Soul of the Fire (91 page)

When Fitch pushed on the door, it silently swung inward.

“
In here,” Fitch whispered. He didn’t know why he was whispering, except that maybe he feared to wake the spirits of the wizards who haunted the place.

He didn’t want the spirits to make him jump from the rampart like the soldiers had done from the bridge; it looked like the edge dropped off down the mountain for thousands of feet.

“
You sure?” Morley asked.

“
I’m going in. You can wait here or go with me. It’s up to you.”

Morley’s eyes were looking all around, not seeming able to decide on where to settle. “I guess I’ll go with you.”

Inside, to each side, glass spheres, about as big as a head, sat on green marble pedestals, like armless statues waiting to greet visitors to the huge room of ornate stonework. In the middle, four columns of polished black marble, at least as big around as a horse was long, from head to tail, formed a square that supported arches at the outer edges of a central dome.

There were wrought-iron sconces holding candles all around the room, but up in the dome a ring of windows let light flood in, so they didn’t need to light the candles. Fitch felt like he was in a place the Creator Himself might have. He felt like he should drop to his knees and pray in such a place.

A red carpet led down the wing they were in. In a row down each side of the carpet were six-foot-tall white marble pedestals. Each had to be bigger around than Master Drummond’s belly. Up on top of each pedestal were different objects. There were pretty bowls, fancy gold chains, an inky black bottle, and other objects, carved from burled wood. Some of the things Fitch couldn’t make sense of.

He didn’t pay much attention to the things on the columns; he looked instead across the huge room, to the other side of the central dome. There, he saw a table piled with a clutter of things, and there, leaning against the table, looked to be the thing he’d come for.

Between each pair of the black columns topped in gold, a wing ran off from the vast central chamber. To the left it looked like a disorderly library, with books stacked all over the floor in tall columns. The wing to the right was dark.

Fitch trotted down the red carpet. At the end, broad steps, near to a dozen, went down into the sunken floor of cream-colored marble at the center of the First Wizard’s enclave below the dome. He took the steps two at a time up the other side, up toward the table before a towering round-topped window straight ahead.

A confusion of things were piled all over the table: bowls, candles, scrolls, books, jars, spheres, metal squares and triangles—there was even a skull. Other bigger objects sat cluttered around on the floor.

Morley reached for the skull. Fitch slapped his hand away.

“
Don’t touch nothing.” Fitch pointed at the scull staring up at them. “That could be a wizard’s skull, and if you touch it, it might come back to life. Wizards can do that, you know.”

Morley yanked back his hand.

Fingers trembling, Fitch finally reached down and picked up the thing he’d come for. It looked just like he’d imagined it must look. The gold and silver work was as beautiful as anything Fitch had ever seen, and he’d seen a lot of fine gold and silver work at the Minister’s estate. No Ander had anything to approach the beauty of this.

“
That it?” Morley asked.

Fitch ran his fingers over the raised letters in the hilt. It was the one word he could read.

“
This is it. The Sword of Truth.”

Fitch felt rooted to that spot as he held the magnificent weapon, letting his fingers glide over the wire-wound hilt, the downswept cross guard, the finely wrought gold and silver scabbard. Even the leather baldric was beautifully made, feeling buttery soft between his finger and thumb.

“
Well, if you’re taking that,” Morley said, “what do you think I can take?”

“
Nothing,” came a voice from behind them.

They both flinched and cried out as one. Together, they spun around.

They both blinked at what they saw, hardly believing their eyes. It was a gorgeous blue-eyed blond woman in a red leather outfit that clung like a second skin. It showed her womanly shape to an extent Fitch had never seen. The low-cut dresses the Ander women wore showed the tops of their breasts, but this outfit, even though it covered everything, somehow seemed to show more. He could see her lean, well-defined muscles flexing as she strode toward them.

“
That’s not yours,” the woman said. “Give it here before you boys get hurt.”

Morley didn’t like being called a boy anymore, at least not by some lone woman. Fitch could see his powerful muscles tense.

The woman put her fists on her hips. For a woman by herself with the two of them more than her match, she had a lot of nerve. Fitch didn’t think he’d seen many women who could scowl as good as she could, but he wasn’t really afraid. He was a man on his own, now, and he didn’t have to answer to no one.

Fitch remembered how helpless Claudine Winthrop had been. He remembered how easy it was to hold her helpless. This was a woman, just like Claudine, no more.

“
What are you two doing in here?” she asked.

“
I guess we could ask you the same,” Morley said.

She glared at him and then held her hand out to Fitch. “That doesn’t belong to you.” She waggled her fingers. “Hand it over before I lose my temper and I end up hurting you.”

At the same instant, Fitch and Morley bolted in opposite directions. The woman went for Fitch. Fitch tossed the sword to Morley. Morley, laughing, caught the sword, waving it at the woman, teasing her with it.

Fitch cut around her back and headed toward the door. She lunged for Morley. He tossed the sword over her head and outstretched arms.

The three of them raced across the sunken floor in the center of the room. She dove for Fitch and caught his leg, tripping him. As he went down, he heaved the sword to Morley.

She was up and running before Fitch could roll to his feet. Morley shouldered one of the white marble columns, toppling it across the red carpet before her. The bowl atop the column crashed to the floor, shattering into a thousand shards that skittered across the marble and carpet with a soft chiming, almost musical, tinkling sound.

“
You two don’t have any idea what you’re doing!” she yelled. “Stop it at once! That isn’t yours! This is no child’s game! You’ve no right to touch anything in this place! You could be causing great harm! Stop it! Lives are at stake!”

She and Morley danced around the opposite sides of another column. When she lunged for him, he shoved the column toward her. She cried out when the heavy gold vase atop the column tumbled and hit her shoulder. Fitch didn’t know if it was pain or rage that caused her to shout.

The three of them serpentined around the columns on both sides of the red carpet, heading ever closer to the door. Fitch and Morley tossed the sword back and forth between them, keeping her off guard. Fitch pushed over one of the columns to slow her and was shocked at how heavy it was. The way Morley shoved them over Fitch had thought they would be easy to topple; they weren’t, so he didn’t try another.

She was yelling at them to stop destroying the priceless things of magic, but when Morley toppled the one with the inky black bottle atop it, she screamed. The column crashed down. The bottle tumbled through the air.

She dove across the floor, her long blond braid flying out behind as she hit and slid. The bottle bounced through her hands, flipping up, then hit the carpet and rolled, but it didn’t break.

By the look on her face, Fitch would have thought it was her own life that was just spared by the bottle not breaking.

She scrambled to her feet and charged for them as they went through the door. Outside, Morley, chuckling, tossed the sword to Fitch as they ran along the edge of the rampart.

“
You boys have no idea what is at stake. I need that sword. This is important. It doesn’t belong to you. Give it to me, please, and I will let you go.”

Morley had that look in his eye, the look like he wanted to hurt her. Hurt her bad. He’d had that look with Claudine Winthrop.

Fitch just wanted the sword, but he could see they were going to have to do something serious to stop her, else she was going to cause them no end of trouble. He wasn’t about to give up the sword. Not now, not after everything they’d been through.

“
Hey, Fitch,” Morley called, “I think it’s time you had your turn at a woman. This one’s even free. What say I hold her down for you?”

Fitch surely thought she was a good enough looking woman. And she was the one causing them trouble. It would be her own fault. She wouldn’t let them be. She wouldn’t mind her own business. She had it coming.

Fitch knew that since he was doing it for the right reasons, for good reasons, he deserved to be the Seeker of Truth. This woman had no right to interfere with that.

Out in the bright sun, her red leather seemed an angrier color. Her face surely was. She looked like someone had lifted her up by her long blond braid, and dunked her in blood.

“
I try to do it his way,” she muttered to herself. “I try to please him.” Fitch thought she might be crazy, standing there, hands on hips, talking to the sky. “And what does it get me? This. Enough. I’ve had enough of this.”

She forced out an angry breath, then pulled free red leather gloves she had tucked over her double strap belt cinching the top of her outfit tight at the waist. The way she drew on the gloves, wigging her fingers into them, had a frightening finality to it.

“
I’m not warning you boys again,” she said, this time in a growl that lifted the hair at the back of Fitch’s neck. “Give it over, and give it over now.”

While she was glaring grimly at Fitch, Morley moved on her. He swung his big fist to punch the side of her head. As hard as he swung, Fitch thought he was going to kill her with the first blow.

The woman didn’t even look Morley’s way. She caught his fist in the flat of her hand, yanked it around, and in a blink spun under it, twisting his arm around behind him. Her teeth clenched, and she drove his arm up. Fitch was shocked to hear Morley’s shoulder let out a sickening pop. Morley cried out. The pain dropped him to his knees.

This woman was like no woman Fitch had ever seen before. Now, she was coming for him. She wasn’t running, but striding with a determination that caught Fitch’s breath short.

He stood frozen, not knowing what to do. He didn’t want to abandon his friend, but his feet wanted to run. He didn’t want to give up the sword, either. He blindly groped the crenellated wall behind him as he started backing along it.

Morley was up. He rushed the woman. She just kept coming for Fitch—for the sword. Fitch decided he might have to take the sword out and stab her—in the leg, or something, he speculated. He could wound her.

But then it didn’t look like he was going to have to; Morley was closing on her, an enraged bull at full charge. There would be no stopping the big man this time.

Without even turning to the onrushing Morley, she smoothly sidestepped—never taking her glare from Fitch—and brought her arm up, ramming her elbow squarely into Morley’s face.

His head snapped back. Blood sprayed out.

Not even breathing hard, she turned and seized Morley’s good left hand. With her fingers in his palm and her thumb on the back of his hand, she bent it down at the wrist until Morley’s knees were buckling as she backed him toward the wall.

Morley was whimpering like a child, begging her to stop. His other arm was useless. His nose had been flattened horribly. Blood gushed from his face. It had to be all over her, too, but with her red leather, Fitch couldn’t tell.

She backed Morley steadily, mercilessly, to the wall. Without a word, she seized him by the throat with her other hand, and, calmly, indifferently, shoved him backward through the notch of a crenellation, out into thin air.

Fitch’s jaw dropped. He never expected her to do that—for it to go that far.

Morley screamed his lungs out as he dropped backward down the side of the mountain. Fitch stood frozen, listening to his friend from the flat place of Anderith plummet down the side of a mountain. Morley’s scream abruptly ended.

The woman wasn’t talking anymore, making any more demands. She was simply coming for Fitch, now. Her blue eyes fixed on him. He knew without doubt that if she caught him, she’d kill him, too.

This was no Claudine Winthrop. This was no woman who was going to call him “sir.”

Fitch’s feet finally got their way.

If there was one thing about Fitch that was better than Morley and all his muscles, it was that Fitch could run like the wind. Now, he ran like a gale.

A quick glance back shocked him; the woman could run faster. She was tall, and had longer legs. She was going to catch him. If she did, she’d smash his face, just as easily as she smashed Morley’s. She’d throw him to his death, too. Or take the sword from him and cut out his heart.

Fitch could feel tears streaming down his cheeks. He’d never run so fast. She was running faster.

He flew down steps, falling more than running. He dove over the side of the landing and down the next flight. Everything was a blur. Stone walls, windows, railings, steps—all flashed by in a smear of light and dark.