The Creatures of Man (36 page)

"How much does our success depend upon the sorceress?" asked Basdon.

"Heavily. She attended the last Great Assembly, nigh fifty years ago, in Oliber, and knows the location of things. You and I alone would be hard pressed even to find the city, so complete has been the destruction thereabouts by the worshippers. And it would be dangerous indeed to ask directions of the locals."

Basdon nodded. "Oliber-by-Midsea is called a city of evil by the god-warriors. Evil is supposed to still linger about the ruins, and infect the countryside for miles around."

"The place has been cursed, all right," agreed Jonker, "but not by my kind of magic, as the worshippers believe."

The day's ride was pleasant, for men and horses alike. Nenkunal had been fortunate in that the inroads of the coming age had been slower here than in most regions Basdon had traversed. The abundant crops in the fields they rode past were ample evidence that the farmers of this land still had the Green Hand. And those tending fields near the trail waved and shouted merrily as the swordsman and magician rode by.

How different they were, Basdon mused, from worshipper farmers, who struggled to the point of exhaustion and surliness for meager and withered harvests. The new age was going to know much of hunger, he told himself glumly.

That night they were put up in the home of a merchant, in a village too small to boast an inn. The next day they rode on toward the cottage of the sorceress Haslil.

The land over which they passed was steepening, with field crops giving way to orchards and the distance between dwellings growing. By midafternoon the hills were small mountains, tangled with timber.

Jonker suddenly reined his mare to a halt and dismounted, waving Basdon to do the same.

"What is it?" asked the swordsman. "We're not there, are we?"

"Haslil's cottage is perhaps a hundred yards ahead, beyond that turn in the trail," said Jonker in a low, tense voice. "But there is trouble."

"God-warriors?" asked Basdon.

Jonker shook his head. "If they were here, they would be everywhere. No, I believe it's a necromancer."

A slight shift of the breeze caused Basdon to sniff the air. "I smell dog odor."

"Black-spellers often house enslaved spirits in dogs," said Jonker. "If we approach it must be on foot. Weredogs would panic the horses."

Basdon answered the implied question by tying his mount's reins to a sapling. Jonker nodded and did likewise. "If we must fight the dogs, try to make your blows fatal. That is the greatest kindness that can be done to a spirit trapped in an animal body." The magician drew his rod from the saddle pack, gripped it and tested its point lightly against the palm of his hand. He sighed, "It lacks the power of old, but it should serve."

"Nothing has cast a shadow on this," replied Basdon, drawing his sword.

They moved forward silently, around the bend in the trail and into view of the sorceress' cottage. The breeze still favored them and they walked on. They were within twenty yards of the door when the dogs took note of them and poured baying from their shelter beneath a porch.

There were eight of the murderously miserable brutes, all of them boar-hunters as large as wolves and armed with vicious teeth.

The two men halted, backs together and weapons poised alertly for the onslaught.

The weredogs skidded to a halt just out of reach and formed a semicircle, leaving the trail behind the men open.

One of them whined, "Avaunt, sirs! You are trespassers here!"

"How is your master called?" demanded Jonker.

"He is called Master," replied the dog. "Begone, or we will feed on your fat belly."

Jonker grunted in annoyance. "Your master is the trespasser here," he snapped. "Now move aside. Once he is properly dealt with, I'll do what I can to free you from your misery."

The dogs conferred among themselves in growls and whimpers in which few words could be distinguished.

"We do our Master's bidding," said the one that had spoken before. He bared his fangs. "Begone, and quickly!"

"We will deal with your master," Jonker replied stubbornly.

With that the pack attacked. Basdon skewered one that came leaping at his throat, and took a tearing bite in the thigh before he could free his blade and slash through the neck of the brute clinging there. The severed head clung to his leg for several moments before falling to the ground. Having learned the folly of thrusting from that beginning, Basdon kept his blade free, guarding himself with quick slashes. A canine howl of terminal dismay behind him let him know the magician's rod was producing dire results.

Then he was too busy to give a thought to Jonker as the remaining dogs concentrated their assault on him.

His blade flashed and sliced repeatedly, blood coursing down its length to spray away from the point on every swing. He was aware of having one squirming monster trapped, his boot firmly on its neck, for what seemed to be an age while waiting for a spare instant in which to dispatch it. The neck gave a convulsive heave and the squirming ended, and Basdon guessed the magician had eliminated that nuisance for him.

The battle was over as suddenly as it started. Every weredog was either dead or mortally wounded, and Jonker moved among the latter giving them the coup de grace while Basdon, now aware of the pain in his thigh, sat on the red-speckled grass and pressed his hand against the wound.

Jonker took note, made an adjustment in his rod, and hurried to the swordsman's side. "Move your hand," he ordered. "I'll cauterize the wound until it can be properly cured. We must hurry!"

Basdon slowly eased his blood-covered hand away, and yelped with anguish as the rod made searing contact. He blinked the tears out of his eyes and saw the torn flesh was no longer bleeding.

He came to his feet, ignoring the pain, and followed Jonker toward the house. The magician hit the front door with rod and boot at the same time, and the door slammed open. He waddled through. Basdon darted in to stand at his side, dripping sword ready for further action.

"Ah, so it's you, Laestarp," Jonker was saying conversationally. "Even in the old days your ethics were dubious. So it has come to this."

He was facing, across the room, a string-bearded magician in a filthy robe, a man who impressed Basdon at first as being abnormally tall, but after an instant he realized the man was merely abnormally thin.

This apparition-like black-speller grinned maliciously. "Ah, Norjek the Fat," he sneered, calling Jonker by what Basdon guessed was his companion's real name. "More ungainly than ever, I see. And in low company if my Art does not mistake me, which it seldom does. A renegade god-warrior, no less."

"Where is Haslil?" Jonker rapped, with no jollity at all.

Laestarp made a grimace of mock regret. "It is sad, but the old girl's soul is now in the care of magicians greater than ourselves," he said piously. "Presumably she knew you were coming, and that gave her the will to be stubborn to the end. She would not bend to my superior power, and as it happens in such unfortunate cases, she broke at last, while you were tormenting my poor servants outside."

The black-speller moved a few cautious steps, keeping his eyes on Jonker, and drew a curtain from in front of a bed nook. The withered, half-naked body of a crone lay there.

"As you can see," Laestarp added, "her spirit has taken its leave, despite my efforts to restrain it here."

"You are a fool, Laestarp," said Jonker. "An overeducated fool."

Laestarp shrugged. "One does as best one can with his abilities, in a world that grows less perfect with each day. But as you can see, good colleague, whatever errand brought you here has come to naught. You need not linger. I will tend to the crone's proper burning, along with that of my cruelly dispatched servants. Let us hope not to meet again, Norjek, as we both seem destined to lose tragically when we encounter."

Jonker's shoulders drooped and he glanced at Basdon. "The harm is done past mending," he muttered. "We may as well return home."

Basdon was cold with anger, and his aching leg did nothing to improve his mood. Before him stood the stereotype of the vile Ungodly Magician, the villain he had been taught to hate as a youthful worshipper, but the like of which he had not previously met in Nenkunal.

"And leave this scum infesting the earth?" he gritted.

"His power to do harm is minimal, now that his dogs are gone," shrugged Jonker, "and the universal geas is now too strong for him to enslave other spirits. Let him live."

Basdon frowned in frustration, but he realized that Jonker had more understanding than he.

"Very well. But you mentioned a small granddaughter of the sorceress . . ."

"Oh, yes," nodded Jonker, "I'd forgotten, the child. We must see her into proper fosterage. Where is the child, Laestarp?"

The black-speller had paled. "Perhaps in the kitchen," he said with a show of unconcern. "Don't trouble yourselves with her, good men. I will see her into kindly keeping when the burnings are done."

Jonker studied him for a long moment. Then he sighed. "You are too filled with sly intrigues to read well, Laestarp. But some things are obvious, and others I can guess. Among the former is that you have not the air of a man whose hopes have been confounded. Whatever your purpose here was, you still hope to accomplish it. And the purpose I can guess at. We will have the grandchild, or we will have you dead!"

"Oh, come-come, good colleague!" Laestarp half-whined. "Enough ill has been done this day! Don't irk me by refusing my kindly inclination to let you depart in peace."

"We will have the grandchild," Jonker repeated firmly.

Laestarp looked from one grim face to the other, then smiled. "You are not an easy man to deceive, Norjek. The child is dead, too, but through no deed of mine. It was one of the strange new pestilences that struck her down. I hesitated to tell you this, fearing that in your present mood you would blame her death on me."

"The child is not dead," said Jonker.

"But . . . but . . ."

Jonker gestured to Basdon. "You were right, swordsman. Slay him while I counter his Art."

Basdon moved forward.

"Good men!"
screeched Laestarp. "I will gladly share with you the trove by the Midsea! There is plenty there for each of us, and—"

Basdon's sword cut his plea short, and the black-speller's body, nearly decapitated by the stroke, fell lifeless to the floor.

"Now you will suffer as you've inflicted, necromancer!" Jonker said in a loud voice.

"He didn't hear you," said Basdon, wiping his blade on a drapery.

"He heard," Jonker replied. "I must find the child." He waddled swiftly across the room and through a door. Basdon started to follow, then decided his help was not sufficiently needed to keep him on his injured leg. He went to the bed nook, tossed the crone's body off onto the floor, and lay down in her place.

His last thought was that he wouldn't have dreamed of treating a dead body with such seeming disrespect while he had remained a worshipper. But a body, after the spirit had departed, was merely so much meat . . .

He fell asleep . . . and had nightmares about dead bodies that were far more than so much meat.

The smell of food woke him. He sat up and saw it was night. The room was lit by a couple of candles, and Jonker was putting plates on a table.

Basdon moved to the edge of the bed. He saw his leg had been bandaged, and there was no pain in it. Jonker grinned at him.

"Let's eat, swordsman. Then we have some work to do." The magician nodded toward the two bodies on the floor.

Basdon stood up and walked to the table, noticing only a mild sensation of weakness in his leg. "Did you find the child?" he asked.

Jonker nodded. "She's sleeping now. It's best that she remain so until we clean up the gore a bit."

"Then Laestarp did not harm her?"

Jonker frowned as he filled his plate. "Frankly, Basdon, I'm not sure what he did to her. She was in a geas-daze when I found her in one of the back rooms. I brought her out of it, and questioned her, but she could tell me little. All indications are that she's been grossly geased, but I don't know to what purpose. Nor can I break the geas."

"I thought that one magician's geas could be broken by another," the swordsman remarked, puzzled.

"In the old days that was true," replied Jonker, shaking his head, "but now . . . well, when a geas is superimposed on a spirit already afflicted by universal necromancy, the two entrapments frequently interweave, and the stronger lends its strength to the weaker. That seems to be what's happened to the child Eanna."

"You mean she's a worshipper?"

"So her words and concerns indicate," Jonker said sadly.

"Poor kid," said Basdon.

"But despite her affliction, she can guide us to Oliber-by-Midsea, in her grandmother's stead."

"But how could a mere child . . . ?"

"Her grandmother trained her for it. Maybe the old girl suspected that something would keep her from going, or maybe it was her way of entertaining the child. Haslil, as I believe I told you, was able to see minds at a distance. Also, under correct conditions she could show her mind to another. She spent many hours showing little Eanna how she traveled to Oliber as a young woman, and some of the things she saw in that city. The child knows the way as well as if she'd been there."

The magician sighed and pushed his plate away. "It is too bad, I suppose, that Laestarp didn't know this about Eanna far sooner. Then perhaps he would merely have stolen the child instead of torturing the old woman to death in an effort to make her cooperate."

"What was Laestarp after, anyway?" Basdon asked.

"Power," shrugged Jonker. "Some of the talismans lost in Oliber should still have fair potency in trained hands. I suppose Laestarp would have succeeded in setting himself up somewhere as a . . . a . . . what is that word for a speaker among worshippers?"

"You mean a priest?"

"That's the word. Laestarp probably saw himself as a sort of super-priest, demi-magician, taking control of some backward region, and perhaps going on from there. Many such will arise during the coming centuries, as talismans are accidentally unearthed here and there and put to clumsy use. Most such discoveries will be destroyed, however. The worshipers and god-warriors seem intent on leaving no trace of the Age of Magic in existence, either on or under the earth."