Michael A. Stackpole (16 page)

From my vantage point I managed to see Kit quite clearly and, seated beyond the circle of young women and fellow officers he had attracted, my grandmother and Marija. Descending to the dance floor, I made my way to them easily and held my right hand out. “Look, look what the Emperor gave me.”

Grandmother took my hand in her icy grip. “They have returned to you the ring.” She smiled for a second, her lips quivering a bit, then she pulled my hand to her and gently kissed the silver ring. “Cardew braved horrors to win this honor, but he gladly accepted the responsibility it represented. Never forget it, and never betray it.”

“Never.” 1 nodded solemnly. “I will never dishonor my father.” I bent down and kissed my grandmother on her forehead.

She patted my cheek with a leathery hand. “No mother could have ever desired a better son.”

The ring of steel-shod wood on stone cut through the whisper-choked air and brought everyone around to look toward the dais on the west wall. The bronze doors had been opened, and a liveried minister stood beside them. Again he brought his staff of office down and sent a metallic peal echoing through the room. “His Supreme Majesty, Emperor Thetys V and his mother, the Empress Dejanna.”

Her right hand resting lightly on his left arm, the Emperor and Empress walked through the doors and to the thrones on the dais. Thetys wore a padded silver doublet over a blue tunic. White breeches, hose, and slippers completed his outfit. Instead of a crown he wore a simple circlet set with a sapphire in the middle, and it struck me that he had dressed as if he and my grandmother had collaborated on their choice of clothing.

His mother, who was a small woman, wore a traditional gown of silver-and-white satin with a roll fastened around her hips and hidden by her overgown. it made her waist look positively miniscule. She had chosen purple as her accent color and displayed it in the amethyst necklace and coronet she wore. She let her son’s arm go when they reached the thrones and moved to the seat on his left hand.

A third time the Chamberlain’s staff struck the ground. “Imperial Prince Lan and the Princesses Nassia and Eriat,” he announced.

Prince Lan stood closer to my height than he did his brother’s, and showed the stocky build my father was supposed to have had. His clothing resembled that of his brother, though his tunic was a shade lighter than his brother’s. He wore no crown and smiled as he led his two sisters onto the dais.

Though Nassia and Eriat were identical twins, they had done what they could to differentiate themselves. Nassia, on Lan’s right arm, wore her black hair at shoulder length, like her mother. She had chosen a gown of primarily white satin and had trimmed it with silver and green. Eriat, by contrast, had trimmed a silver gown with red and white ribbons. That adornment extended to the ribbons she had woven through her long raven hair.

They were pretty enough to make me think I might dance with each three times: once for Geoff and twice for me.

With his family in place, the Emperor stepped forward. “I welcome you all here and thank you for kindly accepting the invitation to join my family and me on this festive night. This is the first Bear’s Eve celebration of my reign, and it is my fondest wish that this will be a ball no one will ever forget.”

He cast a glance back at the Chamberlain, who had announced him, then smiled at his audience. “My advisors have urged me to make a speech of some length to outline my plans for the coming year, but I think, as my gift to you, I will refrain. I trust, in return, as your gift to me, you will thoroughly enjoy yourselves.”

Thetys extended his left hand to his mother and guided her down the steps to the dance floor. Up in the corner the musicians began playing the opening chords of the Ceremonial Dance. Keeping his back to the throne, he led his mother around to face him, and all the women in the audience moved to form a rustling circle around the dance floor.

I looked to help my grandmother up, but she waved me off and gently pushed Marija toward the circle, letting her perform as her surrogate. Grandmother smiled at me warmly. “You dance with Marija, Lachlan. Dance for yourselves and dance for me.”

The men present, save those who were unsteady like my grandmother, formed another circle around the ladies. I noticed that Garn Drustorn stood across from Duchess Nallia of |ask while her husband, the Grand Duke, sat in the corner and rubbed his left leg. Kit chose as his partner a strikingly petite woman who, if I read her rank insignia correctly, was a Priestess within the Church of Pleasure. 1 lined up opposite Marija and grinned like an idiot.

The Chamberlain hammered the floor with his staff. In unison with the other men in the room, I bowed deeply to my partner. When the Chamberlain again signaled with a staff strike, I straightened up and she curtsied to me. As she and the other women recovered themselves, he raised his staff for the final blow that would start the dance.

“Let the celebration commence!” he shouted as he brought his staff down.

If it made any sound at all when it hit the floor, I did not hear it. Thunder exploded in the center of the floor amid a flash of midnight tinged with blood. I felt the sound as much as I heard it, and the shock wave knocked Marija forward into my arms. I caught her deftly and swung her around to place my body between her and the thing congealing in the center of the Imperial crest.

Shadow rolled off it like malignant fog. At first it appeared to be no taller than a dwarf and built much like a tree stump, but then it grew up out of the floor. The chandelier swinging above it cast its shadow long and tall all around the circle, and 1 felt a burning sensation when the darkness touched me. The air smelled bitter, and the stink of fear sweat filled the room.

When it had grown to my height, which took no time but seemed like forever, it unfolded itself and stood tall enough to tower over even the statues 1 had seen elsewhere in the palace. Wearing a hooded robe that looked more mildew and moss than any fabric 1 could name, the creature stared straight at the Emperor. His hood slipped back to reveal a piebald patchwork of sil-ver-and-ivory flesh stretched thinly over its skull.

“Forgive the manner of my arrival,” it buzzed in a cicada voice, “but I could not bring myself to miss this, the first and
last
Bear’s Eve Ball over which you shall preside!”

12

the Emperor shielded his mother from the monstrosity, and 1 did the same for Marija. “How is it possible … ?” Though his flesh had paled, no fear invaded Thetys’s stance, nor did 1 hear any undermining his words. “Leave here, you are not welcome.”

“Come, come, now, Emperor mine. This is a night of charity and good intentions.” The humanesque creature shook his head ruefully. “If you do not purge yourself of your hatred, this coming year of the Griffin will be horrible indeed.”

“How appropriate it is you show yourself now, in the end of the year of the Scorpion, exactly where one would expect to find the sting.”

The creature’s metallic flesh squealed as lips parted in a feral smile. “Word games are unworthy of you, Imperial Majesty. Save your venom to spew upon another. I have for you a gift.”

The Emperor waved aside any offering from the gaunt embodiment of corruption. “My invitations specified my guests were to bring no gifts.”

“But as I was not invited, I am not bound by your social contract.” The creature threw back its head in an attitude of laughter, but what issued from its throat was the crackling wet sound of maggots chewing corpse-flesh. “What 1 give you, boy-lord, is a year. I will return here in a year’s time, and you will hand your crown to me.”

Thetys folded his arms across his chest. “There, you have given me your gift, now you will leave.”

The flesh tightened around the creature’s eyes. “What a poor host you are, Thetys the Last. You would send me hence without so much as a dance? Unthinkable you should do that, and 1 will not permit it. I will not have you be thought so ill-mannered.”

The creature raised his arms above his head, and the sleeves of his robe slipped down to his shoulders. The left arm appeared perfectly formed except in one sense. It looked to be composed of something very dark green, yet transparent. The way the light from the chandeliers wavered as it passed through the arm made me mindful of how the world shifts when viewed from beneath the surface of a lake.

The other arm should have been mouldering in a tomb. Blackened flesh hung from it in tatters, letting me see the reddish brown of muscles and the yellow-ivory of aged bone. Insects scampered up and down it like ants on a tree branch. A dark, viscous fluid dripped from it at the elbow, yet evaporated before reaching the floor.

He opened both his hands and shouted a word 1 could not understand. It came out all hisses and clicks and gave me the same sick feeling inside as when 1 had heard Dalt’s leg break two years ago. Shadows swirled in from every corner of the room and clotted into a staff of onyx with a smoky quartz globe on one end.

He looked toward the musicians and cackled, “You will play for me so 1 may dance.”

The musicians, to a man, set their instruments down.

Moving his right hand down to the staff’s midpoint, the uninvited spun the staff once and the globe began to glow. He snapped it around to point at the musicians, and the globe flared with a scarlet light. I saw that light reflected in their eyes, then one man raked bloody furrows across his face with his fingernails. Others fainted, and one man stumbled blindly forward to trip and dash his brains out as he fell down the stairs.

Wrapped in a red-gold aura, their instruments floated up from where they had been abandoned and hovered in the air. Slowly and faintly they began playing a song of clashing chords and screeching notes. The music pricked at my ears as if each note were an invisible thorn, or silent stinging insects.

The monster closed his eyes for a moment and let his staff sway in time with the tune, then he nodded. “Clearly a song of this complexity would have been beyond your people. This is another gift I give you.”

He loosened his grip on the staff and let the globe fall toward the ground. When his corpse-hand reached its tail, his fist closed and whirled the staff around in an all-encompassing gesture. With its first pass I felt a weariness wash over me. With the second my muscles tightened as if they were strings, and he was tuning me. The third pass, and they tensed yet again, knotting my hands and curling my toes inward. At the globe’s last orbit my every muscle locked rigid and my spine arched backward like a bow strung taut.

Marija reached out to touch me, but where her fingers fell even lightly they sent lightning bolts of agony shooting throughout my body. I gasped sharply against the pain and saw the horror in her eyes. I forced myself to try to speak, but could barely croak out a whisper. Funneling my pain into my voice, I managed one strangled word.

“Run.”

Before she could heed me, the sorcerer gestured fluidly with his left hand. Dozens and dozens of slender golden threads floated from his fingers and touched each woman in the center of her forehead. I saw Marija’s dark eyes glaze over. Her head slumped forward, and 1 fought against the power holding me so I might catch her and prevent her from falling to the floor.

She did not fall. The monster’s left hand grasped the threads like so many reins, then his staff again started swinging in time with the hostile melodies warring about the room. Marija’s head came up as the silver-fleshed guest jerked the threads, and a pulse of red power played along the line and to her brain.

In unison with the other women, Marija began to move to the floor and dance around in time with the music. At first the women stepped lightly and formally as they unconsciously observed the proper forms for the Ceremonial Dance. Their faces remained blank, and though many of them were physically pleasing, their lack of animation robbed them of any beauty.

The music’s tempo increased, and with it I heard my heartbeat also quicken. 1 could follow a line of stringed-instrument melody for a moment or two, then a horn would cut through it and lead me off on a brassy trail of notes. Woodwinds would steal me away from that course, then abandon me again to the strings. All the while the percussion instruments hammered out a message I did not willfully understand, but 1 felt its growing effect on my body.

The pain wracking me ceased as other emotions flooded through me. My muscles slackened slightly, bringing with the change a sense of relief that the music sought to pervert into gratitude for the monster’s mercy. I caught myself and held back from that trap, but 1 still found myself beguiled into a sense of camaraderie with this strange being in the center of the floor. The women danced for him, but he shared them with me.

By his power, they danced for us.

And, oh how they danced. As the pace increased in the dance, so did the wanton grace of their motions. Slender hands caressed lovingly long throats and then slowly inched downward. Full breasts strained against silks and satins while the women pulled fabric taut across flat bellies. Fingers tangled in skirts and raised them to expose deliciously long legs sheathed in the finest hose. Women tossed their heads from side to side, shaking out combs and clasps to free their hair in displays of unthinking abandonment.

I found lust rising in me. My desire for any one woman was eclipsed as the next pirouetted through my narrow cone of vision. Tall women, fat women, old women, and young girls—children really—all frisked past, one supplanting the next as the embodiment of my carnal need. Only the rictus of the monster’s magick held me back, and yet, curiously, I did not resent it because the music assured me that the anticipation would heighten the consummation.

A new melody wove through the demonic concerto and injected a note of caution into my thoughts. The range of my vision expanded, and I saw the lustful expressions on the faces of all the other men. I knew in an instant that they wanted the women 1 had chosen to be my mates on this night. A bloody haze filled my sight, and my fingers itched to surround the throat of the first man 1 could get my hands on.

It mattered not at all that the first man I saw was Kit.

Fury nibbled away at the spell the creature had spun. My hands closed into fists, and 1 felt the warm weight of the ring on my finger. Yes,
the ring. If
I
hit him with the ring, I am certain to leave a scar. An impression of the crestl

I looked up and fingered the ring. Its heft and the fact that it felt right being on my finger gave me a moment of introspection. It freed me from Fialchar’s influence and let sanity return to my mind. No,
no.
Kit is
not your enemy—the monster
is!
Fight him.

1 struggled against the magick that still held me. My fists convulsed in the hopes that their freedom would spread to the rest of my body. When nothing happened I snarled and willed myself to break free, but it was no use. Whatever he had done was too powerful for me. While 1 might have escaped the mental madness, his evil still held my body in thrall.

Suddenly I remembered the rhyme against evil I had learned so long ago and concentrated on it.
If ever there was a time it was meant to be recited, now is it!
Deliberately and slowly, I pronounced each word. I forced my lips to form each letter carefully, so that even if my lungs failed to provide me enough air to speak, the words would exist.

“Fire and silver beat cold and night, but try to avoid evil’s sight.” Heat washed over me in a wave as if 1 had been given refuge in the arms of my aunt or my mother.

My arms bent at the elbows so I could return the embrace, and my toes uncurled.

“When all is lost, brave heart have you,” I barked out as my spine returned to my control. I could feel my legs and instantly spread my feet into a fighting stance. “And evil’s thrall will then be through!”

With the last word of the charm, Fialchar’s control over me vanished. I lunged forward and caught Marija up by the waist in my left arm. My right hand wrapped itself around the magickal thread and, despite the searing pain, 1 yanked sharply downward. The golden line parted around the ring and writhed like a wounded snake, severing other lines with its thrashing. Marija went limp in my arms, and other women spun to the floor as they were released from the creature’s power.

The music stopped so abruptly that only the clatter of the instruments striking the ground told me I’d not gone deaf. All around the room men staggered, all slump-shouldered, with limbs trembling uncontrollably. Most of them sank slowly to their knees, leaving Lord Disaster towering over all of them.

The creature turned slowly in my direction, though his robe gave me no hint of what he might have used for legs. As he came around, and I saw his face in more than profile, my admiration for the Emperor grew. The thing’s gangrenous stare was enough to rot a man from the inside out.

“How dare …” he began in anger, then his mouth snapped shut. He furrowed his brows, and I recoiled, as if his stare had physically struck me. “How is it that you are here, now? This is impossible!”

He turned back toward where the Emperor knelt over his mother. “Little tricks will not save you or your throne. It will be mine, and you will give it to me. I have played for you a tune, and in a year 1 will collect your Empire as payment for it.”

He raised his staff in both hands above his head, then drove the point down into the floor. The resulting thunder crack knocked me down, but I twisted and managed to catch Marija on top of me. By the time I sat up again, all I saw was a fast-dissipating column of greasy black smoke and a smallish green flame burning in the center of the Imperial crest.

Kit dropped to one knee and slid Marija to the floor beside me. “Is she hurt?”

“I don’t think so, just unconscious.” I stared at the green fire. “I never expected anything like that tonight.”

Kit shivered. “A memorable but inauspicious way to start the year.” He chewed his lower lip a second. “I am not certain, and I do not know how he got here, but I think that was Fialchar—Lord Disaster.”

“No question about it.” I shook my head. “That was him.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged. “Who else could it have been?”

Kit hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “You have a point there—it must have been him. And if he can walk in the Empire …”

I finished it for him. “Even a year’s warning won’t be enough to let us stop him.”

13

_M

arija’s hazel eyes fluttered open and became normal again as the pupils contracted. She looked at me, started to say something, then blushed and looked away. She raised a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob.

1 took her other hand and held it tightly in my own hands. “What you went through, what
we
went through, was horrible. What we were thinking, what was going on inside of us was not our doing. Fialchar did it.”

Marija swallowed hard. “You can’t know …”

1 nodded and kept my voice low. “1 don’t want to even imagine because 1 know what he made me think—about you and about everyone else. I was ready to kill Kit…”

“And 1 was ready to kill Locke.” Kit gave her just a hint of a smile. “Corruption was able to tempt us here, but that tempting means nothing if we don’t give in. No matter what you thought or saw, it counts for nothing unless you choose to act upon it.”

Marija closed her eyes for a moment. “What you say, Master Christoforos, makes sense, but how do I get those thoughts out of my head?”

I gave her hand a pat. “Find new thoughts to replace them. That’s what I’m doing.” 1 winked at Kit. “Right now I think revenge fantasies will fill my mind up.”

“My head is fair full to bursting with them.”

Marija nodded and opened her eyes again. “You’re right, and I have work to do.”