Conqueror’s Moon (16 page)

Maudrayne was taken aback. “The—the person receiving the Sending must also possess talent?”

“Oh, yes. The receiver helps to solidify the Sending, which may then prowl about anywhere it chooses. But it can only arrive in the near vicinity of an adept.”

Her glance fell. When she spoke her voice was desolate. “A Sending came to my husband this night and may still be with him in his chambers. I overheard them but didn’t see them together. It was not a wizard who came but a witch: Ullanoth, Conjure-Princess of Moss.”

“By the Three Icebound Sisters! Then Prince Conrig is secretly adept! I never got close to him when he returned to the palace, so I had no idea. His talent must be exiguous indeed if no Brother of Zeth has detected it.”

“This is a calamity, Ansel. If Conrig’s talent were known, he would be barred from the Cathran succession.”

“But surely you would not betray your husband’s secret, my child. Nor would I.”

“I’m not certain what I will do,” she said in an ominous tone. “Answer another question for me. Can a Sending become pregnant?”

“Great God of the Boreal Blizzards,” Ansel breathed. “The Mossland witch has had sexual congress with your husband?”

Her voice had a preternatural composure. “Yes. This very night—and probably not for the first time. I’ve told you that Conrig has been cold toward me because he fears I’m barren. Now I think he may intend to put me aside— perhaps taking this Ullanoth to wife.” She gave a small, bitter laugh. “But here’s a fine jest: I’m virtually certain that I’m two months with child. It was to tell Conrig the wonderful news that I went into his chambers tonight and waited for him. I fell asleep, and when I woke he was in the next room with Ullanoth’s Sending. And they—they—” She squeezed her eyes shut. “God help me, Ansel. I heard them! And if she can also give him a child—”

The shaman bent forward, taking the hands of the princess. “Maudie, a Sending cannot conceive. Neither can it digest food, or perform any other natural bodily function—or even remain longer than a few hours in the place where it was Sent, for then the genuine body would sicken and die as its energies were drained.”

Maudrayne cried, “Say you true?” Tears brimmed in her eyes, and for a moment she was exalted.

“I do, dear girl. I know all about such things, for they are part of the magical heritage of the Far North.”

The sudden joy drained from her face, to be replaced with a look of calculation. “Then perhaps there is time to win him back, if my pregnancy goes well. Conrig covets an heir as much as he does the Sovereignty of Blenholme. But I think I shall not tell him yet. No, not until our love is rekindled and I am certain that I have first place in his heart… One other thing I must know: What is a sigil?”

The shaman’s benign face hardened. “It’s a piece of strangely carved moonstone made by the Salka monsters in ages long past, so fraught with peril that no sensible magicker would have anything to do with it—a charm conjured with the dread power of the Coldlight Army. Don’t tell me Prince Conrig is meddling with such a thing!”

“I’m not sure. What does a sigil do?”

“They have various purposes, depending upon the spell infused within them. But all have the potential to destroy the soul of the user and do great harm to those around them. You must tell me how you came to know of such a thing. Did the prince and Ullanoth speak of it?”

She told him what she had overheard about Iscannon the wizard-assassin, slain by Conrig’s young footman Deveron, and how the Conjure-Princess had inquired offhandedly about what had been done with a sigil taken from his dead body.

“Iscannon,” the shaman murmured. “I know of him. A member of Moss’s Glaumerie Guild, which has custody of Rothbannon’s renowned Seven Stones. So he was killed by a common servant boy! I wonder how that happened?”

“My husband claimed that this sigil was thrown down a latrine in Castle Vanguard by the footman. Ullanoth was happy for its disposal, saying as you do that it was very dangerous. But—I think Conrig may have lied.”

“Hmmm! Why don’t I search his chambers? One can’t scry a sigil, but no locked door can stop me. If Prince Conrig has the magical moonstone, perhaps I can find a way to take it away from him and put it in a safe place.”

Maudrayne brightened. “Could you do that? I confess that I don’t know whether I still love the damned man or hate him at this moment, but I certainly would not have him endangered by evil magic.”

“You can trust me, lass. Of course, Conrig may not have the sigil after all. Who is this young footman called Deveron?”

“A furtive lad, always skulking about and turning up in unexpected places. I think Conrig uses him as a sort of domestic spy. He’s certainly more than an ordinary servant.”

“Does he possess talent?”

“Certainly not.”

“Puzzling,” mused the shaman. “And to think that such a one killed Iscannon! I think I’ll take a discreet look at this interesting young man and find out whether he secretly kept Iscannon’s stone—perhaps as a souvenir. If he did, something will have to be done. Don’t worry, Maudie. I’ll deal with it.” He rose to his feet. “You need sleep after your tiring journey.” He opened one of the pockets on his baldric and removed a green phial, oddly shaped. “Put three drops of this in water and drink it down. You will fall asleep at once and rest dreamlessly.”

She took the tiny bottle. “Thank you, Ansel. Come again to me tomorrow. I’ll tell you about the trip to Zeth Abbey, and you can tell me how you’ve fared for the past three weeks. How is the ambassador’s ailing small daughter?”

“Fully recovered and homesick for Tarn.”

The princess sighed. “So am I, old friend. Sick and so very, very tired!” She kissed him on the cheek, let him out, and secured the door to the corridor.

At the entrance to her bedchamber she paused. By now, the ceramic bottles of hot water the servants had carefully arranged to warm her sheets would be stone cold. Why not sleep in front of the sitting-room fire? She went for a pillow and a down comforter and settled into an upholstered armchair with a footstool. When she was comfortable, she realized she had forgotten water for the sleeping potion. She studied the gleaming green-glass phial in the firelight. It contained over a dram, enough to bring many nights of sleep.

I don’t believe I need this after all, she thought drowsily, tucking it into a pocket of her robe. But it may come in handy later.

eleven

Nightmares had begun to poison Snudge’s sleep even before the prince’s retinue left Castle Vanguard, and they had persisted during the journey back to Cala Palace and in the weeks since then. The dream was always more or less the same.

First he found himself reliving his encounter with the Mosslander spy, saw that ravaged face materialize out of invisibility and assume an expression of false friendship, stubby teeth exposed in a parody of a smile. Then the hawk-orange eyes turned to orbs of onyx blazing with malignant talent. The boy once again felt a profound cold spreading through his body and steely thumbs throttling the life out of him. At the brink of death, he finally took fumbling hold of his dagger and slammed it deep into the enemy’s heart.

And heard the sorcerer’s windspoken cry of desperation: Beynor!

Snudge never saw the spy die, for that was the signal for the dream to change, for another person to appear, one he had never seen when wide awake.

The man was gauntly attractive and quite tall, perhaps no older than Snudge himself, although there was nothing youthful about his masterful bearing and narrow, pinched countenance. He wore sumptuous clothing edged with fur. His head was bare, and his hair was as pale and glistening as thistledown. At first, the young man in the dream appeared to be standing inside various richly furnished rooms, often backed by a window showing a night sky.

In later dreams, Snudge saw him poised in the bow of a great ship, with his hair blown nearly horizontal in a strong wind, which he seemed not to notice. Sails swelled and crackled above him and spray crashed rail-high as the stem of the vessel split the water at speed. Beyond lay an expanse of dark ocean, incongruously unruffled, a few drifting icebergs, and a sky strewn with brilliant stars.

Whether in strange mansions or on shipboard, the young man always held the same conversation with Snudge. His bloodless lips spoke without audible sound.

Throw it into the sea, Deveron Austrey!

“What?”

Get rid of it as soon as you can. Throw it away!

“What? Throw away what?”

That which is mine. Go down to the docks in Cala Harbor and throw it into the water so that it may return to me. Banish all memory of it, or risk the revenge of the Lights, pain and desolation more terrible than any that a human being can imagine.

“Who are you? What are you talking about?”

You know what I’m talking about. You stole it from my servant Iscannon after you killed him. You keep it well hidden. You search through books taken from the library of the Royal Alchymist, hoping to unlock its secret. You never will. All you’ll discover is a horror worse than death.

“Are you the one called Beynor? The Conjure-Prince of Moss?”

I am. And the thing you stole is mine to command—not yours.

“That’s not what the arcane books say. Any talented person—”

So you admit you have the sigil! Stupid cullion—how dare you aspire to know the Beaconfolk? Haven’t your clumsy researches taught you what you’re playing with? The Lights are older than mankind, older than the Salka, older even than the dry land’s rising from the sea. The Coldlight Army could destroy us all on a mere whim.

“But they haven’t destroyed you, have they? And they didn’t protect your spy from my dagger. Perhaps you’re lying to me, Prince Beynor… I wonder if I should ask your sister Ullanoth about the Beaconfolk. And about the sigil.”

Lowborn fool! Whore’s kitling! Stinking heap of dogpuke! Do you think you can bandy words with me? Throw the moonstone into the sea! Do it tonight!

“No. And you can’t force me to do it, or you would have done so already. Go to hell.”

You’re the one who will experience hell, Deveron Austrey. Now feel the least punishment the Lights can inflict on ignorant meddlers: BITHO SILSHUA!

Prince Beynor vanished, leaving only a dream-sky with countless stars and that oddly calm northern sea. Snudge felt a gruesome chill again, like the one the sorcerer-spy had inflicted on him, starting at his extremities and flooding slowly toward his body’s core, sucking warmth and life from his flesh and entrails and brain. His suffering was appalling—but even worse was the sense of overwhelming fear and foreboding that took hold of him. Somehow, he realized that he had not even begun to experience the fullness of agony. But he would, and very soon, because the torturers were coming for him out of that glittering black sky.

Lights.

Slow-moving blobs of silvery-green, scarlet, and gold, accompanied by a faint hissing crackle, rose up from the horizon. The glowing patches expanded, brightened, became sweeping colored beams and enormous rippling bands and pale bursts of unearthly radiance that finally coalesced into iridescent shapes resembling monstrous living creatures. The Great Lights filled the sky with their brightness and engulfed him, bringing the most atrocious pain he had ever experienced. Whispery laughter mocked him and reveled in his agony as he writhed and tried to scream, and shrank away to a frost-coated nubbin of misery, trapped amidst cracked and shattered bones.

==========

He woke up as always, unable to move, rigid on his palliasse in the chamber where he and the eleven other privileged armigers of the prince’s cohort slept. He had flung aside the bedcoverings and lay naked to the cold predawn wind blowing in from Cala Bay, silently cursing the day he had taken the moonstone sigil from the dead sorcerer.

It hung around his neck on a cord. He never took it off and politely refused to let the other boys examine it closely, saying it was a sacred talisman given him by his late grandfather. The bully Mero Elwick had tried to rip it away one day in the washroom, but Snudge had kneed him in the crotch and left him gagging and cursing, and no one had bothered him about it since.

The square of semi-precious gemstone was carved with the circumpolar constellations and odd asymmetrical shapes Snudge could not put a name to. It never glowed or manifested any magic. In the time he had spent in Cala Palace since returning from Castle Vanguard, with Vra-Kilian fortuitously absent on the king’s pilgrimage and none of his assistant wizards clever enough to catch him in the act, the boy had rifled the Royal Alchymist’s collection of arcane volumes at every opportunity, seeking information about sigils, about the insubstantial beings who empowered them, and about the sorcerers who dared to use such perilous magical instruments. Before retiring each evening, he would report to Prince Conrig the things he had learned—little enough that was useful, but a good deal that scared the wits out of him and made the prince frown with concern.

“I know most of your time is now taken up with learning the knightly arts,” Conrig had said, “but keep searching the Alchymical Library whenever you can. I must know more about the Beaconfolk and the royal conjurors of Moss and the sorcerers of the Glaumerie Guild before we invade Didion.”

So Snudge obeyed, and each night dreamed the dream, and woke paralyzed in the freezing twilight before sunup.

After a few minutes he would be able to move again. He’d rewind himself tightly in blankets and feather-tick until he stopped shivering. Then—he never told any of this to Prince Conrig—he prowled the wind in search of any hint that Beynor’s dream-visitation and awful words were anything but the product of his own imagination. The search for awareness-threads was invariably fruitless. No one ever seemed to be scrying the part of the palace where he lay—not that they would have been able to oversee him! And no one tried to bespeak him from afar.

As Snudge’s body warmed, his talented concentration invariably flagged. No matter how hard he tried to stay alert, sleep always claimed him again. Dreamless, he would lie without moving until the rising-bell tolled.