Wrath Of The Medusa (Book 2) (42 page)

It was freezing in the lofty chamber, the high windows gave scant protection against the winter gale. But Odestus shivering at his desk in the cold’s embrace welcomed the numbing disc
omfort like an old friend.  Orcs’ blood he had few enough of those.

There was a knock at the door, soft and hesitant.  “Come in Vesten,” the wizard commanded.

The secretary slipped inside, not daring to open the door more than an inch further than necessary to admit his slender form.  Notwithstanding that he had garbed himself in thick wools and fur, Vesten was so thin that he could entirely disappear from view simply by turning sideways or, Odestus thought with private cruelty, by sharing his personality.

“You summoned me, Governor?”  The secretary’s voice and face were directed squarely at Odestus but his eyes slid ever sideways to the shrouded form in the middle of the chamber.

“She bothers you, Vesten?”

“No, Governor, no,” the secretary trembled with his lie.  “Why … why do we keep her…. Why have we not…”

Odestus shrugged.  “The Master wills it this way, Vesten.  I have not been given leave to bury or to burn her.”

Vesten shook his head, i
ncredulous.  “What can it mean? Does he want her for a zombie?”

Odestus rose like a storm with such a fury that Vesten backed all the way to the door.  “If Maelgrum were to even suggest it, I would burn her myself!” he thundered.  His own alarm surprised him. The secret fear he had harboured these past weeks resonated when echoed by another.  It had driven him to conceal a bottle of quick oil with a soaked rag wick beneath his desk.  Vesten’s
voicing of his own private fear made that seem more a rational precaution than an insane paranoia.

“Of course, Governor,” Vesten cowered in submissive agreement.

Odestus’s temper fizzled away at the man’s shivering trepidation.  He could not stay angry in the face of those who feared him. The absurdity that he, of all people, should inspire horror in another just filled him with weary sadness.  He sat down and beckoned Vesten over.   The secretary was wary at first but then came and stood before him with the merest hint of a glance over his shoulder at the still form of Dema.

“I did not call y
ou here to argue over what the Master may or may not intend for the fallen lady.”

“No, Governor.”  Vesten was inscrutable, every glimmer of curiosity scourged from his face as he waited for Odestus to enlighten him.

“You recall the other day, when Galen launched his little attempt at a coup?”

“Yes, Governor,” the secretary paled at the memory.

“And you came looking for me, to warn me?”

“Yes, Governor.”

“But you did not find me?”

Vesten’s face twisted in distress as he tried to fath
om what was the correct answer, or at least the safe answer.  His mouth worked in the beginnings of half a dozen yes’s and no’s while he scanned his master’s face for the slightest hint of which was the favoured response.   Odestus had not seen such discomfort since he had, by accident, dropped a chameleon on the multi-coloured flag of Undersalve.  The reptile had died and Vesten seemed likely to follow the same fate.

“You came in here and I was not there.”

“Er … yes,” Vesten announced with painful slowness as his attempts to simultaneously shake and nod his head had him tracing circles in the air with his chin.  “If that is what you wanted me to not find.”

“Oh Vesten!” Odestus let his exasperation slip. “There
is no artifice in my question. I know the answer anyway.”

“Then why ask for it Governor,” Vesten whimpered.

“You came in here found the room empty and left to speak with Galen.”

“But then you came out after me.”

“Does Galen know you found the room empty?”

Vesten was all stiff injured pride.   “I do not talk to the necromancer,” he said with haughty servility.   “He does not like me.”

“Galen doesn’t like anybody.” Odestus bit back the further observation that nobody liked Vesten.   “So as far as Galen sees it, I was simply hiding in the room, biding my time.”

“But you were not.”  Vesten frowned.  “The room was empty.”

“It may have appeared so, but I… I was on the Master’s business.”

Vesten’s head twitched in a quarter turn towards the shrouded corpse.  “Did it concern the Lady?”

Odestus shook his head quickly.  “No, no Vesten.  It was another matter, but a secret matter, you understand.”

Vesten nodded eagerly.

“And Galen must not know of it. The Master would be ill pleased.”

“Oh yes, of course Governor.”

“As far as our fine plumed necromancer is concerned I simply chose to work in private seclusion with, admittedly, only a dead friend for company.  He must think I am always here when I am in retreat.”

“He will hear no hint
or suspicion of anything other, not from my lips, Governor.”

“Good, good,” Odestus nodded slowly.  “Make sure it stays that way Vesten.  If I should ever suspect you might be about to fail me in this matter…”

“You won’t Governor.”

“…then I would have to kill you.”

Odestus smiled a broad twinkling smile.  Vesten smiled back keen to share the joke, but the secretary’s hopeful grin cracked and crumbled at the unwavering rictus on his master’s face.  There was no joke.

“Is that all, Governor?” he asked faintly.

“For now, Vesten, yes that is all.”

Odestus waited a long minute after the door had closed, drawing deep even breaths to calm himself for the ordeal ahead.  Then slowly he rose and crossed the chamber to a hanging tapestry, heavy cloth which moved reluctantly aside to expose the bare stone wall behind it.  Odestus worked his fingers in a delicate conjuration stretching his palms apart as
the final gesture in the enchantment.  Between his hands an oval window appeared in the air, a few inches wide and not much taller.  Odestus let his hands drop to his side as he stared into the opening, no larger than a hand mirror.  It was always safer this way, an opening just big enough to see through, far too small for anyone to pass through.  The best way to check that the coast was clear.

The fresh fall of snow cushioned his feet as Kimbolt crept between the trees.   Ahead of him the hooded herbalist strode on oblivious to the dogged tracker that she had acquired.  Kimbolt had slipped onto her trail as she had first entered the woods, a hundred yards or so beyond the palace compound.  Elise walked with the assured purpose of someone with a destination in mind.  Her staff punched precise holes in the snow alongside the swishing track swept out by her skirts.  Kimbolt’s precaution of ducking from tree to tree in pursuit was quite superfluous given her disinclination to so much as glance behind her.

She turned just once.  Some landmark invisible to Kimbolt, prompted her to swerve to the left bringing his only moment of near discovery.  He ducked behind a bush, careful not to dislodge the high blades of snow that perched on its branches.  There was only the soft fading shuffle of robes sweeping through the powdery whiteness as Elise went on her way.

After a moment’s pause, Kimbolt crept from concealment and hurried after her. She had made good ground, her cloaked form disappearing down an avenue of trees.  As he hurried on he nearly stumbled into the clearing where she had stopped. Fortunately she was facing away from him and he was able to step back behind a tree trunk.  Peeping round its bark, etched with white by the wind driven snow, he saw her surveying the ground before a great oak with an air of discontent.  The snow was piled high before the massive trunk.  With a flick of her foot she kicked up a spray of white mist from the mound’s surface.  Then she stabbed the ground with the butt of her staff.

Kimbolt’s jaw dropped as the head of her staff erupted in a flickering green fire.  Verdant flames licked at its gnarled surface.  The fire did not consume the wood but there must have been a heat in the wavering tongues of fire for there was a hiss of steam as Elise thrust the blazing end of the staff into the mound of snow.  The cloud enveloped her as she swept the unquenchable torch back and forth across the pile of snow. 

It took some time for the resultant fog to dissipate and when it did, Kimbolt saw the herbalist kneeling in the patch of ground she had cleared pulling something from a leather sack that still lay half hidden beneath one of the tree’s proud roots. 

He edged sideways, tiptoeing from tree to tree to try and see what she was doing.  If the show with the staff had surprised him, its fundamental purpose remained baffling.  Elise was kneeling, resting on her heels as she chewed absently at a piece of white root in her hand.  She opened her mouth to bite off another chunk and a thin trail of purple juice dripped down her chin.  They stayed there a
minute or so, the incredulous Captain and the munching herbalist.  Then, suddenly satisfied with her unusual repast, Elise thrust the remaining root back in the bag, bundled the bag into the cavity beneath the tree and, with an audible creak of her knees, straightened up.  

Next
, to complete Kimbolt’s consternation, she waved her hands in a tangle of fingers and a cloud of vapour condensed from the cold air and thickened into fresh flakes of snow which tumbled to the ground recreating the windblown mound which her flaming staff had melted.

He had been craning forward to watch the spectacle, so mesmerised by it that he almost toppled forward.  He flicked out a foot to stop himself, but in so doing caught a low branch with his knee dislodging a little flurry of snowflakes. The movement caught Elise’s eye and she spun round staff held two handed before her.

“Who’s there?” There was more anger than fear in her voice.

Kimbolt stepped carefully from his hiding place, left hand resting casually on the scabbard of his sword, fingers of his right hand twitching to reach for the weapon.

“Captain Kimbolt,” she said evenly.  “How unseemly of you to be following a young woman around the forest.  Have you been spying on me long?”

“Long enough.”  He kept his tone level and watched her eyes trying to guess her next move.

“Oh!” she said, hands tightening on her staff.

“I know who you are, what you are,” he said as his right hand crept across his waist.

“Do you now?” If Elise was alarmed she hid it well.

“You’re a sorcerer, a mage.”

“And?”

“You don’t deny it?”

“I’m guessing you saw my little tricks to protect my fingers from the cold.  The sickness still plagues my joints with rheumatism.  It makes scrabbling through the snow very painful for me.  I don’t suppose there would be much point in denying what you had seen.”

“But wizardry is forbidden to humans, all mages are condemned to exile.”

She laughed at that.  “I am indeed.”

“It is the law.” Her amusement stung his professional pride.

“Well Captain Kimbolt, if you can carry me across a hundred leagues of zombie and orc infested Morsalve to cast me into exile beyond the fallen barrier then you will certainly have earned your commission.”

“That’s not the point.”

“And what is?”

“That you’re a criminal.”

“Yes that’s right. I am the criminal who is saving your young friend’s life, and incidentally if you are skulking after me, who is with Hepdida now?”

“I asked
father Merlow to sit with the Princess. I had to follow you.”

He had fired her anger now.  “You fool of a man, are you really so blind to what has been going on around you.”   She spun away from him, quick anxious steps retracing her path.  He had to half run to catch her up.

“I knew you were not who you seemed, I knew you were hiding something.”  He wailed his cleverness at her indifference.  “I guessed it wasn’t herbs for Hepdida that brought you out here. What is that white stuff you were chewing anyway?”

“Radix Tegendo.”

“What?”

“Radix Tegendo.
Some call it thief’s friend. It shields the mind from magical scrying.”

“So you don’t deny you were hiding something.”

“I know my craft puts me beyond the law, Captain. I’m hardly likely to blunder into Rugan’s palace with all its wards and guards with my sorcerous nature shining like a beacon for every cleric and curate to see.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Hepdida, where you should be.”

“Wait,” he caught her by the shoulder to draw her back.  She whirled round, staff raised a few inches from the ground.  “How can I trust you?”

“How can you not?”

“You come here, unannounced, illegal user of magic, worm your way into our favour, effect some cure of an illness it seems only you can understand, despite the finest efforts of every priest and priestess in the palace.”  He tried to be stern in the face of her glare.  “What else might you be hiding?”

She sighed and shook her head.  “Do you not see it Captain, Hepdida was not ill.”

“Not ill? but….”

Elise waved his confusion aside and declared with the certainty of a parade ground sergeant major, “She was cursed.”   The assertion brought another frown of puzzlement to Kimbolt’s features, before the faux herbalist went on.  “It was a wizard’s curse.  Somewhere in that palace is another user of my art who has turned it to a dark path and cursed your young friend.  That is why the many prayers and offerings of the Goddess’s servants could not shift the ailment.  It takes a wizard to undo a wizard’s curse and there have been precious few of them since that fool Thren the eighth condemned us all to ignorance or exile.”

Kimbolt’s eyes flicked left and right as he struggled to assimilate the news. “And you think Merlow is that wizard?”

“I don’t know, Captain.  Any of them might be.  Those who practice the crime of sorcery have learnt new ways of concealment, Radix Tegendo is the least of them.”

The world she painted of a hidden column of secret sorcerers filled Kimbolt with horror.  Suddenly he saw wizards behind every tree and trembled at the thought of how many might lurk along the corridors of Laviserve.   “Who is there we can trust?”

“There is just the two of us Captain, and to be honest, I am not that sure about you.”

They were nearing the edge of the forest now.  A log jam of questions was backed up in Kimbolt’s mind and at last one shook free from his constipated thought processes.

“How long have you been involved in this criminal witchcraft?”

Elise sighed.  “Since the day I was saved, since the day my sister died.  When magic and a wizard save your life
, you find you owe them both something.”

“You were a child then!”

“I was twelve years old with old woman’s hair and skin as pitted and uneven as the Palacintas.  I was dying and he came.”

“Who.”

“The wizard.”

“What wizard?”

“It doesn’t matter now. He’s dead.”

He caught her arm to stop her while they were still beyond earshot of the palace.  “It does matter, it all matters. Explain yourself woman.  I am done with puzzles and mysteries.”  He waved towards the towers of Laviserve poking above the tree line.  “Speak plain or I will tell all at Rugan’s palace just
who and what you are.”

She shook his hand free and glared back, “you wouldn’t do that, Captain.  Who el
se will complete Hepdida’s cure?”

“You know as well as I that she is cured already, cured of the sickness.  It is only the weakness that remains.  A few weeks of good broth is all she needs.”

“And you would betray me?”  Elise sniffed and shook her white hair.  “The ingratitude of men, it was ever thus.”

“Enough mystery, tell all.  Tel
l it now.  Who was this wizard? What is your history?”

Elise gave a weary sigh.  “The wizard was called
Malchus, my mother found him.  I do not know how she heard of him, but she was desperate.” She spoke in quick sparse sentences, as though it were some dry tale of ancient history she were delivering rather than her own life story.  “Rancine and I were sick practically to death.  She would have tried anything, she tried him and only just in time, for me at least.”

“Your father,
what did he say to this?”

A shadow clouded Elise’s ravaged face.  “He was gone by then, a month gone.  He told my mother all would be well, that he had something planned, he couldn’t tell what but she shouldn’t worry.  He never came back, abandoned his post, abandoned us.”  The sorceress glared at the ground.  “Two sick daughters, no money, thrown out of our home.  What was my mother to do? Cures were expensive.
Malchus was our only hope.”

“How did she pay?”

She gave him a pitying look. “How do you think, Captain?”

Still
Kimbolt felt driven to ask the question, his tone thick with disbelief. “She prostituted herself?”

Elise’s eyes flared in anger.  “What mother wouldn’t do anything, everything to save their child.  Come, Captain, ‘tis the gossip of the palace how you were the snake lady’s bed
slave.  I think you are ill placed to pass comment on anyone else’s morality.”

“I am asham
ed of many things I have done, Mistress Elise.”

“Well I am not ashamed,” she stormed.  “Nor need my mother be.”

“How did you come to Oostport then?”

“
Malchus kept a house there as well as in Morwencairn.  In the summer he liked to travel to the Eastern Lands. Trade and research he called it.” She glanced to one side.  “After my father left it was difficult for us in Morwencairn.  But at least in Oostport no-one knew our history. There was only my face to shock the passers-by into unsubtle mutterings.”

“And this wizard took you on as his apprentice?”

“He kept us both, in different ways. At first they were different.”

“At first?”

“He took me on the first visit to Salicia when I was thirteen.  He told my mother he needed my help in gathering and storing the ingredients that you could only buy freely over there.  It became a regular thing then, journeying abroad, just me and him.”  She shrugged and looked away.  “And we did buy all those special ingredients by day.  By night it was different.”

Kimbolt frowned.  “So, the master of magic was also an abuser of trust, of innocence.  Does this not prove the taint of magic, prove its power to corrupt.  Can you not admit the wisdo
m of Thren in banning its study?”

“No!” She shouted.   “No, fool.  In making magic criminal, Thren made honest people into criminals.  Those who have been told they live a life of crime lose all respect for other laws.  It is not the magic which corrupts and makes them criminal, it is the law.”

“You’re saying this Malchus would have left you and your mother alone if he had been allowed to flaunt his mage-craft openly.”

She shrugged. 
“Malchus was not a good man, but it was not magic that made him bad.  If the one pastime had not been made a crime he might never have gained the will to indulge the other.  Indeed, if wizardry had not been bound in myth and fear my sickness and my sister’s would have been understood far sooner.   She would not be dead, my father would not have left.  In short, if Thren the Eighth had had as much sense as he had wives, the Kingdom of the Salved would be a far better place today.”

Kimbolt’s mouth worked in wordless incomprehension at the blasphemous assertion.  Before he could shape his thoughts into sound she snapped.  “There that is all my story.  Well all you will ever hear and more than I have ever told.  If it is not enough to keep that foolish tongue still in your head then so be it.  Whatever cure I may have affected on Hepdida there is someone that has curse
d her, someone who remains at large.  If you would still expose me as the criminal that Thren’s foolish laws have made me, then do so.  As I said, sending me to exile will be a struggle for you now.”