The Wizard's Coming (5 page)

'Where's--?' Hosh yelped. 'Narich!'

Corrain saw the wounded man was slumped on his knees, ashen with blood loss. A raider grabbed his hair, hauled his head back and cut his throat.

'We want fit and healthy slaves,' sneered the corsair who'd chained them. 'Better hope that nose heals cleanly, boy.'

Corrain looked swiftly around. A handful of men lay dead close by. The rest he could see had been taken captive. 'There's the wizard.' As Hosh cowered beside him, whimpering, he indicated Minelas with a jerk of his head.

Some way beyond Gefren who was kneeling in chains, his chin on his chest, Lord Halferan lay face down in the mire, a corsair's boot on his neck. Minelas stood a few paces away, unsullied, brushing wisps of sapphire mist from his thin hands.

A corsair walked up to him, head and shoulders taller. Massive in black leather and a steel breastplate, gold chains were plaited into his beard. 'Well done, my friend.'

'You betrayed us.' Halferan tried to lift his head, spitting mud. 'You bastard.'

'I got a better offer,' Minelas said conversationally, hunkering down beside him. 'When my friend here heard you were looking for a wizard, he made it his business to outbid you.'

'He haggles like a fishmonger, this wizard. You should have paid Scavarin and saved yourself this grief.' The corsair leader kicked Halferan in the ribs with casual brutality. 'And saved me my gold. But I'll make it back selling your men for slaves.'

'Make sure you sell them to the most distant domains of the Archipelago,' Minelas said sternly. 'And cut out their tongues. We want no witnesses.'

'You mind your business and I'll mind mine,' the giant corsair retorted.

'Why did you ever believe Hadrumal would be your salvation, my lord?' Standing up, Minelas shook his head pityingly. 'Most wizards only want peace and quiet to study their books and swap magical theories with tedious mages as blinkered as they are. They'd never be interested in your miserly offer of gold and gratitude. No-one ten leagues beyond your borders even cares about your pitiful little fiefdom's fate. Now, me, I want a lot more than a lifetime in dusty libraries to look forward to. I want wine and women and people looking up to me, and enough gold to keep all that coming till I'm old and bald.'

'You think this scum will keep paying you?' Halfern twisted in impotent rage.

'He won't have to.' Minelas reached inside his jerkin for a blank leaf of parchment. 'Because I'll be taking news of your valorous death back to your family along with your death-bed grant of your lands and family into my guardianship.' As he spoke, black writing rippled across the creamy surface. 'Isn't that your signature, my lord?' He bent to show Halferan the dark flourish at the bottom. 'Your rents and revenues should keep me in the luxury to which I wish to become accustomed.'

Gefren sprang to his feet, taking everyone by surprise. Gripping the chain linking his manacles in both fists, ready to strangle Minelas, he took two long strides towards the wizard. A bolt of lightning from the empty sky lanced into the top of the guard captain's head. He stood motionless, already dead. A bloody blackened gash ran down the side of his face, the scorched line continuing down his tunic and breeches to one boot burst into a smoking ruin. Falling forward, he landed beside Halferan, his sightless eyes staring into his lord's horrified face.

'You won't get away with this,' Halferan raged impotently.

'He will.' The corsair captain plunged his long sword into Halferan's back to skewer his heart. 'As long as he keeps our little hideaway here safe and secret.' He smiled at Minelas with cheerful menace.

The wizard was unmoved. 'As long as you send me a modest share in whatever loot you find outside my fiefdom.'

The corsairs down the path had dragged off all the other men. Now they came for Corrain and Hosh.

'What are we going to do?' the boy snivelled wretchedly as he was hauled to his feet.

'We stay alive.' Corrain set his stubbled jaw while ducking his head in apparent submission. 'Until we can escape and come home to see that wizard hanged.'

'When did any slave last escape the Aldabreshi.' Desolate tears trickled down Hosh's face to mingle with the blood and mucus oozing from his broken nose.

* * *

It was dawn when the coastal trader's ship sailed up to the stubby jetty. Sailors leaped ashore to secure mooring ropes and fenders. As soon as the gangplank crashed onto the square stones, a young woman in a black cloak walked swiftly down onto the jetty, a battered leather sack slung over one shoulder by its drawstring.

The ship's brawny captain hurried after her. 'There's the tavern, my lady. You can rest and take some breakfast--'

'Thank you, but I've no time to waste.' Smooth-skinned, with large and luminous hazel eyes and silken auburn hair to offset an otherwise unremarkable face, she turned a smile of surpassing sweetness on the sailor. 'Where exactly did these men die?'

'Over there, my lady. At the foot of the cliff.' The captain licked dry lips and ran a calloused hand over his grizzled beard. 'But there's naught left. They threw the carrion into the other cove.'

He made no move to follow as the woman walked away, her soft leather half-boots whispering on the stones. She soon reached the broken rocks in the angle between the sloping ridge running down to the sea and the sheer cliffs.

After walking back and forth a few times, she bent to study a gory patch of scree, old dry blood now veiled with windblown dust. Quite composed, she tucked her black cloak around her long skirts and sat cross-legged on the ground. Despite the strengthening sunlight, she took a candle in a shallow pottery holder from her bag, together with a silver bowl and a small mirror of polished brass. She laid the mirror flat, stood the candle beside it, and kindled a scarlet flame with a snap of her fingers. Finding a small bottle in the bag, she uncorked it and poured clear, viscous oil into the silver bowl. As she selected a piece of bloodstained stone, crimson magic shimmered across the mirror.

'Jilseth? Are you there?' A voice echoed distantly from the swirling radiance.

'I am, Archmage.' She dropped the stone shard into the oil. Dark amber light boiled up around it.

'Was it him?' the unseen wizard asked with clipped anger. 'What happened?'

Jilseth leaned forward to gaze into the bowl. 'Six men died, and their horses. Minelas definitely killed them. They were certainly corsairs.'

The distant Archmage's sigh sent ripples across the spell reflected in the mirror. 'Doesn't he know he'll never get away with this?'

'He's managing to hide himself from everyone's scrying, element masters and all.' Jilseth's smile didn't reach her beautiful eyes. 'And I imagine, like everyone else from the Council of Hadrumal down, he considers necromancy a perverted and pointless magic.'

'We have more important concerns than that well-worn debate.' There was a suggestion of apology in the Archmage's words. 'What about this lodestone magic you promised me?'

'Let's see.' Jilseth reached into the neck of the modest grey dress she wore beneath her black cloak. She pulled out a metallic black crystal pendant on a silver chain. Lifting it over her head she dangled it above the seething bowl.

Thick wisps of smoke rose from the oil. Jilseth swept her hand through them. Golden glints flowed from her fingers to shape tiny phantasms. The magic made a gruesome shadow play of the deaths of men and beasts falling down the cliff, once, twice and a third time. Then Jilseth brushed them away and the smoke reformed into a single corsair face screaming in silent terror. A third pass of the magewoman's hand destroyed it and all the smoke vanished. The boiling oil subsided into stillness.

'Well?' The brass mirror rang with the Archmage's impatience.

Jilseth ran the chain through her hands before holding the pendant out at arm's length. The lodestone twitched and drifted inland, gradually rising, the silver links following. It only halted when it had drawn the chain out to its fullest extent.

'It'll take me to anywhere Minelas has ever worked magic.' Satisfaction warming her smile, Jilseth hung the pendant around her neck once more. 'And my other spells will show me exactly what he's done, wherever he's spilled blood.'

'Then we can decide how to punish his crimes.' The Archmage's voice was flinty.

Jilseth nodded as she drew the oil out of the bowl and back into the bottle in a swirl of amber magic. Licking finger and thumb ready to snuff the candle she looked intently into the mirror. 'I'll find him, Planir, however long it takes.'

The story continues in
The Hadrumal Crisis: Dangerous Waters
, the first in a new fantasy trilogy by Juliet E. McKenna, coming August 2011...

About the author

Juliet E McKenna has been interested in fantasy stories since childhood, from Winnie the Pooh to The Iliad. An Abiding fascination with other worlds and their peoples played its part in her subsequently reading Classics at St. Hilda's College, Oxford. After combining bookselling and motherhood for a couple of years, she now fits in her writing around her family and vice versa. She lives with her husband and children in West Oxfordshire, England.