Winterlands 2 - Dragonshadow (24 page)

Dark and mildew.

Firelight. The tawny radiance of pierced clay lamps, and the smell of burning oil. The room lay below her, foreshortened and changed but recognizable as the one in which she and John had been that day. Morkeleb must be lying along a rafter, she thought, with the same detachment she experienced when it crossed her mind to wonder whether John had remembered to put Caradoc’s golden cup back exactly as he’d found it. Question and observation simply came and went.

Dragon-sight—mage-sight—showed her three-quarters of the room encircled by a spell-diagram, a vast sigil of power of a kind she had never seen. The glowing lines of it extended up onto the walls and, in a curious way, past the walls, through them, and down through the floor, visible for some distance into the foundations and the earth. Instead of Guardian Wards, thin wisps of greenish light burned at the diagram’s five points, reflected in the frightened eyes of the black-haired boy and girl who sat bound in chairs within one of the figure’s three circles.

Yseult, Bliaud, and Ian were there, standing behind the young Icewitches’ chairs. It was as if their eyes had been replaced with colored glass. Jenny observed this with a dragon’s heart, the only way her own concentration would not be broken by the life-in-death of her son. On the table beside the box of jewels two more glass shells lay, broken and empty. Jenny understood without knowing how that demons wore those shells when they crept into this world through the Gate to their Hell.

Caradoc wore the embroidered cap that the laundress had brought in clean that afternoon.

Interlocking circles of satin-work; stylized lilies. He’d bathed and washed his hair; Jenny could smell the camomile. Rocklys, standing before him, still wore her red military tunic and her riding boots, and her hair was flattened and matted from her helmet.

She said, “What is it that you don’t want me to see?”

Caradoc sighed. “We’ve been through this before, Ro… Commander.” His voice was a pleasant baritone, but the voice of a man not only used to having his own way but to being always right. “I told you at the outset that the presence of the untrained and uninitiated can completely nullify the effects of a spell.”

“And I’ve heard since then that that isn’t the case.” Her colorless level brows pinched above her nose. She studied his face. Wondering, as John had said, and not really wanting to know. “From whom?” His gesture of scornful impatience was, Jenny guessed, a perfect counterfeit of a familiar human mannerism, and one moreover with which Rocklys was well acquainted, for she seemed to relax. “One of the local hedge-witches? The only spells they ’re capable of wouldn’t be affected by a brass band and a wrestling-match going on in the room. We’re not charming warts here, Roc. We’re not casting spells to win some bumpkin’s heart. If you want my help, well and good, but you must accept that there is a reason for everything I tell you. There is a reason for every request I make. You don’t explain everything to your troops—you can’t, nor should you.” He used the informal “you,” as to a family member, and Rocklys’ shoulders stiffened again, this time with familiar annoyance.

“Please understand that my wishes must be followed to the letter, else I cannot help you accomplish what you seek to accomplish.”

For a time their eyes held, and the part of Jenny’s heart that was human still saw the virile impatient merchant, newly come to court, and the granite-hard angry princess he had courted but could not win. It was an old clash of wills, and it served to convince Rocklys, had she in fact harbored doubts, that there was nothing amiss in this man she once knew. Caradoc held out his hand peremptorily, and after a moment the Commander placed in it two jewels, dark faceted stones. The Icerider boy twisted against the bonds that held him to his chair, bonds twined with spell-riddled chains that glowed faintly to Jenny’s mageborn perceptions, and began to weep. The girl, younger, round-faced, and cold-eyed, stared stonily before her, but behind her gag her breath was coming very fast.

“Were these the best you could get?”

“I have to send some taxes to the south, to justify our presence here.” Rocklys’ voice was cold, angry at being bested. “And I have to pay my men, and feed them, and keep the horses in oats. If word got to that bunch of painted twits the Regent keeps about him that I was purchasing gemstones, do you think”—and the pronoun she used was one of formal usage, of master to servant—“they’d leave me in command?”

“They wouldn’t even care.” Caradoc, who had glanced up in anger at her choice of address, turned with elaborate unconcern and held one of the jewels up, calling a spot of brilliant light into being, so that lozenges of pale purple were thrown onto his chin and brow. “No,” murmured Rocklys. “No, I think you’re right. It would pass unnoticed in their silly quibbling about jurisdiction and whose rights overlay whose.”

“So why trouble yourself?” Caradoc shrugged. “Amethysts are all right—these are of good quality and strong color—but if you could get another couple of rubies or emeralds we’d do better. They hold—” He hesitated, trying to answer the question that was in Rocklys’ eyes without, it was clear, really telling her anything. “They hold certain spells more strongly. I’m not sure about that peridot—I think you were cheated by the merchant, but we can probably make do with it if we have to. And now, Commander …”

He walked to the door, only a step or two, and opened it to look outside and up at the sky. “The timing of these spells is very precise, particularly this close to mid-summer. It’s full dark now, and barely time until midnight to do what must be done. Commander,” he added, as she nodded brusquely and turned to go.

She turned back. The lintel of the door hid her face from Morkeleb’s watching gaze, but every line of her body seemed to radiate discontent.

“Remember what I said about these practices remaining utterly unobserved. Neither of us can risk having one of these wizardlings incompletely given either to my will or to the bonding with the dragon. I tell you, if you or anyone watches what is done in this room or in the courtyard, I cannot promise that you will be able to conquer and hold the south.”

The woman nodded and made again to go. Then she looked back. “And I have told you Sorcerer.” Again she addressed him as she would a servant. No wonder, thought Jenny, that wealthy suitor had gone away unwed. “I do not seek to conquer. Nor to wrest control of the Realm from its rightful King for my own pleasure or to satisfy some greed. I only seek to bring order. To make things as they should be.”

Caradoc bent his head, and the lamp flames slithered along the embroidered lilies and across his silvery hair. “Of course.”

She’s lying to herself. The thought floated through Jenny’s mind as Rocklys closed the door. As he to her.

And the thoughts were gone, put away to be regarded at leisure another time. Morkeleb’s dragon-senses followed the Commander’s boots across the court, hearing even the opening and shutting of her own door, and the creak of her desk chair as she sat. Aware, but setting the sounds aside.

Caradoc walked carefully through the gate in the magic circle and stood before the two young Icewitches. Morkeleb—and through him, Jenny—could feel the spells that Bliaud, Yseult, and Ian kept over them, spells worked through them, like magics worked through the bones of the dead. Caradoc asked, “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The boy nodded. The girl said nothing, nor did she move. But she could not control her ice-gray eyes, and the sorcerer nodded briefly, satisfied that she could.

“I’m going to put one of these in each of your mouths.” He held up the gemstones, burning purple in the lamplight. “If you swallow them, I’ll take a knife and cut them out of your bellies and stuff the cavities with live rats. Do you understand?”

The boy was crying. The girl, bound and ringed and crippled by the spell-wards upon her, flung her hatred at the man, since it was all she had to fling.

Caradoc’s broad shoulders tightened. Clearly he hated having his will crossed. “I see we’re going to have to do this the hard way.” He took the smaller of the two amethysts, a crystal the size of the end of his little finger, and, removing the boy’s gag, put it into the boy’s mouth, afterward gagging him again. The other stone was perhaps twice the size of the smaller, and a few shades paler in color. Caradoc handed it to Ian, who stood nearest him, as if the boy were no more than a table to hold things. Then he took a scarf of thin silk from his pocket and tied it around the girl’s throat, pulling tighter and tighter until her back arched and thin, desperate noises issued from her throat. Leaving only the barest passage for air, he knotted it, then pulled down the gag. Her mouth dropped open, her chest heaving, and he dropped the jewel onto the protruding tongue. The girl moved her head as if in spite of all she would spit it out, but he shoved the gag into place again.

“One thing you will learn,” said Caradoc, looking down for a moment into the bulging, frantic eyes and for a clear moment Jenny saw, not the man, but the demon that dwelled inside. “I will be obeyed.”

Did he do that to Ian? Jenny let the thought go.

The rite was surprisingly short. Jenny watched, dispassionately, through the incense-smoke and mists, recognizing more of the gestures and devices than she expected. There was a Summoning of some sort, but the Limitations set carefully around the two chairs seemed wrong to her. They were signs of protection, of the preclusion of demons rather than their calling. The power seemed wrongly centered, drawn in on the two children rather than on the sorcerer. It was only when, in less time than it would take a loaf of bread to bake, Caradoc brought the rite to a conclusion and walked across the fading lines of the sigil to the young Ice-witches again, that Jenny realized what she had seen done. The boy had ceased his tears. The girl, though her eyes followed the blocky form of the man, showed no more hate, no more emotion of any sort, passive and empty.

Empty.

Caradoc removed the gags, took the amethysts from the mouths of each child, then walked to a strongbox. Lamplight flashed on its contents when he opened it, and with Morkeleb’s eyes, Jenny saw what it contained.

Two rubies and a sapphire dark as the sea, clear, strongly colored, and without flaw. And in each jewel, it seemed to her, though they lay in the shadows, there burned a tiny, infinitely distant seed of light.

But only when she saw him pick up his cup of crystal and nacre and go to the door, only when she heard the chains of the well-cover clatter back, did realization strike her. She cried out, darkness swallowing the vision, the bridge between her mind and the dragon’s collapsing. She cried out again, inarticulate, and felt warm strong hands grasp her arms— “Jen!”

Her eyes opened and she saw John’s face. “Jen, what is it?”

She was trembling, breathless with shock. Having laid hope aside, she had no idea how painful it would be when it rushed back in; the agony of knowing that there might be something that she could do.

“Ian!” she said. “Was he there?”

“Ian …” She swallowed. “The wizard—Caradoc—he didn’t bring the demon into him, to drive out his soul and his mind. John, he took the soul of him—the heart of him—out first, and stored it in a jewel. Then he let the demon in. Ian’s still there, John. We can still get him back.”

“Why would he do it?” John spoke over his shoulder, not looking toward the fire that would dull his night-vision, keeping his eyes turned toward the dark woods. “Why would he want their souls kept around, once he’s taken their flesh?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny glanced up from staring into the fire, from trying to reconnect her spinning mind with Morkeleb’s. “It’s a thing I never heard of. Usually, according to Caerdinn, anyway, the smaller pooks and wights don’t … don’t completely expel the mind, the soul, of their victim. Sometimes that soul can return when the demon is exorcised, if too much time hasn’t passed. With the Great Wights it’s different, of course. But this …” She fell silent, remembering the demon blazing in Caradoc’s eyes. The hell-light in Ian’s. “It was midnight when he met with the demons before, I think,” John said, after a time. Jenny had opened her eyes, unable to find the dragon’s mind with her own. “They came up out of the sea, silver and shining. Salamanders I thought they looked like, or toads, creeping out of little glass shells. Water must be one of their Gates.”

They come from another place, Caerdinn had muttered to her, when they’d stood together on the edge of the Wraithmire watching the ghostly flicker of the fen-wights in the dark. Since ancient days there have been men that would open Gates into Hell, in the hopes of finding power for themselves.

They had been watching, Jenny recalled, for a wight that had seized a simpleminded woman, entering into her mind and dreams and causing her to kill and cut up her husband, children, sister, and father before the villagers had summoned Caerdinn. Together, she and her master had exorcised the woman, but her own mind never returned. Perhaps that, thought Jenny, recalling the silent, bloodied hut, the creeping lines of ants and humming of flies, had been just as well.

Though she knew the presence of wizards in Corflyn Hold would almost certainly make it impossible to scry within its walls, Jenny took the finger-sized sliver of white quartz from her pouch and tried to summon images: the courtyard, Caradoc’s chamber, the strongbox in its niche above the bed. But the place was written over with scry-wards, as she had written them everywhere on the manor walls at Palmorgin. All she could see was the dark bulk of the walls themselves, from a great distance off, and she realized from the look of the sky that what she saw was another night, another season, another year. An illusion.

Caradoc was in the courtyard, she thought. Summoning the Hellspawn from that other plane of existence. Summoning them through that distant Gate, through their medium of water, across whatever space lay between. Summoning them into the emptied minds, the emptied hearts, of those two poor children.

Yseult saying, “Yes, m’am,” and “No, m’am,” with that evasive, casual brightness, not meeting her eyes.