Dangerous Games (17 page)

“No, I think not.” Karsus spoke with one hand on his chin while his other hand tugged and twirled his hair. “No, I was there, in some other form perhaps, since this body wasn’t born for a year or so—maybe a squirrel—and I knew to pull this star down from the sky.”

“Oh, yes, I see …”

Candlemas found himself backing away, checking the exits.

“I’d agree, Great Karsus!” chimed an apprentice, toadying. “Only you would dare harness such power!”

“True. Only I.”

Karsus walked around the star, inspecting it. Candlemas wondered what would come next.

“I know!” the archwizard cried. “Only a genius such as I could conceive of this. We’ll make the entire star into one giant crucible. T’will save time and get on with discombobulating my enemies! A Stoca’s feign or Smolyn’s seer coupled with a Zahn’s location to find the softest parts, and a Proctiv’s dig such as the dwarves use to find water. In one fell swoop—”

“No!” bellowed Candlemas.

But Karsus raised both hands and gabbled fractions of spells, until suddenly a green-white bolt was crackling between his fingertips. With a laugh, he flung the bolt at the magic drenched star.

Candlemas dived under the heaviest table. Not that it would do much good. The whole top of the inverted mountain would probably explode, reducing him and Karsus and Aquesita alike to floating dust.

Several things happened at once.

At the last moment, the chief mage had hurled some sort of shield spell at the star. Karsus’s green-white bolt spanked off the star in an eye smarting electric crackle. Karsus had his hair and eyebrows crisped as the bolt sizzled overhead.

But like lightning, the contrary and muddled bolt went to ground, between the flagstones, where lay pounds and pounds of discarded heavy magic. That magic combined with the bolt to turn it bigger, but more confused. Candlemas saw green fingers of energy like giant grass blades spike up from between the stones. One spike seared a hole big enough for a man’s fist through a three-inch oak table. Another sheared a woman’s arm off. A third shattered a chandelier overhead so the heavy iron latticework crashed down on another unfortunate apprentice. Yet another bolt squirreled up a table leg and danced from artifact to artifact along the table, so an iron gauntlet clenched shut, a glass globe gave a glimpse of the future, a magic sword rang like a bell, a ring’s sapphire turned from blue to red, and there were many more whimsical magical oddities.

Not so funny was that several flagstones erupted from the floor to batter half a dozen people. Candlemas had the sole of his sandal slapped by a chunk of stone.

Yet nothing compared to the final effect, as one super energized bolt ricocheted and struck the star from behind.

The ring’s stone turned to powder. The gauntlet went dead. The palantir burned out. The magic sword lost its luster. One mage clutched his chest, cried in agony, and collapsed. Another shrieked and covered her face. A third went howling mad and ran out the door. And Karsus’s robes suddenly sported great ragged holes that showed dirty white flesh.

Yet the mage was exultant. He danced, shouted, waved his hands, sang, and laughed like a lunatic. Ignoring the groans of the wounded, the clattering of dropped things, the crackling and smoking of several small fires, he jumped in place and clapped his hands.

“We’ve got it! We’ve got it! Imagine the possibilities! My rivals will be powerless! Completely powerless! They’ll be babes for the slaughter! We’ll be invincible!”

“What?” Candlemas coughed as he crawled from under the table. He was surprised to find he couldn’t stand. That slap on the foot had sprained his ankle, come close to shearing it off. He helped up the chief mage, who’d also dived under the table. “I don’t understand. What does he mean? What happened?”

“The magic went dead.” The woman rubbed her nose, found it was bleeding. She pitched her voice low. “It’s happened before. Karsus, Great Karsus, once before, cast a Volhm’s drain on a barrel of heavy magic. He sucked all the power from the mythallars and almost dropped the city out of the sky.”

“Sunrest,” muttered a man. “The city of Sunrest had a mage competing with Karsus. We guess he tried the same thing, because the whole city of Sunrest dropped and shattered.”

“The whole mountain?”

The chief nodded, put her head back, held out a bloodstained hand, and waggled her fingers. “Look at my ring. It was a gift from my mother. Rub it and it sings like a nightingale. But it’s dead. Permanently.”

“All the artifacts in here are dead,” the other mage concurred. “Oh, Kas and Zahn! My experiments! How far did it reach?” He ran from the room and had to leap over a dead man to get out the door.

Candlemas could only stare. Finally, he said, “That man who clutched his chest—”

“—had an erratic heart. A chirurgeon implanted a heavy magic massage spell that squeezed his heart gently, endlessly. It stopped. Nibaw there, I suspect, was using magic to keep her face looking young. And Karsus seems to have stitched his clothes with magic thread.”

The chief yelled at someone to fetch water, either for her nose or the fires.

Candlemas watched the mad mage Karsus chortle with glee, tapping his head and listing dire fates for his imaginary foes while his skinny bum stuck out through a rent in his garment.

Candlemas was alone, but muttered aloud, “I’ve had enough for one day.”

Limping, he made for the door.

Later, washed and splinted, fortified with a small brandy and leaning on a borrowed cane, Candlemas limped through the long journey to Lady Aquesita’s abode. He told himself he went only to consult about this latest madness of Karsus’s, since she was his cousin and, sometimes, keeper.

He hoped she didn’t giggle in her knowing woman’s way at his bald excuse. Actually, he liked her giggle too.

When he was shown into her study, he found her instructing an artist on how capture the afternoon light while simultaneously dictating a letter to a secretary. Yet when Candlemas was announced, she dropped both tasks and sprang up like a newborn fawn. Her smile faltered at his distressing limp. Nothing would do but he must sit immediately while a servant fetched a cool drink and a pillow for propping his foot. Candlemas objected to all the fuss, but secretly liked it. It was such a pleasure to see Aquesita he felt no pain.

He explained how his injuries involved Karsus’s latest mad blunder. As his story drew to a close, Aquesita gnawed her plump lower lip. Her comment was odd. “More bad news …”

Candlemas was instantly alert, and jerked forward so suddenly his foot rang. He asked gently, “What troubles you, Sita?” (How naturally that name came to his lips in a crisis.)

“Portents, dear Candlemas,” she said. Her pudgy hand stroked his pate. “I do so admire a man with a smooth scalp. Have I told you that? It’s a sign of great intelligence, I think. And very sexy to boot. But alas, there are portents no one likes.”

“Who? What?”

“I’m not altogether sure who’s divined them.”

She sat on a low stone railing, patted his shoulder, and left her hand there.

“It was either the sages of Mystryl or the Keeper of the Eternal Sun—you know, what’s his name,” she continued. “There have always been prophecies, of course, especially when donations are slack. The story about the fountains of blood that will precede the fall of the empire is one. Skulls will rain like hail is another. But this one … several sages have dreamt of a woman with starry eyes who blots out the sun just before the city falls.”

“Which city?” asked Candlemas, already knowing the answer. “Not this one. Not with you in it!”

“No, silly, not us,” she tried to sound soothing. “Some other city, I guess. Sunrest fell, you know, everyone in it killed through a magical mishap. And there’s more. I correspond with a great number of people, you know, and many have mentioned the storks being disturbed, that they’re not laying as many eggs as usual this spring.

“The white storks are the blessing of the empire, you know. ‘The Eyes of She Who Shapes All.’ That might be nothing, too. But spells have gone amiss, I know. Mid-wives are worried that babies are stillborn or freakish, but of course no one can show one. But someone mentioned the loss of the ‘first of the brightest,’ which is supposed to mean stars, we think. It’s hard to say. The gods work their will, and we mortals bear up.”

“You’ve nothing to fear,” Candlemas said suddenly. He took Aquesita’s pudgy hand and patted it. “I’ll see that no harm comes to you.”

“You will?” Her smile lit up the world as she said, “That’s very kind of you, dear Candlemas. That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”

The mage didn’t know how to reply, but didn’t need to. The two just sat and stared. And each would have sworn the other’s eyes were lit with stars.

Down in the bowels of the earth, tornadoes like stone cones plotted.

The super heavy magic works its will.

The one named Karsus will blow himself and all the others to destruction soon.

Good. He alone among the humans can sense us.

And the humans think him mad because he rails against us.

All the better.

The Phaerimm had hatched their plot over many generations of humans, leading Karsus to the star-metal and a new application of heavy magic. In all that time, some of these ancient beings hadn’t even stirred from the black cavern.

But who is this star-eyed woman with her warnings?

A deity, one of theirs. Not one of ours.

Can she warn them in time?

We’ll see she doesn’t.

I wonder, can this new super heavy magic penetrate even to our domain?

Best we not find out.

They will destroy themselves long before that.

Perhaps. But we’d best be ready to strike if need be.

We’re ready.

Sunbright woke with a start when a small hand with metal on it touched his leg. “Get up, outlander! Something’s hunting us!”

Tumbling from his nest of rags, the barbarian grabbed his sword and scabbard before putting on his boots. Knucklebones had shaken him, the brass knuckles across her palm like a branding iron on his bare skin. She was already padding from the cavern, having shouldered aside the iron door.

Sunbright followed, his body alert, but his mind still groggy from another night of dread premonitions. It was one drawback to being a shaman, he knew; they lived in dreamworlds as much as in the real one. Knucklebones had drawn only the smallest stripes of illumination along her wrists and ankles. Sunbright thought that cold light trick the handiest cantra he’d ever seen. He’d have to ask to learn it. If she would deign to teach it to him.

Moving up, he touched her ever so slightly, then whipped his hand back. Sure enough, honed reflexes spun her around with the black elven knife outthrust.

“What?”

“What are we after? How do you know we’re being hunted?”

“There’re pigeons’ eggs in the tunnels. Pigeons always lay in pairs, so the eggs are linked. We steal them from nests in the eaves. Half the pairs lie in my bedchamber. Should someone step on a distant egg, the one over my head breaks and wakes me.”

Very neat, Sunbright thought.

“Any idea what hunts us?” he asked her. “Have you been hunted before?”

“At times, when the guards are angry,” she said. “Like when two of their members are hacked to death in the street.”

Obviously this was Sunbright’s fault, she felt.

“Sometimes it’s dogs,” she continued, “sometimes ferrets. They’re not hard to mislead. We lay false trails, walk across mats at crossings and then roll them up. They’ve never found us yet.”

Then why not just do that now? the barbarian wanted to ask. But she’d already moved off, her lean back and buttocks in worn leather reminding him of a mountain goat. He wondered how hard her interior was, for he’d glimpsed a woman’s heart earlier. Now he was intrigued.

At cross tunnels, which might run up, down, at angles or even down as pits, she paused, sniffed, listened, and laid her pointed ears against the dirt. But the broken egg had told her that one certain tunnel had been breached, and she steered for it. Once they had to climb a cracked slope with hands and toes. Sunbright’s moosehide boots slipped treacherously.

When the tunnel flattened, Knucklebones laid an ear to the floor again, then froze. Slithering on her belly, she inched to a bend and peered around. Sunbright had to lie atop her, half mashing her, to get a glimpse.

He had no idea what he saw.

A pack of city guards with batons lit by cold light waited behind a strange, crouching something. It was hard to see, being stone gray, but resembled a giant spider, or part spider, part man. It had carved features, a frowning elven face with a stone mustache, but the head was hollow. Inside, behind the eyes, rustled a scruffy gray-white shape. The animal’s ratty tail slipped out one eye socket, then whisked back in. To Sunbright it looked as if a possum were caged inside an effigy of a black elf. Yet this statue bore six double-jointed limbs with claws like a crawfish. The statue crouched, nose to the ground, sniffing as a possum would.

Knucklebones bumped Sunbright off with her rump. The barbarian slithered backward. Kneeling, the thief drew his head down, planted her mouth on his ear. Her warm breath sent a thrill of ecstasy through him, despite her daunting words.

“That possum’s a sniffer. Their noses aren’t that much, but magic makes them smarter, so they talk in squeaks. The statue is some kind of golem that follows the possum’s movements.”

Sunbright nodded as he sniffed her natural perfume: wood smoke, sweat, and that curious breath of wildflowers. He patted his sword pommel to ask, do we fight?

A pause while she thought, then, “We’ll lay a false trail in Blackwater Bog. It’s confusing enough. But if they pass that, our hideout is endangered.”

Sunbright tapped his chest, made a walking motion with his fingers. Can we lead them astray?

She shook her head, told him, “We’ve used it too many times lately. They don’t fall for the ‘cripple fleeing’ anymore.” But he thought he detected warmth in her tone, as if she appreciated his offer of sacrifice. With a dirty hand, she urged him back down the tunnel.