Michael A. Stackpole (19 page)

I met his intense gaze. “I hear what you say, and I will heed your advice. Perhaps you would have done better to leave me my pain to remind me of the wisdom in your words.”

He shook his head. “I have been assured you are wise enough that such action was not needed.” He bowed to me and to the Emperor, then took his leave from the small sitting room that had become a temporary infirmary.

The Emperor drew a chair across the line of firelight coruscating off the white marble floor and seated himself opposite me. “Lieutenant Christoforos said you told him you saw a Chademon down in the sewers. The Warlord and the lieutenant were too distracted to see what you saw, and I must confess I saw little beyond the Black Churchers. My brother said he saw something dark dart through the hole, but he only saw it at the last. Are you sure what you told your cousin is the truth?”

I nodded solemnly and pulled the sheet up to mid-chest with my left hand. “As certain as I am that you are the Emperor, that is how certain 1 am that I saw a Chademon. A
Bharashadi
sorcerer, in fact. You have my word on this.”

“I do not doubt you, Locke, I merely want to determine how massive a disaster we have here. It had the Fistfire Sceptre?”

“It’s missing from the treasury?” I shook my head. “An obvious question, which you wouldn’t have asked if you had found it in there. Was it a sceptre made of gold, with a black pearl clutched in a fist at one end?”

Thetys nodded mutely.

“That was it, then.” I slammed my left fist into the daybed. “I should have known and found a way to stop him.”

“You did what you could—which was all anyone could have done.” Thetys leaned forward, and the firelight winked from the sapphire in his coronet as he rested his elbows on his knees. His eyes focused elsewhere as he quickly assessed what I had told him and determined the extent of what it meant.

I knew the very concept of a Chaos creature possessing an item that could stop Fialchar terrified me as much as the idea of someone’s slipping the leash on a vicious dog and sending it after children. I realized that 1 defined this threat as one directed against my grandmother and Marija and others I knew and loved. For the

Emperor, the threat was one that could destroy a nation that looked to him for leadership and security.

That is a burden that would crush me utterly and completely.

Finally the Emperor looked up at me. “This is not an auspicious way to begin a new year, is it?”

“No, Highness.”

“Well, sitting here is going to make it no better. Garn and Christoforos have found the sorceress who detected the Chaos magick out in Menal. They are with her in the sewers to determine if the spell used against you was cast by the same creature they found in Menal. My brother is gathering those advisors I can trust with the enormity of this problem. We will have a council of war to determine what we can and must do to resolve this situation. You and your cousin, because of your parts in this, will join us.”

I shook my head. “Majesty, Christoforos is a good choice because he’s smart and has practical experience. I’m just a Garikman who will be as lost in your councils as I’ve been in Herakopolis.”

“I appreciate your modesty, Locke, but what I need now is your intelligence. Garn has told me how you deduced the origin of the
vindictxvara
your cousin found, and your conviction that you saw a Chaos demon in the sewers has not wavered even though we all know that is impossible.” Thetys looked at the door through which Sava had exited the room. “The reason he thinks you were attacked by a Black Churcher is because he would never accept the idea that a Chademon has penetrated the Ward Walls. That kind of unwillingness to explore such possibilities will hamper us, so having someone whose mind is not cluttered with preconceived notions will not be a burden.”

“I appreciate that, Highness, but…”

“Do not even begin to imagine refusing to help me,

Locke. 1 charge you with the duty of making us prove our assumptions as we discuss things. I don’t mean you should assume no facts are true, but our conclusions need to be supported. If we cannot prove what we believe, any plans we make to deal with things will be fruitless.” He nodded once. “This all means, of course, that we have a lot of work to do and much to introduce you to.”

He stood slowly and scratched at his throat. “I have seen to it that your grandmother and her attendant have found their way home without incident. Both are well and have been assured that you and Christoforos are doing my bidding, if you feel up to it, I would like to show you a project started before my father’s reign. It will, I assure you, be very important, and I would like your thoughts on it.”

I pulled the sheet closed around my body and swung my legs over the edge of the daybed. “As you have noted, I am yours to command, Highness.”

“Excellent. Follow me.”

Thetys led me from the small room, and immediately the palace floor started sending a chill back into my body through my bare feet. The Emperor dispatched a servant to find me suitable clothing while we headed off into the palace wing that had been built by Garik’s greatest artisans. It might have been my imagination, but this Garik wing of the palace seemed friendlier and less hostile to me.

We descended one broad set of stairs, then turned the corner into a dark corridor and came to a metal gate not unlike the lattice door inside the treasury vault. The Emperor pressed his hand to it and muttered a couple of words. I saw him shiver for a second, then the door swung back revealing some very steep steps leading down.

“Is that lock a
leechspell? “

Thetys nodded. “It is more difficult to open than conventional locks and were a spy to use the incorrect I rigger-phrase, the result would be quite horrible.”

What little I did know about magick did include information about
leecfispells.
Each spell cast requires energy, and apparently all living creatures possess what it takes to empower magick. Only magickers, however, lake the time and have the discipline to be able to work magick. A
leechspell
provides a compromise whereby someone unschooled in magick can activate a device l hat has been enchanted.

Like the mortar and pestle Birger had used to create my grandmother’s tonic, the lock had a
leechspell
set to drain enough strength from the Emperor to unlock the door. Given the caution he had mentioned against spies, I assumed that the
leechspell
was fairly complex in that if the wrong word was used, it could take energy Irom the spy and use it to trigger a spell that would kill him. The result was determined by the trigger-phrase used by the person touching the lock.

“1 would have thought the treasury would have had such dire spells to keep thieves out.”

“Yes, your thoughts run parallel to mine.” The Emperor shook his head. “Spells designed to defeat thieves are changed on a regular basis so no thief can be certain to command the proper counterspells. The Mage who last cast those spells on the treasury appears to have been induced to reveal which spells he cast, enabling the thieves to dispel them. We do not know if he was a Black Churcher—he appears to be missing.”

A shiver ran down my spine. If Black Churchers could infiltrate the palace staff, well, the very idea of that having happened would have been impossible for me to entertain before the events of that evening had unfolded. The threat to the Empire presented by the Black Church had always seemed minor, but now it took on far larger proportions in my mind.

In silence we descended the dark stairwell, then walked through a narrow corridor that was similarly unlit. I felt the Emperor’s hand in the middle of my chest and stopped. He muttered another word, and a portion of the wall swung inward. Red light from the other side washed over him, then he beckoned me forward.

I stepped out onto a wooden catwalk approximately twenty feet above the floor of the room below. Moondiscs, similar to those in the passage leading down to the treasury, covered the ceiling and walls and provided the room’s light. Each of the discs was full and red, which meant they were linked to the phases of the Assassins’ moon.

Below me, filling the entirety of the cavernous room, 1 saw a crazy-quilt landscape that had belts of glacial ice cutting through bone-dry desert or thick jungle. I saw countless ruins, all in miniature, perched atop rugged mountains or nestled in box canyons. I heard the tinkle of water and saw, there in the distance, a dark, flat body dotted with strange islands.

Suspended from the ceiling by thin wires 1 even saw an uprooted castle floating in the air. Flags with strange symbols dotted the landscape. Row upon row of tiny figures surrounded those flags, and a set of them nearest the edge were painted black and stood beneath a golden-orb flag.

In an instant I knew what it
had
to be, but I could not believe it. “This … this is a topographical miniature of Chaos, isn’t it, Highness?”

“It is, Locke. Your father and your uncle came to my grandfather with the plan for creating it, and every expedition we have sent into Chaos has come back with more information to refine and expand it. We have plotted the zones of variable time, and we know the boundaries for each tribe of Chaos demons. Everything is exacting and to scale, which has enabled commanders like your father to successfully wage war beyond the Ward Walls.”

I pointed to the floating fortress. “And what is that?”

“That, Locke, is Castel Payne.” He leaned forward on the catwalk railing. “That is where Lord Disaster lives and where we will have to go to destroy him.”

15

_D

own on the room’s floor a closer look at the display made it even more incredible. The sculptors had created a very realistic and painstakingly exact simulacrum. Even though 1 had never been in Chaos, it was not hard to make that assessment of the model. Parts of it mirrored geographical and terrain features I had seen on the trip to the capital. Since they looked very lifelike to me, I had to assume the rest of the model was equally accurate and, as such, quite an achievement.

A sorcerer ranked as a Warder both in Construction and Clairvoyant magicks greeted the Emperor as we studied the nearest edge of the model. “Highness, I am honored to see you as always, though 1 regret the circumstances necessitating this particular meeting.” A man of middle age, his hairline had begun to recede, and his red hair had generally thinned. “1 have prepared the scrying room for the meeting. The others your brother gathered are already here.”

“Excellent, Warder Illtyd.”

I watched the magicker pull a small, flat, hexagonal slice of clear quartz crystal from a pocket in the folds of his blue velvet robe. He gently flicked it toward the model, and I expected it to land hard, gouging up terrain and scattering the small
Bfiarasfiadi
figures. To my surprise it hovered an inch above the surface and, because it had landed in the area of hillside, even tipped a bit to remain parallel to the ground.

Illtyd waggled his fingers at the disc and it became parallel with the floor again. “When I have more time to complete the design, I will create a spell that will bind the control, flight, and sympathetic spells all into one. That way I will not have to recast each as it wears out.”

His comment meant nothing to me, but I smiled politely as if it had. He started toward the doorway beneath the stairs we had descended. The Emperor followed him, and I trailed behind. I frowned because 1 knew I should have asked the Warder what the piece of quartz had been for. For better or worse I was engaged in very serious business, and in the battle between being polite and informed, the latter side should win each time.

I decided to ask the Warder to explain about the quartz, but that question changed as we entered the room. A ring of chairs cast long shadows like spokes from the hub of the room out to the walls. Centermost I saw the largest quartz crystal I had ever seen—it literally linked floor to ceiling as if it were a pillar holding up the palace. It had been cut in a hexagonal shape that had to have been at least a yard wide at each face. It provided the illumination in the room, but that was not its primary purpose.

What surprised me—and changed the question I intended to ask the Warder—was that the crystalline column displayed a view of the model landscape. All of the terrain features appeared to be in life scale. By staring into the crystal I was staring into the vista I would have seen had I been standing at that spot in Chaos itself.

Illtyd smiled as I looked at him with amazement on my face. “Warder, the small piece of quartz is linked with this stone?”

He nodded solemnly. “The disc was cut from the same piece, in fact, which makes linking them much easier, as the Law of Contagion would suggest, of course. As commanded, the disc will move over the landscape, and what it sees will be presented here.”

I shook my head. “Incredible. The only thing better would be to place these discs in Chaos so we could see what is actually happening there.”

“The problem with that idea, Master Lachlan, is twofold,” commented one of the other individuals in the room. I looked past the crystal and recognized Grand Duke Ijegron of |ask from earlier that evening. “When we tried to use this sort of magick previously, the Ward Walls interfered with the images. They appeared as insubstantial as heat mirages, which makes them less than useful. In addition, the magick needed to make them work over such a great distance competed with that needed to maintain the walls themselves. To gain an accurate vision of what was happening beyond the Ward Walls we had to damage the walls themselves.”

I shook my head. “Not a good thing at all.”

“Succinctly put.” The older man smiled easily. “Most importantly, though, the linked crystals allow anyone who has obtained one of the pair to be able to see what transpired around the other. I recall being in this very room and finding myself face-to-muzzle with Kothvir himself.”

A reptilian Baron from the island of Shar rested a li.ind on Ijegron’s shoulder. “Yesss, that was the greatest danger of posting these magickal windows in Chaos. What were magickally insurrmountable problems fell victim to logic and hard work. Your father saw I he sssimple sssolution to them. He chose to sssend scouts into Chaosss to perform sssurveys that allowed usss to create the model you sssee through the column here.”

The Baron let his forked tongue slither out of his mouth and snap back in again. 1 had to stop myself Irom staring, but 1 had never before seen a Reptiad. i knew, from things I had read, that these lizard-men had been discovered in Chaos when an effort to reclaim some of the islands was made. At first they were believed to be Chaos creatures because of their scaly gray-green flesh and the fact that they only had three fingers and a thumb, but that thinking soon changed. Aelves and Dwarves pointed out that the islanders had clearly been warped by Chaos to better survive in their inhospitable homes the same way Chaos had adapted some folks into Dwarves to live beneath the mountains or other folks into Aelves to let them thrive in the Imperial Forests.

“Baron Sali’uz has the right of it.” The Dwarven Duke Kozor Goll of Besdan came around the edge of the crystal and hooked fingers in his broad leather belt. “Your father even had me with him on one expedition because he wanted to explore a complex of caverns out in Chaos. We measured those caves so precisely I still know them better than I do my own fortress.”

The Dwarf did not surprise me because I had met more of his kind in Stone Rapids. Two Dwarven prospectors worked the area near the village and came in to trade for supplies from time to time. Like them, the Duke stood nearly two feet shorter than I and his dark brown eyes looked to be mostly pupil. Gray streaked his brown hair and full beard, but 1 found I could no more think of him as old than I could consider rocks old. I mean, 1 knew rocks were old, of course, but the ravages of age had a less obvious effect on the Dwarven Duke than Grand Duke Ijegron.

The Emperor waved the nobles to the chairs, and they seated themselves on either side of Grand Duke Ijegron. “Please, my lords, let us begin. As my brother has told you, more than the appearance of Fialchar has disturbed us this night. When we went to recover the Fistfire Sceptre from the Imperial Treasury, to use in case of Fialchar’s return, we discovered a robbery in progress. We were able to drive them off, killing several and capturing others. The perpetrators appear to be members of the Black Church, but among them there was another. This thief got away with the Fistfire Sceptre, which is a dire thing in and of itself. Worse yet, the thief has been identified as a
Bfiarasfiadi
sorcerer.”

Ijegron blanched. “A Black Shadow
here
? That’s impossible.”

Thetys shook his head and nodded toward me. “Locke saw him and engaged him in combat. He is confident of his identification, and I believe him.”

Baron Sali’uz’s dark flesh began to approach the ivory shade of his throat. “Lachlan hasss never ssseen a Black Sshadow before. Could he have been misstaken?”

I shrugged. “This B
harasfiadi
fit all the descriptions of Black Shadows I’ve ever heard. The possibility that I’m wrong always exists, of course, but if it wasn’t a Black Shadow, I’ve got no idea what it was.”

“If Cardew’s son saw a Black Shadow, I am willing to accept that identification.” Kozor Goll tugged at his beard. “It is not a good thing that the sceptre has been stolen, or that the Black Shadows are doing Lord Disaster’s bidding. An alliance on their parts is very lightening.”

Thetys shrugged eloquently. “Unfortunately that is the situation. While Fialchar distracted us at the ball, his agents worked to steal the Fistfire Sceptre. He reveals to us the great artifact from before the Shattering while its bane—the Sceptre—is taken from us.”

The company in which I found myself cowed me, but I knew I would be useless if I could not grasp the subjects about which they talked. At the risk of being censured, I had to ask for clarification on certain things. “Forgive me, Highness, my lords, but you speak of the Fistfire Sceptre and the Staff of Emeterio as if they were . .” I wracked my brain for an apt analogy and finally found it. “.. . as if they were to each other what my father and Kothvir were supposed to be.”

The Emperor nodded. “Warder Illtyd, perhaps you can explain it.”

The magicker addressed his explanation to everyone in the room, though he focused most of his attention on me. “Those two things are linked in a manner similar to how the disc and this quartz are linked. They come from the same basic material. You see, in the realm of magick, to obtain a device of great power, or to create a powerful spell, it is possible to imbue the item with restrictions. For example, if I create a spell that will create a roaring bonfire, it will require an expenditure of energy from me that I might ill afford. If, on the other hand, 1 limit the size of the blaze, or I make the spell only applicable during a certain season or make the fire only last for an hour, I have sculpted it in such a way that it will not require so much power to create.”

I concentrated hard to understand what he was telling me. In chess, if I limited myself to using only my Cavalry or my Wizards, I could cut down on the amount of time I needed to think about any move. This would limit my strategies and weaken my play, but if 1 were under time constraints for a game, it would greatly increase my ability to win.

I thought about Sava having told me about the
Bfiarasfiadi
spell cast at me. “This is akin to the Chademon that attacked me having limited his spell by making it have a physical focus. Because of that, the coldness of my swords and the water helped counteract the spell. In that case his spell was hurt by the constraints put upon it.”

Illtyd smiled appreciatively. “Precisely, Master Lachlan. In the case of the staff, Emeterio wanted to create an item of vast power. The method he chose was to form an alliance with another Sorcerer, Quire, who was of an entirely juxtaposed and antagonistic philosophical standing. The two of them agreed that both would create magickal talismans, one knowing the other’s item would be able to destroy his. This created a balance of power between them that extended to the items they created. In the ritual that they cowrote and concelebrated, they performed what we call a
desecreation.
From the pool of materials they both had contributed, they drew light from dark, in from out, and up from down. The material in the staff and the sceptre were divided by magick into forms that would destroy each other and negate each other’s work.”

Desecrate and create at the same time.
1 shivered. “And now both halves of that
desecreation
are in the hands of Fialchar?”

“Provided we cannot stop the B
harashadi
from reaching Chaos.” I turned around as Garn Drustorn entered the room. He took a chair next to the Dwarven Duke. “We found the Warder Taci, and she confirmed that whatever cast the spell down in the sewers was what Lieutenant Christoforos and his patrol chased across Menal. With Locke’s identification of it as a
Bfiarasfiadi
sorcerer, we have to acknowledge the Chaos demons have found a way to breach the Ward Walls.”

The Warder frowned. “An easier explanation is that a family of Black Shadows has been living in the Empire since or even before the formation of Tarris.”

“And remained undetected, especially while being schooled in Chaos magick?” The Grand Duke shook his head. “As much as I believe it is impossible for the Ward Walls to be breached, your alternative strains credulity even more, I think.”

“I think, my friends, I like neither of those alternatives—though the former is something of an academic point.” The Emperor held his hands up to forestall any argument. “After all, Lord Disaster showed he was capable of appearing here, in the capital, at will. If he can do it, other creatures of Chaos should be able to do so as well.”

“Highness, I hasten to point out that Fialchar was born before the Shattering. While the wave of Chaos may have changed him, it would not have made him subject to the ban of anything born in Chaos being unable to pass through the walls.” Illtyd opened his hands helplessly. “I would prefer to think my explanation most likely, as horrible or difficult as that is to contemplate. The only real problem with that idea is the one the Grand Duke raised. The Chaos taint to the magick that Taci detected could not have been so strong
if
the creature wielding it were not born in Chaos. If a creature born within the Empire were able to become that powerful in Chaos magick, there are gaps in the spells used to safeguard the Empire that must be checked for and plugged immediately.”

“Perhaps,” offered the Reptiad Baron, “Lord Disaster teleported the sorcerer Lachlan reported over as a test of the staff’s power.”

Ijegron leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees. “That idea is based on an assumption with which I am uncomfortable.”

1 frowned. “You don’t think Fialchar and the Black Shadow sorcerer were working together?”

“We have no proof of any alliance being formed between them at all. The appearance of a Black Shadow sorcerer in the palace at the same time as Lord Disaster invited himself to the ball might suggest collusion, but using coincidence to suggest causality is a fallacy all of us should have long since outgrown.”