Forging the Runes (36 page)

Did the human know how he was being used? Did he care? From what Ardagh had seen of Osmod, total self-interest and a lack of what humans called morality seemed to be his prime attributes.

But this didn't make sense! It was one thing for Darkness to settle about someone like Osmod, someone who could promise chaos and pain. Why, Ardagh wondered, should the Darkness be so suddenly aware of
him?
The Sidhe had never had any dealings with demonic forces!

Ae, wait. Maybe-they hadn't. But he, Ardagh realized with a shock, most certainly had. Even if it hadn't been by his choosing, he had definitely had dealings with Arridu, the late Gervinus's demon ally.

And so it is that the Darkness knows of me, and now the Darkness knows that I'm a threat to Osmod as well. Gervinus, Gervinus, curse your treacherous soul, I thought I was done with you. And wouldn't it please you to see this?

But why hadn't the Darkness already struck? That was obvious enough; it couldn't. If he were reachable, Ardagh thought with sardonic humor, he'd already be dead. Regardless of human tales of demons, no aspect of Darkness could enter Reality without a gateway. And clearly—thank whatever Powers might be involved— those few drops of his blood that Arridu had stolen, the blood that might have formed such a gateway, had long ago lost their potency.

But what of Osmod? He just might be fool enough to invite the Darkness in and never see the harm!

At the prince's angry hiss, Cadwal turned sharply to him. "What? What?"

"The Darkness is in him and about him, swirling over the city, waiting for a chance to enter."

The mercenary didn't have to ask who that "he" might be. "You're not just being poetic, are you?" At Ardagh's impatient shake of the head, Cadwal continued, "And a fellow who can see in the night isn't going to be worried about nice, natural darkness.
Iesu.
You don't mean we're going to be doing battle against the Prince of Darkness himself?"

"Don't joke."

"Wasn't." Cadwal paused a heartbeat "You don't
really
mean—"

"No. There will be no conventional demonic figures. But Osmod is playing with more, I think, than either I or he suspected."

"And where is he? If he's got all that—that dark Power, why hasn't he already done something about our being here?"

"I don't know. Something is very obviously distracting him."

"And distracting the . . . uh . . . Darkness as well?"

Ardagh shook his head. No use trying to explain what wouldn't fit the human tongue. He and Cadwal rode unchallenged into the city in the midst of a chattering group of late-arriving merchants. After a moment's hesitation, the prince turned his horse in the direction of the royal enclosure. But Cadwal moved his own horse to block Ardagh's path.

"No insult meant, but what the
hell are
you doing? Marching right into enemy territory?"

"In effect, yes."

"But you—he—"

"Cadwal, please. I cannot afford to wait meekly for him to leave his sanctuary. Trust me on this: I don't dare. In fact, I don't dare wait at all."
Not with that fog of Darkness all around us and threatening to erupt into Reality.

The mercenary opened his mouth, closed it, caught by the prince's inhumanly steady stare. At last Cadwal shrugged with the casual, resigned manner of one who has fought too many battles to be upset by one more, even one in which he might be badly outmatched. "I keep forgetting. You're not human. At least we have that on our side."

"You still have a choice. You can still leave."

"Hell, man, I've never yet turned my back on a comrade. Even if," Cadwal added with shaky humor, "this time Hell may really be involved. Come on, let's get going before I find some way to talk myself out of this."

Ardagh grinned in spite of himself and reached out to clasp the startled human's hand for a minute. "Comrade, indeed. I'll need someone quite literally to guard my back."

"Uh, right. But," Cadwal added, gesturing with his chin towards the palisade about the royal hall, "getting in there is not going to be easy."

"On the contrary." Even as he spoke, Ardagh was still searching with delicate magical care for Osmod, finding nothing but that unnerving psychic haze of Darkness. "On the contrary," he repeated after a moment, "I suspect that getting into the hall is going to be the easiest part of it all."

A Loving Sacrifice
Chapter 36

Osmod fought down a shout of pure rage. No! He dare not let his emotions overcome him, not now. Grimly, he forced his mind back to self-control, back to total and fierce concentration.

Or almost total concentration. What was going on in this hall was almost too much for even a Powerful mind to bear! Hour after hour, and yet these idiots kept at each other, voices more hoarse perhaps, gestures less frenetic, but with nothing accomplished, nothing!

No. Calmness. Concentrate.

Yes, but again and again he'd almost had them, almost had them all—then again and again had come those savage little surges of distraction shaking his concentration, wasting his already wasted Power, and:

Lords of Darkness, what are You thinking?
Osmod cried silently in sudden, irresistible rage.
It's You distracting me, it's You causing the never-ending chaos in this hall. What do You
want?

No answer, of course. And he knew this was a perilous path to be tracing. But Osmod continued savagely, far too worn for caution:

If You do want war, if You do wish Your share of blood and lives—end this! Let me win, let me win—end this stupid farce now and stop tormenting me with
"
He is here, the prince is here.
"
I
know
the prince is here, but I am only mortal, like it or not! I can only deal with one war at a time!

At least he could draw a token of Power from what was going on here, enough to keep him from collapsing completely, even if it was as tedious a process as gathering grains of sand to build a beach, and never as potent (or as satisfying, to him and the Darkness both) as the blood-sacrifice. All violent human emotions gave off tiny sparks of energy; the more intense and long-lasting the emotion, the brighter the spark, from the foolish quarrels going on here all the way up to outright war.

War.

Ach, yes, war.

The sudden shock of understanding stabbed through Osmod, sharp as a psychic blade, shaking his concentration yet again, making him quiver because: Of course the Lords of Darkness wanted war; that was why They were so willing to support him, their merely mortal tool, in his merely mortal plans of conquest. They would drink deeply of the blood spilled and the lives lost.

What of it? You knew that.

But would They be so easily sated? There was the heart of it. Osmod felt new shudders race through him despite all his fierce determination. Why hadn't he seen this before? (Had They, perhaps, not wanted him to see it? Had they blinded him to it?) Once the war with Mercia was begun, would They ever let it be stopped? Would the Lords of Darkness ride him as he rode the wills of others, forcing him to force the realm towards more and more terrible carnage—

You
idiot!
he snapped at himself.
Afraid of war—bah, you sound like a frightened little mouse of a priest!

There always had been and always would be war; it was the normal state of human life. And most of those lives weren't worth the saving! Bah, yes, look at the lot here. Would the world care if any of them, if all of them, died this very moment? No, no, anyone who worried about the cost or that most absurdly uninterpretable concept, morality, was worthy only of being a victim.

All right, then. Calmness. Calmness. Of course there would be another war, and probably another after it— how else could one conquer other realms? Another war—what of it? This time, Osmod thought, allowing himself a little prickle of pleasure, this time at least, there would also be genuine glory.

Ardagh glanced fiercely about the night-dark royal enclosure, a small, predatory smile on his lips. There were none out here save for the occasional guards, and those were no more than the slightest of nuisances.

"You were right." It was the softest of murmurs from Cadwal.

The prince gave a silent laugh. Of course he'd been right. It hadn't been at all difficult to slip by the guards at the gates, even with the handicap of pulling the human Cadwal into his Sidhe "no one here" illusion; no Sidhe worthy of the name would ever have found it a problem to slide unseen past humans.

High overhead, a wind swept clouds dramatically across the sky, now covering the moon, now letting dramatic flashes of silver flash down, but down here, the air was calm and not unpleasantly cool. Ahead, the great royal hall, alone of all the buildings, still burned with light, torch and firelight blazing from the hall's smoke-holes and out from between cracks in the planking, dazzling Ardagh's night vision. It was more light, surely, than could be explained by feasting courtiers—though the Powers knew there was enough noise for a feast.

Noise that lacks a feast's joviality, though. And . . . Osmod is somewhere in there. I think.
It was difficult to accurately pick out even a magical human aura from out of that tangle.
But I'm not in such a tangle of auras. Why, at such a close range, is he still not aware of me? What could be so totally distracting?

Simple enough to deduce. Since that hall was where the Witan met, what else could it be but something political and controversial? Namely, Osmod's plans for war.

Let us only hope they keep him enraptured long enough for me to—

The prince ducked into hiding against a wooden wall, Cadwal, almost as quick to react, beside him. "Who is
that?
"
the mercenary whispered.

A woman, slim as a wraith, wandered aimlessly alone, her face a pale oval in the night. No servant, Ardagh thought, not with that rich gown, though no lady would allow her long hair to fly about in such wild tangles. Her aura was just as tangled, murky and almost out-and-out vague, and there was, somehow, the
feel
of a child to her—

Ah. Children born with weak or distorted minds, just as those born sickly, didn't live long in the Sidhe Realm; their own magic destroyed them before they left their first years. But humans, he knew, were otherwise. There was a man back in Fremainn, tall and broad-shouldered as a warrior but with no more intelligence than was to be found in a human boy of five or six. He was a sweet, happy fellow despite his lack of intellect, quite content with doing whatever rough job was given to him.

I doubt that this wild, pretty creature has ever done a rough day's work.

Save, perhaps, in some noble's bed—though bedding such a woman, the prince thought with a twinge of distaste, would be almost like bedding a child.

Beside him, Cadwal gave the softest little hiss of annoyance. "Some half-mad noblewoman. Means her women will be coming after her and causing a fuss."

Ardagh straightened. "Not quite yet, I think."

The woman was staring right at him, as though her human eyes could pierce the darkness. With a little shiver, he realized that she actually could see him, though not with ordinary sight. The humans did say that their—ae, what was that pretty euphemism?—their children of God could see Otherliness more clearly than ordinary folk.

The woman was coming straight for him, her face open and trusting as a child's. Ardagh stood frozen, not at all sure what to do. She stopped just before reaching him, staring up at him with wide blue eyes. Dull eyes, yet with a strange glimmer behind the dullness, a wild eeriness that reminded the prince with a jolt of something the would-be scald, Einar, had told him: fey. The look, Ardagh thought uneasily, of those foredoomed.

The woman's voice was soft with wonder. "Are you an angel?" For a moment, Ardagh couldn't find a thing to say, thinking wildly,
I've been called many things, but a holy being never!
Finding his voice at last, he managed a feeble, "Alas, no."

"But you are here," she insisted. "I prayed, and you are here." Her eyes still full of that eerie mix of dullness and gleaming light, she added without the slightest trace of surprise, "You came for Osmod."

Ardagh heard Cadwal's shocked intake of breath and quickly put a warning hand on the man's arm. "How would you know that, lady?" the prince asked gently. "And who, if I may ask, are you?"

"Leofrun." She said that as easily as a child rattles off her name, adding proudly, "I live with Egbert." The flicker of life suddenly animating her face left no doubt how she meant that. And in that one quick moment, it was not a simpleminded face at all, but that of a woman who loves and knows that she loves.

"And does he love you, too?" the prince murmured.

"Oh. That, No. I don't think so. It doesn't matter. He's the king, you know; he doesn't have time. But he's nice to me," she added, so earnestly that Ardagh heard Cadwal mutter something in Cymreig that could only be a curse on the head of any man who'd misuse so innocent a creature.

Ae, no, not quite innocent.
"You hate Osmod."

"Yes, yes, yes." Her expression said, how could he not know that? "He's a devil. You know that, don't you? He's a devil, he kills people. He killed Octa. And—and he tried to hurt Egbert. And I—I—I will not let him. I will not let him hurt Egbert. I will not ever let him hurt Egbert."

Just as love had suddenly animated her face, it now changed her voice to that of a woman who would defend the man she loved with all her being. No matter, Ardagh realized with a little prickle of alarm, how much she had to lose in the process.

Egbert,
the prince thought without any irony at all,
you don't deserve her.

But—Powers, what was that? A chaotic surging of Darkness, of magic—

Osmod!

He had them, Osmod thought, yes, ah yes, he had them almost totally swayed, almost in his hand, the whole noisy Witan, and in another moment they would agree to—

The prince is here!

No, no, he could not listen to that. He had the Witan in hand and all it would take was this one more moment—

Prince Ardagh! Prince Ardagh is—

The moment was lost, control shattered. "No, curse You!" Osmod exploded. "I cannot deal with both at once!"

Damnation! He'd shouted that aloud, and everyone was staring at him. But worse, worse was the cold, deadly, silent voice that might or might not have been real:
Then deal with nothing.

And—his Power was gone, drained away, leaving him suddenly dazed, suddenly empty, while all around him, the Witan was coming back to its collective senses and losing the irrational lust for war—no! He must find prey, now, quickly, before everything was lost! At least it was night out there; there would he no witnesses. Let the Witan all think he'd been struck by illness or madness, it didn't matter, he'd find some smooth excuse, some explanation, but later, curse them, later. He would find prey, and feed, and return with Power refreshed, grab the Witan and shake them once and for all into doing his will!

With a cursory dip of his head to the others, Osmod fled out into the darkness.

Osmod!

Aware that he had just gone into a predatory crouch, Ardagh straightened ever so slowly, watching the sorcerer slip from the Great Hall. Osmod was looking about with—yes—with predatory wariness.

Hunting
Ardagh realized.
No doubt about it. I haven't sensed his Power because he's worn it down to almost nothingness. He
must
hunt to restore it, he
must
kill.

Not,
the prince added,
if I have any say about it.

Wait, though. Surrounding Osmod . . . Ardagh blinked, stared with more than physical sight . . . yes. Darkness surrounded the man, swirling about him, that Darkness that had nothing to do with mortal night.

"Stillness," the prince whispered sharply to Cadwal. "Do not move so much as a hair."

I'll not have Cadwal used as a target. But I also will not have Osmod elude us, not now, not after so—

Leofrun! Her face a serene mask, Leofrun was walking away from them, walking seemingly aimlessly towards Osmod.

Just in time, Ardagh clamped his hand down on Cadwal's swordarm, hissing, "No! Do not move!"

"But she—dammit, man," Cadwal whispered fiercely back, "she's walking right into his trap. The poor thing doesn't even know what she's doing!"

Ardagh tightened his grip. "She does." He remembered the look in her eyes: fey, indeed. Fey as only a woman sacrificing herself for love can be.

But not blindly sacrificing. Leofrun meant to take down Osmod as surely as ever wolf stalked deer—and she meant to do it, trusting, avenging innocent that she was, after death, and with Ardagh's aid. Just then, the prince knew with cool, pragmatic Sidhe certainty what she would do and why.

My aid, sweet Leofrun, you shall have. That, I promise you. You shall not die for naught.

Cadwal was struggling to free himself. "But—you can't just—"

"Curse you, human," Ardagh hissed in the man's ear, "be still! Do you think I
want
this? The Darkness is here, real, perilous!" Struggling for words a human would understand, he continued fiercely, "If we move now, if we try to strike while Osmod is Powerless, his blood forms a link with that Darkness!"
Powers, that means I can't simply stab the man; I don't dare spill a drop of his blood.
"Do you see? The Darkness will come
here,
It will defend Its tool and come down on us, and all three of us, you, me, Leofrun, will die, and die for nothing!" Frantic to end the argument before it began, Ardagh nearly shook Cadwal. "Do you see what I'm saying, human? Do you?"