened, but everybody’s saying the general of that army was set on fire, or turned into stone …” She stopped herself. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

She trembled. “It’s all right,” Jack said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“I have to go now.”

“My name’s Jack. They kidnapped me.”

But the girl turned and left without answering or giving her name. Jack didn’t hold it against her; he could see she was terrified. “Who knows what they’ve done to her?” he wondered. But he decided he would rather not know.

Jack didn’t believe in sorcery or magic. He and Ellayne had had many arguments about it. In his travels he’d seen things that might have passed for magic, but they always turned out not to be. There were ways of cheating people and deceiving them that looked like magic. And there were certain things, a very few of them, left over from the ancient times—Martis had explained it to him—that worked like magic, but weren’t. Those things, Martis said, could be unexpectedly dangerous; and Jack believed him.

Maybe Goryk Gillow had one of those old things.

That was exactly what Martis most feared.

Up on the hilltop, having seen the Zephite army ejected from the city, following a flash of brilliant light that resembled nothing that he’d ever seen before, Martis sat back and wondered what it meant.

Evening was approaching now, and it was growing chilly, but he dared not risk a fire. Wytt found a bird’s nest and brought him the eggs, which he had to eat raw. That, and some few rations given to him by Kadmel when they parted, was all he had to eat. It would be wise to make the rations last as long as possible.

Worse than his immediate fear for Jack was the fear that the Thunder King would turn loose against Obann some ancient engine of destruction. Lord Reesh had always hoped that more of these items might have survived in other parts of the world than could be found in Obann. He had amassed a private collection of these fragments of antiquity—Martis had seen it many times—none of which had any function. But since then Martis had seen and handled one such item that still had life in it, even after so many centuries had passed. Some of these, Lord Reesh used to say, had the power to destroy a whole city in the blink of an eye.

Did Goryk Gillow have a thing like that, down there in Silvertown? Had the Thunder King entrusted him with a weapon of destruction—meaning that the Thunder King himself had more such things?

Finding out, Martis supposed, would be extremely hazardous.

CHAPTER 15

Ysbott’s Enterprise

Some men are criminals because they simply will not live within the law. Ysbott the Snake was such a man. His mother was an honest woman, but Ysbott ran away from home and joined an outlaw gang when he was twelve years old.

Now he was older and he had his own gang—what was left of it after Helki’s outlaw-hunts in Lintum Forest. He also had a hole in his cheek that wasn’t healing well and hurt like the devil, and seven men who would desert him unless he soon found some wicked work for them to do. They were out of the hills by now and still didn’t know where to go from there. The men needed some criminal enterprise to occupy their minds.

“What are we going to do now, Ysbott?” they asked, the morning after they came down from the hills. And this time he had an answer for them. The pain of his wound had allowed him little sleep the night before, but as he lay awake, he finally thought of something.

“We’ll go back to Ninneburky,” he said. “We didn’t get much for the boy, but we might do better if we take the baron’s daughter. He ought to be willing to pay a nice ransom to get her back.”

Maybe pain and sleeplessness had dulled Ysbott’s wits instead of sharpening them.

“The daughter?”

“Yes—the girl who was with the boy when they were in Lintum Forest. We thought the boy must be the king because he was living with the baron in the finest house in Ninneburky. We were wrong about him, but we know the girl’s the baron’s daughter. How much will he pay to save his own flesh and blood—a rich man like that? Let’s find out.”

They would all take turns to walk into Ninneburky and spy on the baron’s household. It would be easy, Ysbott said, to go back in and find an opportunity to snatch the girl. Travelers, trappers, and lumbermen were always wandering into Ninneburky to buy supplies or visit the alehouse.

“No one will pay any attention to us,” he said, “and sooner or later we’ll have our chance.”

“They’ll send the militia after us,” one of the men objected.

“Not if the baron understands we’ll cut his daughter’s throat if he tries to take us,” Ysbott said. “Besides, there are plenty of good places to hide along the river. We’ll make a lot of money, and then be on our way. If we handle it right, they’ll never even know who we are.”

The plan appealed to Ysbott’s men, and after their breakfast, they were on their way to Ninneburky with more of a spring in their step than they’d had the day before.