Lady Of The Helm (Book 1) (15 page)

“I could leave you a thousand more spears, some archers too,” he suggested with an anxiety made urgent as the moment of separation arrived.    

She shook her head.  “I wil
l make do with what I have, my Lord.  You and Gregor face the greater peril. Take that force we agreed.”

He drew her face towards his.  Their lips met in a long last kiss, and then he was gone, striding from the clearing to the impatient Captain Findil.

Niarmit stood at the crest of the pass, gazing down for a pursuit that never came.  Her horse stood sweating at her side, still winded from its panicked flight up the twisting trail.  From this height one could glimpse through the clouds the still green fields of Undersalve, the enslavement of its people hidden in the unrelent
ing fertility of its land.  Eighteen years earlier she had sat astride her father’s great grey horse at another pass gazing on a land of promise and opportunity. 

Just five
years old she’d been, fresh from the great court that had settled the fate of the vacant principality of Undersalve. Her father the newly anointed Prince, plucked from worthy obscurity en route to retirement, had bristled with pride at his elevation.  Without waiting even for the others of their household to join them, father and daughter had taken a small escort and ridden night and day to their new domain. 

Where had all that promise gone
? Davyn’s words came back to her.  ‘My father is no fool, not like yours was.  You know they say that’s the only reason why old King Bulveld let him have this province, that in his madness he somehow knew it was past saving.  Why else would he trust it to a hack of an old general rather than his own son.’

Had that been it? Was it always doomed? How could Bulveld have known what would befall the southern province, or had the Goddess told him?  Niarmit looked suddenly up at the sky where dark clouds already gathered.  “Was that it, my Goddess, a cruel trick you played on all of us, on my father, on me, on poor foolish Kaylan. Did you set us so high just to make our fall more amusing? How can you be good that let’s such evil prosper?”

She was screaming now, loud enough to scare the horse, but years of grief and disappointment fuelled her cries.  “Was it
your whim to crush my father so? or that every man, woman or child I ever loved should follow him to the grave? Did it please you to see my every effort unravelled, my every blow against the enemy rebounding with twice the force upon myself, my friends.  Loyal have I been in your service, loyally have I served my province. I see it now, a fruitless waste.”

She seized the crescent medallion from around her neck, pulled sharp
ly till the gold chain snapped, not caring that it first bit deeply into her neck.  “Hear me now, Goddess, I abandon you, I deny you as you have denied and abandoned me.”  With that she flung the shining symbol way over the edge of the path, watching it spinning downwards, bouncing off rock and stone.  Despite her bravado she still waited, half ready to jump should some bolt of lightning or other sign of her deity’s ire strike at her impudence.  But none came, and that in itself, seemed to be the final confirmation of divine indifference.

Wearily Niarmit remounted and set her horse on the path down the Hadrans towards the grey lands claimed by Prince Rugan of Medyr Salve. No longer princess or priestess, she would make her way now as one of Kaylan’s kind
, living off her wits unnoticed by anyone, least of all those fools she separated from their gold. 

Hepdida
shivered despite the blazing sconces in the castle passageways.  Somewhere beneath the surface a bubble of hysteria was threatening to burst. A few hours had transformed her from servant girl in the strongest fortress in the realm to an orphaned prisoner in a castle overrun by orcs, outlanders and something so terrible that she and the other captives had been locked in the western barracks lest they catch a glimpse of it.  Last night she had gone to bed hopeful of another dream where the bold Captain Kimbolt would take her in his arms. This evening she had not dared shut her eyes, for fear she would not wake up at all.  The grim adrenalin fuelled business of minute by minute, second by second survival was the only thing keeping hysterical shock at bay.

The p
resent circumstances plumbed new depths of anxiety.  She’d been separated from the small band of surviving captives by the fearsome orc who had slain her parents.  He pushed and prodded her along corridors once familiar but now creatured more than peopled with the brutal new overlords of Sturmcairn.  The orcs they passed were of slighter build than her escort and bobbed in deference to him.  The outlander humans too avoided both chief Grundurg’s eyes and Hepdida’s frantic pleading for assistance.

“Where are you taking me?” The previous seven such entreaties had gone unanswered and this
last request got no more response than a grunt and a shove from the orc.

A few more twists and turns brought them to a heavy wooden door and, with a jerk of his scaly green fist, Grundurg indicated that Hepdida should go through it.

“No.”  Fear made her bold.  “No, tell me where you’re taking me.  Why am I here?”

Grundurg was unmoved.  He grabbed her painfully by the upper arm, kicked the door open with a heavy boot and flung her into the room with such force that she stumbled and fell headlong onto the stone floor. 

“Do you always make such an entrance?” A woman’s voice made a cool rhetorical enquiry.  Hepdida looked up at the lady, hooded and masked as at their last encounter but without the blood stained sword in her hand.  She scrabbled to her feet as Grundurg, having followed her in, shut the door behind him.

“Why am I here
?” Hepdida repeated.

“To play a part in a lesson,”
was the unilluminating reply as the hooded Medusa gave Grundurg a nod of instruction. 

The orc disappeared
into a side chamber and returned with a bound and struggling form.  “Captain Kimbolt!” the exigencies of the situation could neither stifle Hepdida’s joy nor soften the formality of her address.

“Hepdida!” Kimbolt gasped.  “
Has this animal harmed you?”

“How touching,” Dema observed.  “But let us to business first.  Grundurg.”

The big orc crossed the room in a couple of strides and grabbed Hepdida round the waist lifting her clear of the floor.  She kicked and screamed.  Kimbolt rose to his feet and, despite his hands tied behind his back, tried to charge across the room.  Dema kicked out with lazy ease, knocking the captain to the ground. 

“Put her down, you monster,” Kimbolt ordered from the floor as Hepdida swayed and struggled in the orc
chieftain’s grasp.     

“
Now, girl, my advice is to stop wriggling so.  Grundurg is quite skilled with his little knife, but you wouldn’t want to knock his hand with all that fittering about.”

Hepdida was abruptly still.  While the orc held her easily with one arm, his free hand held a jagged edged blade a fraction of an inch from her cheek.

“What do you want?” Kimbolt spat a demand.

“
I want you as my slave.  I have paid a high enough price for it.”  She touched her cheek, where the frozen blow of Malegrum’s hand had left a white scaled scar.   “From my slaves I demand obedience.  Now, this girl, she is your lover, yes?”

The Captain’s lips worked in some confusion as he sought a safe answer. 
“She is nothing to me.”

Dema raised an eyebr
ow.  “Indeed. Then let the lesson begin.”

He
pdida shivered.  It was a plan, it was all part of a plan, she had to be strong.  The knife was stroking her cheek now, lightly, not breaking the skin, but still the tears came unbidden.

“
Do you know Grundurg’s special trick? It gets quite an audience whenever there’s a suitable prisoner.  He can remove a creature’s entire skin without killing them.”  She shrugged, “though to be honest, the subjects don’t survive very long afterwards, no more than a day say!”

Hepdida gave a sob; Kimbolt squirmed into a seated position only for Dema to kick him down again before resuming her commentary.  “Usually we have a crowd for his showcases, thousands of orcs gathered around a pit, but here Captain you have a prized ringside seat.”

“You’re sick.  You and your foul pet.”

Grundurg’s knife had been working closer now, breaking the surface and drawing a thin bead of red as the shallow cut drew blood.  He gave a surly growl at Kimbolt’s choice of epithet and drew the knife more sharply across the girl’s shoulder making her yelp with pain.

“Please,” she gave up. Whatever the plan was, she couldn’t do it.  Enough. “Please, make it stop!”

“All right,” Kimbolt signalled his own surrender.  “All right you win.  Put your creature back in his cage.  You’ll have my obedience.”

Hepdida gasped with relief, thankful that it would stop now, but it didn’t.  The knife continued to weave its path crisscrossing her back her arms with cuts such that the blood swelled and merged.  She was screaming now, so was Kimbolt.

“Stop,” the captain cried.  “Stop your monster.”  He wrestled with his bonds, shook Dema’s foot off his chest, scrabbling across the floor to the flailing bleeding servant girl.

Still the orc continued to sweep his knife back and for
th, still the Medusa continued her icy commentary.  “The thing is, I don’t just want obedience, I want understanding. You see I find the human imagination is quite unequal to orcish reality.  You need to see in order to believe, to understand just how terrible the consequences of disobedience can be.”

“All right, all right,” Kimbolt howled.  “You’ll have my obe
dience, my unfailing obedience, on my honour, my honour as a soldier.”

T
here was barked order from the Medusa and the nightmare stopped.  Hepdida hung limp, sobbing and bleeding in the orc’s muscular arms until he dropped her, still weeping, into a puddle of her own misery on the floor.  

Kimbol
t’s face was a mask of despair, all outward resistance crushed by the fear of what consequences it might bring. 

“Your honour as a soldier?” Dema repeated.

Kimbolt gulped and nodded an acknowledgment.

“As one soldier to another, I accept your offer. Unfailing obedience it will be.”

“And in return? T
he girl’s safety?”

She nodded.  “Grundurg will guard her,
but not harm her, leastways so long as you give me no cause to set his vile imagination free.”

“
How can I be sure?”

“Captain, on my honour as soldier, she will be safe.”

A
ll was still in the throne room. Gregor, Eadran, Quintala and Forven were seated in a semicircle staring at the shimmering oval window in the middle of the chamber.  Like a screen without a stand, frame or visible means of support, it hung a few inches clear of the floor as tall and as wide as a man.  Through it they gazed at a distant but familiar scene, the Chapel in Sturmcairn, or to be more precise, the priest’s alcove behind the altar in the chapel.  The view was somewhat limited. In the light of a few spluttering torches the altar cloth and silver ornaments could be seen untouched.  Apart from the lack of activity all was as it should be.  They had chosen this spot with some deliberation.  Forven knew the location well enough to focus his spell on it and, if disaster had overtaken the garrison, it seemed a suitably central but discreet place for a spy to make his magical entrance.

However, the
choice seemed regrettable now, with no visual insights offered and as for the spy using it as a portal.  Gregor’s patience was threadbare as he rounded on his senior cleric.  “Is it working, Forven?”

The A
rchbishop had his excuses ready.  “This is a spell that the Goddess grants but rarely and never to me before. We should not be surprised at the workings of such unfamiliar magic.”

“Workings
? by the Goddess he has not even arrived yet. He stepped into this gateway almost an hour ago and has not yet set foot in Sturmcairn.”

The quick blinking of Forven’s eyes revealed the discomfort that his smooth measured tone was trying to conceal.  “Time does assume a more flexible aspect with this dweomer
, my liege. If it be an hour or even two, ‘tis still faster than a three day horseride.”

“How can that be, how do the
planes make it possible?” Eadran exclaimed, drawing a withering stare from his father and raised eyebrows from the cleric.

Quintala took pity on him, and also the opportunity for some relief from the tedium of their vigil.  “It’s like this my Prince. 
Ours is but one of many planes of existence…”

“Ours is the pre-eminent plane,” Forven interjected.

“Quite so, but there are other planes which are separate but intertwined with ours, all unseen and unsensed by us like different strands in the same rope.  Gateways like this one can be created from our plane into the ether, the space that binds, surrounds and joins all the planes.  By moving through the ether we can take a short cut to another part of our own plane.”

“
Could the sergeant travel to another of these planes?”

Forven crescented himself
, as he interrupted the eager prince.  “This gateway leads back only to our own plane, my Prince.  The Goddess would not allow the pre-eminent plane to be contaminated by contact with any other half-formed creation, should they even exist.  And the Seneschal should know philosophers and theologians differ on that point.”

“Aye,” Quintala conceded.  “The wise men say such places exist and the fools deny them.”

Forven paused for a moment, but made no reply to the Seneschal before pointedly addressing his explanation to Eadran. “The passage I have opened, with the Goddess’s blessing, is but a pathway through the fast flowing ether.  It is as though the Sergeant has leapt into a river to be swept swiftly and surely to a destination downstream where he can step back into our pre-eminent plane in a new location a hundred leagues away.”

“And Sergeant Shalto is
still swimming along the river at the moment?”

“So we hope,” Gregor interjected.

Haselrig pause
d a moment at the sight of his Master.  The undead wizard occupied the castellan’s chair in Sturmcairn’s great hall.  He leaned comfortably back in the seat, although comfort surely meant nothing to a creature whose nervous system was little more than a shadow of a once living body.  His lidless eyes could never shut, indeed Haselrig was sure Malegrum never needed sleep.  However, there were moments such as this, when the normal fierce red flame within his dark eye sockets faded to a duller glow like the embers of a dying fire.  The impression was not so much of a body at rest but of a mind elsewhere.

The antiquary took a step forwards
; the embers flared into bright red light.  “Hassselrig?”

“Forgive me, M
aster.  I did not mean to disturb you.”

Maelgrum waved away the apology.  “My busssinesss was finissshed.  Thisss latest ssscion of Eadran hasss already over-
reached himself and I have ssssent him sssome inssstruction.  The planesss are an amusssing playground for the wissse, a long nightmare for the foolisssh.”

The antiquary
nodded dumbly.  To ask for elucidation of the cryptic comment would only show impertinence or ignorance, neither of which were traits to curry favour with.  Instead Haselrig turned to the safer course of delivering his own message.  “The bodies are being gathered in the Eastern barracks, the necromancers are ready to begin their work, Master.”

Maelgrum nodded slowly.  “That issss good.  Thisss work will strengthen our forcesss, but I had planned for more time before Eadran’s
ssspawn was alerted.  Herssshwood and Nordsssalve have sssent messages of mobilisssation.  Only Medyrssalve hassss yet to ressspond.”

“Prince Rugan ever did hold his counsel close and his armies closer.”

“Ss
sstill, I have not the advantage I had bargained on.  Plansss mussst be amended.  Sssend Dema to me, the Lady hasss a chance yet to prove her worth.  Then I would speak with Grundurg. He too hasss a part to play which will pleassse him.”

“
Will you see Xander too, Master?”  Haselrig regretted the question instantly.  A fast forming halo of frozen vapour showed how the inquiry had affronted the deathless wizard.  The antiquary prostrated himself on the floor in fearful subservience.

“Little one I make my disssposssitions according
to how far I can trussst my ssservants talentsss and their loyalty.  Prince Xander, in whossse veinsss Eadran’sss blood flows, isss one sservant I ssshall keep clossse.  Bypasssing thesssse blood line trapsss that hisss traitor forefather created sssseeemsss to be the ssssource of what little value he isss to me.”