Corsair (33 page)

“A beholder,” he groaned. The gargoyles were trouble enough, but beholders were terrible adversaries. Given a few moments, the monster could destroy the whole landing party single-handedly. He whirled to shout a warning to his soldiers. “Archers, pincushion that thing!”

Most of the Shieldsworn were busy fighting the gargoyles, but a couple still had their bows in hand. Bravely they fired at the multi-eyed monster.

Sarth turned his attention to the beholder as well, hurling a blast of scorching emerald fire that clung to the thing and sizzled like acid. The beholder roared in anger and turned the full fury of its eye-rays against the tiefling. Sarth threw up a quick spell-shield but staggered under the magical assault.

Geran searched his mind for the arcane symbol of a spell he rarely used. He brought it to the tip of his tongue as he wove the point of his sword through mystic passes and unlocked its magic with a single word: “HaethellynI”His blade took on a strange blue sheen, and he leaped in front of Sarth, parrying the beholder’s eye-rays with the sword. He deflected a crimson ray at a gargoyle nearby, who howled and burst into flame, and caught a pale yellow ray next. This one he sent back at the beholder; it struck the monster in its own middle eye with a shower of sparks.

The floating monster wailed and spun its eye away from the battle below. But one of its smaller eyes found Geran and blasted him with a coruscating blue beam before he could deflect it. The magical beam seized Geran like the grip of an invisible titan and flung him headlong down the beach. The swordmage tumbled through the air and crashed into the pebble-strewn beach with bone-jarring force. He felt his left wrist snap under him, and a jolt of hot, white pain ran up his arm. He rolled several times before he came to a stop, dizzy and disoriented. Slowly he pushed himself upright with his good hand and reached for his sword, lying on the ground nearby.

Suddenly something hit him across the back, hard. It drove him to the ground, stunning him again, only to drag him into the air a moment later. Wings beat like thunder around him, and talons clenched with iron strength around his shoulders. Only the potent defensive wardings of his swordmagic prevented them from sinking deep into his flesh. Through the pain, the thundering wingbeats, the dizzying swings and drops, Geran realized that a gargoyle had caught hold of him and was trying to fly off. Already the beach was a good twenty feet below him, and the monster that had him was beating upward with all its strength.

“Geran!”Hamil shouted. The halfling ran after him and paused to take careful aim with his bow. But another gargoyle spoiled the shot, knocking Hamil down as it crashed into him, wounded by one of the Shieldsworn. Sarth dueled the beholder with a blinding barrage of deadly spells and fierce blasts, holding the monster at bay.

Geran struggled in the gargoyle’s grasp. “Let go of me!” he snarled. He was a heavy burden for the monster; it sagged and dipped precipitously in midair as he tried to twist free.

The monster croaked in protest. “Mine!” it rasped. “Catch! Slay! Mine!”

He managed to tear free of one talon, which had only been caught in his leather jacket. The gargoyle almost dropped him; Geran glanced down beneath his wildly swinging feet and realized that a fall from his current height would be sure to break bones, if not kill him outright. In fact, if the gargoyle wanted to kill him, the easiest thing to do would be to let go of him. Despite the searing pain of the monster’s grip on his shoulder, Geran reached up with his right hand and seized one ankle in a powerful grip, determined to cling to the creature until the drop below them was something he might survive without crippling injury.

The gargoyle hissed and turned on him in midair, clawing and kicking at him. Talons scored his chest, raked his limbs, and came within an inch of eviscerating him, but his magic wardings held, blunting the attack. But one flailing kick of the gargoyle’s taloned foot snagged the satchel hanging around Geran’s neck and ripped through its strap. The leather pouch— with the starry compass inside—dropped to the ground below, vanishing into thick underbrush in the middle of a roofless house. Geran roared in fear and frustration, hanging on by one hand and waving his damaged left arm ineffectually to fend off the enraged monster.

Then he lost his grip at the same time the gargoyle’s talons tore loose from his jacket.

For one terrible moment he plunged backward toward the earth, flailing in midair. Then he plummeted through the thin branches of a small cedar tree growing alongside the wreckage of an old temple. Limbs pummeled him in a dozen savage blows, spinning him first one way and then another, cracking and thrashing as he fell. He hit the ground below hard enough that his sight went black and his breath whooshed from his mouth. The compass! he thought. I lost the compass!

Groaning, gasping for breath, he somehow groped his way to his feet and staggered out from under the cedar. He was standing near the front of what had once been a grand old stone building, its facade now little more than heaps of rubble spilling across a densely overgrown street. His back ached, and his knee throbbed painfully; he couldn’t put much

weight on that leg. But he’d been fortunate—the gargoyle’s flight had brought them over the buildings at the top of the bluff, so that instead of falling a hundred feet or more to the beach, he’d only fallen twenty or thirty feet through the branches of a tree. “Fortunate, indeed,” he muttered. “If I’d been a little more fortunate, I wouldn’t have been dragged off in the first place.”

“Catch! Slay!” The gargoyle alighted atop a broken column a short distance from Geran, red rage burning in its eyes. Two more of its fellows circled overhead, apparently drawn by the struggle. The monster flexed its talons and hissed at Geran.

His sword was somewhere on the beach below. The compass was lost somewhere in the maze of ruins around him, if it hadn’t been shattered by the drop. He could barely stand. And he had at least one broken bone, perhaps more. Geran bared his teeth in a fierce snarl. His death was likely moments away, a fact that filled him with fury and frustration. If he fell here, Mirya and her daughter would likely never escape from whatever fate the masters of the Black Moon consigned them to. But he meant to die fighting and die on his feet, if that was all fate offered.

Holding the gargoyle’s gaze, he shaped a single arcane word with his will and whispered, “Cuilledyrr!”

The gargoyle sprang at him from its perch, claws outstretched. Geran stood his ground as long as he could before dodging aside. He managed to twist out of the way of the deadly claws, but his injured knee gave out under him, and he went down in the loose rubble and wiry grass of the street. The gargoyle gave one gloating hiss and threw itself back at him to finish him off. Then the shrill ring of steel on stone echoed through the air. Geran held out his right hand—and his sword of elven steel flew hilt-first into his open hand, summoned from the beach below by his word of calling. In one fluid motion Geran buried the swordpoint in the gargoyle’s black heart. The thing screeched horribly in his ears, and its body slammed him back to the ground again.

He struggled to free himself from the monster’s dead weight and looked up to see the gargoyles who’d been circling above swooping down on him. He didn’t have the strength to fight off another of the monsters, let alone two at once. Wildly he looked up and down the street, searching for some sort of shelter, some defensible position. All that he saw was the dark doorway of a dilapidated palace across the street. There was no way he could

outrun the gargoyles to the doorway, but he had one last card to play. As the two monsters swooped down on him, Geran fixed his eyes on the darkness inside the stone archway and mustered the strength for his spell of teleportation. In the blink of an eye he was no longer on his hands and knees in the rain-soaked street outside, but instead kneeling in the clutter and debris inside the palace, looking back out at the place where he had been. The gargoyles screeched in frustration, fluttering and bounding from side to side in search of their missing prey.

Geran held still, hardly daring to breathe. If the monsters peered too closely at the doorway, they would surely see him … but the creatures moved down the street, passing out of his sight. He heard their wingbeats and their croaking voices moving away.

With a sigh of relief, he climbed to his feet. The interior of the palace was dark and cluttered; he could barely see anything inside. He hobbled a couple of steps away from the open doorway, just in case the gargoyles returned—and then his foot plunged through the floorboards. He hit the floor hard, and the whole thing gave way, sending him into the cellar below in a cascade of rubble and dust. For the second time in the last hundred heartbeats, Geran found himself falling. He hit the bottom, struck his head on something hard, and sank into dizzying darkness.

14 Marpenoth, The Year ofthe Ageless One (1479 DR)

The smell of smoke still clung to Hulburg despite several days of intermittent rain. Rhovann believed it was an improvement over the customary odor of the city. He’d never cared for the cities of humankind, with their crowding, their cookfires and forge smoke, their garbage, their unwashed masses. In his more honest moments he might admit that the cool, damp air of Hulburg’s autumn was much more tolerable than, say, Mulmaster or Hillsfar in the middle of the summer—but he was not often inclined to give Hulburg the benefit of the doubt.

A shame the Black Moon hadn’t burned more of the place, he reflected as he gazed from the carriage at the street outside. Rhovann knew it ran counter to his ally Sergen’s purpose to destroy the city outright, but in his eyes it wouldn’t have done that much harm for a few blocks to be burned down. After all, each injury he inflicted on Hulburg was one more bitter draught of justice for Geran Hulmaster to savor. The wrongs Rhovann had endured at Geran’s instigation were many and great, and it might take a human lifetime to repay each one appropriately.

In the seat opposite Rhovann, Maroth Marstel frowned as they passed another burned-out building, one that had survived the Black Moon attack only to be destroyed by a fire set during rioting two days later. “We should muster a few hundred armsmen and clean out the Tailings,” the old lord muttered. “Drive those Cinderfists, those foreign criminals, out of Hulburg forever, before they ruin everything. That’s the first thing I’ll do as harmach, mark my words.”

“Everything in its own time, my lord,” Rhovann said. “First we must convince Grigor Hulmaster to step down—or force him to if he fails to see

reason. After all, he is simply the wrong man for the times.”

“The wrong man for the times,” Marstel said softly. It was not his own thought, but he was so deeply under Rhovann’s dominion, he likely believed that it was.

“Do not speak of becoming harmach again. It is a secret between you and me.”

“A secret …” Marstel smiled, and his eyes took on a cunning cast. “I have a secret.”

Rhovann frowned. Maroth Marstel was not a young man, and between besotting himself with drink and a certain native lack of wits, he very well may have started along the long, confusing road that afflicted some humans as they grew old. Rhovann had used spells of compulsion and control on Marstel for months now with little concern for the innate soundness of the man’s mind. He found with no small vexation that he did not know exactly how his magic was likely to be affected by the subject’s slide into senescence—one more unpleasant characteristic of humankind seemingly designed for his personal frustration and annoyance. It might be wise for Marstel to spend more of his time out of sight of others and to adopt a pretense that the House mage Lastannor was an especially loyal, competent, and trusted subordinate who conducted most of Marstel’s business so as not to trouble the great man with needless details.

In a tenday or two that will be Sergen’s concern, not mine, Rhovann reminded himself. After all, he didn’t care what became of Hulburg after he was finished dealing with Geran. Whether Sergen succeeded in seating a puppet on the throne—such as it was in this rude little backwater—or lost control of the city as Marstel’s failing mind became apparent to all didn’t matter to him in the slightest. But just in case, Rhovann murmured rhe words of his domination charm and erased the childishness from Marstel’s expression.

The carriage rolled into the courtyard of the harmach’s castle, and footmen appeared to help Marstel from the coach. Judging from the other carriages in the courtyard, Rhovann guessed that they were the last to arrive. He allowed Marstel to lead the way into the castle’s great hall and trailed a step or two behind. The other members of the Harmach’s Council waited by the table, conversing with each other or studying their notes. Seated in the row behind the place reserved for Marstel as

the head of the Merchant Council, the heads of the other great merchant companies in Hulburg—Sokol, Jannarsk, Double Moon, and Iron Ring—waited as well.

“Lord Marstel! Master Mage Lastannor!” the Shieldsworn guard by the door announced. The murmur of conversation in the room died away, and the various officials took their seats. Rhovann and Marstel sat down just in time to be called to their feet by Harmach Grigor’s arrival. They stood slowly, and the mage studied the ruler of Hulburg as he descended the stairs leading to the great hall. Grigor looked pale and tired, and he sat down with an audible sigh. The councilors and assembled advisors and seconds sat down as well.

Deren Ilkur, the Keeper of Duties, rapped his gavel on the table. “The Harmach’s Council is met,” he said. “With your permission, my lords and ladies, we will set aside the normal agenda and proceed directly to the urgent business of the day—the rioting and unrest in the Tailings and other poor neighborhoods.”

No one objected. Then Burkel Tresterfin cleared his throat and spoke. “I suppose I’ll speak first,” he said. “Two more buildings were burned last night. At this rate, there will be nothing left of Hulburg but ashes. What steps can we take to restore order? Can’t the Shieldsworn do something?”