Count Scar - SA (43 page)

"I have pledged myself to the Order and the True Faith, and sworn to serve Count Caloran!" I cried, as much to myself as to him.

"Pledges made in your youth, in fear and in sadness; how can they bind you now?" He advanced another few steps, shaking his head as if distressed with my obstinate refusal to see the obvious.

"Did not this infidel creed that miscalls itself the 'true' faith consign your own grandfather to the flames before your very eyes, merely because he would not bend his neck and bow before it? Our
own late Master was your grandfathers intimate friend in youth, when they were both pupils of the great Magus who once held this very castle, and he spoke often of him. Your grandfather was a
Magian of marvelous skill, yet never a prideful man, never otherwise than kind and forthcoming to everyone he dealt with. You yourself knew and learned from him when young; you know this.

Your own grasp of magic is founded on Perfected teachings, his teachings. Do you know why the working of magic is so difficult for even the senior members of your Order? Why a few simple
sendings weary them to the point of death, whereas our own greatest Maguses, men like the Magus de Cuza, could fight entire armies to a standstill unaided? It is because they wrestle
continually against themselves, always undercutting their own power in an attempt to be humble, as if men were the weakest and least of created beings instead of the greatest!"

"Now you transgress even against your own doctrine," I shouted. "I did indeed learn much from my grandfather, so I know that the Perfected also acknowledge that we are all sinful and fallen."

"Yes, yes, of course we do." He was still smiling, still advancing, as was his sore-faced friend—though that fellow was not smiling. "But unlike what is taught by your Order's doleful creed, we
know we can rise while still in this world! When have you felt strongest, most at peace? Was it when you were groveling in false prayers in which you named yourself lower than the dust from
which we all come?"

"Was it not rather when you were working magic as true magic should be worked, freely, raising yourself for at least a little while to a level only slightly lower than the angels? And why should
you labor in the service of some scarred and twisted cripple from the northern edge of the world? Come join us, and we will show you what magic can be when worked by free men among people
who revere Magians rather than fear them, serve them rather than suppress them!"

Weak as I was with mage-sickness, tired in mind and body from having wrought far too much magic in far too brief a time, his words were almost an incantation in themselves. Of course he was
in part only trying to distract me, to keep my mind occupied while he and his companion worked their way close enough to attempt whatever they were planning. But I felt convinced that he was
also sincere, that if I were to cast aside my defenses and agree to join them I would be welcomed. I was praying as I listened, seeking a way to keep faith against his blandishments, and watching
myself in the old fear that somehow the very roots of my own magic might suddenly be used to turn me to his side. For a moment it almost seemed that I was weakening, feeling myself beginning
to give way.

Suddenly the vision of another face swam briefly between my eyes and the Magian, the scarred obstinate face of a man who might be beaten but would never yield— Count Galoran's face. He had
trusted me even against his own instincts, and I must keep faith with him, whatever else I might do.

The Perfected Magians and soldiers were close enough now. With a jerk that made my shoulder flare in agony, I threw my left sleeve across my face and flung out the powder of blindness with my
right, hearing the bruised Magian's warning yell to his men as the great flash shown all about me.

When I lowered my sleeve, most of the soldiers were staggering aimlessly or clutching at the ramparts with groping hands. Two fell shrieking into the exercise yard when they stepped off into
empty air—I prayed they would not be badly hurt. But both Magians and three of the soldiers who were with the bruised one had shielded their eyes in time. He and they were running along the
walkway toward me now, the men with swords at the ready. "Stay back!" I yelled. But the bruised Magian answered me with a potent magic stroke, which I deflected only by drawing more power
up from the great telesma. The swordsmen were ignoring my warning, too; they were almost on top of me, their blades already upraised. It was too late to evade them with the cloak of shadows,
too late for anything—except the one thing I had most hoped to avoid using, the phial in my other hand. Shutting both my physical eyes and my second vision to what must happen now, I threw
the awful pulvis potentissimus.

When I looked, which I had to do despite myself, it seemed as if four of my apparitions had joined me on the rampart—but it was the Magian and his men, the flesh rapidly melting from their
faces and bodies. The soldiers' swords dropped clattering from the their hands, already skeletal, while their dying bodies collapsed against the crenellations or crumpled to the walkway. The
bruised Magian, somehow supporting his dissolving form with magic, managed two more paces toward me, shrieking a curse and trying to muster one more magic stroke. But then his staring
eyes melted out of their sockets and flowed down his cheeks. An instant later, his face itself fell off, revealing his hollow-eyed skull, and he collapsed lifeless across my feet.

"Melchior!" Bunking away tears of horror and pity, I turned, slowly and painfully to face the other Magian. His hand was stretched out toward me, and the obsidian tiles of the lesser telesma
were glowing upon his breast. "I had hoped to win you to us, but I cannot let this pass," he declared. "You must die."

Magic leaped from his fingers with his last word—and I had him, though not by actually touching the telesma as I had originally thought I would have to do. He had launched his stroke straight
at my face, and I saw his eyes grow wide with the realization of his mistake when it bent in midair and went instead to my breast.

But only for an instant. The conviare seemed to leap against my chest as it seized and channeled the power flowing from the lesser battle telesma, then sent it forth again in a white-hot stream
straight down the line of magic that still linked it to the greater. In the exercise yard below, cobbles split and flew, then the rock itself melted and vanished like ice touched with a piece of molten
iron. I could see the mouth of the Nabarrese Magian work as he screamed incantations, vainly trying to shut off that flow of power. But he was far too late; nothing now could break the lesser
telesma's link with the conviare that had been fashioned to command it.

Within seconds, the lines of magic that he and the other Perfected Magian had doubtless spent numberless hours laying into the lesser telesma had been drained and sent down to melt a shaft
through the solid rock beneath the keep of Peyrefixade. Then the beam of power flickered and went out. I looked down to see the front of my cassock burnt completely away, exposing the still-glowing conviare. When I raised my eyes, a lurid new light was shining up through the narrow shaft that had been burned down through the rock below. There was a sudden rush of stale wind,
then a blaze of fire, and the great battle telesma of the Magus de Cuza soared up, under the open sky again for the first time in half a hundred years, and settled itself upon my tonsured head.

I felt a little push, as if I had been jostled slightly in a crowd, and looked over to see the Nabarrese Magian just lowering his hand. He had tried a magic stroke using his own unaided power—and
the great telesma had absorbed it as the sea takes in a raindrop. When he saw me look his way, he composed his face, expecting an annihilating stroke in return. But I simply waved him into the
guard tower and turned to go my way. I was too weary for needless fighting, and too sickened by what I had done to the other Magian and the soldiers to want to harm anyone again. My legs
seemed as heavy as blocks of stone, and I felt far too weary to stoop and retrieve the cloak of shadows as I began to walk along the wall. I had no further need of it now, anyway.

When I got to the watchpost at the northeast corner of the wall, my foot kicked the apparition telesma and a dozen horrors leaped into existence. I bound two of them to walk with me and sent the
rest flying or leaping toward every corner of the castle. No one else appeared to oppose me as I made my slow way along the north rampart, past the blinded warriors, and through the long
passageway to the main courtyard.

But there was someone there. He whirled to face me with sword in hand, staring with a grim, sardonic face at the monsters beside me and the terrible thing that crowned my head. Lord Gavain.

"So, you and the count have won, it appears," he rasped. "We are beaten with the very thing we had hoped to recover for ourselves. Will you at least grant me the boon of a clean death, rather than
the flames of the Inquisition?"

I was almost beyond feeling anything, yet I felt the stirring of something like joy at his words, for they meant the count had neither been killed or taken. "I have killed too many already this
night; I will not kill you, my lord," I told him with thick lips and tongue. "Both for your sister and father's sakes, and because it would break my sworn oath to kill only in just defense. Take
what men you can still muster into the upper part of the keep and prepare to make what terms you can with your father and the count. This place and the lower keep will shortly be indefensible."

He made as if to turn and go, then suddenly whirled and swung his sword toward me. One of my hideous companions caught the blade on a scaly arm, shattering it. Lord Gavain stood still for a
moment to see if I would now oblige him with death, then bowed, turned, and walked away without deigning to hurry. Armed men appeared in the doorway to the great hall, but he waved them
back inside. More men could now be seen upon the watchpost above the main gate. Lord Gavain called them down and sent them into the keep also, then bowed to me once more and walked calmly
inside to join his men just as if he were going in to have his dinner.

Having seen directly into the conviare while discorporate, I now had no need to pronounce incantations to focus it or send forth the power of the great telesma that it channeled; my thoughts alone
were enough. Weariness was sitting on my shoulders like a thousand-pound weight, and my body remained standing only with the aid of magic. Slowly, I walked over to the big covered well and
sat down on its edge like a man of ninety.

Only one task remained to be done. At my signal, one of my apparitional companions soared to the top of the gate on his dark wings and sounded the horn three times. As the last echoes were still
dying away, I extended my right hand toward the main gate and pointed one finger of my left toward the oaken door of the great hall, then thought a single brief command through the conviare.

A great bubble of magic force appeared, whirling before me like a star come down to earth, then separated into two parts, one much larger than the other. An instant later the larger one went
blazing across the courtyard to my right and struck the main gates with a sound like thunder and a flash brighter than a dozen suns, while the smaller vanished in the opposite direction.

When my sight returned after many seconds, I found myself gazing down the moonlit road to the valley through a great breach in the walls. Of portcullis, gates, guardposts, even the gatehouse
itself, there remained no trace at all. I turned my weary head and saw that the oaken door to the great keep was also no more, obliterated by a hole in the wall a quarter the breadth of the hall
within. Since I saw no bodies, Lord Gavain had presumably taken all his men to the upper storeys as I'd advised. Leaning my weary body against one of the supports for the well's windlass, I let
myself slump at last and waited for the duke and his men— and my confessor, the prior, whose ear and absolution I so desperately needed now. If the Lord willed, I would neither faint nor die
before they arrived.

Chapter Fifteen ~ Caloran

Chapter Fifteen ~ Caloran

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At first I thought he was dead. Melchior lay slumped across the well in the center of the courtyard. He was crowned with some sort of artifact made to suggest a crouching scorpion, which would
have been ridiculous had it not glowed with its own terrible light. Where once the great gates of Peyrefixade had stood was nothing but ruin, from which smoke and dust still rose into the
moonlit sky.

Thierri helped me hobble across the courtyard to him. Looking at the priest's motionless form I felt my loss as keenly as if it had been Bruno again. He had become not just my capellanus, or even
the man who had repeatedly saved my life through his magic, but also my friend.

But as I approached his eyelids fluttered and his lips began to move. I had to go down on my knees and bend close to hear, and when I did I felt the same tingling that I had from his grandfather's
telesma, except a hundred, a thousand times stronger. It was only then that I realized what the object on his head must be and knew that he had succeeded in finding the heretics' great battle
telesma.

"Please, Count, take it off me," he gasped. "I must apologize for having destroyed so much of your castle. I have sinned deeply in shedding human blood, and I do not know what else the telesma
might now do if I were to…"