The Assassin's Edge (Einarinn 5) (66 page)

“You’ll cut me a share or I’ll know the reason why.” I couldn’t help smiling until I saw the blood on ’Gren’s blade. “Who did you kill to get it?”

“No one,” ’Gren protested, injured. “That’s from the miller. The nurse all but pissed herself and ran like a scolded dog.”

“I guessed he’d hide valuables in that room where his son lies.” Sorgrad answered Ryshad’s unspoken question, daring the swordsman to challenge him.

’Gren had already dismissed the matter, turning to sweep a low bow to the women who were looking at the two of them with lively curiosity. “My ladies, my duty to you.” He winked at me. “We needn’t have worried about finding a bath.”

Ryshad had more important things on his mind. “Shiv, take us out of here now.”

Before the mage could reply, the grandmother choked on her meat. “Olret comes,” she gasped.

Her three daughters instantly joined hands, Frala in the middle.

“Quickly.” Gyslin beckoned urgently to her daughter and niece. The grandmother hobbled to the other end of their line and the little girl hid her face in Frala’s skirts.

“We’ll just have to risk it.” Shiv set his jaw.

“No!”

“Guinalle?” I couldn’t help myself; I actually looked round to see if the demoiselle was there in the room.

“What?” Ryshad and Shiv stared at me as if I’d lost my wits.

“Livak, it’s me.” I heard the noblewoman’s voice again but from the bemused faces all around, I was plainly the only one. “Don’t let Shiv work any magic,” she went on urgently. “Olret will kill him.”

“No spells, Shiv. Guinalle says no spells.” I struggled to hear her words at the same time as I was trying to explain. “Usara’s scrying for us and Guinalle’s working her Artifice through his spell.”

“How are they working that?” Shiv was intrigued.

“Can’t that wait?” I glared at him. “Just remember you can’t do any magic without Artifice to ward you or Olret will kill you!”

“Swords’ll kill us a cursed sight faster.” Sorgrad was next to the door, ’Gren beside him. “Half a cohort’s on its way.” The tramp of nailed boots echoed ominously up the stone stairwells.

“Shut the door,” Ryshad ordered. “Bolt it, one of you.” He swept his sword at the women.

I heard the bolts slam home as I tried to concentrate on Guinalle’s far-distant voice. “I have to speak to the adepts you’ve found. Join their line.”

I really didn’t want to do that and not only because the girl’s hand closest to me was so filthy, but we were running out of options fast so I grabbed for her.

The room turned dim around me and for one appalling moment I thought I was fainting. Then I realised I was somehow locked in a corner of my own mind with Guinalle’s will controlling my body, my voice, my gestures. I could look out through my own eyes but in a peculiar, cramped fashion, only able to look directly ahead and as if through Ryshad’s spyglass. I did my best to quell the panic rising within me and then realised that it would do me no good to yield to the impulse to scream, to protest, to fight the enchantment. I had no voice to cry for help, no strength to hit back.

“I am Guinalle Tor Priminale, acolyte of Larasion, sworn to the discipline of Ostrin.” She spoke with my lips and raised my hand to the grandmother. “Will you aid me in the name of all that you hold sacred?”

“We will.” The voices of all six Elietimm adepts echoed around me as the grandmother took Guinalle’s hand to complete the inward-looking circle. The room was instantly overlaid with new images; glimpses of Suthyfer and the newly reclaimed landing, Vithrancel and the busy market place, Edisgesset and the no-nonsense realm of the miners. Each place and person within them was as abiding and as ephemeral as the reality I could no longer feel beneath feet that no longer belonged to me. Something froze around me then Guinalle smashed it like someone breaking winter ice to reveal the fast flowing mysteries of the river beneath. My mother had warned me never to play on a frozen river with graphic tales of children carried away beneath the ice and drowned unable reach the light and air above. The fear I’d felt then was nothing to the terror paralysing me now, even as I felt the women of Shernasekke reaching for the aetheric power long denied them with all the desperate thirst of travellers lost in a waterless waste.

I wanted none of it, struggling not to fall into that torrent of mystery and peril, straining to see the world beyond the enchantment trapping me. Ryshad and Shiv were breaking apart the cages as best they could, ’Gren and Sorgrad piling the twisted bars and frames against the door, wedging broken bits of metal under the bottom, into the hinges, under the latch.

All that was less real than Guinalle now standing before me, dressed in the proud elegance of the Old Empire. Rings shone on every finger, a crescent of gold set with diamonds in her hair, more diamonds around her neck brilliant with fire struck by some unseen light shining on the silk of her flame-coloured gown. The soiled faces of the starved women each faded behind some simulacrum of how they wished to be seen. Frala’s hair lightened to the pale gold of sun-bleached straw, piled high on her head with bone pins tipped with blood-red gems. Her full-skirted gown was a maroon rich against her milky skin. Gyslin and the other sister were dressed in the same style, in differing shades of blue, a many stranded rope of curious milky gemstones twisted around Gyslin’s neck. The younger women wore less costly shades of green, dresses cut to display nubile charms instead of matronly modesty. The grandmother wore black made all the more severe by a few silver ornaments. With her thin face and sharp nose, she looked more like a crow than ever. Only the little girl was left in her grubby chemise, still clinging to her mother’s skirts with one filthy hand and her bedraggled animal in the other.

A booming assault on the door helped pull my wits back to the real world where Ryshad and Shiv were bracing themselves against the wood with ’Gren and Sorgrad still reinforcing their stubborn barricade.

“If we are not all to die at Olret’s hand, we must have help,” Guinalle began.

Civility be cursed, I thought furiously. Get on with it!

“
Seldviar namayenar ek tal rath,
” chorused the Elietimm women and their questing dragged me along with them. Now a third layer of reality or illusion overlaid everything and I knew without question I was in very real danger of being swept away by the currents of aether coiling around me.

“
Har dag Vadesorna abrigal
.” Frala summoned up a thickset man as bald as an egg, shoulders bunching in anger as she spoke to him so rapidly I hadn’t a hope of understanding her. He turned and stormed off into invisibility, melting like a shape imagined in smoke.

“
Edach ger vistal mor din.
” Gyslin and her daughter were pleading with a nervous-looking woman whose jaw dropped in shock, shadowy shapes hurrying to cluster round her.

“
Olret evid enames Froilasen ral Ashernasen
.” The grandmother wasn’t about to stand any nonsense from the well-muscled youth her enchantment had lighted upon. Fortunately he seemed as much inclined for action as her, a spear appearing in his hands in answer to his unspoken wish and his shirt dissolving into a dark cuirass of hardened leather.

Frala turned to Guinalle. “We have summoned aid. They come as fast as they may.”

Was that going to be fast enough? Even through the Artifice clouding my perception, I heard the splintering crash of an axe hitting the far side of the door. I forced a memory of the room before my mind’s eye, picturing Ryshad’s face and Sorgrad’s, Shiv’s lanky frame and ’Gren’s short, wiry one. Thought became reality and I saw the wood splintering as blows came hard and fast, Ryshad and Shiv forced back lest they lose an eye or worse.

“Olret comes!” Gyslin’s simulacrum turned towards the door even as her true form remained locked in the circle.

Even through the wall, I felt Olret’s complete conviction that his intent was strong enough to overwhelm the physical constraints of wood and metal barring his way. He wasn’t wrong. The door shattered into kindling almost as completely as the mill had done, splinters gashing Ryshad and the others. Their swords met those of Olret’s men who could reach through the narrow doorway. Ryshad and ’Gren took on the foremost guards while Sorgrad and Shiv used twisted lengths of metal on the second rank.

Olret’s Artifice slammed into the circle of women but that held. I could see the bastard lurking behind the skirmish in the doorway, face twisted with hate.

“Guinalle! Guinalle!” He sounded as if he were half a league away but that was definitely Usara speaking. “Give me the ring! Temar, put it on!”

“I can only shield you for a short time.” That was Temar’s voice, grim with determination and warning in equal measure.

“That’ll be enough.” I was startled to hear Allin sounding so forceful. “Shiv! Sorgrad! We’re going to form a nexus so make ready.”

A sphere of light appeared between the two of them; long-schooled wizard and untrained mageborn. It burned with a ruddy fire, not the crimson of elemental flame but darker, more ominous, weighted with the power of the earth. Shiv reached a hand out towards it and the colour darkened still further yet paradoxically burning all the more fiercely as his own magelight surrounded him with an emerald aura. Shiv nodded to Sorgrad who set his jaw, no more about to duck this challenge than any other he’d ever faced. He spread his hands in an oddly defiant gesture and blue radiance surrounded him, his fine hair blown about as if he stood exposed to a winter storm. Ducking his head like a bull about to charge, Sorgrad thrust his hands, palm out towards the roiling nexus of power. The spell sucked at the caerulean light and the confusion of colour burned away to leave only an eye-scorching whiteness.

“Now!” commanded Usara.

The nexus burst outward into a sheet of flame. It ripped through the room to set Olret’s men alight, sending them screaming from the doorway even as the first to be hit burned to fragments of charred flesh and naked bone tumbling to the untouched floor. The spell left Ryshad and ’Gren happily unscorched and free to rush at Olret who was also somehow proof against the magic.

Olret raised a hand and unseen power threw ’Gren backwards into Ryshad. The two of them fell hard among the litter of the ruined door and wrecked cages. The Elietimm advanced, menace plain on his face. In the curious double vision of Artifice, I saw he considered himself a good deal taller and more handsome than a mirror would ever show him. Every detail of the simulacrum was precise, his skin smooth and freshly bathed, a brown cloak richly patterned with orange weave slung back from his shoulders to show a livery of grey leather ornamented with copper studs.

Every instinct screamed at me to move, to run, to draw dagger, darts, even throw the filth from the floor at the man but with Guinalle in control of my body I couldn’t move. I would have wept with frustration, if I’d still had the use of my own eyes.

Shiv and Sorgrad moved to stand between Olret and the circle of motionless women. He snarled something, hands moving as if he were swatting flies but a swathe of white light wrapped around them both and nothing happened that I could see.

Olret’s remorseless advance slowed. He looked like a man struggling through a bog. Sorgrad raised a hand and lightning cracked out like a whip. Brow twisted with fury, Olret waved it away but a blackened score appeared down his sleeve all the same. Sorgrad lashed him again and again and, for the first time, consternation shadowed Olret’s eyes.

Shiv squared his shoulders and now Olret’s boots were all but sticking to the floor. He could barely manage to scrape his feet across the boards, struggling like a prisoner shackled to a dragging weight. But that was only the real Olret. His simulacrum came storming onwards, brushing through Shiv and Sorgrad and the light surrounding them as if they weren’t even there.

The aetheric embodiments of the women whirled round to form a new circle, faces outward, elbows linked, expressions determined. Olret’s arrogant opinion of himself marched through the ring of their physical forms, plainly no barrier and slapped Gyslin’s simulacrum hard in the face. She screwed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth and this time he punched her full in the mouth.

“You will not!” Frala’s fury earned her Olret’s hand twisting in her hair and wrenching her head sideways with a violence that would have snapped a real woman’s neck.

“Curse you,” she gasped. “You and your seed to the ninth generation!”

“I’ll kill you!” he roared, wrenching her head to and fro and hammering at her with his other fist. With her arms pinioned, Frala couldn’t defend herself. I watched with mounting horror as her image didn’t bleed or bruise but began to blur and fade beneath this onslaught.

“You will not!” This was not one new voice but three. The people I’d seen Frala and the others asking for help suddenly appeared. Now Olret was surrounded. The younger man seized his raised arm, twisting it behind his back as the older baldpate unwound the bastard’s fingers from Frala’s hair. They pulled Olret away, forcing him round to face the hesitant woman who slapped him full in the face.

It wasn’t a hard blow but whatever power lay behind it did more damage than a broadsword through the side of his head. Olret’s face was ripped askew, left twisted like a child’s clay model crossly squashed for not coming out right. The woman slapped him again and the colour began to bleed from his clothes, brown, grey and copper running together into dull and muddy uncertainty. She struck him a third time, no harder than before and now he began to fade. Not all at once, not like an evil dream as you realise you’re waking but with great rents appearing in his head and body, soon big enough to see through to the room beyond. His simulacrum tore into sinking fragments that vanished as they hit the floor. His distorted head was the last to disappear, eyes rolling wildly, lolling tongue lashing.

The bald-headed man looked down then turned to Frala. “We come,” he said simply and all three of them vanished.

“I can’t stay,” Guinalle gasped and her image fled into nothingness, leaving me collapsing. I ripped my hands free of the grandmother’s merciless grasp and from the girl on my other side. As soon as the circle was broken, everyone fell to the floor, panting like animals. The only one left standing was the little girl, bemused as she looked at the crumpled figures around her.