Wild Magic (15 page)

He sighed, and turned to look for the cat. He would need to speak a few words over his flaking hand if he were to stop the progression of this new disorder.

But of Bëte, the beast in which Rahe had stored a large number of his most important spells, there was no sign.

‘By Falla’s fiery quim!’

It was the worst curse he knew. If Tycho Issian heard him utter it, he would be punished most severely. But the Lord of Cantara was still closeted with the girl Virelai had provided for him the previous night: he would not be abroad for an hour or more yet. Life here in the castle at Forent under Rui Finco’s regime was one of discreet debauchery, for the lords, at least. Even the cat seemed to get up to no good; for although it was not allowed to stray beyond the tower, still it managed to discover and murder a remarkable number and variety of smaller beasts. So far, Virelai had been gifted with – or perhaps tormented with was a more accurate term – several families of mice, laid out in neat rows; a pair of lark’s feet, complete with hooked spurs (but no lark: that had obviously proved too tempting a morsel); three fat rats; a pigeon bearing a message coiled around one grey-pink leg; and once, rather alarmingly, a half-dead rabbit, which had sprung disconcertingly to life when Virelai had reached a hand to it. Where the cat had come by these new acquaintances, he had no idea. Mice and rats infested every keep; and the pigeon must foolishly have landed on the sill of the window. But a lark? A rabbit? These were creatures of open farmland, of which there was precious little in the vicinity of Forent Castle.

The message had been interesting, though.

Consisting of an unhelpful length of thin twine tied into a combination of knots and twists and strange little curlicues, it had taken him several days to decipher and appeared to have something to do with the fact that a plan had gone awry and that a shipman named Dan, or something approximate, had disappeared.

Virelai had no idea why this Dan was so important that his absence had to be reported by messenger-pigeon, but perhaps he should try to find out. One thing he had learned in these long months out in the world of Elda was that information could be as valuable as silver, women, ships; or any other tradable object.

He went to the window and leaned out over the dizzying precipice beneath. They liked to build high in Istria, it seemed: the tower-room he had occupied in the great castle at Cera had also been lofty. But where the view from the window at Cera had been one most pleasing to the eye – parklands, woods and formal gardens all dappled with sunlight and caressed by gentle breezes; milling streets and markets ablaze with colour and buzzing with the noise of all the folk running around below him just like little ants ferrying their supplies to and fro – the prospect here at Forent was quite another matter. All he could see from this north-facing window was rock and sea. And a lot of sky. And all of these were grey. A thick mist had, as was quite common in this goddess-forsaken place – rolled in off the Northern Ocean, melding all three elements – solid, watery and ethereal – into a single monotonous blur. He hated this view; had hated it from the first day he had been incarcerated here. It reminded him too much of Sanctuary, with its grim ice cliffs and frozen gardens, a landscape rendered in a thousand shades of grey. A more poetic man – or one who had travelled more widely and had a greater ability to make comparisons – might have discerned an extraordinarily subtle palette of blues and greens and purples in that scene: but until he had fled the place, Virelai had never seen anything beyond the Master’s icy hell and loathed that too heartily to be bothered to find any poetry in it.

Down below, a larger than average wave crashed onto the jagged rocks at the base of the keep with a roar, sending up a great geyser of white water. Flecks of spume eddied up into the damp air. The sea retreated, leaving behind it a sucking vacuum.

Virelai shuddered – an instinctive reaction to bad memories and the chilly air; but when he felt the hairs on the back of his neck start to rise, he knew the cause was more tangible. Bëte had returned.

Ever since the bizarre vision he had been afforded back in Cera, he had been wary of her. He turned now quickly, unhappy at the thought of the beast’s eyes on his unguarded back.

She sat in the doorway as neat as a statue of Bast, Falla’s feline companion: head up, paws together, tail tucked seamlessly around her feet and regarded the sorcerer with a merciless green gaze. There was no love lost between the two of them: Virelai had the strange feeling the cat blamed him for its separation from the Rosa Eldi. A whole continent away from the hypnotic hands of the woman who had been able to reduce it to a dribbling, purring pet and now forced to eject spells at another’s whim, the cat was developing a nasty temper. Not that it had ever been of a particularly pleasant disposition (and his hands and forearms carried enough thin white scars to testify to
that
fact). Watching it carefully out of the corner of his eye, Virelai crossed the room and sat down upon his bed to allow the animal to pass unchallenged. He had given up trying to stare it down. Ever since he had thought he saw it grown vast and demonlike in that room in Cera, he was trying to avoid the sort of confrontation that might suddenly bring on the same manifestation. He had almost managed to persuade himself that his vision of it in that monstrous state, and the echoing voice that accompanied that vision, had been brought about by his fevered mind, a mind subjected to unbearable stress by the Lord of Cantara.

Almost, but not quite. There had been the small matter of the dead hound he had found at the threshold of the room the next morning, its throat agape, its wiry grey coat all matted with gore. The hound was one of the Lord of Cera’s hunting pack and was a huge beast in itself: how much larger and more savage, therefore, must be the predator which had taken its life and dragged it to the topmost tower-room?

‘Well now, my Lord of Cantara, I can well see why you are late to table this morning.’ Rui Finco, Lord of Forent, leaned casually against the door-jamb surveying the contents of the bedchamber with some amusement. Tycho Issian, that hard-faced hypocrite, pushed the woman who sat astraddle him roughly aside, drew the covers up to his chest and glared at his host.

‘Is nowhere private to you?’

‘Nowhere in this castle.’ Rui watched regretfully as the woman gathered her sabatka more decorously around her and glided away into the dressing-chamber. She had a good shape, if a little slender for his tastes: he could tell that much quite easily even though she was swaddled in the all-encompassing robe: you developed an eye for such things if you had bedded as many women as had the Lord of Forent. It was his right and his privilege, after all, as lord of the domain, and he’d spent much of his time, income and effort on acquiring the finest seraglio in the Empire. Was it Raqla? he wondered. The height and the size of her hips and breasts looked slighter than he remembered them under that rich blue sheeting, but then she might have suffered from the wasting sickness which had taken hold earlier in the year. Raqla had been a favourite of his: a tireless girl, given the right encouragement, who had been happy enough to climb aboard and ride him so that he could watch her breasts sway and jounce with her efforts. None of this sabatka nonsense for him behind his closed doors: he liked the way a woman’s body was made, could not understand how it could possibly be more holy to worship the Goddess’s image through some holes in a robe rather than to appreciate the whole glorious creation in full sight. But he could have sworn he had glimpsed a strand of pale blonde hair caught for a moment in the mouth-slit of the sabatka; and Raqla was so dark to be almost ebony-haired . . .

Curious. He could not place the woman amongst the hundred or so he kept in the castle seraglio; had the Lord of Cantara possibly have had the temerity to spurn his host’s more than generous hospitality and had a girl from the town smuggled in to service him? It seemed unlikely, especially given the network of informers he paid well to keep their eyes on Tycho’s comings and goings; but the southern lord was strange indeed, and obsessed enough to try anything.

‘If your lordship is sufficiently rested, perhaps we might continue our discussion?’

Tycho waved an impatient hand. Beneath the walnutbrown tan his face appeared sallow and unhealthy. It looked as if he had not slept in a week, rather than spent a pleasurable night locked in some lusty courtesan’s embrace. ‘Give me a few minutes and I’ll attend you presently, Rui. Is there no door that locks in this damned place?’

Rui Finco did not bother to answer this naive question. Of course no door but that to his own chamber – and the stronghold below – bore a lock. How effective a politician would he be if he did not know the comings and goings of every visitor to Forent Castle? With a humourless smile and a nod of barest politeness, Rui left the room, swinging the oak door closed behind him.

Tycho pushed himself out of bed and stormed across the room to the mirror that hung over the stone basin and ewer there. Framed by the exquisite mosaic of the frame, his eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks haggard and his chin was dark with stubble. The lines that ran across his brow and beside his nose were more deeply incised than ever, and a whole forest of wrinkles had appeared around his eye-sockets. Rather than the forty-three years he owned to, today he looked closer to sixty. He was not, in truth, getting much sleep; and not just as a result of his exertions with the whores he required Virelai to bring to him night after night, for they were mere distractions, an attempt to exorcise the demon that had his soul in its thorny grip. He had not been sleeping properly now for— He made a mental calculation: he had come from Cantara, via Cera, to Forent around Harvest Moon and the Allfair had taken place at Quarteryear – so it was now over four moon-circles since he had been thus afflicted. It was enough to turn any man’s wits, and his health, too. Before his fateful encounter with the woman they called the Rose of the World he would have called himself a rational man: one given rather more to consideration of the outcome of his actions, one who could always be counted on to choose the best course to progress his own fortunes and status. More than that, in many areas of the Empire his name was a watchword for piety and patriotism: he was known as an orator and upholder of Falla’s laws. A man of shining reputation. True, his heritage was obscure – and he intended to keep it that way – and he had owed the Council a large sum of money (now repaid, with interest); but in all other ways he had worked hard through his life to show to the world a man of great character, a man who lived well but purely; a man who was known to be hard on sinners and the causes of sin, but had himself an unblemished record. And now? All he could think about, at every hour of the day and night was the Rosa Eldi – her milk-white skin, the long golden hair that would tangle silkily around him, the slender waist he could encircle with his hands, the full breasts that would surely spill over his palms, the heat of her softly hairless—

He caught himself up, appalled for the thousandth time at the potency of the image, at the profoundly physical effect it had on him. He had never, he reminded himself now, seen even a glimpse of the nomad woman’s naked flesh; but somehow that one kiss he had shared with her in the map-seller’s wagon at the Fair had been all it had required for her to enspell him, body, thought and soul: she had, he was sure, gifted him with a full understanding of how it would be to
know
every crevice of her in that single encounter, and he had been haunted by this insatiable hunger for her ever since.

Not only was he constantly exhausted, but his wretched cock was eternally hard. It was – apart from being a potentially desperate embarrassment – a practical horror, and no matter what he tried, nothing seemed to reduce the size or insistence of his erection. Cold baths, cold compresses, hours of prayer: nothing worked. So instead he had turned to the professional efforts of the castle’s seraglio: for surely women such as these must have come across problems worse than his in their lustful careers. The whores wore him out and made him sore with their exertions, but still he could not ejaculate. Even this latest experiment did not seem to be doing the trick.

He took a new length of linen bandage and bound himself tightly, wincing at the discomfort.
It is my punishment
, he thought savagely,
for allowing the Rosa Eldi to be taken into heathendom. I must bear it until I can liberate her from that foul barbarian and his wicked, heretical followers. I must take her and purge her thoroughly; rinse her through with my own sacred libations. Together we shall worship the Goddess from whence we all came; I shall cover her flesh from the view of the lustful; I shall show her the true and steady Way of Fire: I shall lead her back to the paths of the righteous . . .

He was beginning to believe the words he cried out in town squares, the words that brought people crowding around him, calling for a holy war against Eyra: a war to end all wars.

Rui Finco tarried in the hallway outside until he heard the water running in the ewer and the lord bidding the whore leave by the secret way; then he ran swiftly down the stairs and entered the elaborate Galian Room below. Behind the vast freestanding bed, with its plush hangings and massively carved posts, he located the panelled door and slipped into the narrow staircase beyond. His great-grandfather, the notorious Taghi Finco, had constructed this neat little maze of secret passageways in the castle walls. In the last century social mores had been strict and congress with a woman not one’s Goddess-given wife a crime punishable by castration. Taghi was a man of enormous appetites, his wife a sickly creature who refused to bed him after the birth of their only son, or to have the Goddess-given good grace to fade away and die. Via the passages, Taghi had smuggled women into the Galian Room and had there pleasured himself and them through many a torrid night. He had, it was rumoured (though never in polite company) fathered half a hundred bastards. Rui blessed his forebear daily: it was not just the castle he had inherited from Lord Taghi Finco.