Sword and the Spell 01: The Grey Robe (46 page)

“We don’t need him,” put in Malingar.

"I wish I could but I have other
obligations," said Jonderill ignoring Maligner’s comments and trying to
sound regretful but at the same time feeling relieved that he had a reason not
to get embroiled in her schemes.

Tarraquin looked annoyed at the blank refusal.
"If you come with me now I will make you the new High Lord when I am
crowned queen."

"I regret I can't, I have to do what I can for
the Princess."

Tarraquin jumped to her feet in anger. "So I'm
not good enough for you am I? Well let me tell you, Jonderill, don’t you ever
dare to set foot in Leersland again in case I remember you’re nothing more than
a runaway kingsward and deal with you accordingly!" She looked around the
gathering, glaring at anyone who dared to smile, her hands planted firmly on
her hips. "And what do you think you're all staring at? Get the horses,
we’re leaving, now! Malingar, get your men together, we have plans to make.

The campsite exploded into instant activity.

"You made a mistake there, boy," said
Pellum, coming to stand behind Jonderill as he used a bit of charcoal from the
fire to hastily sketch the promised map on the back of an old shirt.
"She's not the kind of woman to gainsay."

He sauntered off to where the horses were being
saddled, his eyes following Tarraquin wherever she went until, at last, he saw
her collect her cloak and walk into the trees alone. Making sure that no one
was watching him he followed her and waited until she had stopped in a patch of
moonlight before he moved up behind her and enfolded her in his arms. Tarraquin
spun around, startled by the sudden presence and Pellum pressed her body closely
to his.

"Jonderill's a fool. He doesn't know what a real
woman is, but I do. When I've done my duty in Vinmore I will be back and then
you and I can really get to know each other." He kissed her passionately,
covering her mouth with his and only released her when he felt the steel of her
knife break the skin below his ribs. "Now is that any way to treat the man
who would be your lover?"

"Get away from me before I forget who and what you
are and give you what you deserve."

He shrugged slightly but still gave her a charming
smile as he backed away from the knife she held. "You'll change your mind,
women always do."

Tarraquin lunged forward but Pellum, who was expecting
the move, pushed her knife hand to the side. Still holding her wrist he gave
her a quick but elegant bow and then made a hasty but dignified escape, laughing
to himself. He moved quickly across to where Sansun waited, shouting for
Jonderill as he went. "Come on, boy, I don't have all day to wait for
you."

Jonderill handed his map to Jarrul who took it between
bandaged hands. “Take good care of Tarraquin and keep an eye on Malingar, I
have a feeling that he can’t be trusted.”

"I will and you take care of yourself," said
Jarrul, "and remember I still owe you my life twice over."

"I won't let 'im forget it," assured
Perguine, suddenly appearing by Jonderill's side. "An’ until yer can
settle the debt yerself I'll keeps an eye on 'im."

"There's no debt and no need to come with
me."

"Well, maybe not, but I don't trust that there
prince not ter stick yer with 'is blade as soon as yer out of our 'earin'.
Anyway, it'll annoy 'im good an' proper ter 'ave me along." Perguine
laughed and put his arm around Jonderill's shoulder, silencing any other
arguments as they walked to where the horses waited.

"About time too, boy," snapped Pellum,
glaring at the small thief whilst Jonderill stroked Sansun's nose in greeting.
"If he has to come with us then he stays out of my way and you, boy, remember
your place, not at my horse's head but by my foot. Another thing, I'll have
that sword if you please, it's not much good but it will be more effective in
the hands of a warrior prince who knows how to use it than a bound
servant."

Jonderill reluctantly handed the sword over. He could
find no way to argue with such logic even if his own feelings told him Pellum
was wrong.

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Demon Magic

   
Jonderill
stopped and stared in total disbelief and horror, unable to comprehend the
changes before him. Where smooth boughs of honeyvine had broken through the
ground in a protective circle, dark gnarled trunks of redthorn now tore the
earth apart to support a vicious barrier. Entwined tendrils of white and cream
had been replaced by thick branches of dark brown, knotted together in a
twisted mass. Where once the delicate white flower of the honeyvine had bloomed
and shed its delicate fragrance, blood-red thorns protruded like a tangled web
of miniature daggers. Amongst the branches lay the evidence of men and other
creatures that had tried to penetrate the barrier, their remains trapped and
impaled on the piercing thorns.

"If you expect me to go in there you're out of
luck," said Pellum emphatically. "I may be mad enough to agree to
come with you but I'm not totally insane."

Jonderill didn’t say anything, there seemed to be
nothing to say. He’d been so certain that Plantagenet or Animus had laid the
enchantment which built the honeyvine barrier to protect the sleeping princess.
In doing so, he was sure they would have created a pathway for Daun's true love
to pass through unharmed but this was definitely not their work. The two
elderly magicians would not, could not, construct anything so vicious with the
obvious intent of taking the life of anyone foolish enough to try and penetrate
their protective screen. It had to be Maladran's work, in which case, he would
have destroyed any safe passageway.

"Now we aint gettin' anywhere just lookin' at the
fing are we?" said Perguine, walking along the barrier and peering into
its depths as if he were searching for something.

"Well you go in if you're so brave.” snapped
Pellum. “You're scrawny enough to wriggle underneath and through the
gaps."

"S'pose I could," replied Perguine
half-heartedly.

"What's wrong thief, lost your courage? You were
quick enough to call me a coward but you're not so brave now are you?"

"No!" protested Jonderill. "It has to
be you; you're the one who needs to get through to the Princess."

"Keep out of this, boy. He's the one who called
me a coward, now let's see how brave he is."

Jonderill looked pleadingly at Perguine but the little
thief gave him a shrug and a half grin and dropped to his knees, almost as if
he were praying to the hedge of thorns. Ignoring Jonderill's cries of protest
he lay flat on his stomach and began to squirm forward. His long sensitive
hands clutched at the ruptured earth beneath the first red bough whilst he
pulled himself along, the earth barely shifting under his light weight. Behind
him his toes dug into the soil hard enough to push him forward until his waist
was level with the outermost trunk.

Perguine twisted his lithe body around the gnarled
bark of the next thick trunk and heaved himself forward using his elbows so
that his entire body was beneath the thorn hedge. Here branches, heavy with
long thorns, trailed across the ground and with infinite care he raised the
front half of his body and eased it over the sharp spikes. His head led the way,
ducking beneath a low bough and then his shoulders, hunched so that his chest
wouldn’t touch the sharp red tips.

Finally his knees and hips followed, twisting at an
acute angle, ready to negotiate the next trunk and bough. It was a tight turn,
challenging the fine, delicate movements of a master thief. He twisted his body
one way and then another, concentrating so hard that he failed to notice the
thorn which scraped the top of one finger as he edged his way forward.

A single bead of blood oozed from the tiny scratch and
fell unnoticed onto the broken soil by his hand. As he reached out slowly to
grab hold of an upturned sod to pull himself forward again a branch of newly
grown thorns erupted through the soil beneath his outstretched fingers.
Perguine cried out in surprise and pain and couldn’t prevent the automatic
reaction of his hand as it jerked away from the source of its injury. As his
arm jerked backwards with the thorn-encrusted branch still embedded in his hand
it was instantly sliced into ribbons of tattered flesh on the canopy of thorns
above him.

He dragged the branch of thorns embedded in his flesh
forward and it slashed across his face, ripping down to the bone of his cheeks and
piercing both eyes before he could close them. Blood gushed from the wounds and
where it fell new thorns grew, twisting and turning and slicing into Perguine's
body as he thrashed in agony and screamed in terror.

Jonderill felt the change in the forest of thorns from
the moment Perguine's first drop of blood hit the shattered earth. The ominous
silence and utter stillness, like a predator in waiting, changed to a sibilant
hissing and then to a wild frenzied thrashing which couldn’t be made by one man
alone. Before Perguine had even started to scream, Jonderill was amongst the
thorns, tearing with his bare hands to part the interlocking branches and reaching
for his friend. Despite the strength that his desperation gave him the branches
wouldn’t part. Those that came away in his hands snapped apart only to rejoin
lower down to entangle his legs or higher above his head blocking his way
whilst new branches snaked into place preventing any movement forwards.

Perguine's screams were becoming weaker when reality
broke through Jonderill's desperation. He needed a weapon, an axe to slice the
branches apart but his axe was gone, left behind in the forest and Pellum had
his sword.
"Use your
sword," he yelled at Pellum, who sat impassively on Sansun’s back watching
the scene as if he were a neutral observer. Pellum didn’t reply and made no
effort to assist.

For a moment Jonderill seemed to lose all control as he
pulled himself from the ensnaring hedge and charged at Pellum as if he were the
enemy. He grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him from Sansun's back in a
welter of flailing arms and legs and drew the sword free from Pellum’s belt
before dropping him heavily to the ground. The Prince gave a loud grunt as he
hit the hard ground and then scuttled backwards as if he expected the sword to
be used on him.

Instead Jonderill ignored him and leapt onto Sansun's
back, driving him straight towards the wall of thorns. Sansun never hesitated,
pounding those branches which Jonderill cut beneath his hooves into tinder. On
his back, Jonderill slashed wildly at the hedge sending splinters of wood in
every direction but not noticing that the redthorn which touched his skin
withered away and those tangled limbs which fell before his onslaught slithered
back into the ground from where they had come.

In less than a dozen strokes he could see the prone
figure of Perguine wrapped in a netting of thorns and within another dozen
strokes he was at his side, pulling the thorns free with his bare hands. He
carefully turned Perguine over but there was very little left by which to
identify the corpse. Every piece of flesh had been ripped from the body and the
face was featureless. Even the delicate hands had been torn so badly that only
the bones remained. Jonderill closed his eyes, choking back his tears and
recalled the weasel-like features, the sudden impish smile and the imperceptibly
quick movements of the thief.

That was how he would remember him, not as the bloody
mass which lay at his feet. He took off his jerkin and laid it over the remains
of the thief’s face. As he stood and looked around he suddenly realised that
he’d opened up a pathway into the hedge and apart from a few minor scratches
neither he nor the horse were harmed. Wearily he remounted Sansun and, holding
tight to Plantagenet’s old sword, began hacking half heartedly at the redthorn
forest until a wide, clear path was cut through to the city and palace beyond.

*

The silver globe on the burnt and scarred table began
to vibrate very slowly, disturbing the air so slightly that one would have had
to touch its smooth surface to realise that it moved at all. For some time it
remained in its unsettled state before its agitation increased and its form
lost its clarity, blurred by its constant motion.

A low buzzing filled the air as the globe moved
against its carved ebon stand but the sound lacked urgency and had as little
effect on the dark, sleeping form in the nearby chair as would the hum of a
flying insect. The globe, however, was no insect to be ignored or disdained and
when the trigger with which it had been primed was activated the steady hum
leapt into an angry squeal through which no one could sleep.

Maladran stirred in his chair behind the table where
he had collapsed into a deep sleep after priming the globe. For a moment he
couldn’t remember why his compliant and obedient scrying tool should be
screaming at him. Angrily he whipped off the black silk cloth and shut his eyes
against the blinding light which exploded from the globe once it was free from
its shroud. The sorcerer rapidly placed his hand on the shimmering surface,
reciting words of power which silenced the high-pitched whine and brought the
beacon of light back to bearable intensity.

He stared at the globe and waited for the image to
settle. At first only dark forest showed but it was a forest he was very
familiar with, made up of savage redthorn. He watched as it wilted and sank
into the ground, drawing back and forming an open pathway which had been sliced
through its defences. A movement at the end of the pathway caught his eye and
he leaned forward to study the globe more closely. There, a young man with
brown eyes and dark hair took a sword from his servant, sheathed it and made
his way towards Alewinder's open palace gate.

Screaming an imprecation, Maladran swept the globe off
the table with a vicious swipe from the back of his hand, propelling it into
the wall to shatter into thousands of fragments, eternally irreplaceable. He
didn’t care, all he could see was the Princess’s chosen, Prince Pellum, walking
safely through the forest of thorns which he had created having destroyed the
strongest enchantment he’d ever cast.

If such things could be, then the Prince had to be the
wielder of the great powers he had so recently felt. Was it possible that he’d
misjudged the prince so badly and he truly possessed powers which had the
potential to grow stronger than his own? He couldn’t allow that to happen. He
was and would always be the greatest of magicians in the six kingdoms. That was
why so many people had died and why Pellum would have to die too.

Taking up the serrated knife he’d used to remove his
prisoners’ hearts and not bothering with the remains of his shattered scrying
globe, for which he had no further use, Maladran swept out of the room and down
the spiralling stairs. Wards shattered like glass before him as he descended to
the lowest cavern beneath the tower. Now that their souls had been freed, the
bodies of Garrin and the other captives hung limply from their chains, their
flesh putrefying and making the stale air of the confined space reek with their
stench. Maladran ignored it as if it didn’t exist; the decomposing bodies were
there for a purpose and if that meant the vilest of stenches, then so be it.

Without bothering to remove their chains the sorcerer
sliced through their wrists and ankles and dragged the decomposing bodies onto
the stone slab, heaping them on top of each other in a bizarre mound of rotting
arms and legs. He worked with feverish haste, like a man possessed, not caring
about anything except what needed to be done. That there were thirteen bodies
was no accident but carefully planned for the moment when he would finally call
upon the most terrible of all arcane power: demon magic.

Maladran ran his fingers beneath the lip of the stone
slab, releasing catches to hidden compartments and taking out packages of
powders and metals which he had meticulously prepared beforehand. One by one he
sprinkled the powders across the thirteen bodies, reciting different
incantations for the arcane compounds. With each incantation his voice rose and
waned like waves and strange mists twisted amongst the bodies and filled the
small room.

Finally he laid a crude circlet of base metal on top
of the bodies. A bestial creature, poorly engraved but clearly a replica of the
demon which surrounded the top of the tower, lay entwined around the circlet.
Black ebon wings and white taloned claws had been painted to follow the curve
of the narrow circlet and a spiked tail wound around the metal until it reached
the head with its two protruding ruby eyes as yet dull and lifeless.

Calling on those names given only to creatures of
nightmare, Maladran summoned demon magic, feeling it fire his blood until he
could contain the searing inferno no longer. Still chanting the sorcerer took
the sacred knife and held his hands over the circlet. With two quick movements
he sliced through the veins of both wrists, allowing his scalding blood to
fountain onto the thirteen bodies. Immediately they were consumed by flames
which destroyed all flesh and bone in moments. As the bodies fell to ash the
flames gathered in the centre of the circlet until it glowed white hot. The
sorcerer spoke again and a sulphurous cloud billowed into the air, engulfing
Maladran in a swirling shroud.

A deathly silence fell across the room and nothing
moved. Slowly the cloud dispersed just leaving the glowing circlet in a mound
of smouldering ash. Maladran held out his hands and grasped the white hot metal,
staggering with the pain as the metal burnt into his flesh. Carefully he
separated the demon's head from its tail changing the circlet into a torc which
he slid around his neck. He bit back a cry of agony as his flesh seared and the
metal crumpled to ash, leaving the demon imprinted into the raw flesh of his
throat.