Nor Iron Bars A Cage (34 page)

Meldov said, “You can’t protect the boy. No one can.”

“I’m not a boy!” Not anymore. Not for fifteen years. “And I’ll drive you all out. Out!”

They turned to me as one. The wraith just kept smiling. Meldov began to look confused. But Xan glared at me. “You must go back. Go back and tell them what happened here. Go back.”

The wraith put his arm around Meldov’s shoulders, and Meldov let it lean against him. My mentor’s expression didn’t change. His arms hung at his sides. The wraith was taller than Meldov, and it set its pointy chin on Meldov’s hair, and gave his cheek a little slap. Meldov didn’t react to either gesture. His face became steadily paler. The wraith winked at me. “He’s been fun, but I seem to have eaten him up. What a pity.”

Meldov said to me, “Boy, what have you done?” He didn’t seem to notice the undead draped against his shoulder. His voice had lost its depth, though, and his
tridescant
was flat and hard to understand.

I wrenched my eyes away to look desperately at Xan. “What do I do?”

“Go back. Go back and ask them.”

“Ask whom?” I couldn’t remember where
back
was. This place was all I knew.

“Back to the circle. Back to the sorcery, the tall, old mages.” When I shook my head slowly, Xan added, “Back to Tobin. He’s calling you. Can you hear it?”

“Tobin?”

I listened and heard something. A man’s voice, deeply familiar, calling “Lyon? Lyon? Can you hear me? Wake up. Lyon?”

I needed to close my eyes. It was hard though, with Meldov’s puzzled gaze on me, and the hot, hungry eyes of the wraith meeting mine. I couldn’t take my attention from him long enough to think. I didn’t dare turn my back on him. On
it.
Not for a moment. Never turn, never let
it
get too near.

Xan stepped in front of me, breaking the lock between my eyes and the wraith’s. “You should go back. Quickly now. I’ll stand between you and him as long as I can.”

I stared at the old hillsman. His face was weathered, his eyes deepset, his strong nose, once broken, jutted above thin lips. He was ancient and unlovely, and wonderful. “Why would you do that?”

“It can’t truly hurt me now. And I’d like to see us all go home.”

The wraith bent sideways and waved at me over Xan’s shoulder. “Hurry back now. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Xan’s growl reminded me vividly of Tobin’s. Tobin… I closed my eyes. He was still calling me, his voice getting hoarse. I ignored everything else and followed that sound, followed, until I could smell lamp oil and charcoal, and piss. I blinked my sticky eyes open.

I was lying on the stone floor in the middle of the circle, curled in a ball, clutching the necklace to my chest. I was damp and cold and stiff, and nauseous.

From somewhere, Tobin kept saying, “Lyon? Lyon? Can you hear me? Lion-boy, come on. Come on!”

I mumbled, “I’m not a boy.”

“Ah, goddess, thank the heavens.” Tobin’s voice came from behind me.

I could see the lines of a working on the floor not far from my nose. I turned over carefully, pushing myself off the stone with my good hand to sit up. There was a circle around me, up and running. I could see the shimmer, feel the hum, see, oh gods, see a metal cable that underlay it. I feared that cable, but I couldn’t remember why. My naked ass was cold on the stone, and outside the circle, just far enough not to touch its surface, I saw Tobin, and the king, and… oh, hells! I put my head in my hands, remembering.

“Sorcerer Lyon.” A voice I disliked broke through my distress. “Speak to us, now!”

“What?” I snapped.

“What happened?”

I gave myself one more moment to look at Tobin’s worried face and then turned to Secondmage. “You invoked the summoning and somehow…” My voice broke. I tried again. “Somehow I’ve ended up with Xan,
and
Meldov,
and
the wraith.”

“You what? Who? Impossible.”

I clenched my fist in my hair. “Tell them.”

“Your imagination, perhaps. Overwrought, confused.”

“Not likely.”

“But that’s impossible.”

In my mind, I heard the wraith’s delighted laughter, and Xan’s deep voice.

“Well, they’re in there. The wraith said… it said, ‘second chance.’” I pulled on my hair. The pain was real and present, on my scalp and not somewhere off inside my mind.

“This is the same wraith that took Meldov?”

I stared at Secondmage. “You know about that?” Had I shared that secret with them? And not remembered?

“I told them,” Tobin said painfully. “I had to. You were unconscious for over ten minutes. They were trying to guess why. It seemed like the time to explain. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged a shoulder. “It’s done. You were trying to help.” But I felt angry and very naked in every way, in front of this audience. I turned away from him and said, “Now I have all three of them in my skull.”

“But there’s no focus for them.” Secondmage leaned as close to the circle as he dared to get. “You have nothing on your person, correct? No objects beyond the necklace? No rings, toe rings, ear studs, nothing?”

“Nothing.” The wraith’s laughter was getting closer and I let go of my hair to wrap my arm around my middle. “I swear. I’m not stupid. I understood the reasoning. I have nothing.”

“It makes no sense.” Secondmage’s tone became dispassionate, like a lecturer. It made me angry, but in a way, that anger anchored me here, listening and not floating off into the grey.

“Even if the necklace had gained secondary significance for some other spirit, it can hardly have been important to Sorcerer Meldov. He didn’t visit the palace, and that necklace was locked away in one of the vaults, until we went looking for a piece of the right vintage.”

“In any case,” Thirdmage said, “We’ve used it more than once before. If it had the pull to bring in another ghost, we’d have noticed. Definitely if it could hook a revenant spirit like a wraith. We’d never have missed that.”

“It can’t be the necklace,” Secondmage concurred. “Which means you should be able to at least get Chief Xan out of your head, by sending that focus out of the circle as planned.”

“Not yet!” I pressed my arm harder against my stomach. “If any of them are on my side, it’s Xan.”

“He’s hillfolk. Surely Meldov…”

“This is Meldov’s fault in the first place! And he just stands there.” I dragged in a ragged breath. “He stands there and the wraith touches him. He lets it touch him.”

Behind me, Tobin breathed, “Oh, Lyon.”

I didn’t turn. Secondmage said, “We have to be logical about this. The laws of the working cannot be broken. There must be a focus. Something you ate…? Unlikely. You didn’t swallow a coin for luck, or any such superstitious nonsense?”

“Of course not.”

“A tattoo?” Thirdmage suggested. “Perhaps with bespelled ink? It would take a lot of ink to be a focus, but I suppose it could be done.”

“No tattoo.” I clutched my wrist. The throbbing in my broken finger was matched by the bounding heat under my fingers. “But… how about a burn? A brand?”

“I don’t see how,” Thirdmage said. “There must be a physical token to serve. A brand, even if a metaphysically significant one, has no physicality. It is only your flesh, shaped to another’s will perhaps, but not an object.”

“How was the brand done?” Secondmage asked. “Was it Meldov’s doing?”

“He was the wraith then,” I said. Secrets were a lost cause, here bound in a circle of light while the undead gibbered their amusement in my brain. “He… I don’t remember.” I tried to think back. It was hazy, unreal… the burn on my wrist, the look in the wraith’s eyes. “He pressed his thumb to my skin.”

“His
thumb
? Was it true magic then? Surely not.”

I rubbed hard across the thick irregular scars. “I don’t remember. He put his thumb there. It burned, deep and black and clear. His symbol on my skin.” I rubbed faster. “I guess I thought it was magic.”

“How about acid?”

“What?”

“Aqua regia? A solution perhaps, painted on.”

“I don’t know.”

“Did it burn, or perhaps bubble?”

“I didn’t… I don’t remember. The wraith spoke to me. It held me for a while. When I looked down at my arm, the brand was deep and set. Clean edges, but swollen around it. Like he’d set his heated seal ring there, but I saw no ring.”

“Was his hand bare or gloved? Do you remember?”

I tried hard to think. The wraith and the ghosts were silent for a moment, but they pressed against me. Hot/dry/warm/sticky/cold too much there, too close. “Maybe gloves.”

Secondmage turned to the Third. “A powdered metal solution in the acid? Or perhaps a thin carrier coin, for the edges of the burn to be sharp? The bookbinders in Anthay used to use acid stamps to mark the leather bindings of their books. It would have had to be finely judged, in the amount of acid and the delivery. Or perhaps simply a heated coin pressed deep, although that would be harder to deliver and control.”

“You think it could have been done that way?” Tobin demanded.

Secondmage said, “Show me your wrist.”

I held it up for him, all the wreckage of tight-drawn tendons and thick scars and the thin parallel lines of my despair. I had nothing left to hide now. Except maybe that knife, drawn in desperation across Meldov’s throat. That I still held back.

Secondmage peered at me through the circle. “You destroyed the markings on purpose?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I burned over it.”

“Not cut it away?”

“No.” I’d had one moment of free will, and one tool before me. How could I have known? Would it have made a difference? Could I have spared myself a decade of nightmares by cutting it free?

“That’s it then.” Secondmage looked pleased to have solved the puzzle. “I would bet that somewhere in there, under the surface scar, there’s something metallic that was used to create the burn. Something still present in your flesh and strong enough to bring Meldov to you. And the wraith followed along. Or perhaps the other way around. It makes sense.”

“So what do I
do
?”

“The only chance I can see is to do the same thing we planned for Xan. Toss the focus out to the balance point and as soon as the spirits separate from you, collapse the working. Banish them, and leave you standing.”

“But the focus is
in
me.”

“You’ll have to get it out.”

There was a moment of shocked silence all around, and then Tobin’s snarl was the loudest. “What are you saying?”

Secondmage shrugged, although I thought his attempt to look unconcerned failed. “There’s no other way.
If,
mind you, this is truth and not some crazed fear, brought on by Sorcerer Lyon’s admittedly difficult past.
We
cannot, after all, see these new spirits.”

I
hated
that for just a moment everyone looked at me with speculation, even Tobin. I managed to say, “Test the power equation. You should be able to tell how much weight is in your circle,
if
you know what you’re doing.”

Thirdmage had the grace to look abashed, but Secondmage, damn his eyes, went ahead and pushed more power into the binding while I waited. “Well, young man,” he said after a few minutes. “It seems you have indeed caught an undead spirit.”

I wanted to say
“I told you so”
but I didn’t have
time
for that. “So tell me again what to do.”

“You’ll have to locate the focus in your wrist, get it free, and get it out of the circle into the balance point.”

“Cut it out of me.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

To my surprise, it was the guard captain who said, “That’s asking a lot. Setting a knife to your own flesh is hard. I’ve known hardened soldiers who let an arrowhead fester because they were shot while scouting alone and couldn’t bear to cut it out. There’s no way for us to help him?”

“Nothing can cross the circle right now, except in the order and the manner we’ve designed it for. We might kill Sorcerer Lyon, or worse yet, set loose the wraith.”

“Worse yet,” Tobin sneered.

I said, “Yes.” Which silenced him.

They all watched as I pressed the fingers of my left hand over my wrist. I could feel the lumps and ridges, the marks of pain over pain. And in the center, as I’d always been able to feel it, the round dense scar that had been the wraith’s mark. Maybe still was. I said, “If it’s still there,” and had to pause to fight a surge of nausea. “If it is, then why did the burning help me get free last time?”

Secondmage said, “Maybe you warped it, changed it enough to alter its function as a spell equation. Not enough to get rid of it. Does it matter right now? Time is getting shorter.”

I glanced at him, hearing strain in his voice, and saw a fine sheen of sweat on his face. I realized that holding containment on three contentious spirits, in a working designed for one calm one, was probably demanding a lot of energy. Most of which would come from him as the prime sorcerer. And dawn would be approaching outside. I picked up the knife. Put it down again. Took a fast breath.

Tobin said quietly, “At least I finally see a good side to your favorite old pastime.”

I glanced at him, startled, and he drew the tips of two fingers across his own wrist. Heat and then cold washed over me. He was right. This was nothing I hadn’t done a dozen times. Perhaps a hundred. It would just be… a bit more.

I sat up straighter, and picked up the knife. My hand was steady. I laid my wrist upon my knee, the straining tendons up, a familiar, oh so familiar pose. Slowly I breathed, centering myself in that dispassionate place where a drop of blood rolling free across my skin was art and release and opportunity, not pain. Then I set the tip of the blade at the edge of that old spot, and pressed in.

At first, I felt almost nothing. The tissue there was thick and dead and there wasn’t even any bleeding. I traced a circle around where the brand had been, wide enough to encompass it, and saw the white and purple skin part open under the blade. A second circle, and now red droplets welled behind the knife, forming a thin trickle down my hand. Still no pain.

None in my wrist. In my head though, the wraith screamed, and its voice went through my skull like jagged glass. I dropped the knife and clapped hands over my ears. It did nothing to shut out that sound. My ears grated into my skull, burrowing deep, my brain seemed liquid, churning, incapable.