Working God's Mischief (68 page)

Lord Arnmigal caught a whiff of steaming unhappiness floating around that remark.

“The new firepowder won't be proof against the sorcerer's spells, just more resistant. Our falcons will be able to get close enough to gift him with some truly unpleasant weather.” She did not report that only limited quantities of the new formulation existed. What her audience did not hear, er-Rashal was unlikely to learn. Once the falcons started firing the sorcerer should be too busy dodging to find time to create inconvenient new spells. “He won't get the leisure to look for ways around his new problem.”

Lord Arnmigal puffed up with pride. Pella, assisted by his artillery mentors, had reformulated the firepowder. His idea had been stunningly simple, if not obvious, but, alas, was also stunningly expensive. They added a minuscule amount of silver dust to make the firepowder spell-resistant. Less expensive, but of weaker effect and so necessary in greater volume, copper and tin also worked. Even lead might help.

The metals certainly caused colorful muzzle blasts.

Pella and his accomplices had not yet gotten close enough to the Rascal to test the new powder under combat conditions.

These people would understand that. Still, new powder would buoy morale, heading into the Idiam.

Lord Arnmigal also had a notion that it would be handy to head into unfriendly country with a clearer picture of what waited there.

The Shining Ones scouted reluctantly. They were disinclined to alert er-Rashal to the magnitude of what was coming.

Lord Arnmigal wondered if there was more to the story. He did not fully credit anything anyone told him these days. Sometimes he even doubted Titus's reports, again having misgivings about Consent's religious conversion. Pella he did not trust, either, though in the boy's case because the kid was determined to do things denied him only because his mother would never forgive his father if something went wrong.

“General Alizarin, they say you know er-Rashal best. As Her Grace reported, the Righteous have some unusual resources. I'd like to hear your thoughts on how those might be used.”

He and the Shining Ones meant to use the Great Sky Fortress relics to bump the Rascal through the gates of Hell.

The allies would be encouraged to believe they were in charge but the real power would reside with the Shining Ones. The rest would serve to keep the villain from running away. He would stroke their egos, though.

He did not hide his thinking that well. The others began to suspect. They grew increasingly uncomfortable. The Righteous staff and the Shining Ones became least comfortable of all.

He strove hard against the quickening megalomania—seemingly with lessening success.

In his secret heart, stirring ugly, lay the dread that he had begun to walk the road already taken by Gordimer the Lion. Might he be unable to turn back even while aware of how he was changing? Could it be that the spite of the old women hidden in the shallows of Night made them weave inescapable evil destinies?

No sisters of fate at all, they, but sisters of malice instead?

*   *   *

The talk was done. Argument was at an end. Accords had been accorded, every participant with secret reservations. Negotiations with the Ansa, heavy on the “gifts,” had been finalized. A loose picket line slowly became a siege line as the encirclement of Andesqueluz shrank. A city's noose, Titus declared it.

Skirmishes with er-Rashal's resurrected sorcerer-defenders took place, brief encounters of pain dealt exclusively to the Rascal's minions. Anxious rage inside the ruins grew steadily. Though the darkness inside Andesqueluz was supernatural rather than quotidian, those drawing the noose tighter swore that a black glow waxed and waned there, like the beat of a great slow heart.

The Shining Ones guarded against demonic outbursts while soldiers of the Righteous, the Brotherhood, the Vindicated, and Pinkus Ghort's Firaldian volunteers, with the Ansa and even Black Rogert, labored unto dehydrated exhaustion hauling water and supplies, and dragging falcons to positions Pella chose. The boy picked his sites based on scouting done by the Shining Ones. His choices favored the finest lines of fire.

Pella proved the worth of his new firepowder right away.

*   *   *

The brooding malice in Andesqueluz grew blacker by the hour. His dead operatives lost, er-Rashal came out himself. Cockily, he anticipated inflicting misery on the Righteous by exploding their firepowder inconveniently.

Once more he enjoyed the improbable good fortune of the truly wicked. He survived a hail of poisoned metal and limped to his lair feeling sorry for himself. He resumed his desperate effort to resurrect Asher.

He was very close.

But his new wounds further sapped his strength and hindered his work. He lapsed into sleep when sleep was too much a luxury. If an attack came during a nap, he was lost.

Any attack
would
come then, absolutely. Unseen eyes, of Instrumentalities great and small, heard his every breath and counted his every heartbeat. But they were goats to his tiger! Once he dispelled the last misty chains binding Asher … He would need just a handful more souls.

Those were out there in those people so eager to still his own soul. A grand ironic jest it would be, his most dedicated enemies offering up the final installment on the price of his dreams!

Only, those villains were truly, thoroughly, stubbornly committed to putting period to his tale first.

Er-Rashal's present entourage was minuscule. It included three damaged resurrected sorcerer-lords of ancient Andesqueluz and three reanimated corpses that had been Ansa warriors. Then there were two live Ansa children, brother and sister, twins, seven, so deeply terrified they might never recover. They had escaped sacrifice so far because they were useful for physical labor. Lastly, and of least worth, were several dozen terrified and abused trivial Instrumentalities, none with more power than a hummingbird's shadow.

Still, the Rascal's servants might manage an inept guerrilla campaign still sufficient to tip the scale by collecting the remaining hearts, souls, and flesh their master's triumph required.

Such was er-Rashal's hope.

Too weak and too much in pain to leave the filthy pallet that had become his home, the sorcerer husked, “The night comes.” A statement, not a metaphor. “Our hour bestrides it.”

An ugly, deep chuckle erupted from the female twin, far too ancient and evil for a child. Her eyes glowed a baleful green. “The hour of the Night doth come, indeed.”

The glow faded. The child collapsed. Her brother stared in consternation. What was that?

The air quavered with a sense that some dreadful visitant had just departed. A musty, moldy earthen smell, and a chill, marked its passing.

Then the enemy's falcons began to belch out songs of cosmic indigestion.

Stone shot rattled against tumbled walls and fallen roofs. A jagged flint bounded off a building block, took a reanimated sorcerer squarely on the side of the head. That exploded in a cloud of bone splinters and dust.

Desperately, fighting his own recalcitrant flesh, er-Rashal began his last forlorn hope of an invocation, leeching power from the lives of his enemies to turn against their physical forms.

*   *   *

Lord Arnmigal, with Hourli as Helspeth, slouched in shadow atop a short bluff overlooking what once was the temple district of Andesqueluz. Another dozen onlookers lurked nearby. Some thought the Empress and her number-one soldier were entirely too cozy. Close by, falcons and traditional artillery engines worked leisurely. Fires burned in the ruins, ignited by fireballs thrown by counterweight engines. The falcons barked just often enough to remind the world that they were there. Their propellant
was
immune to the seductions of the Rascal. They would sing in unison if the choirmaster required it.

Those with the Commander of the Righteous included leaders from most of the factions determined to thwart er-Rashal. Even Black Rogert had brought himself to the engagement. The price in pain of his journey through the Idiam and up the Mountain had won grudging respect from everyone.

Captain-General Pinkus Ghort quietly nursed a wineskin. Nassim Alizarin knelt beside Ghort. Alizarin had yet to show any sign of remembering Piper Hecht from Artecipea, let alone some scoundrel who might once have gone by the name Else Tage. Two Ansa chieftains known to Nassim muttered with the Sha-lug, less comfortable with so many foreigners than with the evil in the ruins. The Widow lurked by Pinkus Ghort, too, accompanied by the woman she called Hope and the feeble old man she kept handy with an invisible iron emotional tether.

Lord Arnmigal feared all tonight's physical effort might be the undoing of that old one.

Madouc of Hoeles was not present. Having consulted the Ansa, Alizarin's renegades, and his own Special Office thugs, he had created his own mission. He and his team were in ambush along the one flight route available to the Rascal if things went bad. Madouc was sure that er-Rashal would survive the worst and try to run with crucial relics that would let him commence fresh villainies wherever he went to ground next.

The Shining Ones thought he might flee to the Hu'n-tai At, hoping he could hornswoggle Tsistimed into thinking he might be useful.

Azim al-Adil was absent, too. Nassim had sent him to Shamramdi to bring Indala up to date—hopefully before that city fell. Rumor had it on the lip of the precipice, with no relief expected. Lord Arnmigal thought, and hoped, that al-Adil would broach the peace notion he had tried to fix in Nassim's mind, in such ways that the Great Shake would see it as his own fabrication. Quiet nudges from the Shining Ones should help bring him to the right frame of mind.

The Old Ones were able to reach Shamramdi now. They got up to divine mischief there all the time. It was they who reported the city so desperate that resistance could collapse given one seriously fierce thump.

“Time to hit it,” Hourli whispered. “And let's be careful.” She gave Lord Arnmigal's arm a nervous, possessive squeeze missed by no one but him.

Only Aldi understood that Hourli was not Helspeth. And she was not pleased by Hourli's familiarity.

Lord Arnmigal rose. He seemed to stand taller, wider, more starkly than usual. His shadow, prancing in firelight from below, stretched deeper and longer than any other. An illusion? A trick of the light?

His shadow was missing a hand.

Lord Arnmigal slung a coil of rope down the precipitous slope. The stub of an old stone post anchored its near end. The rest floated out and down, uncoiling slowly.

Lord Arnmigal hefted a weird hammer left-handed, rigged its handle into the same harness that held a long sword across his back. The hammer moaned eagerly. He used both hands to loop the rope around himself before he began a quick, sometimes rappelling, descent from the height.

His weight was on the rope, which thrummed and shook, but the Empress picked it up and looped it around herself, then followed. She carried a light backpack. She used only one hand on the rope. She hefted a spear with the other.

The gallery gawked. What they saw could happen only through the intercession of the Night.

*   *   *

The Widow said, “Dawn, you're next.” Words wasted. Hope was gone. No one had seen her vanish.

The old man peered eastward. “Of course.”

“What?” Kedle asked.

“A full moon rising. It wasn't up before but it had to be.”

“I give up. Why?”

“Asher is the Mountain. He comes with Ashtoreth, Bride of the Mountain. She was a moon goddess. So I'm told.”

“Oh.” The Widow made a raspberry sound. Who feared dead gods?

The old man would never say that the only real fear Kedle actually knew was of normal human relations—though she did seem to be tempted, perhaps unconsciously, to start making an exception for the Captain-General.

Moon shadows danced with those from fires started by the artillery. The former had no power. The Shining Ones were all over the Mountain. No other side of the Night would interfere.

The Widow elbowed past Pinkus Ghort, snatched up the rope. It seemed as lively as a snake. It lacked any tension because of the weight of the people on it. She looped it around herself easily. A pulse in the cable encouraged her to move.

This was sorcery, indeed.

The old man, muttering prayers to the Good God, started down behind her, eyes squeezed shut.

Pinkus Ghort lined up for his turn.

*   *   *

Lord Arnmigal watched Hourli disengage from the rope. She joined him in a clot of darkness. He secured a fat candle from her pack. She said, “Light it before any witnesses show up.” The rope's end lashed like an injured snake.

He willed the candle to life.

Nothing happened.

Hourli snarled. The candlewick burst into flame. Time slowed. She grumbled, “Stay close. We'll end up sorry if I stumble outside the light.” He would carry the candle in the hand that had no shadow.

She did not suggest that he might suffer a lethal trip himself.

What a cosmic anticlimax that would be, clumsily breaking his neck moments before er-Rashal could be conducted to his doom.

“Through there.” Hourli indicated a gap between memorial stelae. Those leaned against one another like drunken comrades. Flickering firelight splashed their inner faces creamy yellow and occasional orange. “Careful. He could smell us out even like we are now.”

The earth trembled underfoot—despite the candle.

The leaning stelae shifted slightly. Detritus fell from where they met. Lord Arnmigal watched a small chunk, guessed that it would take a minute to reach the ground. Time was moving slowly but it
was
passing.

“He does feel us coming,” Hourli grumbled. The Commander of the Righteous heard nothing. She swore. “Damn! The big devil is stirring.” The falling chunk, behind them now, was halfway to the ground. “We walked into a trap. Not us. Not you and me. The company. He doesn't know about the candle. Oh. And he isn't expecting us two, after all. He just feels the threat from those behind us. He is vampirizing them somehow. The middle-worlders. Not us. But he is weakened by the presence of the Shining Ones, some. He wasn't watching the right way. We got close. He should have noticed. But we weren't part of his calculations. Even so, his human trap is working. We could end up sorry if we don't distract him quick.”