Nor Iron Bars A Cage (33 page)

Then I forgot about the king, because Tobin reached for the drawstring of my smalls. I looked down at his broad hands, saw his fingers fumble, surprisingly clumsy with the simple slip knot I used. “I can do that,” I said.

“Let me.” He eased it open and pushed the fabric down. I set my hand on his shoulder to step out of them.

I had a moment of a different regret as I straightened. I should have hugged him before. Now, fully naked, it was a different thing and I couldn’t do it. I gave him a smile instead and turned away. But he grabbed my arm and muttered, “The hells you do.” He pulled me close, leaning forward so only our shoulders touched. He murmured in my ear, “Don’t feck it up.” And then he let me go.

Thirdmage said, “Take off the bandages too. Better be safe.”

Silently, Tobin untied and unwound them, revealing my paralyzed and swollen hand. The curved metal brace for my finger, bent to shape by the medic when he couldn’t get my hand to straighten, had left an imprint in my wrist. I rubbed at it fitfully, feeling the ridges and thickness of the scars there. My whole hand ached badly.

I straightened my shoulders, raised my chin, and dropped my hands to my sides. My fingers brushed bare skin on my thighs, and I shivered. Xan’s necklace hung heavy against my bare chest.

Secondmage said, “Let’s begin.” They raised the chant first, building the structures as we watched. The room fairly hummed with power. I gave Tobin one last look. His eyes were wide and dark, but steady.

After a minute Secondmage added, “Sorcerer Lyon, take your place outside the circle now and prepare yourself.”

It was time to focus on the sorcery. I turned away from Tobin, and took one long slow breath, counted to three, let it out. Then another. With each breath I took a steady step toward the working. One more breath and I stepped into the focus point. I touched the necklace and looked down at the rim of the containment circle. And saw how they managed to push that kind of power into it. This circle was scribed by a metal cable, laid on the floor. The runes and lines of the charcoal working wound over and around it, but the cable drew all of my attention. It was grey steel, made of cunningly woven strands like rope, but mixed into each strand were silver-white threads of admagnium.

Thirdmage stood close by, his working knife ready. He would cut my way through the power-barrier into that circle and then those two old men would chant it closed. I’d be trapped, inside admagnium-laced steel, until someone let me out.

Admagnium doesn’t alloy. It holds its properties, remaining separate, in shimmers of light within the dullness. That material was so familiar. How long… how many hours… how many days had I stared at the manacles on my wrists? They were made like this. This same blend of steel and magic, the near invisible tendrils winding around each other, admagnium seeming to flow and move, to write words that might release me, if only I could read them, if only they stopped dancing before my eyes…

I stepped back out of the focus point. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Secondmage said, “You what?”

“I changed my mind.” I thought my voice was admirably steady. “I don’t like the chances of having this not work, after all. I can put up with having Xan around, if he doesn’t fade. Think of all the history I might learn. I can get used to it, to sharing with him.”

In my head, Xan said,
-You’re lying. What terrifies you so, that you’d rather have me around forever?

I ignored him. “Sorry for being a bother and all. We can just put everything away.” Starting with that cable, coiled like an obscene snake to trap me.

Secondmage said, “Nonsense. Everything is prepared.”

Tobin said, “Lyon, are you sure?”

Thirdmage said, “Why?”

I turned to him, my mind racing for a way to explain without exposing myself. But… but maybe the time had come to be truthful. I could dodge around and lie, and pretend I wanted to keep Xan, but it was no doubt clear to everyone that I was simply afraid. I could make up reasons for that, in desperate search for one that didn’t brand me a simple coward. Or I could just tell the truth. I heard Secondmage huff impatiently, but Thirdmage’s expression was more curious than condemning.

I said, “I hate to be trapped. I hate to be held against my will. And it’s worse when that trap is made of admagnium and steel.”

I heard Tobin draw a sharp breath, and knew he understood me. After one nightmare, I’d told him about those manacles in more detail than I’d ever planned. He said, “Could the circle be redone without the metal there?”

Secondmage sniffed. “Not before daybreak. Come now, Sorcerer Lyon.” He gave my title a twist of scorn. “Surely you can stand inside our circle for a few minutes without breaking down.”

Had I said I would surprise him one day? Ha. He was right, I was weak. “I can’t. When you let me in and then seal the circle, seal it from the outside…” I hugged my arms around myself and shivered, naked and exposed and such a fool.

There’d been no need for admagnium in those manacles, to keep me prisoner. Iron would have held me just as well. Would I have then cowered in fear from my cooking pots?

Xan said,
-Perhaps I can steady you for this, if you let me.

It did
not
make me feel better to have a dead man whispering in my ear. I shook my head hard.

Thirdmage asked, “What makes it hardest for you?”

“That I can’t get out!” The answer was ripped from my throat.

Over Secondmage’s response, Thirdmage said clearly, “What if you could?”

Secondmage and I both stared at him. He said, “What if I give you the scribing knife? You cut your way in and take it with you. You cut the opening to the focus point again when it’s needed. You control it.”

Secondmage said scornfully, “That’s unheard of. Why do a circle like this, and then give the entity inside the ability to break it? The sorcerer controls the blade. That’s nonsense, Third.”

“Hardly nonsense. Usually, yes, of course we wouldn’t give a wraith-ridden subject the means of escape. But Sorcerer Lyon isn’t going to try to escape. He wants this to work correctly. Why not let him have the ability to do it himself?”

“And if it goes wrong, and the knife is locked inside the circle?”

“We can take the whole working down without the knife, if we must. It would be no worse than not making the attempt.”

Secondmage turned to me. “Surely you see this is a poor choice. Banishment is always controlled from outside, and all the more so if there is a case of possession.”

I could only shake my head. I’d been controlled. I couldn’t do that again, not even when my own brain was screaming at me for being foolish and calling me every name in the book.

Thirdmage said, “If there’s only one way open, what do we lose by trying it?”

Secondmage gestured to him urgently and they retired to a corner of the room, consulting in sharp whispers. I stood where I was and looked at the working. The energy of that containment was a whole different level from any I’d done, although it rose in a wall as colorless as any other. I let my eyes glide around the diagram, noting the inscriptions, the protections, the way the energy should flow. When they raised the chant again, the rest of the spell would take shape. It was all as I had expected, except for that silver noose, waiting.

Xan said,
-I don’t know that metal. Is it truly so fearsome?

-Only in my mind.
Knowing I was wrong didn’t make it any more possible to take a step forward.

After several minutes of argument, the sorcerers returned. Secondmage said, “We have decided that there is no intrinsic reason why Sorcerer Lyon couldn’t be the one to open the circle. If that’s the only way for us to proceed.” He frowned at me. “I trust that will be enough to allay your… concerns? And you will follow directions explicitly? You do remember the procedure?”

I swallowed. My mouth was full of dust and my heart pounded, but when Thirdmage touched his short blade to the tip of his work-point, and then held it to me, hilt-first over his forearm, I took it.

He said formally, “This blade built the working, scribed the lines that bind it. This blade can force the circle to open for you.”

A sorcerer’s blade was forged new for him and tempered in the flames by him, so that no one else’s energy would be tied to it. The hilt came sweetly to my hand, and the short silver blade caught the light. I turned it over, familiar in my hand. A thought occurred, and I wasn’t delaying, or not much, when I said, “Don’t you die and become a ghost while I’m doing this.” I was only half joking. “Not while I have your knife in there.”

I expected a frown for my levity, but he said, “I’ll try not to. Your head’s already crowded.”

At least he had a sense of humor.

The sorcerers stepped back into their points. After a long, long moment I did the same. Their chant brought the power up once more. I looked at each sorcerer in turn, and when they nodded, I lifted the blade and sliced once down the side of the power-bounded space.

I directed my cut where the energy visible only to its makers must surely be, over that gleaming cable. From head height, downward, stopping only a finger’s breadth above that metal boundary. Then I lowered the knife and stepped forward through that opening, naked, into the confines of the working.

It was reluctant to let me in. The power crawled over my skin, thick and clinging. But its builder’s blade had demanded entrance and it let me through.

At the center I stopped and turned around slowly. From inside, power visibly shimmered in a cylinder around me, floor to ceiling. Through it, the other people in the room had a wavering unreality. The king’s curious intensity, Tobin’s focused attention, the guard captain’s alertness, all seemed faded. The space inside the circle was the most real thing in the universe. The shining line I’d cut for access thinned, dimmed, and was gone.

I hefted the knife for a moment, feeling the hilt comforting in my hand. I wasn’t trapped. I had control. I believed that. The impulse to cut again, to claw my way back out, was almost a live thing in my chest.

Xan murmured,
-Steady now.

I held the knife, until the shape of the hilt was printed in my palm. I could do this. I would. I kept my eyes away from the circle itself, and watched Thirdmage instead.

Xan said,
-It feels different from before in here. Stronger.

-This is a stronger design.

-Ah. I won’t be sorry to leave it.

Time to continue. Daybreak was no doubt approaching. I knew what was required. Very slowly I uncramped my fingers from around the hilt, and laid the knife at my feet, the tip of the blade pointing toward the focus point. As directed, I closed the flamestone on its chain between my left palm and right wrist, holding it steady away from my chest. I saw both sorcerers in their supporting corners take a deep breath to begin the next part, looking enviably calm and composed. Of course it wasn’t their ass naked for the taking inside this circle. …don’t think about that, don’t think, don’t…

They took up the chant, raising more power. I tried to breathe along with it, letting the familiar words of summoning wash through me.

-It hurts. It pulls at me, but I’m already here.
Xan’s mind-voice was labored.

The chant built. The flamestone between my hands felt warm to the touch. Its heat radiated through my skin, built slowly higher, sparking to raw agony against my damaged wrist. I hung onto it, not wanting that heat to hit my chest if I let go. It felt like it was burning me, a familiar pain, but there was no smell of singed flesh. I did know what that smelled like. Twice in my life, I’d had the tang of my own seared meat in my nose. Once of my own accord. Once before that…

I cried out as the hurt stabbed me deep to the bone. Cried out, dropped to my knees, and closed my eyes. Deep in my mind I heard Xan shout,
-What’s this?

And in words not nearly as ancient, I heard Meldov’s familiar voice say, -
Boy, what have you done?

And then the wraith, silky smooth as butter sliding along my bones.
-Ah, yes, second chances. I adore second chances.

I’m sure I screamed. I couldn’t hear the sound. My eyes were closed, and yet I found myself in a grey misty landscape. Less than twenty feet away, every detail faded to a haze. But within that space stood three figures. Xan, in the leathers and fur I knew well, Meldov, as I’d seen him a thousand times, in the black trousers and long coat he favored, and a tall, thin man with eyes glowing red as hunger.

“No. No. No. I’m not here.” I chanted it aloud, battling the pain in my wrist to get the sounds out. “I’m not here. You’re not really here. I’m not. I’m not. You’re not.”

“Unfortunately we are, Lyon. What kind of mess have you got yourself into?” Meldov’s expression was disapproving and familiar.

I couldn’t help answering him. “Me?” I glared at him. “You’re the one who said yes to a wraith. It was you!”

“I don’t remember.” He looked around. “Where are we?”

Xan took a step toward me. “Who are these two?”

Meldov said, in the same tongue, “I’m his master.”

The wraith smiled, slow and sharp as a knife, and said, “No. In fact, I am.”

I shook, and the whole world rocked, the dry earth beneath our feet heaving and trembling with me. Meldov staggered. The motions startled me, but in a good way, making it seem like I mattered in this place.

Xan braced himself against the motion. “You both can understand me?”

The wraith said, “I have a gift of languages. I like to share it. With the
right
people.”

Xan peered more closely at him. “I know what you are. Wicked undead, creeping stain on the ancestors. Begone.”

The wraith laughed. “Creeping stain. Oh, I like that. I haven’t heard that in ages. The little witchy folk of the hills called me that. Usually before I ate them.”

“You’ll not eat me, foul blight.”

“I have no interest in you at present. You’re already dead. What I’m in the market for is a live host. And I know just the man.” It showed me its teeth.

Xan stepped between us. “Leave the boy alone.”