Lord of the Isles (52 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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Callin slapped her. Her head bounced into the shoulder of the man on her right. The soldiers had taken off their armor when they reached the castle, but the impact of hand and bone turned her surroundings into a white blur.
“All right, my fine lady!” Callin shouted. “I wish you all the comfort you deserve in your new quarters!”
Snatching a taper from a wall sconce, Callin strode toward the staircase leading to rats and slime and blackness. The soldiers carried Sharina after him, dragging her feet through the rushes on the floor.
T
he moon had set and it was still an hour short of dawn. The usual morning haze lay over Erdin. The vegetable seller halted his pushcart outside the gatekeeper's wicket.
“Reava baked cherry tarts this morning,” he said. He unwrapped the broad mullein leaf from around the pastry the cook had given him when he delivered the day's produce to the kitchen at the back of the house.
“I'd hang around her even if there was nothing but her cooking to keep me warm,” the gatekeeper said as the two men divided the tart in their usual fashion. The vegetable seller muttered agreement around a mouthful.
The cook and the gatekeeper had an arrangement during the long periods when the cook's husband was at sea. The sailor was home in Erdin now; the gatekeeper discreetly avoided the kitchen and the cook never came to the front gate. She invariably slipped a tidbit from the family's table to the vegetable seller for delivery, though.
“Quiet, I guess?” the vegetable seller said. The men had known each other for a decade; the bor-Mulliman family had kept the same staff and the same method of provisioning when they'd moved from the outskirts of Erdin to this mansion in a wealthy district. Each was probably the other's closest friend, though they had little contact except for the early-morning greeting and chat.
“As the grave,” the gatekeeper agreed from the other side of the wrought-iron fence. “Mind you, I'm not complaining.
Better quiet than watching a mob come up the street to rape and pillage the rich folks.”
The vegetable seller laughed. “Guess you'd sell your life dearly to protect the master and mistress, hey Esil?” he said.
The gatekeeper snorted. “They don't pay me enough to convince me I'm rich, Toze,” he said. He licked the last of the filling off his fingers. “Mind, I'd go some lengths to get Reava clear. She
can
cook.”
“Shepherd spurn me if it's not the truth,” the vegetable seller agreed as he chewed. His jaws slowed and he frowned along the foggy street. “There's a fellow just went down the side alley,” he said.
“No law against that,” the gatekeeper said, but his eyes narrowed. “Probably just a drunk watering the ivy. He'll be back out in a minute.”
“He walked an all-fired long ways to take a whiz,” the vegetable seller muttered.
He continued to watch for movement where the alley joined the boulevard. Unless the gatekeeper opened the gates and went out, he could only see the wedge of street directly in front of the wicket.
“He wasn't anything special,” the vegetable seller said, working his tongue over his teeth to clean them. “A fat guy in a white tunic. He must've had a light with him, though …”
He wanted to describe the blue glow he thought he'd seen, but he wasn't sure how to.
Iron rubbed from the back corner of the property. “Sister take him!” the gatekeeper muttered. He got up from his stool and lifted the axe-bladed halberd leaning against the wicket. “Guess I earn my wages.”
He looked at the vegetable seller. “Want to come along?” he asked.
The vegetable seller grimaced. “Yeah, sure,” he said. He turned and got the three-foot oak cudgel from the pushcart while his friend unlocked the gate.
The grounds within the vine-grown fence were well manicured. Shrubs that the previous owners had ignored for years were pruned back, or cut down and replaced where they'd been allowed to spread beyond normal maintenance.
The men didn't speak as they walked in the direction of the sound. In order to screen the tomb at the back of the property, the bor-Mullimans had built a brick planter after they moved in. While the men were just the other side of its profusion of scarlet lobelias, a blue flash lit the night. When it vanished, it sucked the darkness deeper than before. Metal snapped with a clang.
The gatekeeper cursed softly and shifted his grip slightly on the shaft of his halberd. He stepped forward. The vegetable seller caught his sleeve and held him.
A door opened, then thumped closed. The haze of blue light glowing through the foliage was as insubstantial as the odor of rotting meat.
The men looked at one another. The vegetable seller tugged his friend away. Together they walked slowly toward the front gate, looking over their shoulders.
“It's not your job, right?” the vegetable seller said. “It's not part of the grounds that come with the house. You told me that.”
“Yeah,” the gatekeeper muttered. “It's not my job.”
He opened the gate for the vegetable seller, then ran his hand up and down the bars. The feel of cold iron settled his mind a little.
“You could tell somebody come morning when you go off duty,” the vegetable seller said slowly. “Of course if you did, then they might wonder why you waited.”
“Right,” the gatekeeper said, staring toward darkness and wishing the sun would rise a little sooner. “There wasn't anything there, you know. I'm not sure there was even a light.”
Then he added, “You know, Toze? If that mob came down the street right now, I'd welcome their company.”
T
wo soldiers held Sharina's outstretched arms, twisting her torso sideways as they descended the narrow enclosed staircase one ahead of the other. A third soldier, the one with the key to the cells, held a lantern at the front of the line.
Callin was in back. The bare taper in his hand fluttered and frequently sank to a blue spark around the wick, but he managed to prevent it from going out.
Sharina saw the rosy glow pulsing from the corridor while she was still on the staircase. She looked around wildly. Callin and his men appeared not to notice what she thought was obvious. The light quivered like the sea just after the tide turns, when the surf neither gains nor ebbs.
They reached the bottom of the stairs. Meder was chanting in a loud, high voice, but echoes down the long corridor masked the words: The soldier in the lead stopped and raised his lantern. The light from Meder's cell was bright enough to throw the shadows of his bars across the floor of the corridor.
Callin finally saw the glow. “I told him what to expect,” he said in a kittenish voice as he drew his sword. “Sister take me if I didn't warn him.”
In a completely different tone he added, “Come on.”
He strode down the corridor, freeing his left hand by tossing the candle to the floor. The flame guttered but continued to burn. The men holding Sharina trotted along behind the courtier; she lengthened her stride to avoid being dragged.
Asera stood at the front of her cell, touching the bars. Her
expression was taut and unreadable, but Sharina thought she was afraid.
Sharina herself was afraid.
Meder sat cross-legged on the floor chanting, “
Sesengen io barpharnices …
”
Sharina smelled fresh blood; the corpse of a rat lay at the back of the cell, its throat a ragged wound. Blood smeared the wizard's face: he must have torn the beast open with his teeth.
“Get the door open!” Callin shouted to the man with the key. The soldier fumbled, either nervously clumsy or consciously trying to delay. “Get it
open
!”
The wizard had drawn a six-pointed star in rat's blood on the stone. He'd broken off the end of one of the pair of bones that had been hanging from the manacle to use as his athame. He gestured with it as he chanted, “
Nebouthosaoualeth aktiophi ereschigal …”
The soldier inserted the key into Meder's lock and turned it squealingly. One of the men let go of Sharina to draw his sword. The other tightened his grip unconsciously, his lips drawn back in a snarl.
“Io berbita io thobagra baui!”
Rock pattered to the floor. Sharina and the three soldiers looked around, but Callin ignored the sound and dragged at the cell's sticking door. The man holding the lantern screamed.
The nearest pillar was crumbling. From its heart unfolded the form of a demon as black as the stone itself. Its legs were short but the arms were as grotesquely long as the forelimbs of a crab spider. The creature had small hands with four daggerlike claws splayed from around the edges like flower petals.
Callin glanced behind him and struck, quickly as a cat. The tempered steel of his blade sparked on the demon's head and rebounded, humming like a hawser about to snap. Callin cried out in anger and pain, grasping the sword hilt with his left
hand to damp its vibration. The demon gripped his face and pulled it off in a gout of blood.
Bits of rock dribbled from the pillars farther back along the long corridor, clicking and dancing like the start of an avalanche as they bounced on the floor. The man holding the lantern dashed it in the demon's face and tried to dodge past. The demon caught him in both arms and began to pick him apart. Killer and victim were silhouetted against the light of the candle at the other end of the corridor.
The remaining soldiers ran past the creature while it was occupied with their fellow. The man who'd drawn his sword dropped it. The first demon waddled after them, tossing to either side fragments of the man it held. Five more demons twisted free of their rocky prisons farther down the corridor and spread their arms.
Meder's cell was open. Sharina pulled the key out of that lock and turned to release Asera. The procurator's face was as stiff as a skull. Sharina grabbed the older woman by the wrist and shouted, “Come on!”
The only way out of the dungeons was past the demons. They had to try. Cracks ran across the corridor ceiling now that the pillars no longer supported the weight of the building above it. A chunk of rock the size of a man's head crashed to the floor beside Sharina.
The last of the soldiers screamed like a dying rabbit while four demons tore him limb from limb. “Meder!” Sharina said. “Can you control these things?”
Meder walked out of his cell with a look of supernal calm on his face. “Oh, they'll go away,” he said. “I don't need them anymore, you see.”
He put his hand protectively on Sharina's forearm. She shook him off.
“There were so many things I didn't understand until I came here,” Meder said in a satisfied voice. “It's all so clear to me now.”
The ceiling crumbled in pieces ranging from gravel to a slab as big as the mantelpiece upstairs. The demons were
crumbling also. A long arm fell off the nearest one; then a leg collapsed and the torso shattered like an egg when it hit the floor. Pulling Asera with her and trusting the wizard to follow on his own, Sharina ran toward the distant staircase.
She didn't care if Meder followed. Her bare feet skidded in a pile of human entrails which lay where a demon had dropped them.
Let Meder go where he belongs, to a Hell beneath this Hell.
The wall between a pair of cells collapsed, bringing the ceiling after it in a blast of shattered rock. The roar was louder than the terror in Sharina's mind. The candle had vanished—burned out, buried; smothered in dust too thick to breathe.
Stone turned and fell to sand under Sharina's foot; it was the limb of a demon disintegrating like the castle it had supported. Blind and choking, the girl groped toward where memory told her the stairwell had been.
Light gleamed in a halo of dust so dense that it illuminated only the hand holding the torch.
Nonnus held the torch.
“Upstairs!” the hermit shouted. “I'll cover the back!”
He carried the Pewle knife in his right hand. His javelin would have been awkward on the winding staircase.
“They're all dead!” Sharina said. Another huge slab fell, pumping air full of rockdust into her like the current of a millrace. She gagged. “Only us …”
She slid past Nonnus, knowing that he wouldn't precede her. There was no time for argument, maybe no time at all. She continued to hold Asera's wrist but the procurator was moving normally again. The air became cleaner as they climbed the stairs, though each crash in the dungeons blasted more dust up the staircase.
Sharina reached the upstairs corridor. A soldier lay there with a surprised look on his face and a grin from ear to ear carved in his throat. A crack ran along the floor at the base
of the sidewall, but the vaulted basements above the dungeons hadn't yet collapsed.
Sharina bent and snatched the man's dagger instead of taking the time to unhook the belt and sheath; the sword would be too heavy and awkward to be any use to her. She missed the familiar heft of the hand axe, and she had to have
some
weapon.
Asera came out of the staircase ahead of Nonnus, who was dragging Meder by the throat of his tunic. The crack in the floor widened; the wall trembled noticeably.
“Outside!” the hermit said. “There's a coach and team in the stables. Out fast because this whole place is going!”
Another soldier was on the floor of the room where Sharina had dined. The fire still burned in the hearth. Soot puffed down the chimney every time the castle shook, covering the corpse with a gray veil.
Sharina put her weight against the outer door and swung it open as the others joined her. She paused on the court of hexagonal basalt pavers, because she didn't know where the stables were. Callin had dismounted at the door, leaving his underlings to care for the horses.
“This way!” Nonnus said, leading the way around the black flank of the castle. He carried his javelin again.
The sky was clear and starlit, though there was no moon. Meder had lost the bone athame. Most of his face and clothing was covered by powdered stone, but he still smiled.
The stable walls stood, but over the years most of the roof had fallen in. Complete, the structure would have held forty horses in individual stone stalls. Part of the original slate roof remained over the near end; Callin's men had cleared additional stalls and covered them with sailcloth.
Horses whickered, made nervous by the trembling of the rock beneath them. A coping fell from a high wall, striking several times before the final crash.
“I saved you, Sharina,” the wizard said archly. “You see what I can do for you. You'll always be safe with me.”
“Liar!” Sharina screamed. “Nonnus would have saved us! You did nothing! Nothing!”
The hermit touched her hand and turned her toward the stables again. “You'll have to harness the horses, child,” he said. “It's not a skill I've ever had to learn.”
Then he added in a voice of pale despair, “What's done is done. What he did and what I did. Done.”
Sharina tugged Nonnus with her into the stables to find the tack. She didn't want him to be alone just now.

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