The Sable City (The Norothian Cycle) (68 page)

Nesha-tari shoved herself away from Shikashe and Amatesu, growling again though it was now with a human voice. The blue lightning bloomed in her hands and she threw her tanned arms forward, split sleeves hanging off them in tatters, and unleashed arcs of crackling blue fire across the room, into Balan.

The devil was lifted off his foot and hoof, and Zeb and Tilda flattened to the ground as the creature was blown across the wall above them, rolling and screeching. Balan slammed into a corner and fell to the ground in a smoking heap. The smell of bad barbeque filled the room so thickly that Zeb nearly gagged.

“
Ouch,” Balan muttered, lying on his neck and shoulders with his legs sticking up against the wall. He groaned and rolled to his side, then pushed himself up to a seat. A hole had been blown in the clothing on his chest and the jagged edge of coat, vest, and shirt were all smoldering. The gray skin beneath was blackened like a piece of meat fallen off a spit into the fire. He coughed, and a puff of smoke came out of his mouth.

Nesha-tari stood glaring, her own tattered clothes hanging so she had to hold the trousers up with a hand. Blue fire still danced in her other palm.

“
Where is the Wizard?” she hissed.

“
And J-John Deskata,” Tilda added, almost getting it out without stammering.

One of Balan’s arms hung limp at his side, but the devil pointed back into the tower entryway with the other.

“
First set of double doors on the left. Long hall through the wing, then another set of doors into the central tower. They are both in there.”

The lightning in Nesha-tari’s hand rose in intensity, and Balan shook his head.

“
You chose badly, Kitty,” he said, then rolled on the floor and disappeared.

*

Balan rolled another turn across the hard ground of a courtyard, shouting as he went over his broken arm. He stopped on his back and let out a ragged breath at the featureless night sky above.

“
Poltus,” he said, and the devil appeared instantly above him.

“
Anything?” Balan asked, and the spiked devil shook his head once. Balan sighed. “Such a waste. Open the western tower.”

Poltus bowed and disappeared. Balan lay still for a moment, grimacing as the fried skin on his chest moved, burns and blisters sinking back into the flesh and the unhealthy gray pallor returning. Nesha-tari’s lightning bolt had caused the muscles of Balan’s left arm to contract so violently his humerus had snapped. Nothing funny about it. Balan grabbed the arm under the elbow and pulled it straight with a gasp, so that the bones could knit back together.

“
Balan?” a disembodied voice asked from all around.

“
Danavod,” Balan said, needing to add no affectation of strain to his voice. “The Circle Wizard is in the central tower, at the Node. I have opened the tower doors to your hobgoblins. You must send them right away.”

“
The Wizard did this to you?”

“
No, Blue Akroya’s servant. She seeks to aid the Wizard.”

There was silence in the courtyard but the air seemed heavy, and angry.

“
Does my Blue brother act against me?” Danavod asked, possibly a rhetorical question but Balan answered anyway, and as always with complete honesty.

“
I do not know what Akroya wants done here, your Fierceness.”

There was another moment of silence, then dust stirred all around the courtyard as if tremendous wings had beat the ground. The dark presence of the Dragon rose into the sky, and moved off west.

Balan winced and pulled himself to a seat. He moved his left arm at the shoulder with only a twinge of pain, as his chest was fully healed. The clothes, however, were a complete loss.

“
Such a waste,” he muttered again, and climbed to his feet.

*

When the white light faded before Phin’s eyes, he found himself looking at Kanderamath’s book in his hands, which he had caught just above his nose. He dropped the book to one side and scrambled away from Centurion Deskata, but caught his breath when he looked at the man.

Deskata had tossed the leather satchel aside after shaking out the book over Phin‘s head, and the fact that he now stood absolutely still was nowhere near as disconcerting as the fact that the satchel was hanging motionless in the air a foot from his hand. Phin stared at the man and realized that
absolutely still
was an understatement. Deskata was frozen in mid motion, one foot raised to step forward, mouth hanging open to draw in breath, probably so that he could yell at Phin some more.

Phin scooted away and scrambled to his feet, panting so hard that it struck him that his breath was presently the only sound in the vast room, and seemingly in the world. There was a cold profundity to the silence all around, and the quality of the light was somehow off as well though Phin could not say just what was wrong with it. He turned where he stood, looking all around, and jerked when he saw the winged woman who had led John Deskata here, across the room and up on the second floor catwalk. She was perched on the balustrade, squatting on her haunches with a broad smile on her face. Motionless.

Some movement did appear in the corner of Phin’s eye and he turned to it almost desperately, but then drew in his breath. At the base of the circular dais of ascending stairs, the dark floor seemed to shimmer as it turned a milky white. A figure began to rise upward through the stone. It was robed all in white and seemed to be wearing some sort of crown, but a nimbus of light that made Phin shield his eyes made it impossible to perceive detail. It did seem to be facing toward him.

Phin did not know if running or playing frozen was a better idea, but in truth he did not know if he was up to a run. The cold feeling he associated with necromancy gripped his innards and he shivered to his core.

The figure stopped rising at the height of a man and the light flared more strongly, causing Phin to close his eyes. When he opened them, the man was staring back at him. He was an older fellow with a salt-and-pepper beard, deep frown lines across his forehead, and a long nose with a distinctive hook. Phin knew the face. The man’s crown was more of a circlet with a zigzag pattern on top, and his long, rumpled robes were an all-too-familiar shade of gray. In one hand he held an onyx wand twisting like the root of a tree, with a great golden gem the size of a goose egg atop it.

“
Briandh, bodoan
,” the man said, speaking the old language of Tull. Phin answered by rote in the same tongue.

“
Greetings to you, brother.”

The man walked up the stairs towards Phin with the stride of an old campaigner, belying stooped shoulders and the network of lines at the corners of pale green eyes. He shook back a wide sleeve from his empty hand and stretched it out toward Phin, who brought his own hand up automatically. They shook, but as their hands touched Phin gasped and swayed on his feet for he felt like his brain had been kicked over on its side and everything was spilling out. He saw Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor, and tall Abverwar for the first time. Voices of his instructors. A young girl, pretty and blonde, laughing in the gray robes. And books. Lots of books. Lessons read, examinations taken. More reading, memorization that faded in days, other things that Phin never forgot. Souterm, Nesha-tari. Zeb and the Westerners, and the Duchess Claudja. Black boots with sharp, cruel heels. Then Deskata, frozen in mid motion.

Phin stumbled and nearly went backward down the stairs, but the man braced him with a hand on his shoulder.

“
Your forgiveness, Phinneas Phoarty,” he said. “That is a lot faster than asking questions.”

“
You, you, you…”

“
Yes, you know me,” the man nodded, then turned his face and his hooked nose to profile. “Not too bad a likeness, I reckon.”

The man was referring to a portrait he had seen in Phin’s head, which Phin had seen every day for the ten years he was at Abverwar. It was one of several hanging above the Chancellor’s table in the mess hall. Second from the left, in fact.

“
Kanderamath,” Phin said, and the man frowned.

“
Well…almost. More like Kanderamath’s ghost, to be blunt about it.”

Phin only stared, for the second Witch King of Tull had been dead for around five centuries, ever since he had caused the First Opening of Vod‘Adia. Despite being dead, Kanderamath narrowed his eyes and stared off into space for several moments, his gray-flecked eyebrows rising as he did so. He looked at Phin.

“
So you did not come here for me at all.” The old Witch King turned and looked at the book on the floor. “You only brought an item of mine here by chance.”

“
Kanderamath,” Phin said again, for he had little idea of what else to say. Kanderamath looked at him sideways, and sighed.

“
Do not take this the wrong way, Phinneas, but I had rather hoped for a wizard of a somewhat…greater competence. The Circle has done a number on your brain, boy. If they ever catch you, tell them I am sorely disappointed by what they have become.”

Phin stared at the crowned figure, then looked all around the chamber filled with light of a strange quality, as though everything were stuck in a frozen moment.

“
Did, did you stop time?”

Kanderamath smiled faintly. “In effect, but not in reality. Time stops for no one. It is however possible to step out of the stream, for a few minutes. And a few minutes is all that we have. Hearken unto me, Phinneas.”

The Witch King took a firmer grip on Phin’s shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes.

“
My entrance into Vod’Adia was a disaster, both for the friends who came in with me, and for the world at large. All that I have seen in your mind confirms this for me now. Opening the city unleashed the undead upon Noroth for thirty years of war, and now it has allowed devils and demons to enter this world without being summoned, to butcher the unwary to make claim on their souls. This is intolerable, and it must end.”

“
You want
me
to end it?” Phin blanched, the thought finally jerking his brain loose from the deep wheel rut in which it had been stuck.

“
It needn’t be that hard, Phin. May I call you Phin? Good. You see, when I came here I used spells of gyring to move Vod’Adia out of the state in which it had existed since the Ascension.”

“
Since the what?” Phin asked, and Kanderamath frowned.

“
Let’s just call it the Cataclysm, shall we? The event fourteen centuries ago that tore the city out of our material world, and slew every living thing herein. To enter the place a millennium later, I first had to set it moving. Turning, if you will. For one lunar month the place was to resume its connection to this world, our world, so that I and my companions could venture inside.”

“
Why, why in the world would you do that?” Phin asked.

“
Because, Phin, in my day that was the sort of thing we forerunners of your Circle of Wizardry did.” Kanderamath sighed. “We were not the customs agents and messengers of an Empire, but a union of the most powerful magi on two continents. Dedicated to the study of magic for its own sake, not just for the practical applications. We believed in magic not just as a tool, but as an art and a science.”

Phin opened his mouth for another question, but Kanderamath raised a hand.

“
Let me speak, Phin, for there is space between the things you must know, and those you only want to know. I caused Vod’Adia to Open so that it could be explored, and perhaps reveal clues as to the nature of the…Cataclysm. But what we found here was the immortal remains of all those souls who had perished a thousand years before, reduced to unholy, undead monstrosities.”

“
Like those that emerged at the Second Opening. Those that it took the thirty years of the Dead War to destroy.”

“
Exactly like them, for that was the same bunch.” Kanderamath sighed and rubbed a finger on the side of his nose. “When we realized that the place was haunted, to put it mildly, my fellows and I still believed that we had the power to fend off the dead while we conducted our exploration. We had too much faith in our own strength, and not enough appreciation for the fact that the undead do not get tired, or afraid, or concerned for their own casualties. The attacks were unceasing and we were picked off, one at a time. In the end, I alone reached this chamber.”

Kanderamath looked at the spot on the floor from which he had arisen, and Phin had no doubt it was the very spot on which the Witch King had fallen. His shade spoke quietly.

“
In my hubris, I had bound my gyring spells to cease only upon my exit from Vod’Adia. When I knew my own death was near and that I would never leave this place, I cast certain spells to become as you see me now. I am not Kanderamath, I am only what is left of him.”

“
So that when another wizard came looking for you…this would happen,” Phin said. The shade nodded once.

“
Even without my leaving, the city Closed to our world after one month. But it continued to move. Ninety-nine years later when it Opened again, the undead poured out into the world where they had once lived, and you know the rest of that story. But what happened after that was in some ways worse, for while Vod’Adia is only Open to our world once in a century, during the long times between it is Open to other places. Infernal places. With the city emptied of the undead, other, even more dangerous things began to make their way in.”