Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (50 page)

Elise watched as Harris arranged his bedding.  Their fellow traveller had chosen a spot a little apart from Elise and her pair of soldiers.  An additional few feet from the campfire to recognise his foreign status with their little group. 

It was the lead cavalryman’s turn to cook so Elise watched as Harris folded the old worn cloak he carried, dark and stained, into a tightly wound pillow.  He pulled a scrap of jerky from his bag and chewed on it while his hands worked at a scrap of branch with a short knife.  The activity put her in mind of Kaylan and the whittling which kept the thief’s quick hands busy, when his mind needed to be elsewhere.

The cook handed her a mess tin filled with beans and some scraps of salted pork.  She thanked him and picked at the meal with little interest.  The soldiers fell to talking as they often had, dull murmured conversations she was not meant to overhear.  Nothing untoward, simply the talk of military men who would rather not be in company with women or civilians.

She stood and carried her tin the few yards to where Harris was gnawing with difficulty at the lump of leathery meat, while his hands struggled with the simple sculpture he was attempting.  She sat next to him and offered him the meal.  She saw the flash of hunger in his eyes before the courtesy took control and he shook his head.  “Oh no, Mistress Elise, you are too kind.  I could not.”  

She took the knife and the carving from his hands and pressed the tin upon him in their place.  For a few seconds some sense of sensibility fought with his hunger, but then hunger won and he scooped a handful of hot food into his mouth.

Elise turned the piece of wood over in her hand.  It had a natural curve which Harris had been trying to accentuate, paring off strips of grain and narrowing the ends to sharp points.  As she twisted it back and forth, Elise suddenly saw what he was making.  “You’re carving a crescent.”

He looked up, flushing with embarrassment before he nodded.  She stifled the dry laugh tickling the back of her throat.  “Have you not got a proper one?”

Harris quickly swallowed what must have been a painful mouthful of heat.  “I lost it,” he said.  “A while ago now.”

“And so superstitious that you do not like to be without one?”

“There is a lot of superstition around, superstition and fear.  I have walked through many places, where gold would not buy food, or a horse or a token of the Goddess’s grace.”

Elise held the crudely carved symbol up to her eyes.  It was a clumsy piece.  Kaylan would have wrought something much more graceful with much less effort.  “I would lend you mine,” she said.  “Save that I don’t have one.  The Goddess and I, we are estranged, if she exists at all.”

“I too have had such moments of doubt,” Harris admitted.  “I have them still.   But I dare not risk offending the Goddess by not believing in her.”

Elise laughed at that and Harris smiled too.

“What is your business at Rugan’s court?” she asked.

He frowned.  “I have a message to pass on.”  He tapped his head.  “It is in here, not written down, but it is important.”

Elise smiled at the little man, thin and grey and old.  He was an unlikely messenger for any message of significance, but then could he not say the same of her.  Disease ravaged and bitter, she made an unlikely ambassador.

“My guards tell me we will be at Lavisevre before midday tomorrow.  You will have your chance then to speak with Prince Rugan.  My audience is with the queen.”

“The queen is there?” Surprise caught Harris mid-spoonful and a mouthful of pork and beans fell back untasted into the mess tin.

Elise nodded.  “She was headed there when word last reached me, my news is for her to hear.”

“My own story would better suit her ears than the prince’s.”  The prospect had driven all thought of food from Harris’s mind.  He stared over the steaming mess tin at some imagined meeting that Elise could not see.

“Well, when mine is told, maybe I shall ask her to see you next.”

“You are too kind,” Harris said with feeling. 

The little wizard’s legs ached and his finger tip was numb from the constant pressing against the chameleon scale in his pocket.  But at least his quarry was moving no faster than he was.  A long sorry line of men and women walked the dusty road ahead of him, a handful of guards kept a hundred prisoners in thrall with the rarest crack of a whip.

Odestus suspected that necessity rather than mercy stayed the guards’ whip hands.  Their prisoners were in too dire a state of health to bear much punishment, but evidently they were to be delivered intact. This was their second day on the road and already some where tottering unsteadily. 

His enquiries in Morwencairn had thrown up too few fragments to assemble a whole picture.  No-one had been able to corroborate Hustag’s sighting of a snake lady in company with some indescribable new allies of the Dark Lord.  If Odestus had thought Hustag had the wit to lie, then he might have thought the whole story a pure deception.  But the details of description were at once too credible and too far beyond the miserable orc’s capacity for imagination and dissembling. 

However, even if Hustag alone had seen the snake lady, several of his interviewees had backed up the captain’s account of a camp north of Morwencairn which was in receipt of regular consignments of prisoners.  A camp where new allies were in training.  It was the only lead to pursue.  So Odestus found himself dawdling discretely behind the crowd of prisoners all of them too miserable even to moan.

It was crowded in the Chamber of the Helm, nearly all the thrones were occupied.  Chirard Dragonsoul had been somewhat dismayed to find that the great coup of his own recruitment to the cause had been trumped by the return of the Vanquisher himself.  The Dragonsoul was a handsome man of considerable height and a full head of red gold hair.  His imposing physical presence and the genuine achievements which history had credited to him had fuelled a well developed sense of his own importance.  That ego had been only partially mollified by Eadran’s admittance of him to the front rank of the thrones. 

The Vanquisher had determined that they should each take an assigned seat.  He sat on the central white seat, facing Niarmit on her gilded throne atop the dais.  To either side of the Vanquisher sat Gregor and Thren, the two who had between them marshalled the squabbling monarchs and yoked them to a single purpose.  Beyond them the Dragonsoul sat on the left and the Lady Mitalda on the right.

It had been some surprise to Niarmit to discover that the Vanquisher had never met or known his granddaughter.  She had been born after his death and came to the Helm after his self-imposed internal exile.  Only Mitalda’s father, Thren the First, had known the vanquisher in person and his seat, at the end of the second row was one of only two yet to be taken.  The other was that of the Kinslayer who stood a perpetual statue behind the outer semicircle of thrones.

But, for all his descendant’s ignorance of him, the Vanquisher had a certain easy charm.   The ill-starred pairing of Danlak and Chirard the Second had been welcomed to the gathering throng and graced with seats in the second rank.  Even Bulveld the Second had put in an appearance and been granted a seat as far from his father and his son as was possible, in a concession to the widely accepted rumour that he had disappointed the former and been murdered to advance the succession of the latter.  

Santos too, had taken his place on the simple wooden chair laid on for the Steward of the Helm, though the august company seemed to have silenced even his sycophantic utterings.

Niarmit surveyed the impressive array of her living and breathing antecedents.  How could the power of the ancestors be best marshalled to defeat Maelgrum?

“What news of the enemy,” Eadran began proceedings.  None had thought or dared to challenge him for the leadership of this most privy of privy councils.

“Johanssen reports little activity on the borders of the seven counties,” Niarmit began.  “Lord Torsden and his cavalry have skirmished with occasional orc raiding parties, but there are no large scale movements.  Scouts have identified holding camps of undead a league or more within the enemy’s territory, but Maelgrum must find them ill suited for the cut and thrust of raiding.” Niarmit paused between reviewing the enemies’ dispositions and describing their own forces.  “Pietrsen’s levies are shaping up well in training, we will soon have sufficient force that we can launch an assault towards Morwencairn.”

“Is that wise?”  Mitalda asked. “Listcairn still is in enemy hands.  Should we not secure that fortress first and a coherent front line against the enemy.”

“Strike for the core, my lady,” the Dragonsoul weighed in.  “Let us tear out the heart of this evil realm and the body will crumble to dust.  The bold strokes are the best.”

“It is also the surest way of drawing Maelgrum himself into the fray,” Eadran spoke softly.  “And defeating him is the only way to be sure of lasting victory.”

“Defeating?  We must destroy him.” The Dragonsoul thumped a fist on the arm of his throne.

“And how, dear brother, does one kill that which is already dead?”  Danlak made an acerbic query.

The Dragonsoul scowled at his younger sibling.  “When you have won some victories, maybe you would be fit to ask questions in this gathering, brother.”

“It is a good question,” Niarmit broke in on the exchange of glares between first and second rows.  “Perhaps my Lord Eadran can offer some enlightenment.  How does one kill that which is already dead?”

The Vanquisher frowned.  “It is true, Maelgrum is already dead, slain by his own hand, but he so arranged matters as to evade the harvesting of souls and remain here with his own corpse.”

“The harvesting of souls?” Gregor the Third made a timorous interjection from the far end of the back row.  “Forgive me, but I have not heard this term.”

Niarmit saw a scowl of impatience crease Eadran’s features, though the Vanquisher was saved from answering by his granddaughter.

“When a person dies, their soul lingers on the Earth just until the sun next sets on their remains,” Mitalda explained.  “That is when the souls are harvested as the Earth sweeps remourselessly into the shadow of night time.  The reapers endlessly travel with the setting sun, claiming the dead in peace.”

“And if the dead don’t want to be claimed?” portly Gregor asked.

“No soul can escape the reapers for good or for ill,” Mitalda told him.  “The guilty may fear what fate awaits them after death, but for good or ill, no man can defeat the reapers.”

“Maelgrum did,” Eadran reminded them.  “Though not without a price to be paid in pain and suffering.  He chose death at a time and place where he was buried so deep in the Earth that he might have thought himself already in hell.  At that depth the power of the reapers was so attenuated that, though they could see and reach for him, his soul was able to struggle and rail against their clutches.  The reapers once defeated could never claim him again and so alone of the dead souls his walks the Earth still.  His body was dead, its decay held at bay only by icy magic, its strength fed and bound by the sinews of his will, more than the rotten tattered muscles of his limbs.”

“And if we destroy that body, what power has he to harm us then?” The younger Bulveld struck out for pragmatism.

The Vanquisher sighed. “At most that gains us some time. He has the power to seize another body and shape and form it to his will.  It is his soul that we must banish, or trap, or destroy, and souls are hardy things.  They can endure the fires of hell for all eternity, so there is little on Earth that can harm them.”  

“You made a prison for him before,” Niarmit reminded her founding father.  “A great gem to trap his soul.  If we could destroy his body, could you imprison him again?”

“Gems that would make such a prison are hard to find and difficult to fashion, my dear.”

“I have seen some,” Niarmit said.  “In fact I have seen twenty-two of them.”

There was a certain pleasure in puncturing the Vanquisher’s self-assurance.  “Twenty -two?” He frowned at the familiarity of the number.  “That would be a mighty ransom.  The Monar Empire in its pomp would have traded a quarter of its cities for so many such jewels.  How do you know that these were fit for the purpose you ascribe to them?”

“Because Maelgrum told me so.  They were his prisons, intended to capture all of you in perpetuity, when he destroyed the Helm.”

There was an explosion of noise. The honoured monarchs of the first rank were lost to the Vanquisher in inattentive chatter, just as much as the less favoured kings seated behind them.   Eadran glared around the room and thumped his fist against his throne in search of order, before being obliged to raise his voice and demand silence.

“Imprison us? Destroy the Helm? None of that is possible.” He stood up to glare at Niarmit.  “Explain yourself child.” 

She met his gaze with a level stare.  “Maelgrum knows about the Helm.  He knows what it is.  He knows who is hidden here.  He meant to get us, to get you all out of here.  To trap your souls at his pleasure and convenience.”

Again the noise, again the Vanquisher’s furious command for silence.  “He cannot know, it is impossible for him to know.  It is impossible for any who knew to have told, and any who could tell, knew nothing.”

“The impossible has happened,” Niarmit told him.

Eadran ran his fingers through his thinning hair, then swept his arm in a broad gesture of dismissal.  “Leave us,” he commanded.  “I would talk with Queen Niarmit alone.”

“She is my daughter, I’ll not leave her.”  Gregor stood firm as the other monarchs rose to file out.  Santos had already fled. 

“And I may know something of consequence in this matter,” Thren spoke up on the Vanquisher’s other side.

For a moment Niarmit thought Eadran minded to dismiss them nonetheless, but the square set to Gregor’s jaw and the steadfast stance of slim Thren persuaded him otherwise.  “Stay then,” Eadran barked.  “And see what sense can be made of this.”