Siege of Macindaw (19 page)

"Stay back, I warn you!" he called. But now a series of red flashes and flares ran through the trees, circling the clearing, throwing huge, twisted shadows across the small open space, shadows that were there and then gone in an instant. And as this happened, they heard Serthrek'nish speak for the first time, his voice deep, resonant and blood-chilling.

" The flames have died. The power of the circles is weak. I will have the blood of one of you."

One of the Skandians went to rise, battleax ready in his hand, but Malkallam's outstretched hand stopped him before he had gone above a crouch.

"Stay where you are, you fool!" his voice cracked like a whip. "He says he wants one and one only. He can have the Scotti."

"No-o-o-o-o-o!" MacHaddish's cry was high-pitched and agonized. To the Skandians, the demonic red face was a terrifying apparition. But to MacHaddish, it lay at the very heart of terror. It was the basis of all fear for Scottis, instilled in them when they were children. The flesh eater, the renderer, the tearer of limbs – Serthrek'nish was all these things and more. It was the demon, the ultimate evil in Scotti superstition. Serthrek'nish didn't just kill his victims. He stole their souls and their very being, feeding on them to make himself stronger. If Serthrek'nish had your soul, there was no hereafter, no peace at the end of the long mountain road.

And there was no memory of the victim either, for if a person were taken by Serthrek'nish, his family were compelled to expunge all memory of him from their minds.

With Malkallam's words, MacHaddish knew he was not facing just a terrible death. He was facing a forever of nothing. He looked up now into the implacable face as the wizard stepped toward him.

"No," he pleaded. "Please. Spare me this."

But the blackthorn rod had moved out and begun to scrub an opening in the circle of black powder that surrounded

MacHaddish.

Frantically, MacHaddish tried to restore it, pushing the powder back into place with his hand, but his efforts only succeeded in widening the gap. His breath sobbed in his throat, and tears of abject terror scored a path through the blue paint on his face.

Then the face reappeared in the mist, seeming to be more clearly defined now. It flickered, faded and disappeared again.

MacHaddish looked up at the wizard's painted face. All traces of the proud, unbending Scotti general were gone now.

"Please?" he said. And the staff stopped its work.

Malkallam paused. "No," he said impassively.

MacHaddish, already on his knees, now bent forward until his forehead touched the ground – making sure that he remained within the circle, Will noted.

"I'll give you anything," he said. "Anything you ask. Just keep the demon away."

Malkallam's staff moved toward the thin black line once more, touching it, stirring the grains of black powder that marked it out, slowly separating them, deliberately working to form a breach in the circle. The general watched the tip of the staff at work, watched his safe haven slowly being scraped away.

"Please?" he said, in a voice that was cracking with fear.

The staff stopped moving.

" Tell me," Malkallam said in a deliberate voice, "what are you planning with Keren?"

MacHaddish looked up quickly, suspicion mixed with fear on his face as he heard the terms. He had expected something else from the wizard – a demand for riches or power or both. Information was the one thing he hadn't expected Malkallam to ask for.

"It's a simple question," Malkallam continued. "Tell me what you have planned."

In spite of the terror that gripped his insides, the discipline MacHaddish had learned over long years as a warrior and leader reasserted itself. To disclose plans like this was treachery, nothing less. His jaw set in a hard line, and he began to shake his head.

Malkallam's staff begin its inexorable work again, wiping out the circle that protected the Scotti. MacHaddish knew his own folklore. He knew the black circle was his only protection against Serthrek'nish. He knew that once there was a gap in the circle wide enough for the demon's hand to enter, it would be the end of him.

Serthrek'nish would drag him, screaming, from the circle and into the black night under the trees – and into a greater blackness beyond.

He watched the gap widen. A lifetime of loyalty and discipline struggled with a lifetime of superstition, and superstition won. He reached out and grabbed hold of the tip of the staff, stopping its deliberate movement.

"Tell me what you want to know," he said in a low voice, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

"Your plans for attack," Malcolm said."How many men are coming? When are they going to be here?"

There was no further hesitation from the Scotti. He had committed to betray his trust, and he could see no point in hedging.

"Two hundred men, initially, from the clans MacFrewin, MacKentick and MacHaddish. The commander will be Caleb MacFrewin, warlord of the senior clan."

"And the plan is to occupy Castle Macindaw, then spread out farther into Norgate Fief, correct?"

MacHaddish nodded. "Macindaw will be our anchor point, our stronghold. Once we have neutralized that and occupied it, we can bring more and more men through the passes."

A few meters away, Will and Horace exchanged worried glances. Both knew the potential danger of having an armed force of two hundred men loose in the province. And those two hundred would be just an advance party. Once a foothold was gained, more would follow in their tracks.

It would take a major army to dislodge them, and that army would have to come from the south. It would be months before King Duncan could put a large enough force together and then march them north. By then, the Scottis would be firmly entrenched and it might well prove impossible to drive them back through the passes to the high plains of Picta – particularly if they held Castle Macindaw in strength. If this went unchecked, it could mark the beginning of a long, drawn-out war, with no guarantee of victory for the Araluen forces. You could almost redraw the maps of Araluen and Picta and move the permanent border fifty kilometers to the south.

But most of this they had already guessed. There was one question still remaining that needed answering. And that answer might well hold the key to Norgate's future.

"When?" Malcolm posed the question. This time MacHaddish did hesitate. He knew as well as they did that this was the vital question, and for a moment his loyalty reasserted itself.

But not for long. Malcolm twisted the point of the staff from his grip and moved it toward the thin black line of powder once more.

" Three weeks," MacHaddish said, a note of surrender in his voice. "Three weeks from yesterday. Caleb MacFrewin is already gathering the clans. They're marching to the border now. It will take time for them to get through the few passes that are open and then reassemble into marching order. They'll be at Macindaw in three weeks."

Malcolm stepped back a pace, studying the crouching figure before him. He saw the slumped shoulders, the downcast eyes and the look of defeat. MacHaddish was a broken man, a man who had betrayed his own honor, and Malcolm had no intention of crowing over the fact. Nor did he plan to reveal to MacHaddish that he had been tricked. But that was less because of any sympathy for the man and more because he realized that there might come a time when he needed more information.

"Thank you," he said simply. He took a sack from an inner pocket and bent forward, pouring black powder onto the ground to restore the gaps he had forced in the circle.

Then he walked quickly to the smoldering remains of the fire and threw another handful of powder onto the coals. There was a deep
hoof,
and a vivid yellow flash, and the flames reignited instantly, climbing high into the dark sky above Grimsdell Wood. He looked at the three Skandians, who had watched the proceedings in terrified silence.

"We're safe," he said. "Serthrek'nish can't harm us now."

The tension went out of the Skandians' bodies as he spoke. They gripped their weapons a little less fiercely, although Will noticed that they didn't actually let go of them. Then, from behind Malcolm, they heard an unexpected sound.

MacHaddish was sobbing. But whether from shame or relief, no one could tell.

They spent the rest of the night in the clearing. Throughout the hours of darkness, Malcolm replenished the flames whenever it seemed necessary with the strange chemicals he carried. He was determined to maintain the illusion that he had created for MacHaddish's benefit.

As the first gray light of day crept over the treetops, they climbed stiffly to their feet and headed back to Healer's Clearing. They traveled silently. Even by daylight, Grimsdell was a foreboding place that discouraged idle conversation, and the events of the night before were fresh in all their minds.

There was a general lightening in their collective mood when they finally stepped into the open space that marked Healer's Clearing. The other Skandians called greetings to the three who had accompanied the small party, while the Scotti soldiers looked curiously at their general, who kept his eyes averted from them as he sank to his knees, allowing Trobar to transfer his chain once more to the larger log. The stiffness and pride were gone from MacHaddish's body language. He was a shattered man.

Malcolm, who had wiped off his wizard's makeup and resumed his normal gray robe before they left the clearing, beckoned to Will and Horace as he turned toward his little cottage.

"We'd better talk," he said. "Orman will be anxious to hear the news."

The two young men agreed and followed him to the cottage. As they entered the warm parlor, the healer slumped gratefully into one of his carved wooden armchairs.

"Oh, that's better," he said, the relief obvious in his voice. "I'm getting too old for all this playing around in the forest. You've no idea how exhausting it can be prancing around in high boots pretending to be an evil wizard."

He twisted awkwardly in his seat, grimacing as he favored one side of his back.

" Then Nigel let that flying face get too low and nearly took my head off with it, so I had to duck out of the way. Think I might have ricked my back," he said sourly.

At the sound of their voices, Orman and Xander had appeared from an inner room. Orman looked from one to the other.

"I take it the expedition was a success?" he asked.

Malcolm shrugged, then obviously wished he hadn't, as his back twinged in pain.

"You could say that," Horace answered for him."Malcolm got the names, the numbers and the timetable. Took him less than twenty minutes too," he added admiringly."On top of that, he scared the daylights out of MacHaddish and our Skandian friends."

Malcolm smiled at him. "That's all?"

Horace grinned sheepishly. "As a matter of fact, you made me a little nervous too," he admitted.

"And me," Will added."And I know how most of the illusions are done."

"Well, you're one up on me," Horace told him. "Everything came as a wonderful surprise as far as I was concerned."

" The demon face in the fog – and the giant warrior – they were your normal projection illusions, weren't they?" Will asked Malcolm.

Horace snorted. "Normal!" he muttered under his breath.

Malcolm ignored him and replied to Will's question. He was justifiably proud of the technology he had created to form the illusions, and he couldn't help preening just a little.

" That's right. The fog serves a double purpose. It gives me a kind of screen to project on, but it also dissipates and distorts the projections so they're never seen too clearly. If MacHaddish had got a clear look at them, he might have seen how crude they are. The suggestion is all important. The viewer tends to fill in the empty spaces for himself, and usually he does a far more terrifying job than I could."

"The lights in the trees I've seen before too," Will continued. "After all, we use them when we're signaling Alyss. But the flying face – the one that nearly hit you – how did you manage that?"

"Ah, yes, I was quite pleased with that one. Although it nearly brought us undone. Nigel and I spent most of the afternoon rigging that. He's only seventeen, but he's quite an artist. It was nothing more than a paper lantern with the face inscribed on it in heavy black lines. We mounted it on a fine wire that ran across the clearing. It was invisible in the dark. The idea was it was supposed to swoop down, then disappear into the trees opposite."

"But it... just seemed to fly apart into sparks," Will said.

Malcolm nodded enthusiastically. "Yes, that's another little chemical trick I learned some years back. A combination of sulfur and saltpeter and..." He hesitated. Proud or not, he wasn't willing to share all the details with them."And a bit of this and that," he continued."It creates a compound that burns fiercely or explodes if you contain it."

"It was very effective," Horace said, remembering how the red shape had swooped out of the sky, flashed across the clearing, then dissolved into a shower of flame and sparks in the treetops. "I think it was the final straw for MacHaddish."