Lady Of The Helm (Book 1) (34 page)

“Indeed, but first we have our own orders to follow.  Droost and the bridge.”

Xander nodded.  “Bring up the cavalry and the
wolf-riders.  Let us feed the people of Droost a small taste of my venegeance.” 

Kaylan kicked over another piece of driftwood and then cried in alarm at a shape bobbing slightly in a rocky crevice at the sea’s edge a dozen yards away. Unlike the others he had inspected this one was the right shape, slim of build and tall a tangle of long hair swirling in the foaming eddies.

The thief had been some hours about his miserable task.  The trail from Glafeld had led him to the docks where a red headed
woman boarding a schooner had lodged in the memories of a few watermen.  However, they had been quick to add tales from the big merchant cogs that had arrived to meet the dwarven caravan.  The merchant men had told of a great storm and how one had seen a schooner cast on the rocks as they had fought their own struggle to survive.  There had been much shaking of heads when Kaylan had asked after survivors.  The nature of the storm, the treachery of the coast, the evidence of the merchant sailors and above all the lack of news direct from any member of the schooner’s crew all augured ill for the small ship’s company and passengers.

But nonetheless Kaylan ha
d ventured north.  A horse bought with the last of Mag-ap-Bruin’s generosity had been ridden into slavering exhaustion as the thief hurried to his lady’s aid.  Visions of Niarmit injured or in peril both sustained and tortured him on his mad rush along the coast road.  Now, confronted with the shredded evidence of the catastrophe which had overcome the schooner, it all seemed hopeless.  The timbers that had reached the shore were little more than matchwood.  True, the bodies he had found, flung out by the sea, had all been male.  The corpses had suffered the inevitable bloating ravages of a few days immersion in the water, but their bodies bore other marks of the storm’s violence.    The crushed or missing limbs, shattered bones, ruined faces were all testament to a disaster that had done much more than drown these poor souls and every broken body was another blow to his hopes that Niarmit could have survived the wreckage.

So he approached this
latest corpse with a grim trepidation.  Pale white hands floated on the surf, sodden hair well past shoulder length.  It couldn’t be her, his lady was never fated to die in some inconsequential ship-wreck. Hers was a much higher destiny. And yet he struggled to see how she could have been spared.

He seized a hand to pull the body onto the rocks and then nearly vomit
ed as hand and arm came free of the sleeve, leaving the rest of the body bobbing in the water.  Gulping back his rising gorge he lay down to get a better grasp of the body and hauled it two hands on the torso up on to the rock.  He took a moment’s breath to brace himself before rolling the body onto its back.   It was a horrid sight, the face pulped by sharp rocks, the clothes all but shredded.  Kaylan, hardened by battle and the horrors of occupied Undersalve still found himself voiding his stomach in a rockpool, to the consternation of its crustacean inhabitants.  As he wiped tendrils of vomit from his mouth Kaylan tried a dispassionate inspection of the corpse.  The build was right, but the hair freed from the water’s grasp was now more clearly black than red and the open shirt revealed a scratched and battered torso that was entirely male. 

“Thank the Godde
ss,” Kaylan muttered, but then, above the surf, he caught a different sound a horse neighing, and another.  The  shelving strata of weathered rock to landward hid him from view of the coastroad.  He scurried close up against a rock face and thanked his paranoid caution in stabling his own horse a mile away inside an abandoned croft.  Listening carefully he could make out the jangle of harnesses, voices speaking the human tongue but with a thick southern accent.  When his ears told him the riders were moving away he quickly peered over the edge of the rock to see. 

There were a hundred or so of them.  Swaggering nomads on horseback, riding in a column four abreast down towards the shallow beach which was to be Kaylan’s next search zone.  At the head of the column, rode the squat and ungainly figure of the Governor of Undersalve.  The little man’s limited horsemanship was further compromised by him m
anaging the reins one handed. His free right hand was stretched out infront of him, fingertips twitching as he felt the air ahead of him.

Kaylan cursed his ill luck that this intervention would not only delay his search but would
trample into obscurity any traces of Niarmit making it ashore.  Still he was one thief and they were a hundred warriors, while the Governor was even rumoured to be a wizard.  Kaylan squatted down behind his concealing ridge and resolved to wait for the interlopers’ departure.

A cool breeze swept down off the Palacinta hills stirring Dema’s snakes into hissing wakefulness.  She had the watchtower platform to herself, pacing the narrow space unmasked and unhooded.  The orc and outlander lookouts had been sent away so the Medusa could enjoy a rare moment of freedom.  Normally she only let her snakes and her gaze go free in the heat of battle and even then only if there were few of her own troops to be accidentally harmed by a misplaced glance or an irate serpent.  In the main she trusted to her own formidable skill with a sword at which neither orc nor outlander had yet managed to best her.

However, once in a while there was a sense of freedom to be revelled in. She stood arms raised to the heavens, spitting serpents writhing on her head, surveying the rolli
ng farmland with a petrifying azure gaze.  For just a moment she let her guard drop, acknowledged the creature she had become, a glorious monstrous affront to all that the Salved held holy.

It had been twenty years
earlier in a long abandoned magistry that she had first felt this chilling power course through her veins.  The numbing shock of the little wizard’s magic had faded and she had begun to stretch up from the kneeling position in which she had received his incantation.  She had been aware of a strange prickling sensation in her scalp that made her reach for the hand mirror they had brought.  In looking for that first rather than at Odestus she had probably saved him, and he in turn, in kicking the mirror from her hand so it shattered on the stone had probably saved her.

“Why did you do that
?” she had demanded, perturbed that her hands still looked slim and feminine and then that her voice was unbroken. 

That the spell had misfired in someway was quickly becoming apparent without the little wizard
’s frantic cry, “Don’t look at me. Don’t look at anything.  Yes shut your eyes.”

“What
? Why? What has gone wrong little wizard?”  The crawling sensation on the top of her head was more insistent now, she had reached up to scratch her head and then screamed at the feel of reptilian scales the hiss of a snake.  She had grabbed its body thinking to throw it free, but a yank brought only a searing pain in her head as though she were pulling her own hair out.  Her hair had become snakes.

“What have you done to m
e little wizard?” she had demanded.  Odestus had been cowering before her, hands over hs own eyes face turned to the ground.

“It’s not my fault,” he was insisting.  “I never meant for this.”

She had seized him by the collar and hauled him to his feet.  “What have you done to me? Tell me now or I will prize those hands away from your eyes and make you look at me.”

“No… no!” the very suggestion brought a long paralysing cry from the quivering wizard.

“Then maybe you should undo it and not just free of charge, give back the money I have paid you.”

“It was never about the money and I can’t undo it.”

She’d seized his hands at that and yanked them apart to look into his screwed shut eyes, shut as firmly as if he had been gazing towards the midday Sun. “Speak little wizard and start making some sense, or by the Goddess I will peel back your eyelids with my finger nails.”  There had been a chorus of hissing as the serpents on her head seemed to respond to her mood.  “And first question, little wizard, is why have I got snakes stuck to my scalp?”

“The scroll, the spell on the scroll, I misunderstood the translati
on.  It is an ancient language, an easy mistake, the transformation it wrought was not into the form I had thought.”

“I had gathered that, little Wizard.  You have not made me into the form of a ma
n. What have you turned me into?”

Odestus had wailed
.  “I have made you a monster, Lady. We are both doomed to exile.”

“Undo the spell then. U
ncast it.”

“I cannot. T
he spell is gone from the scroll. It is spent and I have no other scroll nor power in my own skill to undo the spell.  You…. we, we are stuck with how you are.  They will send us beyond the barrier. We will be eaten by orcs, devoured one limb at a time while the rest of us still lives. Why did I agree? You made me agree.  I never wanted this. Why didn’t you leave me alone? I was happy with my hobby.”

Dema had given him a sharp slap to rouse him from his hysteria and, as his head swung sideways his eyes had opened a fraction in surprise and then
immediately closed clenched as tight as a whelk before she could catch his gaze. “Come little wizard, it wasn’t just a merchant’s hobby.  You wanted to do big sorcery. You wanted it as much as I and now you have right royally fucked it up.  What have you turned me into?”

“A monster, the worst of monsters.”

“I don’t feel like a monster.”

“You will become one, not tonight, not tomorrow, but the
monster will merge with you. You will lose your humanity all trace and vestige of the human being you were and in time you will become that monster.”

“What monster am I to become
?”

“Oh Dema, I have turned you into …. i
nto a medusa.  Any unfortunate who meets your gaze will be petrified, any fool who comes near enough your head will be poisoned by your snakes.  Oh Dema I have killed you as sure as if I had stabbed you through the heart. It would be kinder to do the deed now than let your spirit whither into nothingness inside this creature.“  As he spoke the little wizard was fumbling in his cloak clumsily reaching for a dagger which Dema with a pinch and a twist easily relieved him of.

“Little wizard you would never be able to stab me through the heart even if you could bear to look at me as you did it.  Now listen I am Dema, I will always be Dema.  My spirit is not withering anywhere least of all inside my own body.  Now you get me somewhere I can hide while we work out how to undo this mess you have created
.  You can find another scroll that reverses this change, pay whatever you have to. The Goddess knows you’re rich enough.”

Odestus had bobbed
and whimpered but he did as he was bid.

Two decades later atop the tower of her own fortress, Dema stretched her arms aloft and allowed the snakes their moment of hissing bickering freedom.  Not days, not weeks, Odestus, she said to herself.  Two decades she had survived, t
wo decades she had been Dema. She had held at bay the snarling visceral abomination whose physical form she wore.  True there had been moments of necessary cruelty, but that had been the natural human fight to survive, not the gratuitous sadism of an unfettered medusa.  For twenty years she had thought and fought to see herself as just somehow differently human. Kimbolt’s jibes about her humanity had hurt more deeply than she dared admit. 

The thought of Kimbolt darken
ed her mood once more and she glared anxiously South East, desparate for the distant murk to disgorge the precious reinforcements from Undersalve and pressage the long overdue reunion of the warrior Medusa and her wizardly creator.  Her scrutiny of the unyielding horizon was disrupted by another powerful stomach cramp.  She bent double and gritted her teeth against the pain.  “Not now,” she muttered to herself before demanding of the clouds low on the Southern horizon.  “Where are you Odestus, I need you now?”

Hepdida hurt.  The long deep cut in her back was the worst.  There were no mirrors in Grundurg’s tent. Vanity was not one of the orc chieftain’s many vices, so it was only by touch that Hepidda could explore her unseen wounds. The supple flexibility of youth had been compromised by her other cuts and bruises so that twisting and reaching round with her hand was a stiff and painful experience.  It brought a wince to her lips even as her fingers tips crept across her back towards the ragged edge of Grundurg’s cruellest cut.  Before she even reached the seeping wound itself she felt the flesh grow hot and could imagine the reddened skin as her body fought infection.  Her mouth felt dry and her head ached and she knew the untreated wound was spreading its poison through her body. 

Her trembling self-examination was cut short when she heard the howls of returning wolves.  As hurriedly as the pain and stiffness allowed, she drew the dirty linen cloak around her shoulders and crouched dutifully on the floor to wait her master’s return.
  The coarse rope tether had scoured the skin of her ankle until it bled, making it uncomfortable to sit crosslegged.  So she squatted awkwardly within the limited freedom that the rope gave her.

Grundurg
was in good spirits when he stormed into the tent, though that was never a guarantee that he would leave her alone.  If his business had gone ill, he would take out his frustrations on her, if it had gone well he would celebrate at her expense and if it had been a quite day’s scouting he would vent his boredom on her injured frame.  Hepdida had yet to find any combination of humility or circumstance which would secure the freedom that Dema had promised her from orcish torture.