Aquamancer (mancer series Book 2) (26 page)

Coventown

Douglas and Marbleheart smelled Coventown long before they saw it. A fitful breeze carried a stench like burning sulfur mixed with the hot, sour reeks of molten lead and wet, rotted wood.

“Woof!” The Otter snorted and sneezed. “First Pfantas, now here! How in World do they stand it, these Witchpeople? I’d think they’d suffocate in no time!”

Douglas climbed to the top of a sharp ridge, screened from the town by thick-leafed, thorny brush. He crawled the last few yards on his stomach, carefully parting the stiff branches to peer into the deep cleft between two barren, out-flung mountain spines.

They’d climbed steadily all day, losing sight of the Witchservers’ trail hours before. Nothing short of a mountain goat could climb the sides of the main valley the Witchservers had entered until the Sea Otter found a side gully for them through which to scramble unseen.

In the narrow canyon before them, the travelers saw, at first, thin and twisting columns of sooty smoke rising from red glints of flickering fire. As they looked closer, however, they saw that what they had first thought sharp pinnacles and overbearing tors were in fact crooked, smoke-blackened, too-thin buildings climbing from the valley floor up the opposite mountain ridge.

A dark and dreary castle stood above it all, its topmost towers taller than the edge of the ridge behind it. In its embrasures and from arrow-slit windows, flares blinked malevolently, like wicked watchful eyes.

The castle outline blurred and shimmered in waves of heat, columns of dun-colored smoke, and gray steam. Before its narrow gate a company of Witchservers armed with pikes and long, curved swords stood watching, unmoved as heavily burdened lines of slaves were whipped through into the castle courtyard and back out again. The crack of whips, the rattle of chains, and the groans of the driven came clearly to the Journeyman Wizard across the dim vale.

“Coventown,” he said emphatically. “Could be nothing else.”

“And that’s the abode of this Emaldar the Beautiful,” sniffed Marbleheart. “So called.”

Douglas pointed down and out from their vantage. On the path approaching the town along a narrow stream at the bottom of the cleft moved the party of Witchservers, surrounding their rickety garbage wagon. Its wheels squealed as it swayed and jerked painfully over stones and ruts.

In its bed knelt a forlorn figure, heavily chained and carefully watched by his captors.

“Cribblon!” cried Douglas softly, although the constant din of Coventown made his care unnecessary. “I should have rescued him before this! Now we’ll have to get him out of that... that nasty place!”

“Nothing we could have done about it,” Marbleheart said to comfort his friend. “There was no other way to find the Witch.”

Douglas slid back down the ridge, out of sight of any watchers on the dark castle’s battlements. The Otter sniffed twice more in disgust, and followed.

“Let’s find a place to hole up,” he said. “I assume we’ll need to scout about a bit before we move in on this Witchperson. The landscape looks a little cleaner and a bit more hospitable up in that direction.”

Douglas nodded and motioned the Sea Otter to lead the way beside a tiny mountain rill that fell by uneven and uncertain stair steps from the treeless mountainside high above.

Marbleheart stopped to taste a mouthful of the water from the creek, spat it out, and made a wry face. “It tastes like the town smells. And it’s warm, not cold as you might expect decent mountain water would be. Nothing but slime and scum lives in such water. You see? No trout for dinner tonight!”

“I’ll treat it to remove the taste and the slime,” decided Douglas. “I don’t want to go much farther up than this. Do you see a sheltered spot where we can camp?”

“A little farther up, I think,” urged his companion. “See? There’s a fairly deep overhang a minute or two farther on.”

In fact, it was a cave, low and narrow at its mouth but opening up into a large, low-ceilinged room beyond.

“Clean, quite warm, and nice and dry,” Marbleheart decided after peering about with satisfaction. “Who’d have believed I would ever be grateful for a dry spot! It’ll do, don’t you think?”

“Suit admirably,” agreed Douglas. He chose a flat ledge near the cave mouth on which to build a small fire—worth the risk, he decided. Since the cave entrance faced the opposite canyon wall, a seeker could be ten steps away and not glimpse a blaze within. A continuous wind sighed mournfully down the mountain, whisking the thread of smoke away with it.

“Ah, supper!” sighed the Sea Otter, slumping down on the dry sand before the fire. “What will we conjure up this evening, Wizard?”

Douglas suddenly realized he was both very hungry—they hadn’t stopped for lunch at all that day—and very weary. Climbing mountains was something to which you had to grow accustomed.

“Pancakes and maple syrup?” he asked, beginning to make the requisite passes in the air. “A few rashers of hickory-smoked bacon? Cold, fresh milk from Blue Kettle’s springhouse?”

“If you can’t produce ‘em, don’t torture me,” moaned the Otter, although in truth he had no idea what pancakes might be. “If you’re not teasing, don’t waste time talking about it!”

At the moment he would have eaten almost anything.

Once the meal was prepared—spelled, rather, out of Blue Kettle’s kitchen a thousand miles away at Wizards’ High—and eaten, the travelers could say they were fairly comfortable. The cave, at first dim and cheerless, took on the feel of home.

“A night’s sleep? Then what, Wizard?”

“You’re right. Tomorrow morning we’ll sniff about some, get the lay of the land. I’d like to catch a glimpse of this Emaldar person, just to make some assessment of her. We’ll have to face her, eventually, but I’d like more information about her and her people before I jump into the Witchfire.”

“I’m not at all sure I like your mentioning fire,” complained the Otter. “Well, take ‘em as they come, I say. I’m going to look about in the dark—make sure there are no Witchservers snooping up our gully—and then get some sleep.”

“Good idea,” said Douglas, sleepily. “Don’t wake me up unless you have a good reason.”

By the time the Otter had paused to let his eyes adjust to the darkness of the mountainside beyond the cave, the Journeyman Wizard was sound asleep and dreaming of swimming in Warm Seas with a very pretty pearl fisher’s daughter and a Giant Sea Tortoise named Oval.

Marbleheart had the right coloration, the low build, the hunter’s instincts, and the very strong desire to move quietly—silently, in fact—through the wind-tortured brush and over shadowy, scoured-bare rock. He crossed the crest between the little creek gully and the deeper, wider one in which had been built the Castle of Coven and its wretched village.

From a narrow ledge just below the rim of the larger canyon, he studied the setting. The main valley continued on up the slopes of Blueye Mountain almost as straight as an arrow can be shot, until it topped out in a jumbled, torn field of jagged black stones, which looked as if they had been shoved into place by a gigantic hand and left for the centuries’ rains and snows to pack down hard.

About the village, the Otter could see no living plant except an occasional patch of shriveled broom or ground-hugging heather. There were few thornbushes, still without leaves at this altitude, although it was well into spring in the lower lands.

Down the sharp cleft past town and castle dashed a foaming stream. It caught the light of a few stars, reflecting it feebly to the lone watcher. At Coventown it slipped reluctantly into a long, narrow pool. Here the water, stilled, reflected the dirty red and yellow blur of the flambeaux on the battlements and a few dim sparks of lights in the town. A crude earth-and-rock dam had been dumped across its course to flood the narrow lake.

Below the dam the stream waters reappeared as overflow, now dark and muddy, with no reflections but slimy swirls and oily stains. From the canyon rim the Sea Otter’s sensitive nose caught its stench of sewage, the smells of human sweat and offal, bad teeth, worse breaths, and other foul castings.

Downstream the rivulet seemed to slink in shame among great, tumbled rocks thrown down from the mountainsides in ages past. It completely disappeared, perhaps underground, before the canyon curved away to the southeast toward the pinelands and distant Pfantas.

“Argh!” Marbleheart gagged, willing the wind to change and take the smells away. “Worse by far than Pfantas!”

It was past a normal bedtime in the town’s maze of cramped alleys and uneven stairways and there were only guttering torches here and there as people huddled for warmth indoors and spoke in low murmurs not meant to be overheard.

The castle above was black by day and blacker by night. Its glaring window eyes looked over the town, the canyon, and off toward Pfantas and beyond, to Old Kingdom.

“To judge by this Witch’s windows,” muttered the Sea Otter to himself, “she really does cast greedy eyes on Old Kingdom.”

At last he turned about on his narrow ledge and climbed up over the ridge again, dropping quickly down to the cave where Douglas slept. Even in his thick waterproof fur he was glad to be out of the stinging, acrid wind once more. And away from the odors, especially.

Here the air smelled of the stream’s hot, sulfurous water and, a pleasant surprise in such a place, tiny, white flowers such as grow on the edges of glaciers.

My dear young Otter,
he said softly to himself as he gallumped down the last rockfall to the cave mouth and safety
, you might as well get used to the smells and the eye-watering fumes and the mysterious lights. You’re going to have to go much, much closer than this, soon.

One of the red-shot eyes of Coven Castle was larger than the others, although Marbleheart hadn’t noted it particularly. It was the embrasure that lighted and aired, more or less, a large, bare-walled, dank-smelling anteroom of a haughtily beautiful woman. She sat erect and proud in an ebony chair supported by writhing, deeply carved jade-eyed serpents with golden fangs.

The Black Witch called herself Emaldar and was called by her sycophants, servers, and slaves “Emaldar the Beautiful” and “Queen Witch” and, sometimes, “Woman of Bare Mountain,” among a number of less happy things not worth remembering now.

She was silently studying the young-old man in the tattered gray robe standing unhooded before her with his head up and, his eyes slitted, bravely waiting.

“You are Douglas Brightglade.”

It was a statement, not a question.

“If you say so,” murmured Cribblon.

“Eh? Speak up! Louder, so we can hear you, Brightglade Bumbler!”

Cribblon winced at her shrill tone but stood, still silent. A Witchserver guard prodded him with a three-tined pike, none too gently, making him flinch and stumble forward. The former Apprentice Wizard glowered over his shoulder at the soldier.

“They’d love to tear you limb from limb, of course,” remarked Emaldar with a throaty chuckle. “Or use your pitiful body for target practice at the archery butts.”

“I am sure,” agreed Cribblon.

“Not now. Not just yet, however. I want some answers from you, Journeyman. Then a long stay in my sweet dungeon, a remarkably vile place. Even my Witchservers hate it down there.”

She stood and paced back and forth before her chair for a moment, looking down at her dainty feet as they moved under her heavily jeweled and crescent-spangled gown.

“Where, now, is Flarman the Freak?”

“I don’t know any such person,” said her prisoner.

“Flarman Flowerstalk, then, or Firemaster, if you prefer.”

“I assume he is at his home at Wizards’ High in distant Dukedom,” said Cribblon, shrugging. “He doesn’t tell me his comings and goings.”

“I’m sure of that!” laughed the Black Witch, scornfully. “Were I Flarman, I wouldn’t give you the time of day, either. But you must know what he knows about me or you wouldn’t be here. That’s what I want to hear from your lips, either now—or later, when they are broken by beatings and blistered with thirst and your body is twisted and screaming with remembered pain.”

“I forget the question,” said Cribblon, seeking to string the moment out, fearing what would follow when the interview ended.

“I want to know what Flarman knows—and Augurian, too, blast him—about Coven and about me.”

Cribblon shuffled his feet about, not looking up at the Witch Queen. He was, in fact, struggling to recall a simple spell Frigeon had taught him, ages ago. It was supposed to make one impervious to pain. He had too long forgotten some of the words, and the passes would be impossible with chained wrists.

“They know
who
you are,” he said just as the soldier raised his pike to prick his backside once more. “They certainly know
where
you are, and
when
you came here. I’m not sure even you know
why
you came.”

“My goals? Well,
someone
has to rule Old Kingdom! It’s laying about completely ungoverned, in utter chaos. All sorts of people and things come and go as they please! Or they sit and sneer at you when ordered to leave! There are even some here who are happy and at peace with themselves. That won’t do! It just won’t do! There are too many things to be done and run and taken to pieces and put back together again the right way—my way!”

She sat abruptly on her chair and leaned back, stroking one of the carved serpents thoughtfully. There was a speculative look in her eyes that gave Cribblon more shivers than her threats of torture.

“Personally, I like things neat, straight laid and perfectly efficient,” Emaldar went on more quietly, as if to herself. “I require all my people to know
exactly
where they stand... or grovel, if in my presence. I don’t like that it’s sometimes warm in winter and cold in summer. People must realize World will be much better off when everything is exactly the same everywhere, for everyone, forever!”

Cribblon sagged—he had been standing braced for hours now, and the chains about his arms and legs were very heavy. Wasn’t there a spell Frigeon had drummed into him? Something to do with rusting heavy iron?