The Warrior King (Book 4) (5 page)

“Ah, ah,” Markal said with a waggle of the finger. “No magic.”

Darik got up to get away from the ants, but as soon as he stood, he found himself out of the shade, with the sun beating down on his bare head. Sweat trickled down his temple. A moment or two of that, and he decided to risk the ants. He dropped to a squat next to the wizard.

“We’ll help the girl,” Markal said, “and hopefully get a better understanding of what the Betrayer is about at the same time. And of course we won’t leave Marrabat before we figure out what he’s up to. At the very least, we need to stay to make sure he doesn’t meddle in this business with Princess Marialla.” Markal popped another segment of orange into his mouth and winked. “Meddling is my business, not Chantmer’s.”

“Maybe there’s a guard or soldier from Balsalom who could escort Sofiana north,” Darik offered. “Or we could find the salt traders and see if they’d take her away.”

“Good, now you’re thinking. We’ll figure out something. For now—” Markal stopped, cocked his head with narrowed eyes.

Darik followed his gaze. A pair of cats paced along the top of the wall opposite. He’d seen plenty of cats in the palace—lounging about, stalking birds, eating scraps fed to them by servants and slaves—and he wouldn’t have otherwise found the sight odd if not for Markal’s sudden look of suspicion. Now that he was looking, it struck him as strange that they were out in the blazing heat of the day instead of sleeping it off like everyone else. And something was wrong with one of the cats.

The first was sleek and gray and bright-eyed. The second was a white cat with black fur on the face and black mittens, but its fur had a bedraggled, sorry appearance. Its head drooped, and it limped like a very old cat, or one that had been attacked and savaged by dogs and now needed somewhere to curl up and die. The first cat leaped from the wall to a tree, then turned to watch its sick companion come to the edge and hesitate. The gray cat meowed plaintively.

Darik rose, growing concerned not only with the strange appearance of the two animals, but with Markal’s wary look as well. The wizard rose and pulled back the sleeves of his robe.

“
Now
can we use magic?” Darik asked. 

“Not yet.”

The second cat finally gathered itself and sprang. It slipped as it jumped, and its claws barely reached the branch. It flailed, trying to get its balance. If it fell, it was a dozen or more feet to the flagstones. The gray cat hooked it with a paw and yanked it up until the sick cat could get a better grip. Then the gray cat scrambled to the ground and stood meowing up at the branch until the other one had managed to get itself down.

Darik found his attention suddenly drawn elsewhere. He recognized it as magic, tried to fight it, but by the time he’d turned back to the cats, they were gone. In their place were two figures in robes.

“Hah!” Markal said. “It’s you.”

The wizard Narud stood in front of them in a gray robe. He was the strangest member of Markal’s order, and his powers were connected to the earth and to the animal life living on it. He could change himself to seemingly any animal he pleased, although this was generally an owl, a goat, or some other harmless creature and not something useful like a lion or a mammoth. Markal could change forms too, but it cost him a great deal more; Narud seemed to complete the transformation at will and with little cost.

Narud paid no attention to Markal and Darik, but had his arm wrapped around the second figure, who lurched and almost fell, head drooping. The person staggered and would have fallen without the wizard’s support.

“Help me get her to the shade,” Narud said.

Together, Markal and Darik took the weak, swaying woman. A length of damp hair, as black as a raven’s feather, fell out of her hood and she lifted a pale, sweating face to look at him as he helped her down. Darik had a jolt of recognition at the sight of her familiar brown eyes.

“Daria!” he said.

An initial burst of elation to see the griffin rider quickly turned to alarm. She felt so light in his arms, not the strong, lean figure he’d last seen two weeks earlier in the mountains.

“What’s wrong with her?” Darik asked, his fear growing by the second.

Narud pulled back his sleeves. One of his hands was withered and blackened as if burned. The other was pink and raw and tender looking—more healed from an earlier spell, but still weak. He placed this one against her head. “It’s the heat. It’s killing her.”

“You have a spell to cool her,” Markal said. “Why didn’t you use it?”

Narud grimaced. “I used everything I could to get us across the desert. We left the griffin in a cave five miles outside Marrabat—I couldn’t risk flying into the city during daylight. He’s a big animal, and it was all I could do to cool his surroundings enough to help him. I thought the girl would hold up until we found you.” A worried look crossed his face. “Perhaps not.”

Darik sat down and put his hands on Daria’s face. It was dry and hot. The desert seemed to have wrung the moisture from her body. Narud had a waterskin at his belt, but it only had a few swallows, which he tilted into the young woman’s mouth. It temporarily wet her red, blistered lips.

Daria looked up at Darik and tried to smile. “Well met.”

He was too worried to answer her. The griffin rider was a daughter of the high mountain peaks, her people shaped over generations to breathe the cold, thin air. Daria bathed in icy streams, could walk barefoot in the snow without being troubled, and flew her griffin to heights that made Darik lightheaded and faint. But she found even the moderate warmth of a northern summer oppressively hot, dangerous if endured too long. Here in the desert, she would melt like a drift of snow beneath the midday sun.

“The Harvester take you,” he said angrily to Narud. “Why did you bring her into the desert? You know she can’t stand the heat.”

“Shh, Darik,” Daria said. “I wanted to come. It was the fastest way. Talon—” she stopped and swallowed.

“Talon?”

“The golden griffin,” Narud explained. “Quickly, is there more water?”

Darik sprang to his feet with the empty waterskin in hand. He left the dry gardens in which he and Markal had established themselves. Hurrying through the sloping courtyards below theirs with little worry about spies or palace guards, he went until he found one of the many fountains. It sent water overflowing into a coursing channel that gurgled through a cobbled trough into the next series of gardens below. He filled the water skin and ran back to rejoin his companions.

Daria gulped half the waterskin and would have emptied it, but Darik instead pulled back her hair from her face and poured it over her head.

“It’s so warm,” she said. “Don’t you have anything cooler?”

Nevertheless, her voice seemed more clear. By the time he returned with a second full waterskin and she had drained it, she looked a little stronger. Her face regained some of its color, and perspiration began to bead on her forehead. Soon she was sweating profusely. No wonder she’d been so dehydrated.

“Poor girl,” Narud said. “So brave and strong. She faced down a dragon. They say it was a hundred feet long, but she crippled it and drove it off. And now look at her.”

“So why did you bring her here?” Darik asked. “Her place is in the mountains.”

The reason, Narud explained, was the ravagers. Since Markal and Darik departed, the ravagers had been growing in strength and had escaped toward the Desolation of Toth on their way east. More terribly still, King Whelan’s own brother Roderick, former captain of the Knights Temperate, was in their midst, and Narud suspected that Roderick had been their target all along, that they’d only risked entering the Free Kingdoms to murder him and force him into the service of the enemy.

“But I don’t understand why,” Narud said. “And I don’t know how to stop them from raising more of these dead men as their champions.”

Markal chewed on his lower lip. “It’s difficult, costly magic to bind a man’s soul to his dead body and keep the Harvester from gathering his wight. In the Tothian Wars—the first wars, that is,” he added ruefully, “—there were never more than a handful of ravagers. One of them murdered Memnet the Great in his garden with the sword Whelan now carries. I don’t understand how Toth is creating so many of them. Or why they would need Roderick in particular. You’re sure?”

“I am sure of nothing,” Narud said.

“I’ll have to get close to Roderick to find out. Capture him, if I can. If not, one of his fellow ravagers.”

“How will you do that?” Darik asked.

“I don’t know, but I can’t do it here. I’ll have to travel north again. I suppose Whelan could use my advice and assistance, if nothing else.” Markal glanced at Daria, then at the other wizard. “A golden griffin, you say? Could it carry three?”

Darik’s heart leaped at the thought that he might be flying out of here with Daria, but then he realized he was the one who would be excluded. Markal would have greater need of Narud’s wizardry, and of course the griffin rider herself needed to get away from this place as soon as possible. That would leave Darik behind to deal with Whelan’s bratty daughter. And then who would face Chantmer the Tall?

“It’s a golden griffin,” Daria said. She was so damp now with sweat that her robes themselves were soaked. Already, she was eying the empty waterskin. “Of course it can carry three, if we fly low enough.”

Narud shook his head. “You are brave and so is Talon, but we struggled with two. Markal is larger than I, and the griffin is already tired.”

“But if Darik flies . . . ”

She also was thinking that Darik would be the third. It made his heart ache with longing to imagine flying with her again.

Narud rested a hand tenderly on the young woman’s head. “By the Brothers, you’ll see each other again. Now, is there somewhere we can find to cool the girl? We’ll wait until night to travel.”

Chapter Six

Roderick woke with a start. He sat in the saddle of a horse, all pain receded to a haze in the back of his mind. Rags no longer covered his body. Instead, he wore a fine cloak, leather breeches, boots, and riding gloves. He touched a hand to his breast. There he wore a black metal breastplate. He remembered the smell of his own burning flesh as they’d pressed the hot branding iron into his skin. Yet his mind had been gone, lost in a haze of pain and torture from the savaging of Pradmort’s dogs. After the branding, he’d lost consciousness.

He thought at first that it was night, but then he saw the morning sun rising over the blasted land, witnessed through the hazy cloud over his eyes. What he’d taken before for the fog of a deep sleep passing had become his permanent vision.

They were riding through the Desolation of Toth. Roderick had only glimpsed it before from the Tothian Way as the road carved a magical passageway through the ruined, dead kingdom of Aristonia, left so destroyed by the Tothian Wars that it had become a dead land, haunted by mindless, gibbering wights. The Harvester himself couldn’t gather souls in the Desolation.

Even though the sun itself looked dim in the sky, and the massive, billowy cloud with its castles and windmills seemed gray and faded, like the colors of an old painting that had been rotting in the cellar of a derelict castle, he was surprised by how clearly he could see the features of the Desolation itself. There were people and beasts among the ruins. Peasants tended fields, and soldiers rode horses. A boy drove a herd of goats across a field, and when the goats stopped, they dropped their heads to pull at the grass.

Except there was no grass, only sand. There were no fields, either, and the women sweeping their houses were only passing invisible brooms over the rubble of gutted cottages. The soldiers rode their horses in straight lines across roads that no longer existed, and hadn’t for hundreds of years. Most curiously, Roderick could only see the people and animals when he stared straight at them. As he turned his head, they faded even before they’d reached his peripheral vision, while other people appeared instead. Whenever he stopped focusing and cast his gaze across the entire landscape, all he could see was dead, dry land and empty ruins.

Roderick rode in a company of ravagers, with Pradmort next to him, and two more men in front. The captain stared straight ahead without acknowledging that the other man had just awakened. Roderick opened his mouth to speak and was surprised by the words that came out.

“Master, how do we travel through the Desolation without attracting attention from the wights? Why don’t they attack us?”

The man glared at him. “Speak when spoken to.”

A tide of uncontrollable emotions swept over Roderick at the insult, and he found the sword at his waist and drew it. It was a heavy, evil thing with a red sheen like blood. It reminded him of his brother Whelan’s sword, Soultrup, except dark and wicked. He lifted the blade to strike.

Pradmort lifted a hand. “Enough. Save your emotions for when we train. Put the sword away.”

A flush of loyalty washed over him, and shame that he would lift his sword against this man who had brought him back to life. A small voice noted this reaction with alarm.
Roderick, what are you doing? Have you gone mad?
 

But the voice blinked out as soon as he noted it. He slid the sword into its scabbard. “Yes, my master.”