The Quest for Saint Camber (23 page)

“And that's all been done
since
Charissa,” Conall added.

“Correct.”

Conall mulled that for a moment, but Charissa made him think of Rothana. He wondered whether he dared ask Tiercel about another kind of magic—far more ancient, he suspected, than even the Portal knowledge.

“Tiercel, can I ask you something, one man to another?”

“Certainly.”

“Tiercel, do you—have any love potions in that satchel of yours? Or do you know any love spells?”

“Love spells?”

“Don't you dare laugh!” Conall muttered, his tone so deadly serious that the smile beginning on Tiercel's face immediately disappeared.

“Why, what do you want with love spells?” Tiercel asked, after a few seconds. “Your lady loves you already. She's carrying your child, she—”

“She is
not
my lady,” Conall said coldly. “She's my mistress. The fact that she carries my child is incidental. I could never marry Vanissa.”

“Ah, then you mean to
marry
the object of your affections—except that I gather she does not return your advances.”

“Don't use that tone with me,” Conall snapped. “She would if it weren't for—no matter about
that
. But, she's my perfect match, Tiercel,” he went on plaintively. “I danced with her after my knighting. She was like a feather in my arms. Her touch made the blood pound in my head—”

“It made all your brains fall into your crotch!” Tiercel muttered. “Conall, do you take me for a fool? Even if I had a love spell or some magical potion that I could give you, don't you realize how unethical that is?”

“I want her love, Tiercel! I'm a prince. I don't care what it takes—”

“It can't be bought, Conall. Don't you understand? It's worthless unless it comes of free will. A man named Rimmell found that out the hard way, and two other innocent people paid for his folly with their lives. Morgan's sister, and Kevin McLain,” he added, at Conall's belligerent look of question. “And it was a ‘love spell,' as you so quaintly put it—actually, a ‘love charm.' God, I would have thought you'd grown beyond such peasant nonsense!”

“Don't you dare patronize me!”

“My, we
are
agitated about this, aren't we?” Tiercel murmured, shooting out a hand to block Conall as the prince lurched angrily to his feet and took a swing at him.

Conall's continued hostility made Tiercel come half to his feet himself as he caught the prince's wrist and gave it a deft twist, forcing the younger man back into his chair with a
whoof
of pain. Raging at his physical helplessness, Conall even made a tentative mental foray against Tiercel's shields. The shields held, but not without far more effort on Tiercel's part than he had expected, and he wrapped a blanketing lock around Conall's shields in return, hardly able to believe the other's strength and determination.

“Let it go, Conall,” he ordered, not letting up on his wrist lock as the prince continued to fight him, both with body and with mind. “Give it up! I don't want to hurt you. This is a stupid argument. I couldn't give you a love spell if I wanted to. I don't know any.
Will
you stop it?”

The fight seemed to go out of Conall all in an instant. With a little groan, he collapsed across the table and buried his face in his free arm, all resistance gone, so that Tiercel nearly staggered physically from the sudden yielding before his pressure.

“Easy,” Tiercel whispered, as he edged around to Conall's side of the table, keeping contact with mind and one hand, until he could help the trembling Conall to sit up.

The prince's primary shields had collapsed at his surrender, under the pressure of Tiercel's blanketing lock, but the secondaries held as Tiercel tried a stronger probe, shielding what lay in the deeper levels of consciousness that Tiercel himself had sequestered off, months ago, to protect the knowledge of what he and Conall did from detection by Morgan or Duncan or any of the other Deryni at court. Now Tiercel wondered what was going on in there and what
had
been going on in there, since last he'd had free access to Conall's mind. He did not like the flash of willfulness he had just seen; and Conall's unexpected strength could be cause for even greater concern.

“Do you mind telling me what that was all about?” he said softly, avoiding Conall's eyes as he continued to probe what he could.

“I'm sorry,” Conall whispered. “I don't know what came over me. I guess I lost my temper.”

“I guess you did,” Tiercel replied. “Do you think it's going to happen again?”

Conall managed a careful smile and shook his head, drawing back from Tiercel's touch, and the Deryni lord withdrew.

“All right. I'll accept your apology—but on one condition.”

“What's that?”

“I think I ought to do a very deep probe on you tonight. I want to find out what made you react the way you did. We'll go back to your own rooms, so I can give you a sedative and not have to worry about how you're going to get back. You'll sleep the better for it anyway, after all that's happened.”

Conall swallowed visibly. “I said I was sorry.”

“So you did,” Tiercel said, setting a hand under Conall's elbow to assist him to his feet. “And so am I—because it's partially my fault for letting you overextend—too much Portal travel, all at once. For that reason, we'll go back through the secret passageway rather than risking another Portal jump.”

He was glad Conall did not ask what would happen if Tiercel did not like the result of the deep probe, for Tiercel did not know himself. Neither of them said anything else as they set the room in order and Tiercel released the guard ward on the door so they could leave, but the incident continued to trouble Tiercel as he and Conall slipped out of the study, locking the door behind them and making their way out of the basilica. Conall's insistence on arcane assistance to win the lady of his desire touched on something Tiercel could not quite isolate; something said in Council, perhaps; something very important.

They were deep in the heart of the keep, climbing a narrow stair by the light of Tiercel's handfire, Conall leading, when the answer finally came to Tiercel.

“Rothana,” he murmured, stopping dead in his tracks to stare at Conall in disbelief as the prince whirled on him with stark panic in his grey Haldane eyes. “Arilan talked about her only days ago. It's Rothana you've taken a fancy to—
and you know that Kelson wants her
. It's your goddamn jealousy again!”

But he got no further with his accusation, because suddenly Conall, in a blind rage, was shoving him backwards down the narrow stair.

Too startled even to cry out, Tiercel tried to break his fall, to catch himself against the narrow walls with outstretched arms. But his cloak tangled between his legs and tripped him worse as Conall, instantly sobered, tried to catch him. The Deryni lord went over backwards, his handsome face contorting as the back of his head smacked against a stair tread. His open mouth, gaping in a soundless cry of agony, was the last thing Conall saw of him as he tumbled into the curve of the stairwell to disappear in the darkness.

After a few seconds, the frantic sound of scrabbling, of flesh and bone thudding dully against stone, was punctuated by a hollow, sickening snap and then replaced by an all too total silence. And then, where Tiercel had been standing when it all began, the handfire left hanging there flickered, then faded and was no more, leaving Conall standing terrified in the darkness, alone.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the beginning; but the end thereof shall not be blessed
.

—Proverbs 20:21

“Tiercel?” Conall squeaked, not daring to move as utter darkness pressed in on him from every side. “Tiercel, are you all right?”

No answer—and the heavy silence, underlined by darkness, made Conall's already racing heart pound even faster.

“Tiercel?” he repeated, more softly this time.

When still no answer came, Conall made himself take several deep, ragged breaths and cupped his hands to conjure handfire. The light grew slowly in his trembling hands, ruddy and uncertain until he forced more control on his growing panic. He tried not to think about what he might find at the bottom of the stairs.

He kept his handfire cupped in one hand as he began his tentative descent, fearing with each step to see what lay around the curve of the stairwell, until at last, just before the landing of the next level down, he saw a boot, a leg, and a tangle of russet cloak. Somehow he managed to scramble over the motionless form without repeating Tiercel's mishap, but he knew, even before he crouched by Tiercel's lolling head, that the man was dead.

Conall choked back a whimper as he gently lifted Tiercel's head to see if there could be some mistake, but the slack movement only confirmed his worst fear. Tiercel's neck was broken. The supple mind that had roused him to undreamed of potentials was stilled forever, the almond-colored eyes already filming over, sightless, the formerly impenetrable shields already half-gone as the physical processes of death continued.

Dear God, what had he done? And worse, what was he going to do? He dared not go for help—not that anyone could help Tiercel de Claron now. Tiercel's death had been an accident, but who would believe it? Conall
had
pushed him, and they
had
quarreled. If that came to light—and it would, under close interrogation by any Deryni, along with the reason for the quarrel—not only would Conall lose all chance of eventually winning out over Kelson for Rothana's hand, but his magical connections with Tiercel over the past year would be discovered, the latter with potentially far worse consequence than merely being bested at the chancy game of love.

He dared not confess, then. If, on the other hand, he simply left the body where it was—or, better yet, dragged it the rest of the way down to the next landing and left it in the shadows to one side—days or even weeks might pass before anyone discovered it. Maybe even months.

And when the body eventually
was
found, why should anyone suspect Conall? He didn't think anyone was aware that he even knew about the secret passageway. And it connected with Dhugal's rooms, after all. Let someone else figure out what the Deryni Tiercel had been doing here.

The plan was not the best of all possible solutions, perhaps, but it seemed workable. When Conall had dragged the body the short distance to the next landing, he took great care to arrange things so that it looked as if the dead man could have tumbled into that position by falling all the way down the stairs. Tiercel's russet cloak blended well with the shadows, so that any passerby not actually looking for something unusual probably would never notice him. Not until the body began to decompose, of course—but Conall would be well gone on the royal progress before that happened.

One thing he did do, before setting the final touches to the scenario, and that was to remove the leather satchel that the Deryni lord had always brought to their sessions. A quick search confirmed that the coveted ward cubes were there in their pouch, and some of the drugs might come in very handy. Perhaps a little
merasha
in someone's wine …

He shook off such thoughts as he knelt a moment longer beside the dead man, searching again for any visual clues that might betray him and reviewing whether he had left anything undone.

“I'm sorry, Tiercel,” he murmured under his breath, preparing to retreat into the darkness. “I'm sorry you had to die unshriven, too. That would have mattered to you, wouldn't it? I wonder, did you make your last prayer to your precious Saint Camber, there in the chapel?”

But as he bent closer self-consciously to trace a cross on the dead man's brow, mildly regretting the uncharitable thought about Camber, his mind brushed the surface of Tiercel's disintegrating shields, the memory dissolving beyond, and a daring idea came to him.

He had Tiercel's legacy of the ward cubes and the Deryni drugs, some of which he knew how to use to continue his psychic growth on his own. And he had his training. But what if he could learn even more by trying to read what was left in Tiercel's mind? He had seen Kelson try it on a dying man, and extend the reading beyond death—with very useful results. The man had not been Deryni, but with Tiercel's shields gone, did that matter? And to gain the secrets of a full Deryni lord, and a member of the Camberian Council, at that—

He did not pause to consider further. How much might already have slipped away, gone beyond all possible hope of retrieval, while Conall attended to the mundane details of making good his escape? Calling on all the skills he possessed, he wrapped his shields tightly around the fading, shifting knot of energy that was Tiercel's essence and probed deep, bypassing the trivial memories of Tiercel's day-to-day living and seizing only on those things that had to do with being Deryni—ritual procedures, outright spells, mental exercises, methods of arcane combat, snatches of Tiercel's interaction with the Camberian Council, with which, apparently he often had been at odds.…

There was too much to assimilate with any real understanding, and few items were really complete—
damn
, why had Conall not thought of this sooner?—but any additional knowledge was better than none at all. He could sort it all out later, when he had some leisure. He read all he could, until his knees ached and the body was cold beneath his hands and he could take no more of contact with the increasingly fragmented impressions that were all that remained. He avoided, once he had touched them, those final and most recent memories—the horrified disbelief as Tiercel fell, the pain, and then the final darkness putting an end to all future. He was sweating as he withdrew from Tiercel's mind for the last time, his whole body shaking with fatigue and sheer after-reaction, but he managed to pull himself together as he stood.