War of Wizards (27 page)

Darik held out his good hand, palm up.

Chantmer squatted in front of the khalifa. Sweat was pouring down her face.

“Life is a cycle, Khalifa,” Chantmer said, and his voice was softer than usual. “We begin as seeds. When we die, the Harvester gathers our souls to sow them once more into the fertile soil so that new souls may grow. The dark wizard has corrupted this cycle, and he seeks to end it forever. You must hold this thing within you. You must, or life and death themselves will cease to have meaning.”

He rose and took Darik’s right hand by the wrist. “Do you love your queen?”

“I do.”

“Would you die for her right now?”

“Yes.” Darik spoke without hesitation, but his heart jumped, and his stomach clenched in fear. Is that what Chantmer was asking? “I would do so gladly.”

“Think of that. Think of your friends, Markal and Whelan. Of the griffin girl, what is her name, the young flockheart?”

“Daria.” Darik’s mouth was dry.

“They will all die if you do not summon every bit of your strength and send it through your hand. I need it all if I’m to cast this spell. The very world needs it.”

Chantmer’s voice was calm and measured. Much of the cold, arrogant attitude had gone out of it, replaced by an earnest intensity, and Darik caught a glimpse of the wizard’s true potential, why he had been honored and respected in the order, if never beloved of anyone.

Darik heard the wights now, a whisper from the hallways. He felt something sniffing, searching. A guard cried out, weapons clashed. Then the guard fell silent. The enemy would arrive in moments.

“Yes. Take my strength.”

Chantmer began to speak. It was a long spell and went on for some time, filled with many words in the old tongue that Darik didn’t recognize. He didn’t even try, but kept his gaze on the khalifa. Everything the wizard had said went through his mind now.

Chantmer’s voice raised. Darik’s hand burned. A great rush of power drained out of him, and he doubled over in pain as Chantmer cried out the last words of the spell.

The door burst apart in a shower of splinters. Wights poured into the room.

Chapter Twenty-six

Whelan and Markal led the men across the courtyard heaped with dead bodies and to the base of the fortress at the heart of the Dark Citadel. The men dismounted and climbed a stone staircase leading from the base to a pair of heavy, ugly, iron doors. There were no visible handles, no way to get leverage to force them open.

“Stay back,” Markal ordered when the king reached out his hand. “It’s an old trick. The doors open to the touch, but only for those who the spell caster has authorized. If anyone else touches it, the surface will melt, and his hands will sink into molten metal.”

Markal withdrew his orb. One final tendril of magic remained, but it would be enough. The dark wizard’s spell was arcane and ancient, but easily defeated with the right counterspell.

“
Reddite simplices isti et insidias struat.
” 

Render harmless these traps and snares.
 

When Markal finished, he put his hands on the metal. The surface grew hot beneath his fingers, and a twinge of doubt squirmed in his belly, as he felt the dark wizard’s spell testing him. But he had disabled the trap. The doors swung open of their own volition. It was dark as a tomb inside, and even Markal’s keen eyesight could not penetrate the gloom.

The stench of rot and decay rolled out, even more overpowering than the smell of death that permeated the courtyard. One of Whelan’s captains turned away, his face pale.

“Torches!” the king commanded. “Quickly. You there, bring that up here.”

As soon as he had torches, Whelan barked a few more orders, then led them inside, where they proceeded down a long, narrow corridor. The stone was hot, and men were soon shedding cloaks and hoods. Markal sensed other traps lingering in the dark spaces, and he pulled up short. As the men stopped, sounds reached his ears: screaming, pleas for mercy, a roaring fire.

“Even now, he tortures and kills,” Markal murmured. “Do you hear that?”

“No,” Whelan said. “What is it?”

“Never mind. Your men cannot come. They will be killed. We must go alone.”

The king had ordered some fifty men into the Dark Citadel with them, with the rest remaining outside to surround and secure the citadel complex. Now these men grumbled and protested that they wouldn’t be sent from Whelan’s side so close to their final battle with the enemy.

“There are traps and snares,” Markal explained. “It is the venomous lair of the dark wizard, and he would have no assassin kill him on his throne. I would disable them, but I cannot.” He held up Memnet’s orb. It was cool and dull. “That leaves my hands, and I must preserve those for the enemy himself.”

“But you and I can get past?” Whelan asked, frowning.

“Yes. We possess the final magic of Memnet the Great. His orb carries its own protection. As does Soultrup.” Markal took a torch from one of the king’s men.

Whelan rubbed at the pommel of his sword. “Then we must go alone and trust to our own strength. The rest of you, outside. Ninny, you too. No arguments. Quickly, now. Go.”

“Follow me,” Markal said when Whelan’s men had retreated.

The two men continued alone, the wizard and the king. The air grew hotter and hotter as they continued, until they were gasping for breath. Cells lined the corridor, filled with dead, dismembered corpses. Chains stretched rotting bodies along the wall, and bloody benches and torture devices littered each chamber.

“Listen to me,” Markal said. “This is the source of Toth’s magic, this pain and death. The screams—can you hear them? He is
still
drawing power. When we find him, end the torture first. It will weaken the enemy.”

A glow came from the end of the corridor, and soon it was bright enough for Markal to cast down the torch. The screams grew in intensity. At last, they reached the throne room of King Toth.

The room was massive, some 200 feet across and another 150 or so high. A giant pit of smoldering coals sat at its heart, roiling smoke toward a hole in the ceiling. Two sweating, soot-streaked men shoveled charcoal from a wheelbarrow into the fire, while two more heaved at bellows to stoke the flames. Six torturers, themselves minor conjurers in gray robes with cartouches of power, encircled the pit, chanting foul words in the ancient tongue. They were drawing power from the prisoners being tortured in cages above the fire.

Men lowered the cages up and down above the flames, dropping men, women and children to be burned and then lifting them out before they died. They screamed and writhed in unbearable torment. Their flesh bubbled and smoked, and fat dripped from their bodies.

“The Harvester take me,” Whelan whispered.

The sight almost blinded Markal with rage and horror, and he searched until he felt the source of the evil. There, to one side, sat the dark wizard himself, naked on a throne of smooth black iron. King Toth.

Toth gripped the armrests, sighing in pleasure at the screams of his victims. From a doorway on the opposite side came more screams. Men with swords and flails guarded several dozen prisoners who were being led out of the room onto an exterior balcony. These were the ones being hurled down to the courtyard.

“Help me!” a woman screamed from a cage above the pit. “Mercy! By the Brothers!” Chains clanked as torturers lowered her toward the fire.

This seemed to jolt Whelan out of his stupor. He grabbed for his sword and tried to wrest it from its scabbard, but the magic was strongest here, the dark wizard’s wards the most potent, and the move to draw the weapon had frozen the king’s muscles. He cursed and strained.

Release his muscles,
Markal said in the old tongue. A simple spell, it brought a twinge to his left hand, but no damage.

Whelan got the sword free. Even then, the dark wizard’s magic weighed on him, and he almost dropped the blade. But Soultrup had its own strength, its own will, controlled by the raging struggle of good and evil souls trapped within it. Chief among them were the souls of Memnet the Great and Captain Roderick, the latter Whelan’s brother and a former captain of the Knights Temperate. The sword moved and hummed in the king’s hand.

He sprang toward the men at the chains and gears. Two swipes, and he’d hacked them both down. Whelan lowered his shoulder and knocked into one of the torturers, who flew forward and landed screaming in the giant pit of coals, clothes bursting instantly into flames. Whelan sprang toward another of the torturers, who didn’t stop chanting even as the king came at him.

Markal moved toward the dark wizard on his throne. Toth looked up and smiled.

“You are weak,” Markal observed. “You cannot release your torturers to defend themselves, because you need every bit of strength they can give you.”

“Not so weak as you think.” Toth’s voice was deep and rasping.

Another torturer cried out as Whelan cut him down. Three of the guards herding prisoners onto the balcony grabbed up their weapons and rushed to engage Whelan, but Markal paid them no attention. The king was in a righteous fury now, and armed with Soultrup, no man would stop him. Markal was not so confident as to attack Toth himself, and thought only to hold the dark wizard until Whelan had finished weakening the source of his power.

“No?” he asked. “So you
let
us break the city walls? You
let
us penetrate your throne room? It doesn’t bother you that we will destroy the source of your evil magic?” Markal smiled. “You never recovered from your defeat in the Free Kingdoms, did you?”

“I am stronger than you will ever be. An army of wights overruns your king’s army. A second army has taken Balsalom. Even now, they are within the palace, and they have your precious khalifa.”

Markal didn’t know if the dark wizard was telling the truth, but he understood the cost of commanding such armies. He had seen it for himself, in this charnel house, in the thousands of dead heaped in the courtyard outside.

“Yet if you stop for a moment, they will falter,” Markal said. “The wights will flee in all directions. Their only thought will be to hide from the Harvester. You will have nothing. No armies, living or dead, to command.”

Whelan finished killing the torturers and the guards, and stopped only long enough to haul the wheel back to lift the poor suffering people in the cages. Then he flew at the remaining guards still leading people outside to their deaths. They fought him with flails and swords.

Markal glanced at the fighting, wondering if any new surprise awaited him, or if Whelan would kill the other guards as easily as the first three. It was a foolish move—doing so took his eyes off the dark wizard. By the time he looked back, Toth had one hand up and a spell on his lips.

Markal braced himself, hastily lifting his left hand.

Toth opened his mouth, and a black shape uncoiled from it like a shadowy snake. It lashed at Markal.

Markal found the spell. “
Protector meus et clypeo!
”

The air shimmered in front of him, and the shadowy snake slammed into it and broke apart. A small part of the whole found its way through and knocked Markal backward. He took four steps toward the pit before he caught his balance. If the bulk of the spell had hit, it would have thrown him straight into the fire.

But Markal’s left hand was now withered and useless. He’d used too much magic. If he’d been paying attention, he could have cast the spell in front of Toth before the shadowy snake emerged, and it would have reflected some of the dark wizard’s magic back at him.

Markal’s left hand was now useless, and Memnet’s orb was drained. That left his right hand, against whatever the dark wizard had to attack him with. A smile played at Toth’s lips, as if he knew.

Whelan shouted in triumph as he cut down his last enemy. He came running over. Before Markal could stop him, the king sprang at the throne. Whelan’s attack was hasty, ill-conceived, but now the enemy appeared to be caught in the same trap that Markal had been in moments earlier. All Toth’s attention had been trained on Markal.

Toth’s eyes widened in alarm. He lifted his hand and shouted a spell as Whelan swung Soultrup. The magic bent the angle of the sword attack. But Soultrup had its own will; it twisted back into place. The blade struck Toth on the shoulder and would have hacked right through him, had he been any other man. His body seemed made of oak, and the sword edge bit in and stuck. Whelan pried the blade loose.

Toth lifted his hand to cast another spell, but Markal was ready. He drew his final reserve of strength and put it into a simple sleeping spell like the one Darik had used against Chantmer on the Tothian Way. His hand curled and blackened, and to his dismay, a twinge of doubt entered his mind at the last moment. His old curse; the doubt bled away some of the magic.

But it was enough. The spell died on Toth’s lips, and he slumped as if with exhaustion. His eyes fluttered, and he pried them open. He looked at Whelan as the king prepared for a final swing.

“You have lost,” the dark wizard said. His eyes rolled back, and something seemed to go out of him.

“King Toth,” Whelan cried. “I bind your soul to my sword.”

He swung his sword. Soultrup struck home. There was no resistance to the blade this time. It hit with such force that it cut through King Toth’s neck. The head rolled away with a spurt of blood, and the naked body collapsed off the throne. The severed head came to rest right side up, the eyes blinked once, the lips moved, and then it stopped moving.

Whelan gripped Soultrup in his hands and closed his eyes. A look of deep concentration crossed his face.

“Did you get him?” Markal demanded. “Is he in the sword?”

Whelan opened his eyes, and his mouth turned down in a grim frown. “No. He is not in there with the others. Soultrup did not capture him.”

You have lost.
 

And there was that blank look in Toth’s eyes before the sword hit. Markal looked around the room, searching for a wight, a soul fleeing in mindless terror. He saw nothing, felt nothing.