Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (37 page)

Hepdida stared intently at the great Helm of Eadran the Vanquisher sitting on the table between her and her cousin.  “So,” she said. “Is it broken?”

Niarmit shrugged.  “Did it feel any different to you?”

Hepdida shook her head.   “Just the same. Heavy enough, a little warmer than metal should feel.  I don’t know what it’s like when you wear it though.”

The queen sighed.  “Without Torsden I’d have been dead and you might have got your chance to find out how that thing works.”  The princess raised startled eyebrows and Niarmit leant across to seize her hand.  “But don’t,” the queen urged.  “Whatever happens to me and whatever anyone tells you, don’t wear that thing.”

Hepdida nodded.  “I don’t like the thing anyway, and I’m certainly not made for the business of being queen.   You need to look after yourself better, to take more care.”

“I can’t send people out to risk their lives unless I’m prepared to ride with them.”

“You can’t be everywhere, Niarmit,” Hepdida said.  “And putting yourself constantly at risk, that’s not wise.  You told me once the Goddess doesn’t protect people from their foolishness.”

“You think I’ve been foolish then. You think the Goddess meant to chastise me for that error.”

Hepdida shrugged.  “Either that or the bloody thing just stopped working, whatever it is that working means.”  Niarmit struggled to frame some words of reply and her cousin swotted away the effort with a flick of her wrist.  “Yes, I know.  You can’t speak of it to anyone.” She sniffed her displeasure. “Bloody mysteries and secrets.”

“I’m sorry, Hepdida.”

“So the question is, do you trust it still?”

Niarmit frowned.  “I thought it would protect me, that’s what Feyril told me.  No one should have been able to strike me, still less knock me flying on the ground.  The orcs at Morwencairn were destroyed by its touch.  When I threw it at a wall of them, it was the Helm’s power that blasted a hole for our escape.”

“These were zombies though,” Hepdida pointed out.

“There were zombies at Morwencairn too chasing us when we escaped.”

Hepdida nodded thoughtfully, reliving the experience in her memory.  “But,” she began.  “They never caught us.  Never even came close.  You never threw that thing at them.”

Niarmit frowned.  “What are you saying?”

“Just that, maybe the thing isn’t broken, maybe the Goddess isn’t cross with your obsession with self-sacrifice, maybe it’s just that the thing never would work on zombies.  You were just lucky in how you found out. Lucky that Torsden was there.” 

Niarmit frowned and shook her head. “But why? Why wouldn’t it function like it did before? The Zombies were no less a threat than the orcs.”

“Well,” Hepdida sighed.  “To answer that you’d have to speak to someone who knows how it is supposed to work.”  She glanced around the empty room.  “And there aren’t many of them around here.”

“There aren’t any anywhere.”  Niarmit picked up the Helm glaring at its steel visor.  “Thank you, Hepdida.”

“For what?”

“For useful thoughts, for wise words for a foolish queen.”

The princess could not help but preen herself a little at the rare praise.

“You should turn in, it is late,” Niarmit went on.

Hepdida gave a shrug of studied casualness. “I thought I’d take a stroll around the battlements first.”

Her cousin looked up sharply.  “The boy? Still the boy?”

Hepdida’s cheeks flushed with colour.  “If he happens to be out there, then I am sure he’ll walk a while with me.   There is no harm in that.”  Niarmit arched a doubtful eyebrow drawing an exasperated exclamation from her cousin. “Honestly, Niarmit. There’s five thousand soldiers camped within these walls.  I am sure that’s more than enough to make sure Jay behaves himself as a gentlemen should.”

Niarmit frowned, “but what about you.  Who will make sure you behave, Hepdida?”

The princess stood hands on her hips in a pose of furious indignation. The first syllables of outraged honour were already past her lips before she realised that her cousin was smiling, smiling and laughing.  “Your face,” she said.  “It is a picture.”

The bubble of Hepdida’s anger was abruptly punctured.  “Then I can go?”

Niarmit waved her away.  “Go, a half hour no more and no straying into stables or smithies, just a walk on the battlements.”

“Just a walk on the battlements,” Hepdida echoed before skipping to the door.  She hesitated there, turning back a word of thanks on her lips, but Niarmit was already lost in rapt contemplation of the Helm in her lap.

Haselrig looked down on the twin swords nestled in their wooden case and sighed.  He had won back some favour with the master.  His answers to the Dark Lord’s questions had given some slight satisfaction.  It was not rehabilitation exactly, but Maelgrum had afforded him the slightest inclination of his head, the merest flicker of his glowing red eye sockets.  A sign that he had taken a step back from the precipice of ‘useless waste of space’ and maybe lost the epithet of annoying too. 

There had been something else in the master’s demeanour too.  Maelgrum habitually met triumph and disaster with the same uncompromising force of will.  The celebration of success or the retribution for failure were untainted by any shred of self-doubt in the Dark Lord.   But in the castellan’s chamber the undead wizard had radiated a cold uncertainty, the air frozen not so much with his displeasure as with his dissatisfaction. 

Haselrig closed the lid and shook his head.  He had supplied one piece of a puzzle, a fragment of useful knowledge, but he did not know what other pieces Maelgrum might have brought or what picture he might assemble from them.  When he had returned to the chamber there was nothing different to be seen. The master was gone and Quintala was staring out of one of the arrow alcoves.  All was as it had been.   There was just the lingering deeper chill in the air, augmenting the unwavering cold laid on to preserve the medusa’s corpse beneath its shroud.

Haselrig crossed to his work bench.  He had elevated himself a notch or so in the master’s esteem, and what long term surety had that bought him?  He still lived, a piece of flotsam swept along by a tide of evil.  However, the best hope that remained was still simply that he might delay the moment when he sank without trace and in the meantime minimise the discomfort until that moment came.

He took a weary seat.  Looking back was both difficult and futile.  The decisions of the past had shaped his present self in a thousand different and irreversible ways.  To ponder the might-have-beens and the what-ifs was merely an exercise in wishing his present self were dead and that a different man had lived a different life. Once each choice had been made the fast flowing waters of cause and effect had quickly dragged him from any point or thought of going back and unpicking what he had done.  But still, he scratched at the past until it made his memories bleed.

An abrupt hammering at the door startled him out of the morbid reverie.  Furious clash of fist on wood, Odestus screaming, “Haselrig!”

The ex-antiquary hastened up the short flight of steps and unbarred the door with little thought other than to calm and quieten the voluble wizard before his cries should attract attention.  In the captured fortress of Listcairn it was safest to assume that any attention was unwanted and unhelpful.

Odestus tumbled through the door.  The few hours of separation since their last discussion had wrought an unhealthy transformation in the wizard.  His bald head was pink and peeling with sunburn, his clothes dusty with ochre sand, his nose an angry red.  The crows’ feet in the corners of his eyes were white lines against a livid skin.

“What has happened to you, Governor?” Haselrig exclaimed.

Odestus pushed the door shut with one hand and grabbed Haselrig by the throat with the other. “Where is she?  What have you done with her?  What has He done with her?”

Haselrig grabbed at the wizard’s wrist.  Odestus’s grip was strong and his eyes wild.  The man’s sanity must have fled.  It took Haselrig both hands to prize the wizard’s fingers clear enough to draw breath to speak.   “He has done nothing, I told you.”

It had been a most honest assurance by Haselrig that the Lady Dema was to be undisturbed.  It was founded not so much on his own much mortgaged honour, as the master’s clear and certain will.   Maelgrum’s own instructions to the ex-antiquary and the half-elf, had been that whatever happened the body was to remain where it lay.  “She is still there,” he gasped past the wizard’s grasping fingers.

“She is not.  He has taken her!”

“I assure you, the Lady Dema lies still beneath her shroud.  Maelgrum has gone and she is there.”

“Not Dema.” Odestus choked his own words off even as he spoke them then, squeezing a little tighter on Haselrig’s throat, “Where is Galen?”

Haselrig gave a slight sideways jerk of his chin, the closest he could come to a shake of his head in the grip of the sunburnt madman. “I don’t know.  I’ve not seen him.”

“What words has he had with Maelgrum?”

“How should I know,” Haselrig squeaked. “Our communions with the Dark Lord are ever a private matter and Galen has barely spared me more than dozen words since I got here.”

“You lie.” Odestus squeezed a little tighter still.  Haselrig’s breath came in anguished gasps.  A corner of his mind laughed at the irony of the moment.   Of all the dangerous people by whose hands he could have met his end these past seventeen years, of Xander, or Dema, or Quintala, or Rondol, or even Maelgrum himself, he would never have thought it was the little wizard would be the one that throttled the life from him.

Suddenly the pressure vanished and Haselrig fell gasping and wheezing to his knees.  Odestus loured above him podgy red fingers tangled together, working over and over themselves in tightly wound anguish.

Haselrig looked up at him, massaging his bruised throat, not daring to think what bruises might yet come.    “What has come over you, Governor?”

Odestus shook away the question, “forget it.”

“Forget what?” The half-elf’s lilting voice preceded her as she pushed the door open and stepped onto the narrow landing.  She took in the scene, Haselrig still spluttering, Odestus glowing with heat and glowering from some undischarged fury.

“A disagreement, Lady Quintala.” Odestus insisted.  “That is all.”

The half-elf arched a silver eyebrow in disbelief.

“The governor was concerned over the Lady Dema’s remains.” Haselrig volunteered.  “And also the whereabouts of Galen.”

“Indeed, and why would he come to you for the answer to either question?”

“It is nothing,” Odestus insisted, pulling a hand down over his reddened face.  “Please excuse me, I must have been mistaken.”

He shuffled out past the half-elf while Haselrig pulled himself upright.  Quintala shook her head.  “Really, Haselrig, your knack for making enemies knows no limits.  With a skill like that I would not dare send you out as a shepherd for fear your own flock would maul you to death.”

Haselrig stretched his neck and gave a hoarse cough.  Quintala leant him a companionable arm and lead him down into the chamber to a seat at his table.  Haselrig sat twisting his head left and right, testing the strained sinews.  Quintala bustled about finding a flagon of liquor and pouring out a generous measure.  “Here, try this,” she said thrusting the cup at him.  “It might soothe your neck from the inside.”

He gulped it down, fire gliding down his throat.

“Now tell me, what was that really about?”  She pulled the black medallion from around her neck, unhooking it from the chain and spinning it back and forth between her long elegant fingers.

Haselrig shook his head.  “I don’t know.  He just went mad.  He is obsessive about the lady’s body.  He said that she wasn’t there, that the master had taken her.”

“Well she indubitably is there, secure beneath her shroud.  Not that the little wizard would know either way.  The master has been most insistent that Odestus should be barred from the castellan’s chambers.”

Haselrig stared at Quintala, scanning her laughter filled eyes. Odestus’s concern seemed real.  What purpose could be served by a cold corpse kept in a secure tower? “And what does the master want with the lady?”  He asked the question anyway, though he doubted he could trust the half-elf to answer straight.

Quintala shrugged and poured him another draught of liquid fire.  “Who knows the workings of Maelgrum’s mind?  Suffice to say you’ve seen her for yourself, give the little wizard the reassurance he craves.”

Haselrig took another swallow.  “He asked after Galen too, wanted to know where he was.  Have you seen him?”

“Not for a couple of days,” Quintala admitted.

“Where has he gone?”

The half-elf held up two fingers to count off a simple pair of choices.  “Either he has strayed somewhere on his own account, or he is on some secret work at the master’s behest. Either way, it is not a concern of mine.”  She spun the medallion on the table, it balanced on its edge spinning so fast it appeared to be a black globe sucking the light from the room.

Haselrig found his gaze drawn by the flickering darkness.  Quintala’s tone was light, as she spoke, but her eyes were hard, looking at him over the whirling disc. “I worry about our small wizardly friend,” she said.  “The nightly communions with Maelgrum are a strain that could warp a spirit of steel, Odestus’s will is made of softer and more precious stuff.”

  The medallion was slowing, tipping sideways as it lost the stability of constant movement, switching from an upright spin to a sideways rocking around its own rim, a motion that became flatter, faster and more desperate with each successive gyration. “We are all of us clinging to our sanity in orbit around the Dark Lord,” Quintala said as the medallion settled lower and more noisily.  “For some the perturbations grow ever more eccentric, the struggle against the slide into madness ever more inevitable.”   The rattle of the falling medallion was rising in pitch.  “I think the little wizard may be reaching that point.”

She snatched at the medallion in the last instant before it fell flat and silent on the table.  “We will have to watch our friend Odestus most closely.” She smiled.  “Or rather you will.  Another task well suited to your station.”

“I am to spy on Odestus?” Haselrig massaged his bruised neck, feeling the ache of swollen tissue.

Quintala shrugged.  “Be his companion, Haselrig.  He has need of company.  I am sure you will find some liquor that you both can enjoy.”