Banner of the Damned (110 page)

We looked down at enormous fireplaces at either end of the vast chamber that hearkened back to another age. The walls were plastered, decorated with gigantic stylized horses and eagles and wind-blown riders, surrounded by interlocking knotwork patterns. These latter glowed ruby-red with magic potential.

A mighty table built of timbers from century-old trees, each leg ending in raptor claws, had been arranged before one of the fireplaces. From the looks of the gathered jarls and their attendants, as they stamped and rubbed their hands, the heat from the roaring flames did not reach very far.

The servants had just brought hot food and drink when Ivandred arrived at last. Everyone stilled as he walked down the center of the hall of his ancestors, Haldren at his left in shield arm position, their heels ringing on the icy floor.

“Van,” Danrid said. His friendly tone, magnified in that vaulted hall, sounded false to my ears, his laughter a bark of anger. “This is a surprise.”

Ivandred said, “Let’s understand one another. Here’s an order, plain to all. King to sworn jarls: disperse. Go home.”

“But we have made a pact,” Danrid replied, standing away from the table. He reached to his shoulder and pulled his sword.

“A pact for the good of the kingdom supersedes a bad order, even from a king,” the Jarl of Khanivar said pompously, looking at the others for support.

His cousin from Tlen spoke up. “Your own ancestor, King Senrid, made that claim when he reunited us.”

“Van, you’ve let a woman tie you by the prick,” Danrid stated with cordial contempt. “Do you really want to turn us into a nation of shopkeepers and caravan guards?”

Ivandred ignored Danrid and said to the others, “I do not want Marlovens riding under the banner of Norsunder. Our souls are our own.”

Danrid’s brow twitched at that. Some of the others stirred and whispered.

Ivandred looked upward, then around the chamber, and raised his voice. “I know you are listening, Hannik. Or whatever you call yourself—I refuse to malign ‘Herskalt’ any further, a once-respected title.”

Between one moment and the next, the Norsundrian we’d called Herskalt appeared before the fireplace, facing Ivandred, who stood directly below me.

I gripped my first lily as the Herskalt glanced sideways at the jarls. Desperation gnawed at me—I had to catch him facing away. He must not see the magic coming, not at this distance, or he’d have time to ward it. “Each one of you swore to ride to war and glory,” he said to the jarls, and to Ivandred, “What matter whose glory?”

“My glory,” said Ivandred, “is in keeping faith with my wife.”

Next to me Lasva stilled, unbreathing.

“With her, I keep faith with my family. With my family, I keep faith with your families, Yvanavar, Tlen, Tiv Evair, Sindan-An, Khanivar, Fath. With our families, we keep faith with our kingdom. My mistakes are my own, but I can fix them. Because my soul is my own.”

“Too late for that,” Hannik said.

Then everything went awry. Ivandred raised his hand in a familiar sign—the Fire spell! Frantic with dismay I drew breath to halt him, for I’d been certain there would be sword play, and in the moment the Herskalt was busy with steel, I’d planned to make my move.

Lightning flared; Hannik vanished a heartbeat before it could reach
him. Lasva flinched as Ivandred’s lightning, which had been sent toward Hannik before the fireplace, rebounded as no natural lightning had ever done, and shot—aimed deliberately by a will expert in cruelty—straight at the six jarls, as Ivandred watched in astonishment.

Lightning flared terribly around hair and clothing, amid high screams of pain and amazement, then hurled their souls to infinity as their bodies drifted to the floor in puffs of ash.

“I need you intact,” the Herskalt said to Ivandred, emerging once again from nothingness. “I have great plans for you. Glorious.” The word rang with mockery.

Even if he was an image—a projected illusion—my cage of mirror wards could propagate up the link to him. As he passed underneath, I opened my lily, the magic streamed downward, twilight blue, and closed around him with a faint cobalt glitter as the Herskalt’s image looked sharply up. Then froze.

Ivandred looked up, too. And saw us. “Lasva?” he whispered, face drawn with pain.

“I don’t think that’s going to hold Hannik,” I said. “You’d better get out—”

Ivandred didn’t hear me. “Lasva, why are you here?”

“I had to see you,” she began.

The cobalt figure pulsed with a ring of light, then began to coalesce into a different form: taller, more slender. Long hair, whiter than snow. Whoever it was had the skill to draw the magic from my cage ward and use it to build power. Layer by layer.

“Get out,” I pleaded.

“Lasva, I did everything for you,” Ivandred said. “I could have conquered all Halia. I held them all off, because you wanted peace.” He wasn’t bitter, or even angry—he spoke with the pain and bewilderment of a man trying to understand.

“I know.” Lasva leaned dangerously over the carved rail. “And I loved you for that.”

“But you loved him more. Is that it? You always did?”

She opened her hands, an expression eloquent and disconsolate. “I tried—”

Those words, simple as they were, impacted him with the force of steel.

“Look.”
I pointed at the figure not ten paces away, rippling with white-hot coruscation. Streamers of magic bled from the wards all through the room, purple and green and red, drawing power inward.

Ivandred turned to Haldren at his side. “Get them out of here.”

“No,” Haldren replied. “Where you lead I follow. Even into death. So I swore.”

“Haldren, I am damned, but you can save yourself.”

“Then the damned will ride together,” Haldren said, and from behind came shouts: somewhere underneath us, out of sight, the First Lancers had gathered to protect their king.

“Show us the soul-eaters!”

“We will fight!”

“You can’t fight that magic,” I said urgently to Ivandred.

“We can’t run from it either.” He looked around as if blinded.

“
You
can.” I made my decision, clutching the transfer token in one hand, as I tossed my second cage ward down. “Ivandred, take this. It’s the only way to save your people. Get as far away from the castle as you can. The Herskalt might have a cage ward waiting somewhere on the road, just like this one. If he tries to close it around you, open this.”

His hand came up automatically to catch the paper. The words “Save your people” forced him to act. He stepped back from the incandescent figure, glanced upward at us, as I called, “She will be safe!” and with that he began to marshal his followers as they clattered rapidly out of sight and away.

I gripped Lasva. “Get the servants outside. What I am going to do might bring the castle down.”

“What about you, Emras?”

“I’ll be fine,” I lied. “See? Transfer token. But I can’t take servants, so go!” And as she started away, “Your lover’s cup—it’s in my trunk.”

Lasva glanced back once, but decision cleared her brow. She’d seen the transfer token, which meant I could escape. But the castle servants had no such aid. She vanished down the stairs to lead them out to safety.

I turned my attention back to the impossible glowing figure, evidence of magic far beyond my skills. But I had Adamas Dei’s chain of mirrors…

A halo of magic formed around the figure, shrinking slowly toward the upraised hand, as I whispered over my transfer token, weaving a new chain over the layers already there. The magic halo thickened to a ring, forming into a ball of violet effulgence. Right before it touched that outstretched hand, I dropped the token directly into the center of it.

The result could not have been more dramatic: my mirror ward smashed the coalescing power outward. Air hissed on a high note, like a shrieking wind, as the lightning exploded. Plaster blackened, tapestries
whooshed into blue flame, then drifted in ash; the building rocked under the onslaught.

I staggered, then gripped the balcony. Now it was time to release my wards bound to the Herskalt’s access ways: one up high, a second off the kitchen, the third in the tower over the garrison, the fourth in the basement. Everywhere I’d found spells ready to force a connection between Norsunder and the world I reflected the magic back onto itself, again and again, and in a random lack of pattern that it would be impossible for him to keep up with, wherever he was.

Crack!
Resounded from the biggest tower, where four hundred years ago Fox had sat on the battlements with Inda, talking about how beating did not bring out the best in the academy youth, but having a common goal did. The rampart exploded in a mighty clap, raining stone chips beyond the outer walls as below, terrified servants and stable hands fled.

My balcony swayed. I nearly fell over the edge, so flung myself backward. A carved pediment with owls and vines and eagles crashed down at my feet. I transferred to the tower directly above the secret room, which overlooked the road leading down into the town of Darchelde.

I rejoiced for about a heartbeat when I made out Lasva, her hair a tangle, leading a straggling band of servants—many clutching whatever they could grab up—as they exited the big gate in the wake of the First Lancers, who had leaped on their horses, weapons to hand, lances snapped into place, with drilled speed. Ivandred was leading his force away from the castle, obedient to my directive, because he had no defense against magic, only a driving need to save his people.

I couldn’t breathe as every muscle and nerve in my body urged them faster.
There’s going to be a cost,
the Herskalt whispered in memory from the first time I heard his voice, as Ivandred and the First Lancers galloped in perfect formation down the road toward freedom—

Toward a faint, forming shimmer. And there it was, the expected ward.

Only larger than I had believed possible.

Beyond the hill curving above the town the air glittered as if a gigantic hammer had smashed diamonds into a million shards. They winked and shimmered as they blended and then merged in a writhing rope of darkness that vibrated through the air, shattering rock, shivering winter-bare trees, and making my teeth rattle. It stretched between ground and sky, thickening into roiling darkness.

In the road, Lasva’s group staggered, some falling to their knees in the snow churned up by the lancers, hands clapped over ears.

The rope of darkness began to open into a chasm. Ivandred made one last gesture of defiance, flinging his hand high as he snapped open the little paper—which merely drew the focus of that vast access way to Norsunder.

The entire column of lancers was swallowed by the chasm. Then it slammed shut and vanished in a tumultuous reverberation of thunder and a whirling gout of lightning that blasted those shaken trees, and set roofs aflame all through the town.

I had won: Norsunder could not enter Marloven Hesea, and thence the world.

But the Herskalt had won: Norsunder had captured Ivandred, and the best trained of all his warriors.

M

My ears itched. Furious with the futility of my efforts, anguished at my failure to save Ivandred from the Herskalt’s trap, I wiped impatiently at my ears. And looked down at fingers smeared with blood.

Then the frigid air stirred, and the Herskalt appeared next to me, his arms full of cloth—a fold contained a crookedly stitched ship. I’d seen that in Lasva’s memories… Inda’s wedding shirt?

The Herskalt said—and though I’d been deafened, I heard the words inside my head—“Well done, Emras, for a beginner. But as you see, not sufficient. Come along.”

I raised my hand in repudiation, and he laughed. “Do you really think that you would fare any better with Sartor when they catch up with you?”

“Watch me,” I said—that is, my throat worked, but I heard nothing as I threw at his face the toe ring that I had been clutching in my hand.

He disappeared before the ring bounced off the honey-colored stone, then it, too, vanished. I held my breath, expecting anything but more silence.

Of course. First, the Sartoran mages had to discover that the border ward against transfer had been lifted. That, I’d set in motion the previous week, using Adamas Dei’s spell so that it would quietly propagate itself.

Then they would have to dare the castle, which was still creaking. I walked inside and down the cracked stairway to the upper level of the residence wing, silt dropping from overhead. Here and there fires smoldered. The place was a ruin, the air purple with snarls of dark magic. Wearily, sore at heart, I forced myself to assess each of my access ways. Every one of the Herskalt’s transfer wards had been thoroughly obliterated. I was not going to be able to rescue Ivandred, but at least the Herskalt could not get back here without a very great effort.

I kept walking, increasingly dizzy, through the empty castle. Lasva and the servants were somewhere on that slushy road between the ruined castle and the burning town. At least they were alive.

I picked my way down the remains of the grand staircase, avoiding the great hall and the ash where those six men had died. I wiped at my cheek, where a bit of flying stone had scored, and daubed with my sleeve gently at my right ear, which bled sluggishly.

My head was still ringing from the explosion, echoing on a high singing note as I slipped between the iron-studded front doors. One had cracked, flinging splinters clear out into the muddy courtyard below the two sweeping stairs. I lowered myself onto the first step, shivering. Presently the air stirred, and two figures appeared.

Was that Olnar? Looking solid as our father—and a little apprehensive. Next to him was Greveas, also older than I remembered, hands up and ready for desperate measures.