The Western Wizard (9 page)

The second sentry passed around the bend, and another appeared as he did, their succession impeccable. Garn frowned, aware he would need to call upon the same timing and intuition that had kept him alive in the gladiator pit. At first, he cursed the guards’ fastidiousness. Then, almost as quickly, he realized it would make their patterns predictable which might work to his advantage.

A moist breeze blew wisps of fog across the stars, obscuring them. All but blinded by darkness, Garn edged closer, counting footsteps as the sentries made each pass. He watched, assessing with a hunter’s patience, as the clouds thickened in the heavens. Lightning flared, revealing the nearest sentry. Thunder boomed between the granite crags. Suddenly, rain pelted from the heavens,
soaking Garn. He welcomed the storm’s cover.
One, two, now.
Garn sprinted for the wall. A second flash sputtered, then lit the sky like day, revealing him.
Damn!
Garn ran on, head low. As he came to the wall, he skidded to a stop, whirling and pressing his back to the stone. Beneath his own stifled panting, he heard the uninterrupted slap of feet above his head.

As the sentry passed, Garn turned, seeking irregularities in the wall that could serve as handholds. Finding many, he climbed, fully attuned to the positions of the sentries. One retreated toward the bend, and another approached. Hugging the wall, Garn kept his face buried in the stone to muffle his breathing, tasting mossy dampness. Cold seemed to penetrate his hands, making them ache. Rain slicked the granite, forcing him to gouge his fingers into stone. Again, lightning split the clouds. Garn held his breath. He had given up on gods and prayer as his months in cages and pits stretched to years. Now fully displayed by the storm, he placed his faith in luck; and, apparently, it did not fail him. A booted foot touched the wall a hand’s breadth from his nose. When it passed, Garn flung himself across and over the ramparts, prepared to roll on the ground below. He plummeted.

Garn snapped off a gasp, nearly biting through his tongue. Thorns clawed his face. A branch pierced his arm and splintered. He landed hard in a tangle of shrubs, wood snapping in a widening path beneath him. Incensed by pain, Garn gritted his teeth and lay motionless, preferring the stab of limbs to a guard’s spear.

A sentry shouted from above in Béarnese. “Who’s there?”

Raised on the Western trading tongue, Garn had only learned a spattering of Béarnese in the last few months. This challenge, he understood. He dared not move.

“Who’s there?” The voice became gruffer with repetition. Footfalls thumped in the courtyard, and another guard answered from the ground. “What’s the problem?”

“Thein!” called the sentry on the wall.

A third sentry answered from the ground, a few yards to Garn’s right. “You call me?”

“There’s something in those bushes. Something big.”

Garn pursed his lips, tasting blood.

Boughs crackled. A spear darted toward him. He shied back as far as he dared, and the point became tangled in the brush. The guard tugged, sending the branches into a rattling dance. He pulled harder, and the tip came free in a wash of leaves and twigs. Suddenly, a cat burst from the shrubs, howling in rage as it raced into the night.

Startled, Garn stiffened, his sinews clamping into a rigid, painful spasm that, mercifully, passed quickly. Thein shouted words Garn did not understand, clearly profanities by his tone. Apparently, either Garn’s fall had stunned the cat or fear had held it immobile until the spear had shaken it free. For the first time in more than a decade, Garn seriously contemplated the existence of gods.

“Thein?” The sentry on the wall prodded his companion.

“One of the princess’s stupid cats,” Thein yelled back.

“You sure?” The wall guard sounded skeptical.

“I know what a cat looks like.” Lightning flashed, revealing a burly guard in Béarnian blue, staring at his hand, his shield propped against his hip. “Damn animal clawed me.” Spear butt dragging in the mud, Thein shuffled back to his post.

Thunder slammed against Garn’s ears, then faded into a rolling grumble. Apparently, the wall guard could not see through the twined branches that had closed over Garn. The gentle splash of his feet signaled that he, too, had resumed his vigil.

Garn sagged, waiting until his heart rate slowed and the sentries had fully turned their attention from the brush. Then, he freed himself from the jabbing branches, using thunder to hide the rustle of his movements. In the flashes of lightning, he glimpsed trees and outbuildings that did not fit Sterrane’s description. Distant spying had already revealed that the crafted castle grounds had grown, the old wall had been dismantled and a new one carved to enclose more of the surrounding valley. In the nearly two decades since Béarn’s heir had escaped his uncle’s purgings, details of the castle and its courtyard had changed as well. Garn hoped desperately that Sterrane’s escape passage had survived, though its exit now
lay within the repositioned and restructured fortifications.

Once free of the bushes, Garn followed them and the wall eastward, skirting the castle’s few lit windows. Wind stung, numbly cold against his sodden tunic. He used each branching bolt of lightning to define the location of the sentries and tried to spot the ancient ash that Sterrane had called the “tree of life.”

The brush grew denser until, at length, Garn was forced to crawl. Mud and thorns stung his cut knees, but the thick brambles hid him from the courtyard guards, and the springy green vines made little noise with movement. Bruised and wet, Garn cursed Sterrane. From the courtyard, the new wall towered higher than they had anticipated. He saw little chance of slipping past the wall sentries a second time to escape, and too many battles lay ahead. The steady patter of rain seemed to mock him, a lone soldier against the defenses of the West’s high kingdom.

It never occurred to Garn to surrender. Time and again, Santagithi’s guards had shoved him into the gladiator pit to face adversaries who, under other circumstances, would have been strangers, acquaintances, or friends. Then, he had focused on the freedom that would one day become his and the woman whom he would one day marry. Survival had become his religion. And, once too familiar, despair became a stranger.

Lightning arched above the castle spires, etching a dark ash tree from the gloom, less than a yard ahead. Irrationally afraid he might lose it in the blackness, Garn sprang for it. Bark scraped skin from his fingers. A low moan of thunder sputtered and died.

Garn groped along the weathered trunk. His palm calluses grated against bark, then caught on the rim of a small hole. His fingers sank into wood chips and fur. Lightning flared. Fully revealed, Garn bit off an oath and dug furiously through the burrow, seeking some sign of the promised door, secured by inner hinges. A fingernail snapped against metal. Garn sucked air through his teeth. It required effort to shift the ancient, rusted latch, but the door yielded with a creak of corroded hinges. Swiftly,
Garn ducked into the opening and pulled it closed behind him.

Blindly, Garn drew the tinderbox and dagger from his pockets and a torch from his belt. He slashed the dagger across flint, scattering sparks. These met the wet torch and died.
Damn!
Garn used the unsharpened edge of his dagger to scratch wax from the torch head and then tried again. This time, the pitch sputtered feebly, then lit. The wax made a soft hiss. Garn headed down the passageway.

Rats fled like shadows before the torchlight. The semicircle of light revealed intricate carvings on the walls, blackened in patches from dampness and partially obscured by moss. Masters of stone craft, the Béarnides had sculpted the castle and its city from the mountain. Yet, despite their skill and the solidity of their materials, Garn wondered if a path so old could withstand time. He tried to imagine innocent, naive Sterrane as a child, fleeing through a damp, rat-infested tunnel with the screams of his mother, six siblings, and the most loyal guards and servants echoing behind him. Garn shivered at the pictures his mind conjured, marveling at how Sterrane had remained so innocent and gentle after such a tragedy.

Garn continued, the dense silence of the tunnel revising his conception of Sterrane’s escape. More likely, buried beneath thicknesses of stone, he had heard nothing of the battle. Still, regardless of how much or little Sterrane had directly witnessed, the fact remained that he had lost his family, all of them at once. At one time, before the birth of Garn’s own child, the significance of such a disaster would have been lost on him. His own father was a skilled gladiator who, offered freedom, had chosen the pit and died there. A scullery maid beaten and abandoned by her own parents, Garn’s mother paid him little heed. At the request of Garn’s father, Captain Rache had raised Garn, though little more than a child himself. But that relationship had degenerated into hatred the day Rache had helped capture Garn so that Santagithi could sentence him to life in a cage.

As always, bitterness welled up in Garn, accompanied by rage. He suppressed his wrath with the mental control to which Colbey had steered him more than a year ago. His thoughts returned to Sterrane, and he could not help
but wonder how Béarn’s heir had managed to escape the hot, vengeful malice that had at times driven Garn to madness and volcanic violence, even against his friends. With Rache’s death had come a control, though not for the reasons Garn had expected. Now, Garn sincerely hoped he could fulfill Rache’s dying request, wished that he could raise Rache’s child better than Rache had raised Garn.

The passage ended abruptly. With a vicious curse, Garn threw back his dark, dripping hair and assessed the presumed cave-in he would need to clear to complete his journey. Wedging the torch in the crevice of a carving, he drew his dagger and chopped at the moss. Dirt peeled from the surface, then the dagger rasped against rocks, uncovering an etching of a spitted deer. Rather than a collapsed barricade of rubble, Garn had discovered the far wall of the tunnel. Replacing the dagger, he grabbed the torch, raising it to the ceiling. Cracks formed a square hatchway, with a central hole. Once, Garn guessed, a rope had graced the middle section, the hemp now rotted away.

Garn extinguished his torch, groping for the hatch in darkness. Sterrane’s description and Shadimar’s magic had revealed that the doorway would open into the room of a young girl who Sterrane could not identify. The brief research they had managed to do suggested that the child was Morhane’s granddaughter.

Sterrane had also warned Garn that the closed hatch fell flush with the floor and could not be pried open from inside the castle, thwarting pursuit. Decades ago, Sterrane’s eldest brother had slept in this room, with the panel wedged open but hidden. Sterrane had come upon the hatch by accident. Unable to justify his jaunt into his brother’s room and fearing the elder boy’s wrath, he had never mentioned his find. On the day of Morhane’s attack, Béarn’s oldest prince had been away from his room. Sterrane alone had escaped, pulling the hatch closed so that Morhane’s men could not have followed, even had they known of the tunnel’s existence. At that time, the ash tree exit had stood just outside the castle wall. Now, the damp, rodent-filled darkness confirmed Shadimar’s
claim that only the king, his heir, his most trusted bodyguard, and the Eastern Wizard knew about the route.

Light diffused through the crack. Hearing nothing, Garn poked his head into a room dimly illuminated by a single candle. Despite the gloom, rich furnishings struck a vivid contrast to the moldering plainness of the hidden tunnel. Multihued streamers dangled from the ceiling. Across the room, a simplistic pastel rendition of an animal-crowded forest encompassed an entire wall. To Garn’s right, a shelf held a line of thin books with Béarnese titles and a silver mug. On a bed to his left, a child huddled beneath a finely-woven blanket. Wisps of sable hair spread across the pillow.

From long years of habit, Garn listened to the child’s breathing, hearing the deep, slow regularity that indicated sleep. No other sound reached him. Quietly, Garn hooked his fingers through the crack and hoisted himself through the hatch, using his shoulders and back to support the door. As he eeled his legs through the opening, he twisted to catch a grip on the panel. The wood-lined stone slipped beneath his breeks. His grab fell short. Fear touched Garn as the hatchway slammed toward closing. Desperate, he thrust his left hand for the opening. The door crashed onto his knuckles, causing pain that momentarily incapacitated him. Garn hissed, choking off a cry.

The sleeper stirred. Her breaths quickened and went shallow.

Grasping his spent torch, Garn worked an end beneath the hatch, levering it open far enough to free his fingers. He left the torch in place to brace the hatch. Redness washed across his fingers, threatening a long, ugly bruise. He bit his lip, waiting for the agony to ebb.

The child rolled toward him. Black hair framed a round, olive-skinned face.

Garn froze, shielding the entryway with his body. Seeing no place to hide, he chose silence instead. The knife slid into his hand.

The girl’s lids parted to reveal dark eyes. They rolled briefly, then she looked directly at Garn. “
Noca?
” She used the Béarnese word for “grandfather.” She sat up,
the fur trim of her sleeping gown ending in a jumble at her thighs. She looked no more than five or six years old.

The ache in Garn’s fingers receded enough for him to drive it from his mind. He knew pain too well to let it steal his concentration when matters of consequence needed handling. It joined the background throb of his knees and the branch-stabbed bruises that peppered his body. He rose from his crouch, the dagger hidden, couched against his wrist. The steel felt cold and solid on his flesh, and the child looked small, no threat to his venture. Still, she only needed to cry out once to bring Morhane’s guards, to cause Garn’s execution, and to see to it that Sterrane never returned to his throne. Garn had hated the murder that Santagithi’s guards had forced him to commit in the pit, and the idea of harming a child seemed an evil too repulsive to contemplate.
What must be done must be done.
Garn grimaced at the thought.
Damn! Why did she have to wake so easily.
Stalling the inevitable, he spoke. “Hello,” he said in his best Béarnese, his voice sounding thick after the long silence. “Who are you?”