The Conqueror's Shadow (8 page)

TO ONE SIDE
, half a dozen men, all large, filthy, and well armed. On the other, a lone figure, long hair wild about his neck and shoulders, easily half again the age of his eldest opponent, armed with only a heavy spade.

It was not a discrepancy that Brend, Varbin, or the others failed to notice. A mocking, contemptuous grin settled upon the features of every man present.

“You seem overmatched, old man,” Brend told him, taking a confident step. The resemblance between the new arrival and their captive didn't escape his attention. “Her father?”

Corvis nodded once.

“How cozy. You came to die with her.”

These men had worked together for several years, and for all their bickering, they moved and fought as one. Even before he'd finished speaking there was a sudden lunge, not from Brend, but from the man who'd held his knife to Mellorin's throat, intended to quickly end what negligible threat the girl's father might pose. They'd used the tactic many times before, and it never failed to catch the target off-guard.

There is, as the saying goes, a first time for everything.

A blur of movement, a sudden hum in the air, and the spade flashed downward, striking the man's forearm edge-on. A hideous crack reverberated throughout the woods, instantly followed by an agonized scream. The man stared, eyes filled with tears of pain, at his arm and at the two separate ends of what was once a single bone, now protruding through torn and mangled flesh.

His face slack with shock, Brend stepped toward Corvis, his hand dropping frantically toward the hilt of his sword. Corvis met him halfway, jabbing with the butt-end of the tool. Brend, sword dangling from its scabbard, fell to the ground thrashing, a bubbling sound in his throat as he tried to draw breath through a crushed windpipe.

The other four men charged as one, Varbin leading the attack, a cry of rage on his lips. Four swords rose in the air, clutched in hands eager to kill this interloper, to rend him limb from limb and feed the surrounding soil with his blood.

The environment itself conspired against them. One man fell, his boots tangled in a protruding root that he would have sworn was not there mere instants before. Before he could rise to his hands and knees, Corvis's spade landed, point-first, on the base of his skull. Another thug hauled back to take a mighty swing, only to find his blade lodged in an overhanging branch, granting his foe a precious moment to dance aside.

Even as Corvis swung the spade with his right hand, his left darted out and grabbed for the man's wrist. By the time the body hit the forest
floor, ribs caved in by the edge of the tool, Corvis held the man's long sword in his other hand.

Varbin was next, falling to his knees as a shrub twisted beneath his feet; as he plummeted earthward, the flat end of the spade rose up to meet him, spreading his nose across the rest of his face. The blow might or might not have been sufficient to kill him. Corvis, growing more tired than he let on, was not about to take any such chance, and finished the fallen man with a quick downward stab of the stolen sword.

That left only one man unwounded. He, fully aware of his fate should he continue to fight, allowed his sword to tumble into the dirt and dropped to his knees. “Yield!” he shouted, staring upward, his eyes imploring. “I yield!”

“Very well.” Corvis stuck the bloody long sword into the earth behind him, reached out with his vacant hand, and dragged the first man he'd struck—who stood, sobbing and staring at his ruined arm—to stand beside the one who'd surrendered. Then, keeping one eye upon the pair of them, he knelt down in the grass and hugged his shaking daughter to him.

“Did they hurt you, sweetheart?”

“They … they hit me on the head,” Mellorin told him, twisting so he could see the blood matted against her skull, plastering her hair to her face. “And they … they were going—”

“Shhh. It's all right now. Everything's all right. We're leaving in just a few minutes.”

“Can't we go home now?” she implored.

“In just a bit, sweetheart, I promise.” He turned his own head, so she couldn't see the burning in his eyes. “Daddy has something he has to do first. And I need you to do something for me, Mellorin.”

“But—”

“I need you to rest.”

Carefully disentangling himself from her arms, he rose smoothly to his feet. A short muttered incantation, and Mellorin fell into a restful, painless sleep. It was a shame the spell wouldn't work on an alert subject, one not already on the edge of unconsciousness. But then, Corvis
wanted
them awake. Aware.

Feeling.

The prisoners blanched, falling back before the doom they saw etched across his features.

“You first,” he said, facing the uninjured man. “Who sent you here?”

“No—no one!” he stammered, edging backward. “We're just—just wandering bandits! We—”

Corvis nodded once, and then the spade flashed upward. It hit directly between the man's legs; his scream wasn't quite sufficient to drown out the sound of his pelvic bone cracking under the impact.

“As you can see,” Corvis said mildly to the man with the broken arm, gesturing with the bloody tool at the quivering shape on the ground, “I'm in no mood to have my time wasted. Who sent you?”

“Oh, gods!” The man's broken arm spasmed as he gestured. “I can't tell you! I can't! He'll …” He froze, his lip quivering, as the spade rose slowly to point at him.

“I doubt they'll be able to save that arm,” Corvis told him. “But you have three other working limbs.” He smiled, though there was no mirth at all in the expression. “At the moment.”

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

The past seventeen years had failed to rob Corvis of his flare for theatrics. Very deliberately, he allowed the spell that had set the roots and branches against his enemies to lapse. Murmuring the words of a new incantation under his breath, he released the spell even as he drew breath to answer his prisoner's terrified query.

It was a simple illusion, easily mastered by the youngest apprentice of the First Circle, but it was more than sufficient. For the span of perhaps a dozen heartbeats, he towered over the cringing soldier, encased once more in black steel and gleaming white bone, an iron-banded skull staring down upon its latest conquest.

“I,” he intoned as the mirage faded, the last remnant of a forgotten dream, “am Corvis Rebaine.”

For long moments after the illusion flickered away and was gone, the injured man stood, frozen, his shallow breathing the only sign that any life remained to him at all. Even the steady patter of dripping blood came briefly to a halt.

And then he laughed. It was harsh, high-pitched—bordering on the
manic—an ugly sound. It twisted itself around the trees, insinuating itself between the leaves and through the holes in the trunks. Animals, creatures that had hunkered down and hidden during the clamor of the battle, pricked up their ears, flattened their tails, and fled.

But this was no mocking cackle, as Corvis at first assumed, no last act of defiance. It was flavored instead with sheer desperation, blind panic, and perhaps the first hint of looming madness.

And still he laughed, until tears ran freely down his cheeks and his face reddened for lack of breath. Only when he literally lost the strength necessary to keep it up did the fit subside, leaving him standing, fully spent, before his captor.

“Are you quite through?” Corvis asked coldly.

“Corvis Rebaine.” The bandit shook his head, eyes wide, teeth and lips twitching randomly from a rictus grin to a clench of pain to slack-jawed fear. “Of course. It would have to be.”

“Why are you here? Who sent you?”

“We'd wondered if you were dead, you know,” the man told him, oblivious to the questions he'd been asked. “After that fiasco at Denathere, everyone figured you'd be back for revenge, but it never happened. We …” He froze, the words clinging by their fingertips to the inside of his throat, as Corvis again raised the spade and held it, tip down, over the man's left foot.

“Three limbs. Remember?”

“Audriss,” he whispered, his face white. “Audriss sent us.”

The ground tilted beneath Corvis's feet.
He wasn't supposed to come here! Chelenshire is useless to him!

He was supposed to leave us alone …

“Why?” Corvis demanded. “Is he headed here?”

“I—I shouldn't …”

The spade dropped an inch or so.

“No! No, please! I don't know! I swear I don't! We were just one of a dozen scouting parties! He's sent us all over Imphallion! Getting the lay of the land, seeing what kind of resistance he might face! But I don't know which way he's going! I don't know! I don't! I—”

“I get it! Shut up!”

Corvis thought furiously in the sudden silence. It didn't quite ring
true, yet he couldn't bring himself to believe the man was lying to him. Whatever the case, any illusions he'd harbored that Chelenshire could somehow avoid the whole affair had been brutally shattered into so many splinters.

He glanced around him as though seeing the area for the first time. Four corpses, and one man on the ground, twitching, who wouldn't survive the next few hours without the attention of a healer—attention that Corvis was not inclined to provide.

But that left one man standing.

“The first question,” he muttered, “is what to do with you.”

“Mercy! I told you everything I know! Mercy, I beg you!”

Corvis nodded once. “Mercy, then.” He spun about once, his left hand yanking the stolen sword from the earth. Momentum carried him about, full circle, and the man's head bounced across the dirt to fetch up against a nearby oak. The rest of the body toppled sideways, the broken bones of the arm digging furrows into the soil.

“Considering what I want to do to you,” Corvis told the head, meeting its lifeless gaze, “that's mercy enough.” The sword, coated in blood, tumbled to the ground; the spade followed a moment later. Somehow, he didn't think either he or Tyannon would care to use it in the garden anymore.

Corvis knelt, cradled his daughter in his arms, and slowly made his way home.

“Are you certain about this?”

Even in the darkened basement, lit only by a single black candle in the room's center, the irritation was obvious on the younger man's face. “I'm certain that if you ask me that one more time, I'm going to strongly consider feeding your liver to the gnomes.”

The ancient fellow, his skin desiccated and shriveled almost to parchment, recoiled, one hand nervously rising to stroke the remaining wisps of beard. “It's just … You understand what it is you're trying to awaken here?”

“Better than you. Do it, before I decide to use your soul to awaken him the old-fashioned way.”

The old man muttered something unintelligible, knelt beside the candle with a creaking of tired bones, and began to chant. Three times, his old voice wavered nearly enough to break the spell, and three times the younger man reached for his blade, ready to spill the wizard's life.

But there was no need. Faint, so faint that even the lone candle was almost enough to drown it out, the tiny stone that was the object of their attention began to glow.

/Feed …
/ It was weak, barely an echo of a whisper, but they both heard it in their minds.

“Soon,” the younger man cooed, his tone almost seductive. “Soon, my friend, you'll have all the souls you could ever wish for. But first I need your help to locate someone, someone who knows some
very
important secrets.”

/Who …?/
It was almost a groan, little more.

“A rather violent fellow by the name of Valescienn.”

“WELL,”
Audriss said, leaning back heavily in his velvet-lined chair, “that was unattractive.” He negligently waved a hand through the image hovering over the mahogany table before him: Corvis Rebaine carrying Mellorin from the woods. It scattered like pipe smoke and faded away.

/It's not as though you didn't know what he was capable of,/
the now familiar voice in his mind responded drily.

“Perhaps, but it was surprisingly brutal.”

/Most animals get that way when their young are threatened./

“Indeed.” Audriss rested his chin on an open palm—only here, in the sanctity of his most private chambers, would he dare to remove the featureless mask—and stared moodily across the table. “He used magic in that battle.”

/Assuming Rebaine hasn't signed any sort of treaty with the local flora, or learned to disguise himself as a suit of armor, I'd say that was a distinct possibility./

The dark-garbed warlord ignored the sarcasm. “I thought you said he and your old friend had parted ways.”

/Spells that simple, Rebaine can perform on his own. And Audriss, if you refer to Khanda as my “old friend” one more time—well, I have a truly horrendous genital-rot curse I'm just itching to try out on someone./