The Raven Warrior (2 page)

The lands he moved through were rugged, wild, and unsettled. He remained wolf as he traveled. There were two or three packs about; they hunted the stony defiles between the hills even as the occasional big cat still ruled the heights. But Mother taught him to be an efficient, able wolf long before he ever thought about turning to his human side. So he had no problem avoiding them.

It was spring and there were females in heat that drew him, but he wasn’t ready, not really mature enough to fight for the father right. In any of the packs, poaching on the territories of the leaders would sooner or later lead to an attack, possibly by the whole pack. Wolf law said you presented yourself openly, took your place in the hierarchy, then challenged the leader. The treacherous interloper would meet the bared fangs of the leader and his inner circle, all yearning to shed his blood.

Farmsteads were scattered on fertile patches of soil throughout the forest, but they were, without exception, surrounded by high, earthen banks surmounted by palisade fences. The resident war dogs that protected the livestock were nothing a lone wolf wanted to mess around with. So he moved secretly and silently through the countryside until one morning, just before first light, he came to a valley with a lake.

He should have known.

From the first moment, it raised the hackles on the back of his neck. A wolf would have left. But with him, there was that human component.

So he trotted downhill into the fog that filled the bowl of the valley.

No humans. That in itself should have made him suspicious. But he was far too inexperienced to have his anxieties roused by the absence of something.

Light was spreading from the east into the silent forest at the lake’s margin, illuminating the haze that hung between the trees with long shafts that were almost as discrete from each other as a handful of sticks. Nothing. No wolves, no humans, and in a place as beautiful as morning in paradise. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Indeed, he shouldn’t have.

He sensed the water was very close. Then he smelled it and found he was trotting along through a very shallow marsh. Ahead even through the fog he saw a stretch of open water and a dim shape that might have been an island. The light striking down from above was losing its grayness and turning slowly to gold, trees to green, and the water to a multicolored gem as it cast back the reflection of the surrounding forest.

He bent his head and drank, troubling the absolutely smooth surface with his tongue. When he raised his head, he found the fatigue of the long night’s trip weighed heavy on him. He was not used to traveling so far so fast as a wolf.

And then he reflected that, while lonely, he was at least now free of the thousand constraints that had beset him as a human being. He could return to the forest, seek a warm nest in bracken and dried leaves, and enjoy the luxury of sleeping as long as he liked.

He stretched as languorously as a cat, stiffening each of his hind legs in turn, yawned, and just about then . . .

He felt the weight of a big, heavy hand on his neck . . . and every hair on his body stood straight up at the sound of a triumphant crow of savage, evil laughter.

Igrane knew from the slightly withdrawn, preoccupied look in his eyes that he was up to something. They had, after all, been lovers now for over thirty years. But since he was far older and smarter than she was, she was unable to guess what.

She hoped the bright lechery she saw in his gaze would prevail over any magical experiments he wanted to undertake. Hoped that he would dismiss the servants, throw her on the floor, and possess her violently.

Sometimes he did it that way. At others he played with her, tormenting them both for hours, until they both reached a frenzy of desire before he allowed her fulfillment and release. Both memories were erotic in the extreme. But they were shadowed by other, darker occasions when his de-sire to cause her pain and punish her for (as he saw it) ensnaring him into an erotic commitment he despised overrode all other considerations in his mind.

The strongest part of his being was his desire to dominate political events. Women—even boys from time to time, he took both—were mere amusements. But she drained his powerful magical abilities like a leech. She clung to him, she pleasured him as no other ever had. And in return, he kept her young and beautiful.

But sometimes . . . sometimes he forced her to contribute the unguessable. . . .

When they were both stuporous with food and wine, he said, “I have a gift for you.”

It was growing cold on the terrace above Tintigal. Her women were gone and his menservants had rather thankfully melted away into the dusk. They, too, felt the tension between the two adepts at the table.

Over the sea the cloud spires were lifted into flame by the sun’s last rays. They burned over the dark water like the towers of a city in flame.

She shivered. “Let’s go in. You can give me the present as we recline before the hearth. Come, my love.” She reached for his hand.

Suddenly he wasn’t empty-handed any longer. A cup was in his left. The stem and footing were of gold, which girdled the coiled spiral of a shell, a white shell glowing inside and out with mother-of-pearl.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, but her heart was hammering and she could barely breathe.

“Yes. Now take it in both your hands and drink.”

“Wine,” she whispered. “I’d rather not. I’ve had . . .”

“Drink!”

The word had the force of command. At the same moment, she felt his right hand encircle her neck, her long, regal neck. He stroked the hollow at the base of her throat with his thumb. She’d seen him kill men that way, crushing the ridged cartilage of the larynx with his thumb, leaving them to kick and gasp their lives away while he watched with evident enjoyment.

She seized the cup with both hands and brought it to her lips. Its contents filled her mouth and nose both, so she couldn’t even scream when she was drawn into the spiral coil of the vessel.

She seemed to move down a glowing white, curve-walled corridor filled with pale, diffused light. The inner shell was not transparent but translucent. She fled along a rough pathway like one following an ever-narrowing spiral staircase down and down to some unguessable destination, unable to halt or go back because the walls and floor weren’t sufficiently bumpy to allow her to stop or crawl back.

Panic struck as she reached a passage so narrow that she could no longer walk or, at last, even crawl. She screamed, and at her first scream, she debouched free of the shell, rolling across a carpet on the floor of Merlin’s stronghold.

The place both awed and terrified her. It was part of the sea. A sea on some world she was sure the rest of mankind did not share.

The room was luxurious. Soft rugs, jeweled with many colors, lay like pools of brightness on stone floors. Velvet-covered couches were scattered around haphazard flowers blooming in a dark shadowed mezzanine. The whole front wall of the room was glass, some kind of glass that overlooked the sea. And when the tide was in, as it was now, the blue and green waves crashed against the glass, towering over her as she lay on a soft, scarlet rug on the floor.

The glass-not-glass allowed sound and air to pass through its permeable surface and the room was scoured by the sea wind. She screamed again as a gigantic wave towered over her and broke, foaming against the glass wall before her, and the wind tore at her hair.

She scrambled toward the back of the room, where a gigantic double-walled Roman fireplace formed the back of the long sea-view room.

“That’s it. Incinerate yourself,” he said contemptuously.

She sat up, shivering. “You know I hate this place,” she whimpered.

“Too bad,” he said. “But whatever you feel, stop squalling or I’ll have you gagged. Or maybe I’ll just have one of my servants cut out your tongue.”

She knew he was capable of doing either one as easily as the other, so she was silent.

He waved his hand and it seemed the glass between them and the raging sea grew denser. The noise of pounding waves lessened and the wind dropped. She realized it was near night in this place, as it was at Tintigal, and some of the brightness in the room was from the fire at the back, fanned by the wind.

The glow faded and the room grew darker. Beyond the windows, the sea churned higher, the waves now breaking on the roof above the window wall. The trees were scattered around the room in pots, some in leaf, others laden with fruit, and some in flower. Peaches, plums, apricots, apples, and quince. They yielded to his power, dormant flowering, fruiting at his will.

As she watched, he picked a pale white plum, dewy ripe, from one of the harvest trees. He reached down and put it in her mouth, where it dissolved, honey-sweet within, tart and biting at the skin.

“Spit the pit into my hand,” he said.

She held back, keeping the fissured seed in her mouth. But then he caught her hair in one hand and shook her. “Don’t you dare! I will tear out your tongue!”

She spat the pit into his hand. He snapped his fingers, and two of his golems appeared. She knew this was going to be worse than anything she’d anticipated, maybe worse than anything that had ever gone before.

The golems always frightened her. They were dead men still inhabiting their bodies. Unlike others he raised, they were not zombies suited only for simple tasks. They retained intelligence and volition, even though they were clearly corpses. Gutted, cooked to render away fat, then soaked, tanned the way a hide is tanned, then sewn back on withered muscle and cartilaginous bone. The faces were tight, dry masks, the eyes lifeless, hard, opaque, and pale, but with a dark ring where the pupil had once been and a spark of light at the center.

“Your clothes,” he said, “or shall I have them strip you?”

She shuddered. “No!” she whispered. “No!”

She rose to her knees and was naked in a few seconds. She had been prepared for him, wearing nothing under her gown and shift.

Merlin pointed at a dark stair leading down into another, larger room that she could see only dimly below. She hurried to keep ahead of the two golems, running down the shallow steps into the large room.

Even though night was falling outside, it was filled with light. The roof was a glass dome of fitted pieces, as were the windows of the first room she had been in. Above the dome, the sea crashed and boiled frighteningly.

Once the domed room had been a small bay, carved from the cliffs above by wave action. But someone, something, had enclosed the bay in glass, smoothed the floor—it was polished gray basalt—and pushed out the encroaching sea. Now it thundered and roared as if in mad frustration at this usurpation of its powers.

Yes, this was a place of awesome power; she recognized that. Not sea, not land, and she stood there at the moment of not day, not night, not darkness, not light.

Igrane whimpered with terror.

Merlin wasn’t interested. He whispered an incantation and a symbol flared into life on the mottled gray floor. It was a Saint Andrew’s cross, an X. It was set in the floor among the remains of sea creatures that lived long ago and left their images pressed into the rock caught in stone. Not dead completely, yet not alive, either.

“Hurry,” Merlin snapped. “The light is fading! Tie her.”

She screamed when the golems seized her. They hustled her to the glowing cross-shaped marking in the center of the floor, then tied her arms, fastening them at the wrists to two lines that vanished into the shadows above. Then one of them kicked her legs apart and placed her feet on the glowing X she stood on, so that her body formed another X above that on the floor.

She tugged and found she couldn’t move her feet. They adhered to the glowing lines beneath.

She screamed again.

Behind her, she heard Merlin test the whip. It cracked across the chamber with the sound of snapping wood. Light filled the room and Igrane looked up and around into what seemed a thousand mirrors, all reflecting both of them.

He was standing behind her, whip in hand. Oddly, she felt relieved. She had been afraid he was going to kill her. But a whipping wouldn’t do that. He had whipped her before and seldom lasted beyond two lashes. By then his desire to see her suffer was at war with his overwhelming need to possess her, and the need to possess her won.

She felt the surge of power from the symbol she stood on; erotic need consumed her. She was almost ready to beg for the lash.

She saw in the thousand mirrors around her the movement, snakelike and savage, of the thing in his hand. A second later, it coiled at her loins.

Her response was a shriek of uncontrolled pain. God, it had never felt like this before.

She saw a weal leap up a finger’s breadth and width across her buttocks and down to her thigh, the tender part just between her legs. Then, as the agony faded into a more tolerable ache, the wound began to leak blood from its center.

“No!” she screamed as the next one came coiling around her body above the buttocks at her waist. The tip flicked her nipple and split it like a ripe cherry.

She watched transfixed with horror as blood from her breast flowed down her belly and thigh, and dripped down on the floor. She didn’t scream again, but fought the ropes that tied her wrists and whatever power that caused her feet to cling to the floor like a madwoman.

Then she went limp with almost unspeakable relief as she realized he was walking toward her . . . he’d had enough . . . oh, God! A few seconds later, she felt his arms around her waist and his lips on her neck.

“That was worse,” she whimpered. “Worse than all the other times. Please, please cut me down.”

“My poor dear,” he whispered in mock sympathy. “Hold yourself in readiness. It’s going to get worse still.”

But he did release the ropes holding her arms and forced her to the floor, positioning her on top of the X-shaped symbol. The light in the room died, and, above through the glass, she saw the green and churning sea. It was almost nightfall outside, and she knew he must be in a hurry to complete the spell before darkness wrapped this coast in gloom, because she saw him glance uneasily upward.