The Sworn (26 page)

“You have my word.”

Rosta dropped her voice. “You know how bells of different sizes produce different sounds? Well, we think—but we can’t prove—that magic is like those bells. For some, the power is like a gong, while for others it might be like a delicate chime. I’ve heard it whispered that Alyzza’s magic was ‘attuned’ to the power of the Obsidian King, and that the backlash from his destruction damaged her.” She paused as if she were debating whether to say more. Finally, she gathered her courage. “We think that those who have gone mad in this recent group all heard the same pitch, for want of a better word. We think that’s why they’re still so addled. Their magic is resonating with something that literally frightened them out of their wits.”

They stopped in front of a door. All of the rooms down the corridor had heavy wooden doors braced with iron. This door was solid iron. “We’ve had to put Alyzza in
this room because it’s the most secure in the whole fortress. The windows are warded so that nothing can enter or leave except light. Her furnishings are minimal, to keep her from hurting herself.” Rosta motioned for Tris to come to one side of the door. She raised her hand and spoke a word of power. The stone wall became transparent. Inside, Tris could see a figure swaying and dancing, arms upraised.

“She’s quiet at the moment,” Rosta said. “But she dances or paces all day long. She barely sleeps. It’s mania. I wanted you to prepare yourself.”

Tris nodded. “I’m ready.”

Rosta gestured for the others to stand back from the door. “I’d suggest that you raise your wardings. When you’re ready, I’ll drop the magic that binds the door long enough for you to enter. I have to raise the magic again when you’re inside. I’ll keep watch on you while you’re with her. When you’re ready to leave, come to the door, but make sure Alyzza keeps her distance.” She paused. “M’lord, I realize that you think of Alyzza as a friend. But I beg of you, be wary. She’s not as you last saw her.”

Tris raised his wardings and waited. The magic that bound the door shifted, and the door opened for him of its own accord.

“Come in, come in. It’s time, you know.” Alyzza’s gravelly voice was a sing-song chant. She had a threadbare shawl wrapped around her body and head, and her feet danced to music only she could hear. She did not turn.

From the back, Alyzza looked gaunt and frail. She had been stooped before, but now the hunch was more apparent. Where she had been well fed, now her skin hung like crepe on her bones. “It’s time, it’s time,” she sang, almost
to herself. Swaying to the rhythm, Alyzza turned to face Tris. Her face looked as wizened as an old corpse, and her eyes were bright with madness. But in those eyes, Tris saw a glimmer of recognition, and something else. Fear.

“Ah, yes, you’ve come.”

Tris slowly took a few steps into the room. “Do you recognize me, Alyzza? It’s me, Tris Drayke.”

It had been only two years since Tris had fled for his life from Jared’s coup. Tris, Soterius, Carroway, and another friend, Harrtuck, had tried to elude Jared’s guards by hiring on as tent riggers with Maynard Linton’s caravan on their way to safety outside Margolan’s borders. Alyzza, then a hedge witch traveling with the caravan, had been the first to recognize Tris’s newly woken magic, powers Tris did not understand and could not control. Alyzza and Carina had been his first teachers as he struggled to keep his power from destroying him. And it had been Alyzza who one night had put a blade against his throat, determined that he should prove himself to her rather than let a new dark summoner rise again.

Alyzza hummed a tune and swayed toward him, looking like an animated corpse. “The king, the king, all hail the king,” she sang. “Let warriors tall and maidens all attend, all hail the king.” The words were to a popular song, long a tavern favorite, but the melody had been replaced by a discordant sing-song that sent a chill down Tris’s spine.

Tris met Alyzza’s eyes. Fire and fear burned in equal measure, and with them, a canny intelligence. “What do you see, Alyzza? What frightens you?”

“Fie!” Alyzza’s outburst startled Tris. “I will not speak ill of the damned, lest we meet, and soon.” Words to a play
this time, a drama that local bards often performed at festivals. A play popular among taverngoers for its lurid enactment of corpses drawn from their graves by a dark mage.

“Where would the damned meet, if not by moonlight?” Tris ventured, remembering a line from the play. Alyzza’s eyes lit up with recognition, and a gap-toothed smile spread across her face.

“Walk not by moonlight, m’lord, or risk your soul. There be corpses in the copses, and
dimonns
by the wayside. On such a night, keep salt and iron at hand.” Alyzza’s voice had become conspiratorial, though her words were still those of the play. Tris glanced around Alyzza’s sparse room. All along the walls lay a fine white powder of salt. Runes were scratched into the stone walls, darkened with what Tris guessed was blood, from the ruined fingernails and scabbed fingers of Alyzza’s hands. A circle had been drawn on the stone floor in what appeared to be charcoal, and a braid of rags had been added to it as a charmed mat. At the quarters and cross-quarters lay bits of slag iron. Salt and iron—two of the most basic charms to ward off evil.

Tris racked his brain for memories of the tavern play. It had been a long time since he’d seen it. Carroway could probably recite the entire play from memory, but he was far away, healing his damaged hand in Dark Haven. Tris gambled on his memory and remembered another line. “The Wild Host comes on the north wind. But ’tis souls, not stags, that come to the hunting horn. Hide yourself away.”

Alyzza’s face shone with recognition. Tris felt as if they were sharing an elaborate code. “Where will you hide, when Nameless sounds Her horn? Where will your
soul take its refuge? Would there were a summoner to hide my soul away.”

Tris drew a sharp breath. He had forgotten that line. The stories of Nameless, the eighth Aspect of the Sacred Lady, told of the Goddess in her guise as the Formless One riding the cold autumn winds through the countryside, harvesting souls. Tris had heard it said that many villagers would not be abroad by night in the weeks around the Feast of the Departed for fear of hearing Nameless’s horn and being called to her hunting party of the damned.

“I’m that summoner, Alyzza,” Tris said, meeting Alyzza’s eyes. “I have the power to protect you. Tell me what you see.”

“I see, I see, a far, far sea. The sea we all must cross. Gray and cold, dark and deep. Across that sea there comes a ship, a ship. A ship that comes for me.”

Cam’s note said that Alvior sailed away in a strange ship across the Northern Sea. Cam thinks Alvior’s coming back across the sea with his dark mage. Alyzza may be mad, but she’s mad as a dancing spider.

“You hear a bell I can’t hear, Alyzza,” Tris said evenly. “Let me listen with you. I won’t hurt you. Let me listen
through
you.”

Alyzza exhaled in a hiss. “I would not take that road, m’lad, though all the gold be mine. Not king, nor queen, nor beggar fool return from that dark lane.” A song again, about a desperate man’s date with Death.

“The bells, Alyzza. Let me hear the bells.”

Reluctantly, Alyzza stretched out a gnarled hand. Despite her madness, she stopped just shy of Tris’s wardings without touching them, giving him to know that she saw the magical protection and knew it for what it was.

Without dropping his wardings, Tris projected his magic across the shield to touch Alyzza’s outstretched palm. Tris drew them both onto the Plains of Spirit, anchoring Alyzza with his power. Tris could sense the power that Alyzza’s magic still commanded, although that power had become as gnarled as her bony hands. Tris extended his spirit, and as Alyzza dropped her own battered and ragged shielding, Tris let his power brush against her mind.

Immediately, he heard it. The sound was low and distant, like a rumble of thunder or the crash of a rock slide. But this sound was as much unlike those sounds as it was similar. Deep and vibrating, the sound waxed and waned. At its loudest, it crowded out thought, but at its softest, it hovered menacingly at the threshold of hearing, threatening to return. Carroway had once told Tris that there were certain chords that could produce madness if sounded incessantly. Tris had heard of torturers who used particular sounds to increase the pain of their victims. Until now, Tris had believed that the sounds of battle were the most damnable, along with the dying screams of men. But something in that distant rumble resonated with primal terror deep in Tris’s mind. It supplanted reason and training, and all vestiges of modern civilization, a warning to the animal core at its most basic. Channeled through Alyzza, Tris heard the reverberating sound, felt it amplified through her terror and her tangled power. It was all he could do not to tear free and scream.

Alyzza suddenly launched herself at him. His shields held, but Alyzza reached as if to grip and hold his head close to hers, hanging on though the magic of his wardings burned.

“It comes,” she shrieked, as if she were trying to shout over the low, damnable sound. “A key. A bridge. A voyager. It comes for these.”

“Who? What key? Which bridge?”

But as abruptly as Alyzza had thrown herself toward him, she drew back. For an instant, her eyes were unclouded. “Protect the bridge, Tris. Protect the bridge.”

Like a curtain, the madness descended once more. Alyzza’s hands fell to her ragged skirt and she curtsied as she began to dance. “Oh, will you walk a space with me, a pace with me, or two or three. Oh, will you walk a pace with me for now, the sun is setting.” It was a child’s rhyme this time, and Alyzza’s voice was reedy and high, like a deranged young girl. “Oh hush, my love and don’t you fear, or shed a tear, or two or three. Oh hush, my love, and don’t you fear, for I the fire am setting.” Alyzza’s voice grew by turns louder and softer, and she turned away from Tris as if she had forgotten he was there. He watched her for a moment, and then walked to the door, making sure that he did not turn his back on Alyzza. Until Rosta opened the door, Tris did not realize he had been holding his breath.

“You see, she is quite mad,” Rosta said as she closed the door behind Tris, setting the wardings back in place.

“I felt it, Rosta. The resonance. You were right. There’s something out there, something she’s attuned to—and probably the others, too. Goddess help me, if I had that in my head all the time, I’d be as mad as she is.”

The guards took up their places outside the door as Rosta gestured for Tris, Soterius, and Mikhail to follow her into a small parlor. Its furnishings were threadbare and hard used, but at the moment, Tris welcomed the chance
to sit down. His encounter had left him shaken, and he wondered if it showed. As if Rosta guessed his thoughts, she went to a cabinet and withdrew a bottle of Cartelasian brandy, pouring Tris a generous portion and offering some to the others as well. Soterius accepted the drink. Even Mikhail looked uneasy.

Rosta and the others listened as Tris recounted his exchange with Alyzza. At the end, Tris looked to Rosta and Mikhail. “What do you make of it?”

Rosta thought for a while before she replied. “I don’t know what the ‘bells’ are that you heard, unless it’s the reverberation of immensely strong magic. Some mages are able to see halos of energy around people, and they say we each glow a different color and that our colors change or fade depending on many things. If some mages can ‘glow,’ perhaps others have a sound to their magic, although I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

Mikhail nodded. “You may be immune to it as a summoner, but most mortals get an uneasy sensation near places where the undead dwell—both
vayash moru
and other immortals.” He paused. “My point is, just the presence of the magic that sustains us seems to ‘resonate’—to use your word—with mortals on a level that’s often below thought. They don’t know why they’re uneasy; they just are. Something makes them avoid an area, for no apparent reason. It’s stronger for some than others, and a few are either immune or are able to block it out. I’m thinking about Jonmarc Vahanian in the latter case, a mortal surrounded by undead all of the time.”

“There are mages of minor power—hedge-witch-quality magic—who can sense the presence of spirits year-round, not just on Haunts, but they can’t summon them,” Tris
mused. “I’ve spoken with several. Some of them are quite attuned to restless spirits, places where energies remain disturbed after a massacre, things like that. They also say it’s a disquieting feeling, almost like a hum, that alerts them.

“We had a genius of a scientist who built our war machines at the Battle of Lochlanimar last winter,” Tris said thoughtfully. “Wivvers. He makes all kinds of contraptions and tries to figure out how magic—and other things—work. Wivvers explained to us how particular noises, like the banging of drums or very shrill pipes, can make glass shatter or whole walls collapse. Perhaps that’s something like the ‘resonance’ Alyzza hears, and maybe only some mages are attuned to it.”

He sighed. “I had a firsthand experience with just how powerful the Flow really is when Carina and I healed one of the energy rivers. I saw it as light, but perhaps others ‘hear’ it.”

“Well, if it drives mages mad, then we’re fortunate you can’t hear it,” Soterius said. “And I’m the last one to speculate about how magic works, not having a speck of it in my bones. But the possibility remains that something is coming from across the sea—and it’s not friendly.” He looked at Tris. “You fought Foor Arontala and won. You defeated the Obsidian King’s spirit. And I saw the magic you did at Lochlanimar—you’re much stronger now than you were then. Do you doubt that you could fight whatever this is?”