Lady Of The Helm (Book 1) (11 page)

Thren took a quick glance over the battlements at the seething mass of invaders flooding into the castle bailey. 
“I doubt we shall live to find out, Captain,” he said bitterly.  “But first let us fire the warning beacon.”  He strode towards the brazier of torches for a flame with which to trigger the beacon.

“Stop!
” Udecht called from the doorway.  “Stop, Thren, you know not what you do.”

“Kill him, Thackery,”the prince commanded.

The aged Captain sprang obediently to his Castellan’s bidding, swinging his sword high for a blow that would cleave the false prelate from shoulder to sternum.  He adjusted his angle of attack mid-flight as the priest dodged to one side, still calling on his nephew to desist.  But Thackery’s blow never fell. Unexpected and unlooked for, Kimbolt had stepped from the Bishop’s shadow, his levelled sword driven deep into the veteran captain’s chest.  Slowly the older man slipped to his knees, his eyes staring into the face of his old friend.  With his last breath, the word “why?” pushed past his lips and then he was gone.

Thren torch in hand, took a stride towards the channel of oil that led into the heart of the beacon pyre, but hesitated at the false Udecht’s voice.  “Do this Thren and your
death will be long and painful, yet follow me and I will plead for you with my Master.  He can be merciful and I am especially favoured in his councils.  A man like you could earn much power in his service, as I have done.”

The torch dropped from Thren’s fingers.  He bowed his head, an abject figure.  Grinning, Xander in Udecht’s form took a step towards him, and in a trice Thren was upon him.  The sword of his fathers humming as it swung towards the false prelate’s skull.  Udecht fell backwards, muttering in panicked haste, “sum defensus.”  A glowing shield of light and colo
ur appeared between priest and Castellan, which rang like a bell as Thren’s sword crashed into it.  Under cover of the scintillating disc, Xander scrabbled backwards.  “Kimbolt!” he cried but the Captain was motionless, kneeling by Thackery’s body.

Again, Thren struck, and this time the conjured shield shatter
ed in a shower of sparks.  The Prince raised his sword for the final blow while Xander cowered in the shadow of the battlements.  But then Thren stopped.  Xander had heard it too, running footsteps on the stairs close at hand.  Thren cursed at succumbing to distraction for purely personal motives of revenge.

As outlanders poured into the tower, h
e skipped across the stone, grabbed the torch and leapt onto the battlements.  One hirsute ruffian drew foolishly close in pursuit and the Prince sliced off his arm.  After that the others held back, while Thren, sword in one hand, torch in the other, gauged the weight of the throw to toss the flaming brand into the oil channel.

“Prince Thren!” a woman’s voice called.

Thren swung his arm back and then forward.  His eye, scanning the tower caught a foot clad in chain mail.  His gaze travelled upwards over the woman’s elegant armour, glancing over the sharp chin, the unsmiling mouth and then the unmasked eyes.  He gazed no further upwards, not to the crowning mound of coiled and hissing snakes.  The arm that swung the torch came to an abrupt halt, its throw unfinished as the flaming brand skittered harmlessly across the stone, some feet short of its target.

But Thren saw none of this.  Thren saw nothing after the sparkling, scintillating frozen blue of Dema’s eyes.  Patterns of light that shimmered and danced as they worked their evil medusa magic.

There on the battlements, where a living breathing man had been, was a perfect statue of a warrior poised for action as though carved by some master mason.

King Gregor the Fifth awoke still clutching at the Ankh talisman on its chain around its neck.  His fingers recoiled at the heat from the gem set in the eye of the ankh, the burning heat which had precipitated him from sleep to alarmed wakefulness. He gazed at the jewel.  Even in the darkness of his chamber he could see the red glow.   It was not the comforting steady warm red that he had witnessed since the day he had become king.  This was a throbbing scarlet gleam whose significance he dared not infer.

On the beacon platform, the form of Udecht the false priest shimmered and changed until once more the wispy bearded outlander, Prince Xander stood before them.  “Ah, that’s better,” he announced.

“A worm by any other fac
e is still a worm,” Dema said as she replaced mask and hood, her writhing snakes stilled by the dark material.  “If I hadn’t set Haselrig to alert me to any folly on your part, who knows what disaster would have befallen our Master’s plans.”

“She set you to spy on me,” Xander confronted the bashful antiquary as he made his way late on to the body strewn platform.

“Be glad she did, my Prince. Else the execution of our plans would have been less than perfect, and we all know how little our Master likes imperfection.”

With a discontented twitch of his mouth, Xander approached the petrified prince on the battlements.  “Can he he
ar me?” he demanded.

“He hears nothing, he is entirely stone,” Haselrig answered.

“So he’s dead then.”

“No n
ot dead …. Just… just suspended in another state.  He could be restored to life provided his body could stand the shock of such magic.”

“How?
”

“Odestus knows a spell,” Dema interrupted
.  “It is a subtle incantation, hard to master, but he was always the better wizard than you, worm.  Which is why our Master sent him to rule Undersalve rather than you.  That must have hurt eh worm, to be denied the same province a second time.”

Xander seized a sword and struck out at the statue, scratching the smooth surface of Thren’s cheek. “Can he feel that?” he whirled round to interrogate Haselrig.

“No, he can feel nothing,” came the weary re-assurance.

“But if he were restored.”

“Aye then he would bleed.”

Heartened, Xander swung again at the single oddity in the statue.  The ancestral sword was still a gleaming piece of steel, immune to the transformation that had overtaken the rest
of Thren’s attire, equipment and flesh. He hacked at the stone fingers of the statue’s right hand until they shattered and released the ancient blade to Xander’s grasp.  The false prince held the sword close, kissed its hilt, before quizzing Haselrig again.  “And now, what if he should be restored now?”

“Now he would have to learn to fight with his other hand, assuming healers were on hand to ensure he did not bleed to death.”

Xander nodded with grim satisfaction and waved Thren’s sword at Dema.  “See this lady, this is part of my inheritance.  When I am in full possession of it,  there will be scores I will settle.”

Dema said nothing, but suddenly raised her hand to her mask as though to tear it off.  Xander swung away av
erting his eyes in panic.  The Medusa laughed.  “Ah, well when your eyes can meet mine in safety, worm, then maybe you may give me as much as half a contest.”

With a d
iscrete cough, Haselrig pointed out, “Your brother’s sons still stand between you and a legitimate inheritance, my Prince.”

“Indeed.” Xander seemed grateful for the inte
rvention as he wheeled away from the teasing Medusa.  Then he set his shoulder to the statue on the battlements and heaved with all his strength.  Thren rocked a moment and then fell from view with startling abruptness. Xander cupped a hand to his ear as he listened, with exaggerated care for the crash of stone on the rocks below.

As Gregor gazed into the glowing red gem, it flared into a sudden blinding red light.  At the burst of heat he dropped the ankh on the floor with a cry of anguish which, despite the heat of the enchanted gem, owed more to raw emotion than pain.  He fell to his knees fumbling across the thick rug of his bedchamber for the fallen talisman.  When at last his fingers closed on it and he held to his eye, the gem at its heart glistened emptily white.  The sight wrought a stifled sob from his throat.

The fog in Kimbolt’s mind cleared at last.  He was kneeling by the body of his dead friend, whose arms he must at some point have folded across the old captain’s chest.  He closed Thackery’s reproachful blank eyes and let his ears and eyes absorb what was happening.

The transformed Xander was sniggering gleefully and offering
the hilt of his sword to the lady.  “Go on, have a go, feel the weight of it, the perfect balance.”

“I have a sword, worm,” she told him.  “Keep your little dagger.”

“Oh,” Xander feigned disappointment.  “Does no one want to try out my new sword. Here, what about you.”  The excited Prince skipped from outlander to outlander repeating his offer to each in turn, but none would accept, suspicions raised by Xander’s agitated state.  The one at the end of the line, more brave or foolish than his fellows, at last reached out for the blade to his instant regret.  As his fingers closed around the hilt there was a crack of lightning and the unfortunate outlander was flung back halfway across the tower before slumping into unconsciousness.

“You utter arse, Xander,” Dema spat.

“Oh sorry,” Xander gushed to the comatose outlander.  “Did I not mention, you have to be of Eadran’s bloodline to handle one of these artefacts.  Makes the things bloody hard to steal eh?”

As the watchers on the platform watched or avoided Xander’s antics, according to their mood, Kimbolt rose to his feet, picked up the still glow
ing torch that Thren had mis-thrown and thrust it into the oil channel at the foot of the great pyre.

The tower guard at Morwencairn kept an uneasy watch.  At his shoulder stood King Gregor, an unaccustomed night time visitor to the capital’s beacon tower.  The guard could not guess what cause had brought his Majesty to this place at such a time, still less why he tarried so long, always staring westwards towards the distant peaks of the great barrier mountains.

“Ha!” the king cried with a certainty that the guard could not at first share.  But then, there it was the unmistakeable kindling on
the horizon of a beacon fire, the last one in a dozen strong chain that led from the capital all the way to Sturmcairn.

“Orders your M
ajesty,” the guard asked, stunned at an event that had not been seen in his lifetime.

“Repeat the signal onwards to North, South and East, let us alert Princes Hetwith and Rugan, as well as the
Lord Feyril,” Gregor commanded grimly. As others hurried to his bidding, Gregor looked again at the Ankh still nestled in his palm.  At the centre of the whitened precious stone a bead of red was visible, growing steadily.  Gregor nodded somberly and called out, “pass the word for Prince Eadran.”

Atop Sturmcairntor all was confusion.  Outlanders scattered futiley.  Some beat at the flames with cloaks that instantly caught fire and had to be discarded falling like flaming leaves into the bailey below.  Others unhitched water bottles and threw the contents at the inferno, only for the liquid to turn to a cloud of steam mid-flight.  Kimbolt noted with satisfaction the cold dread with which Xander stood rooted to the spot. Even though his beard was smouldering in the heat, his face was a mask of white terror.  Even the masked Medusa, still aware enough to try to co-ordinate the efforts of the rapidly singeing outlanders, seemed shaken by this turn of events.  Haselrig alone kept his head.  “There’s no point any of you,” he cried.  “This thing was never meant to be put out.  Come we must leave here before we fry.”

And in the midst of it, his own skin scorched by the intense radiation, Kimbolt waited for their retribution.  It was Xande
r saw him first, anger serving as antidote to the traitor Prince’s fear filled paralysis. “Kimbolt!” he screamed, rushing at the Captain with Thren’s blade held high above his head for a blow Kimbolt had no intention of dodging.

But the blow never came as, with an athletic flick of her foot, Dema dumped X
ander on his backside.  As the Prince tried to rise, Dema stepped astride him and grabbed a handful of his hair.  A quick twist of her wrist subdued the furious traitor long enough for her to question the Captain.

“You are Kimbolt? Captain Kimbolt
?”

“Of course he is wom
an, the man who has undone our Master’s plans.”

“Only because your spell of entrancement failed, worm.  I like this Captain. I think I will keep him.”

“He must die.”

“He is my prisoner.
I decide.”

“Our M
aster will not be pleased.”

“He is my prisoner.”

Xander opened his mouth to utter another argument, but then shut it again, a smug smile creeping over his lips.  “On your squirming head be it, lady.”

That settled, Xander scurried for the stairwell, while Dema held out her hand for Kimbolt to follow. “You are my prisoner Captain, come with me.”

“I would rather die here and quickly.”

“Bravery and stupidity are different things Captain, don’t mix them up.”

“My life is forfeit anyway.  Your sword, your gaze, those flames or that fall, I don’t intend to see another dawn,” Kimbolt replied his eyes full of shame at the part he had played in the invulnerable Sturmcairn’s fall.