The Sorcerer's Legacy (23 page)

A large young man with hair so light it was almost white and the petite young apprentice from the bakery pulled up to the keep with a wagon loaded with baked goods. The young man was tall and broad and had a friendly face that constantly bore a large smile. Azerick had them pull the goods to the kitchen door where they both helped Agnes and her assistants unload them.

“I understand you two are getting married soon,” Azerick put to the obviously happy couple.

“Aye, milord, just as soon as I can earn enough coin to build us a house and a plot of land to farm. I had hoped to have the house finished before winter set in but I couldn’t find enough work this summer until you started putting the tower to rights,” the young man replied with his ever-present smile.

“Well maybe this will help you get your marriage started a little sooner,” Azerick said and handed the young man a small pouch of coins.

“Oh, milord, you just paid double for the order. Ya don’t need to go and do that,” Jess said reproachfully.

“Consider it an early wedding present,” Azerick insisted.

Jess’s fiancé smiled so wide Azerick was afraid it would swallow his whole head. “Thank you, milord, you are most generous!”

“Thank you, Magus, thank you so much!” Jess almost wept in joy as she hugged Azerick tightly.

“We can get married now, Ronald!” Jess cried, holding the young man’s hands and hopping up and down excitedly.

“We can get married at the winter festival!” Ron shouted. “Master Azerick, you must come to the wedding!”

“I will see what I can do,” the sorcerer replied noncommittally. “I have my hands full at the moment.”

Azerick had to bid the couple farewell as the miller’s wagon approached the keep. Azerick, Zeke, Evan, and the other men that had come helped unload the wagon. Several sacks of the delivery they stored in the large pantry but most went into one of the smaller stone buildings next to the keep.

No sooner had they finished unloading the dry foods, the butcher’s wagon pulled up. The men unloaded the packs of cut meat and sausages and hung the sides of beef and pork in the cool room. The cool room was in one of the underground chambers and had a thick door that sealed tightly in the frame. Huge blocks of ice were stacked along nearly every wall clear to the ceiling. Azerick was glad the butcher had the foresight to bring a few iron hooks with him because Azerick was several hooks too short to hang up all the meat.

Azerick settled his bill immediately and went back into the main hall to check on his company. The women and several of the older children were busily stuffing mattresses with the wheat, barley, and oat chaff that the miller had also brought in tied into tight bundles. Most of his guests had fallen asleep right on the bare floor due to their full stomachs, warm room, and the exhaustion of trekking five miles in the deep snow.

Azerick flopped down onto his own bed, weary from the day’s events but filled with pride, purpose, and a sense of satisfaction that he had been missing in his life that his tutelage of Ellyssa had only begun to satisfy.

CHAPTER 9

Duke Ulric sat in his study drinking brandy with a man that he would normally never associate with, but as the old adage said, politics makes for strange bedfellows. The other man in the room also enjoyed the fine liquor but his very presence eliminated any the ability to describe him as merely sitting in the plush, red velvet-upholstered chair. He occupied, he dominated the chair and the very room with his presence.

His name was Kayne. No surname, no military rank, nor title of nobility; he was simply Kayne. Such a man needed nothing so pretentious as rank or titles to give him the airs of command. His presence reeked of authority and power oozed from every pore of his body, dominating the air and everything around him. Even duke Ulric whose ego knew no limits was not immune to the power of the man’s aura.

Kayne wore the only thing anyone had ever seen him in no matter the time of day or night. His black scale armor rippled like the glossy scales of a dragon. A blood red belt comprised of smaller scales encircled his trim waist from which hung a fierce blade that had taken more lives than the population of a medium sized town. His cloak was of a slightly darker red than his belt, the hood thrown back to reveal his clean-shaven head.

A gruesome scar put a deep cleft through his left eyebrow and ran in a straight line to the corner of his mouth in an angry pink ridge broken in half by a nearly perfectly white eyeball. The eye seemed almost completely devoid of any color, its surface unmarred by a colored iris or black pupil. It was as if his natural eye had been replaced by a glossy white hen’s egg. Only by looking very closely could you make out the faint hint of a pupil—and no one ever dare stare long enough to take notice.

The other eye was a rich mahogany filled with specks of red. It was said that in moments of great fury, the eye would burn with a brighter red than the massive scar that cleaved his eyebrow in twain. A small inverted triangle of closely cropped black beard bobbed up and down slightly as he spoke in a surprisingly rich tone.

“So Ulric, you wish to unleash Hell’s Legion on your own people,” Kayne stated with an air of familiarity.

Kayne was likely the only man alive, save the king, that the duke would tolerate the use of his name without the honorific preceding it. Even the other dukes and duchesses of the realm did not dare do so for want of avoiding his scorn.

Kayne treated no mortal as his superior and only treated those he respected by way of character or strength of arms as an equal. Or a prospective employer and that purely for courtesy’s sake. He was nothing if not a good businessman.

“On the contrary, my good Kayne,” Duke Ulric countered. “I wish to keep them on quite a short leash and use them to herd the bastard king’s people. Once all is in place, then I will unleash them on my enemies.”

“Very interesting; most men, and occasionally women, hire my legion to simply roll through their enemies, inflicting wanton slaughter, and ruthless destruction. You have the mind of a tactician; I respect that, Your Grace,” the mercenary leader said, rewarding the duke with the use of his title. “How precisely would you use my men to affect your strategies?” the infamously brutal mercenary asked with a surprisingly educated voice.

Ulric stood up from the plush chair and stood near the newly constructed table occupying the center of the library.

Kayne surrendered his own chair after a moment’s hesitation, swallowed the remainder of the aged brandy in his glass, and helped himself to a refill.

“I plan to have perhaps four or five hundred of your men, all mounted, make strategic strikes against the towns around Brightridge and then Brelland as well as a few other outlying regions,” Duke Ulric began as Kayne strolled over to the table and looked down at the large map. “After your men have pillaged a town or three, cries of outrage and pleas for protection will be made to the dukes to whom the towns pay taxes in exchange for their protection and leadership. When the dukes and mayors find that they are unable to effect the necessary protection, they will plead to the king for help.

“As King Jarvin attempts to rally his own forces, your men and mine will stage a series of mock battles. It will look vicious and bloody and I believe it can appear convincing to a handful of witnessing peasants with few real casualties. Your men will flee before my superior forces. The common people will quickly realize that the king is impudent to stop your men and that I am the only person who has had any success in protecting them. They will begin to declare for me to ascend the throne, or at the very least not fight me when I take it.”

“What of the duke and duchess of Brightridge and North Haven respectively. It is my understanding that they have no great love for you,” Kayne smiled, showing two rows of small, perfect, white teeth.

“I have a plan to deal with them when the time comes, I assure you.”

Kayne swirled the brandy about in his glass. “The only thing now is to formulate my fee. I can field five hundred hell riders but they do not come cheaply,” he said and took a deep swallow of the fiery liquid.

“My plan is more complicated than that,” Ulric conceded. “The final piece of my plan will require at least two thousand men. I can add nearly a thousand of my own to augment yours while dressed to blend in, however.”

“And how long will you require the use of my entire legion?” Kayne asked, already calculating the numbers in his sharp mind.

“If the people will call for the king to relinquish his throne and raise me to his place, then no more than a month at the most. If I must pull Jarvin from his throne then I will be forced to put Brelland to siege.”

“A siege can be rather time consuming, not to mention expensive.”

“Not so long as you might think, especially if the doors are opened for us,” Ulric replied cryptically.

Kayne gave the duke another feral grin. “You have men on the inside.” It was statement not a question.

“I have allies,” the duke allowed.

The two powerful men spent the rest of the evening hashing out the cost and the allowances for cost overruns. Duke Ulric was forced to concede an extra allowance for plunder but even with that concession, his coffers would be considerably drained. It would take time but that came as no surprise. Ulric knew that Kayne would not move his men until spring, and crossing the badlands added its own degree of difficulty, but he had patiently invested seven years for the crown so he could wait one more.

Then he would make that traitorous bastard Baneford pay!

***

Azerick woke one morning at the start of the second week of hosting the homeless children, well, mostly children though he now had just over a dozen adults as well. He finally admitted to himself that he was in way over his head and he needed help—badly. Few of the children were literate, but fortunately four of the women and one man’s academic abilities ranged from reasonably able to read and write to nearly scholarly.

He invited Simon to live at the keep, which he thankfully accepted, and since he was a lifelong bachelor, it had posed no real problem. Azerick put him up on the second floor with Teresa, the tutor he had hired who was a spinster of fifty-two years. Teresa came highly recommended. She was exceptionally stern but not in a cruel manner like Azerick’s old etiquette tutor and magus Bauer, his first instructor at The Academy.

She was extremely knowledgeable over a wide variety of subjects. She wore her mass of heavily grey-streaked black hair piled up on top of her head in a massive beehive that towered over Azerick by at least half a head even though she was shorter than he was by several inches.

Azerick had decided to put the time he had with the children to good use by teaching them to read and building upon their education. However, even with the help of the other educated adults, his problems continued to mount. Wolf ceased speaking to him the day after all the vagrants arrived, claiming they were eating all of his food and that he was on the verge of starvation.

Azerick had been assaulted by flying dinner rolls striking him in the back of the head but he never actually saw the ambusher. He knew it must have been the peeved half-elf, or else the ghost had returned and was now trying to drive him out using a softer tactic. An animal had also marked its territory on his favorite cloak and he had to assume it was the work of Ghost although he would not be surprised if Wolf had added his own stream into the act of vandalism.

The children spent the first three days lying on pallets of straw-stuffed mattresses in the main hall. Azerick was able to shuttle several carpenters up to the keep where they hastily constructed a multitude of beds and cots over the last week and placed them in the completed outbuildings that had once been barracks. That still left two score sleeping in the main hall.

Azerick had just gotten the carpenters returned to the city before the next big storm blew in and dropped another three feet of the cold, white powder. He put the men to use shoveling paths between the buildings and clearing the roofs before the weight of the snow brought them down.