Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (84 page)

Jay was dragged back to consciousness by a visceral howl.  It was a many textured scream, falsetto squeals mingling with deep bass moans as of a hundred different beasts burning in agony.  Acrid smoke filled his nostrils and bit at the back of his throat to provoke a spluttering cough.  He struggled upright, gave a shriek of his own at the pain in his arm, though the sound of his own cry barely troubled his ears above the keening scream that filled his senses.  It was bright, bright as noon so he had to hold his good hand fingers splayed against the light and squint at the blazing sun that had descended onto the hilltop. 

It was not a sun, it was Maelgrum, the Dark Lord wreathed in bright flames as he twisted and turned his hands clamped to a helm, the Helm, set firmly upon his head.  But there was no purchase for his charred fingers, his hands slipped like oil across the metal surface.  Though any oil would have surely burned for the Helm was blowing a dull red colour and getting brighter.

Jay turned away from the blinding light and saw the queen crawling backwards across the ground dragging an injured man behind her.  Her face was obscured by her red hair as a powerful inward draft of air blew it towards the pillar of flaming lich. The same air fed the flames and rose with them sending a column of fire high into the air.

The queen had her hands under the injured man’s arms pulling him away from the roasting heat.  Jay did not recognise who it was, just a powerfully built man of middle years, a high forehead slick with sweat above a face that was pale even with the firey red illumination.

The red was turning yellow now, then white.  Jay looked back at the intense heat.  It was a flame of pure white through which only dim outlines of shapes could be seen.  The Helm was a dome of incandescence in a sea of white.  The roar of fire and the inrushing wind that fed it had quite drowned out the screams.  A figure stood tall within the glowing heat and then there was one last flash so bright and white that it filled and held Jay’s vision in a long embrace and only the silence told him that the fire was over.

“That’ll be the magnesium,” Eadran murmured as Niarmit cradled him in her arms.

She had been looking at the Vanquisher’s pale face, peering into his fading eyes when the last flash came and so her eyes were not blinded by the light.  She turned and looked at the spot where Maelgrum had stood.  There was nothing there.  No Dark Lord. No Helm.  Just a crater burned in the ground and lined with a fine white ash.

“Is he dead?”

Eadran shook his head, spilling a drop of blood from the corner of his mouth.  “That which is already dead can not be killed.”

“Then where is he? Did he escape?”

Eadran coughed a bloody laugh. “His body was ensnared and destroyed, his soul had to go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Into the Domain of the Helm.”

“But the Helm’s gone.  It’s destroyed.  It’s ash.”

Eadran nodded.  “The Helm was the only route in, or out, for anyone.”

“Then he’s trapped in the Domain of the Helm?”

Eadran blinked a weary agreement. 

“With Chirard the Kinslayer?”

Eadran’s mouth twitched in a ghostly smile.

“He’s really gone, they’re both really gone.”

“They’re never coming back girl.  They’ll never die and they’ll never escape.”

Niarmit’s mouth flattened with grim satisfaction. “No better prison for the pair of them.”

“Hey!”  Jay called from the other side of the crater, blinking streaming tears away from his eyes and pointing down the slope.  “What’s that?  Who’s coming?  I can just see shapes.”

Niarmit followed the line of his outstretched hand.  Figures were climbing the hill towards them, a dozen or so, in borrowed arms and armour.  The monarchs had come, a sombre sober gathering as the last few minutes of daylight slipped away.  Some like the Dragonsoul and Danlak had found death early on the battlefield, the others wore the stains of combat with a certain pride.  Bulveld the Third was splattered with the gore of a multitude of sundered orcish skulls.

Eadran stirred restlessly in Niarmit’s arms.

“Easy,” she said holding him close as the monarchs spread around them in a circle of silent homage.  “Don’t try to move.”  The blood pooling in her lap was testimony enough of the slim chance Eadran had of making it the mere seconds to sunset.

He shook his head, “must tell you.”  His hoarse whisper drew her close.  “I was wrong.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“I was wrong about immortality.  There are only four ways, four true ways to live on after death.”

She held the rambling monarch close.  “The first is in the things we make that endure,” he glanced at the discarded swords of The Father and The Son. “Some more than others.”

“The second is in the memories that we sow in the minds of others.”  He reached a bloody hand to stroke her cheek as she bent over him.

“The third is in the habits we teach which, whether we mean them to or no, others follow us in.”  He looked across the crater to where Thren the First slipped uncomfortably from his gaze sidling behind the tall figure of Bulveld the First, longshanks.  His voice was barely a whisper. “And the fourth and greatest immortality, lies in the children we leave behind us.”

“Is Kimbolt there with you?” she asked him.  But the power of speech had gone from Eadran.   He drew ragged painful breaths and stared at his son’s shoulder.  “Tell him, if he can hear me, tell him…” But speech had deserted Niarmit too and she washed the Vanquisher’s face with her tears.

She saw a blur of movement through her watery eyes and looked up, her vision clearing briefly as the tears drained away.  Santos was padding across the circle, bringing Thren the First by the hand.  He bid the Vanquisher’s son kneel by his dying father and then pressed their hands together. Thren bowed his head and Eadran blinked his gratitude and seized his son’s hand with a grip that for all its puniness carried every scrap of strength he had left.

“Late again,” Queen Baltheza curtly observed as a final monarch joined the ring.  “Where were you? Talking to trees?”

“I had some letters to write,” portly Gregor said.  “Many things to explain.”

“We had a battle to fight,” Mitalda told him.

“Did we win?” Gregor asked.

“We did,” Thren the Seventh told him.

“A great victory,” Mitalda said.

“The greatest,” Niarmit’s father added taking a step towards his daughter.

“Then why is the queen crying so?” portly Gregor mumbled unhappy with his own confusion.

And the tears would not stop.

“I am in your debt beyond measure, Niarmit,” her father told her.  He laid a hand on her shoulder and she reached for it and squeezed his fingers tight.  “If the Goddess is willing, I may yet see Prince Matteus again and tell him what a daughter he raised, and tell your mother what a daughter she bore.” 

“We are all in your debt,” Mitalda said.

As the sun slipped behind the mountains, gentle Thren spoke in his mild eastern twang, “The Goddess herself is in your debt, Queen Niarmit.” 

With the coming of night, the monarchs began to glow with a ghostly yellow light.  Against the odds Eadran had lasted to sunset, drawing ragged breaths through blood drowned lungs and Niarmit held him close and tight as the monarchs all fell to a gentle shower of glowing dust.

And the abandoned queen cradled the Vanquisher’s body, tears tumbling through clenched eyes as the day faded and she sat waiting for flesh to turn to dust and leave her all alone once more but still her arms closed round a hard physical presence.

“Look,” Jay said with a tremor in his voice.

She opened her eyes.  The body in her arms had not crumbled, nor had it died.  She looked down and blinked. Kimbolt lay in her arms in full rude good health, unharmed by anything save confusion.

She gasped and pulled him close and felt a light fluttering in the pit of her stomach as though a butterfly were trapped there.  And then it came again another tiny kick of the life within her. She seized Kimbolt’s hand and pressed it to her belly.  “It is our child Kimbolt,” she said.

They were all gathered in the graveyard by the lake at the volcano’s heart.  The ceremony was done, the song was sung and the karib filtered away to honour the dead with their honest toil and private mourning.  Two alone stayed behind.  The tall cloaked girl and the squat figure beside her gripping her forearm as much for support as for condolence.

Persapha dabbed at the tears that stained her cheeks.  “He shouldn’t have died,” she said.  “It’s not fair.”

“He saved you,” came a hoarse answer.  “He kept you safe from your greatest foe all your life.  That is his achievement, his legacy to you.”

“I don’t want a legacy.  I want him here, beside me, with you.”

“We cannot all have what we want, we must be grateful for what we have.”  Her companion held up a clawed hand, three scaly twisted fingers. “He saved me too.  He saved you from your inner demons and he brought me back from the fire, well brought most of me back.”

Persapha nodded.  “He was a good karib.”

“The best,” Odestus added looking down at the simple stone set next to Lyndat’s.  “If I should ever chance to catch fire again I will remind myself that they know nothing of healing burns who have not lived beneath the shadow of dragons in Grithsank.”

Persapha took his maimed hand in hers and stroked the wrinkled burned skin from the bald patch above the little wizard’s missing right ear down to his scarred neck.  “It has healed well,” she said.

He smiled and the left hand side of his face lit up with something like pleasure.  “You are a dreadful liar, Persapha, but I am a lot less dead than I deserve to be and that is miracle enough.”

“Bob,” she exclaimed as the little lizard high stepped its way across the freshly turned mound of earth.  “Have you no respect?”

The chameleon opened its mouth to display a hopeful tongue. Odestus looked down with half a smile.  “You have spoiled him,” he said. “Long years of being hand fed are not good for a reptile.  It makes them lazy.”  He rubbed his own scarred skin, its texture not unlike the lizard’s though the colour was a more violent mix of pinks than the muted shifting shades of the chameleon’s scales.  “I should know, you hand fed me for long enough.”

Persapha scooped the chameleon up in her arms.  “He’s not spoiled are you, Bob?” She stuck out her tongue at the lizard tasting the air between them.  “He thinks you’re being very mean.”

Odestus hesitated rolling the thought around in his head before daring to make the suggestion.  “Would he perhaps forgive me if I took him on a trip?  If I took us all on a trip?”

Persapha wrinkled her nose.  “We can’t go outside.  The sandsnakes will be in season.”

“I wasn’t thinking of outside,” he said quickly.  “I was thinking of going home. A one way trip home.”

She stood very still, she did even seem to be breathing and for a long drawn out moment he did not dare to draw a rasping breath.

“I thought you said you couldn’t,” she spoke all in a rush.  “I thought you said you’d never be able to, that you were too injured.”  She jerked her chin towards his twisted hand.

“It’s not easy,” he admitted.  “I’m slower at everything than I used to be.  But I’ve been practicing.  I think I can do it.”

“I can’t leave here,” she looked around her suddenly frightened.  The karib were at work in the fields or pushing skiffs out onto the lake.  A few of the younger children splashed in the shadows.  “These are my family.”

“They are your tribe, Persapha and they love you dearly.  But they are not your family.  Vlyndor was your family and he is gone now.  It is time you went home.”

She set the lizard down on the ground.  “I’m not ready,” she said.  “Bob’s not ready.  We need more time.”

Odestus raised his hands, both the three fingered right and the five fingered left up towards her head.  Gently he pushed back the hood of her cloak.  “You are ready, Persapha,” he said as her long blond hair tumbled free.  “You’ve been ready for two and a half years.” He looked into those deep brown eyes so like her mother’s.  “It is time we all went home.”

The rain battered at the shutters of the Dragonsoul Inn and the wind howled over the chimney top teasing the fire into long strands of flaming life.  Ailsa wiped down the bar with a rag and grumbled at her plight.  “Every night,” she muttered to the uncaring saloon.  “Every night I’m left on my own.  Grown man shouldn’t get an attack of the vapours, leastways not every night.”

She spied a jar on the table by the fire inbetween the two winged chairs.  She muttered a soft curse as she went to retrieve it.  No job ever seemed finished these days, certainly not with Old Trajet taking to his bed so readily and rising so late.  If Young Trajet were here he’d do his part, or at least shame his dad into fulfilling the job as well as the title of innkeeper. 

She reached for the half full tankard but a thin hand shot out from the nearer winged chair and grabbed her wrist.  “I’m not finished, Mistress Ailsa.”

“Goddess, prophet and Saint Morwena,” Aisla gasped, “but you gave me a shock there Mr Marcus, sitting so quiet and still.”

“I’m good at that,” the thin man with dark hair replied lifting the tankard to his lips.

Ailsa watched him take a deep draught.  She wanted to say that the man had maybe had enough, save that Marcus was the only regular customer, the only resident customer and times were still hard in Salicia.  It would be a week more at least before the garrison returned and the times of bounty and overflowing tap rooms could resume.  In the meantime Mr Marcus’s half silver crown a night for a small room were most welcome, not to mention the ale and spirits he seemed to absorb with no visible dimming of his faculties.   

Her reverie was broken by a sudden hammering at the door that made her jump and brought an amused smile to Marcus’s lips.  “We’re closed,” Ailsa shouted, but the hammering just resumed with greater intensity.  She walked over to the door and shouted through it again, “we’re closed.”  The next sudden thumping was level with her head and she started in alarm.

“For the love of the Goddess, let them in woman,” Marcus said. He looked around the vacant tables, the room scarcely much emptier than it had been all day. “Sure you could do with the business.”

“Hold on,” Ailsa called as the thumping resumed. “I’m getting it.”  She raised the bar and pulled open the door. Two sodden figures tumbled into the room. A short man followed by a tall girl.  Ailsa gasped at the man’s deformed hand and then caught the angry red scar that soured the side of his head. She looked quckly away, hiding her revulsion by pretending she was looking at the man’s companion.  A tall young girl with her arms folded inside her cloak.  The deluge had plastered ropes of blond hair to her scalp and shoulders, but despite that she looked around the inside of the inn, brown eyes bright with fascination at the entirely ordinary surroundings.

“My apologies for troubling you at so late an hour, good mistress,” the man was saying, wringing water out of a corner of his cloak, one good hand and one bad hand twisting inefficiently against each other. “I had misjudged our bearings and we were somewhat lost.  It was only with some difficulty that we argued our way through the night gate and got directions to your esteemed establishment.”

“You must have argued well,” Marcus said limping over to carry his tankard to the bar and, on the way, get a better look at the newcomers.  “The night gate isn’t supposed to open for nobody save them on the governor’s business.”

“I’m a merchant,” the man replied.  “I have a gift for haggling.”

Ailsa could not take her eyes off the man’s scars.  By all that was holy he was missing an ear and all the hair that should have been near it.  How could a man survive that kind of scalding? 

“I fell asleep in my cups one night,” the man answered her curious stare.  “Rolled in the hearth, didn’t wake up until the damage was done.”

“I didn’t ask no question, sir,” Ailsa insisted.

“But you wanted to,” the man replied without rancour.

Ailsa swallowed awkwardly and shrugged.  “We baint be having many visitors these past few months.  Every newcomer is somethink of an event, marked or not, begging your pardon for any offence.”

The scarred man nodded.  “Yes,” he said.  “I had thought it was quieter than I remember, quieter and more worried.” 

“Well with the garrison gone overseas everybody’s been at their quicks’ ends.”  Ailsa said.  “Not knowing when they would be coming back, or even if they’d be coming back.  We’ve been through a terrible time and all that while we was wondering if the Satrap would take the chance to attack while we got nothing but old men and wenches to defend the walls.” She sighed, “My man, Old Trajet, we call him that on account of how our son also be called Trajet so he’s Young Trajet and his da is Old Trajet.”

“Ingenious,” the scarred man complimented her.  His eyes scanned the inn and then he stepped over to the bar, dripping water all the way.

“Well, Old Trajet he’s bitten his fingers to the bone with the fretting about which way’s going to be up when the dust finally settles, takes to his bed right early of a night.  I think he might be sickening for something.”

“Only for liquor,” Marcus grunted. “I see how he takes a bottle with him whenever he goes up.

“Well you’re a fine one to talk Mr Marcus,” Ailsa snapped in instinctive defence of her husband’s uncertain character.  “It’s a dry night when you down less than two bottles yourself and to no social purpose barring your own amusment.”

“I can hold my drink,” Marcus replied.  “And it’s medicinal, Ailsa, it’s for easing some painful memories.”

The stranger looked at him sharply. “Do you find it works?”

“Not well enough,” Marcus replied dourly.

“Well it has been a time of worry right enough, small wonder Old Trajet has been so stuck on liquid solace when Young Trajet was out risking life and limb near enough four hundred leagues over the sea,” Ailsa dabbed at the counter, wiping some of the dirt back on from the cloth.

“I keep noticing you speak in the past tense, Mistress Ailsa.” The scarred man said, choosing his words with careful deliberation.  “Does that mean your time of worry is at an end?”

She looked at him queerly.  “You baint from round here are you sir, though I can’t hear no accent in your voice.”

“I’ve been away travelling, for a long time, with my niece.”

The girl was wandering around the room with an air of insatiable curiosity.  Marcus was watching her carefully.  She stuck out her tongue at him.  He blinked.

“You mean you ‘aint heard a word about the goings on in the Petred Isle.”

“A bad business,” Marcus growled.

“So you keep saying Marcus and then you never say more, so if you baint got anything beyond your tut tutting and sip sipping to contribute I’ll thank you to keep your trap shut and let them as know what’s what tell the tale.”

“You’ve been there to the Petred Isle?” the scarred man asked.

“No but near enough as good as, I’ve had letters from my boy Young Trajet.  He writes real good, time was he was going to be a priest.  But then he took the governor’s penny and joined the garrison.  Never expected that to take him overseas though.”

The visitor leaned idly on the bar, drumming his three fingers against the half-polished wood in a most disconcerting way.  “And what does your brave soldier son tell you in his letters of the Petred Isle?”

“Well you heard tell there was a dreadful evil let loose.  Orcs aplenty, all the great castles of the land taken and worse.”  She dropped her voice and leant in to confide in a way that was somehow still less discreet than a hail across a street in broad daylight. “I’d never have believed it save that young Trajet wrote he’d seen them with his own eyes.”  She ran her tongue over her lips savouring the awful details in her tale.  “Yes the unrested dead was stalking the land, bodies kept walking and made to kill long after their owners had lost all use for them.”

“That’s hard to credit.” There was belief in the man’s eyes, if not his words.

“There’s worse monsters than orcs and the undead,” Marcus shivered and again the blond girl stuck out her tongue at him with a puzzled frown upon her brow.

“Well it were all true and young Trajet and his brigade they was in a battle, a great battle against the enemy.  They’re calling it Gogoument after the name of some manor house that was next to the battle field.”

“What happened?”

“The enemy was defeated,” Ailsa played a trump of gossip with great pleasure.  “And the Dark Lord, he was destroyed.”

“Maelgrum, destroyed?”

“Yes that was the feller,” Ailsa hastily concurred raising her voice in her anxiety not to bear any interruption to her story telling.  “And he’s not coming back.  They had the victory, this young slip of a girl that they say is queen now, though rightly I baint never heard of her before a few month back and who knows what happened to old King Gregor and his two fine sons, but anyways this slip of a girl come out of Undersalve and turns out she’s the heir and everything.  All done right proper or so young Trajet says in his letters, but it’s a rum business if you ask me.”

The girl hissed some murmur of warning at the scarred stranger as Marcus frowned.  “Forgive me sir, but how come you knew the Dark Lord’s name was Maelgrum?” Marcus kept his gaze as level as his voice, though there was a weight behind his light words.

“The lady must have mentioned it.”

“She didn’t.”

“Maybe I did, Mr Marcus, sure I must have,” Ailsa bristled.  “Now let me tell the tale, we are just coming to the best bit.  See my young Trajet he was there in the thick of this battle of Gogoument and he was fighting orcs and zombies and everything. Even wizards, by all that’s holy and they was so outnumbered but they won.”

“By themselves they defeated Mael… the Dark Lord’s army all by themselves?” the scarred man was shaking his head.

Ailsa frowned.  “There was some elves came along right at the end, some of them dodgy folk, tree huggers from the Silverwood, but by then young Trajet and his boys had been fighting all day and the battle was as good as won.”

“And the enemy is gone, totally gone.”  The stranger slid onto a stool, trembling slightly.

“The queen laid him low with some purty trick, there was a big fire on the hill and he was turned all to white ash.  She told ‘em all he was gone and he weren’t coming back.”

“She must be a truly remarkable lady,” the man’s voice was almost too soft to hear and he shook his head sadly.

“An odd lady, if you ask me,” she said and went on even though he studiously hadn’t asked her.  “Lots of funny goings on after the battle.  I tell you things they are a changing.  I’m right glad that the garrison is coming back here, where we know how to keep the salved laws, though saying that it probably won’t last long until this young girl of a queen starts spreading her modern ways of thinking across the seas.”

“Why, what’s she done?”

“Well there’s three things mainly.”

“Three?” after a moment’s patient silence the stranger gave her the prompt she craved.  “Do go on.”

“Well first there was the wedding.”

“Wedding?”

“She married her first minister, Seneschal Kimbolt.”

“Kimbolt?  Kimbolt lives.”  The scarred man hissed the question and then quickly looked around for the girl. She was sitting by the fire struggling with her cloak which seemed to have acquired a life of its own.

“Not just lives, he’s king now.  Well prince consort I think they call it and young Trajet says he weren’t much more than a guard captain.  He’s a good soldier ‘n all, spared a few words for young Trajet before and after the battle, but he weren’t born in a bed any grander than the straw matress I pushed young Trajet out on.”

“Marrying upwards? That’s no bad thing.”

“But that’s not the half of it, there’s marrying and there’s marrying in haste and then there’s what she did.”

“What did she do?”  The stranger obliged.

“Why she married him there right there on the battle field, with the dead not yet buried and the sun barely set on young Trajet’s great victory and she calls over a priest and she makes him marry them there and then.  No fancy dresses, no wedding announcements, no big ceremony.  The pair of them just stood in their battle gear, splattered with blood and poor father Novus trying to make like it were spring in the church.”

She leant in and tapped her nose knowingly.  “A rush like that, fine lady and great victory or not, there’s only one reason for such haste you mark my words.  Come midwinter’s day if there ain’t a royal baby to celebrate you can come in here and drink yourself under the table for free, there’s Ailsa Trajetson’s word on it.”

“She had, according to your er … young Trajet just defeated the greatest evil the world has ever known,” the stranger chided.  “I think she might be entitled to a little relaxation of the normal proprieties.”

“I’m not discounting her or nothing, sir,” Ailsa hastily scrubbed up her compassionate credentials.  “I think it’s all to the good when people try to do the right thing by their mistakes.  But the way I sees it, if she weren’t a queen and him a commoner, she’d be on her way to a one of them maudlin nunneries for the fallen.”

“You said there were three things, Mistress Ailsa.  I fear if you do not tell your tale quickly my curiosity might not outlast my exhaustion.”