The Book of Kane (13 page)

Ostervor, however, had not expected tire panel to swing shut as he passed through it.

He counted slowly to fifty, his eyes pressed shut, before he moved. Other than the spectral groan of hinge, as the doorway closed, there was no other sound. At least, he told himself, he wasn’t backlighted by the feeble glow of the candle in the chamber behind the wall. Kane—and Ostervor had earlier peered into the passage for a gleam of the assassin’s light—had likely passed beyond earreach in search of a hidden entrance to the Vareishei’s private quarters. Ostervor withdrew a fresh candle from a pouch at his belt—there was yet another, and a tinderbox to strike fire—and tied a neckscarf about it for bulk. This he wedged against the now-closed doorway, marking its location. Silently counting his paces, Ostervor felt his way along the pitch-dark passageway, following the direction Kane’s footprints had taken.

He had counted only seven paces when Ostervor’s outthrust fingers encountered a stone wall.

Ostervor halted before the unexpected barrier, puzzled by its presence. He knew to expect the trapdoor paving at thirty paces, to be wary of the pivoting steps midway down the first staircase, to avoid the spring-loaded spears just beyond the second turning—these and other deathtraps were described in the fragmentary journals he had discovered. There was no reference to a blank wall, such as he now confronted.

A later modification, Ostervor decided. At some point the citadel’s master had walled off this series of passageways. And yet, Kane’s footprints had led this way. It was impossible that Kane could have passed him upon returning; therefore the assassin must have known of another exit from the passage. Or had his returning footprints, no longer damp from the night beyond, left marks unnoticed at Ostervor’s first glance?

Stealthily Ostervor retraced his way along the passage, seeking Kane in the other direction. Ten paces beyond the point of his entrance, Ostervor’s outthrust fingers encountered a stone wall.

Ostervor swore silently, beginning to know fear. Feeling his way carefully across the blank wall and back down the passageway, his toes nudged the candle knotted within its scarf.

The flicker of his tinderbox was blinding, and his hand shook as he applied its flame to candlewick. Its light was more than sufficient to disclose that the passageway had been walled up at either end.

The doorway by which Ostervor had entered the passage refused to open for all his cunning attempts to activate its hidden mechanism, nor did the thick oaken panels yield to his frantic pounding.

Ostervor wasted most of his one remaining candle seeking some other means of egress. Kane’s bootprints , maddeningly obscured by his own footprints, somehow seemed to lead in either direction and into nowhere. Giving it up, Ostervor began to hew upon the oaken panels through which lie had entered. His last candle gave light long enough to disclose the steel plating sandwiched within the paneling, but it was little joy to Ostervor that he had solved the mystery of the hidden doorway’s solidity.

In the long darkness that followed, Ostervor’s kicking and pounding brought no more response than did his screams. The north wing, of course, was reputedly haunted, and seldom was it visited. In time his shouts became a hoarse croaking, his hands raw and bleeding, his body an agonizing mass of bruises from useless rushes against the unyielding walls.
The choking dust only made his thirst come upon him the sooner, so that the torture of his thirst for some time obscured the realization that the air in the passage was growing bad. Whatever circulation might exist, it was inadequate for his needs, and Ostervor was slowly suffocating inside this crypt. He lay motionless, conserving strength, only his brain furiously at work on the problem of escape. Time became a meaningless interval between useless efforts to open the door; it may be that lie slept, for the choking darkness gave no indication of tire hours that passed. The poisoned air now hurt his lungs worse than the agony of his parched throat.

Rising from a hopeless stupor, Ostervor knew his strength was failing. He forced stale air into his chest for one last jagged howl of despair and flying his pain-racked body against the unyielding doorway.

The doorway instantly pivoted before his weight, and Ostervor fell headlong into the chamber beyond. Upon the floor beside his face, the candle he had placed there was still burning.

“Time, after all,” said Kane, reaching down for him, “is only relative.”

Ostervor’s hoarse breath melted the flecks of frost upon Kane’s boots.

“Ostervor, come with me.”

Sitilvon liked to refer to the cellar chamber as her studio. Seated at her writing table, she stared thoughtfully at the half-covered page of parchment before her. Her pen had dried again, and she absently wet its tip with her tongue to keep it from blotting—a habit that left her with a blotchy sort of mustache when she kept late hours in her studio. She considered the now-still body of the youth strapped head down upon an X-shaped frame in the center of the chamber. Beneath his dangling head, a large silver bowl was nearly filled with blood-tinged vomit. Sitilvon reread her notes of earlier that evening, then dipped her clean pen into her inkwell and concluded her notes.

“Subject 3 is young male of sound physique and good health. Force-fed vomitus concentration from Subject 2, placed upon frame. Severe convulsions observed by second hour, increasing intensity with total vomiting of stomach contents by third hour, decreasing soon thereafter. No observable signs of life after fourth hour.”

Sitilvon frowned and continued to write.

“There seems little point in continuing this line o study. Despite common belief, it is demonstrable that a combination of arsenic and mercuric salts does not increase in toxicity as the poison is recovered from the vomitus of one victim to the next.”

“Obviously you were only diluting its virulence, commented Kane reading over her shoulder. “One might as well maintain that a blade grows sharper each time it hews flesh and bone.”

Sitilvon’s pen shook a spatter of ink upon the page, but she gave no other outward sign of disquiet.

“The poison might have absorbed certain essences of death from each victim,” she said calmly.

“What? Heavy metal salts?” Kane was derisive. “Rank superstition.” She rose slowly from her chair and faced Kane, gaining considerable assurance from the fact the assassin had not simply cut her throat once he had crept upon her unseen.

“I had thought I had given orders not to be disturbed. Shall I call in my guardsmen?”

“They are rather less capable of obeying you now,” Kane said.

“What do you want?”

“I should think you must know that answer.”

Sitilvon knew, but she also knew that while they talked, she remained alive. She smoothed the folds of her gown across her hips and faced him coolly. While she scorned to take pains with her appearance, she knew her features were good, her figure exciting to her occasional lovers—and Kane, after all, was only a man.

“You are no common assassin,” she told him, “or you would have slain me from behind.”

“I was interested in your conclusions to this experiment,” Kane said. “I had earlier amused myself by reading through your journal. Truly remarkable.”

“One would assume an assassin would be interested in the practical, if not the theoretical aspects of toxicology,” Sitilvon smiled, edging toward a credenza. “May I drink a glass of wine?”

“It would be rude to refuse you, “ Kane acceded. “The notes where you established the toxic characteristics of each portion of the monkshood plant were particularly methodical. Forty children—fascinating!”

“Will you drink a glass with me?” Sitilvon invited.

“This vintage has lain in our cellars since it was pillaged before my father’s day. None of its has been able to identify it.”

She poured two ice-clear goblets with heavy, tawny wine, and then handed one to Kane.

Kane had been watching her every movement. “The other goblet, if you please,” he said, ignoring the one she preferred.

Sitilvon shrugged and made the exchange. “As you please.”

She took a luxuriant sip from her goblet, then noticed that Kane was still watching her, his own wine untasted . “I’m sure you’ll understand if I exchange goblets with you once again,” Kane smiled, giving Sitilvon his wine and taking hers.

“Under the circumstances, I can understand your caution.” Sitilvon returned his smile above her goblet. She drank deeply, and Kane followed suit.

Sitilvon drowned her laughter in the wine. Both of their glasses were poisoned, for the decanter from which she poured was steeped with enough distillate of the amber poppy to kill a hundred men. Sitilvon, whose addiction to the same rare drug had established an enormous tolerance, considered this tainted liqueur no more than a pleasant nightcap. For Kane, the sleep would never be broken.

Kane drained his goblet. “This is one of the sweet white wines that could be had from regional vineyards where the Southern Kingdoms border Chrosanthe,” Kane decided, “until the killing blight of a century past destroyed the grapes there. Its precise vineyard and perhaps its exact year I might have told you, had the wine not been so heavily laced with a tincture of amber poppies.”

Sitilvon’s eyes grew wide with fear.

“The stimulant I swallowed as you poured for us is quite sufficient an antidote,” Kane said gently. “After all, I’ve had time enough to peruse your journal—and to partake of your sideboard. The opium of the amber poppy is no stranger to me.”

Sitilvon realized that her heartbeat was too rapid, too erratic, even for fear. Pain lanced through her chest.

“When you switched goblets with me…”

“Actually, it was in your inkwell,” Kane explained.

Her pulse was shaking her entire body. Sitilvon clutched at her writing table, her legs nerveless. Kane’s hands reached out for her.

“Sitilvon, come with me.”

Puriali dipped his brush of maidens’ eyelashes into the jade cup of infant’s blood and completed the final astrological symbol within the pentacle’s inner circle an instant before the last weakened cry of the newborn. Difficult in the extreme, each step had been, but then the stakes were the highest, and Puriali knew he was too accomplished an adept to fail. He gathered his magician’s robes close to his bony knees—it would be catastrophic should one of the lines be obliterated at this hour—and stepped carefully outside of the pentacle. Its outermost circle of power touched the threshold of the tower chamber’s door and encompassed half the room. Puriali seated himself at his desk in view of the only door. A block of tarry substance with which he had formed the outer circle lay in his fingers, and his hand hung down only inches from a short gap that broke the outer circle. His lips barely seemed to move as he crooned a low chant in an archaic tongue.

The wait was longer than Puriali had anticipated, but in time Kane slipped past the open doorway and stepped into the circle of the pentacle. Puriali lashed out with his dubious chalk and closed the circle. Kane halted at the sudden movement, watching the sorcerer.

Puriali nodded a complacent greeting. “By now,” he said urbanely, “it would no doubt be facetious to inquire after the well-being of my paternal siblings.”

“Do you really want to know?” Kane asked.

“Surely you couldn’t have thought I bore them any brotherly affection. They would have rid themselves of me long ago had we not needed one another. The solution to the problem is that I was first to realize the others were superfluous.” Puriali’s smirk bespoke private jests. He watched Kane pace about the pentacle, seemingly studying its artistry try with the detachment of the connoisseur.

“I imagine you may be curious as to why I have summoned you to me,” Puriali suggested.

Kane ceased his pacing and regarded the sorcerer attentively. “I was awaiting a polite opportunity to ask.”

“I know everything about you, of course,” Puriali assured him with benign humor. “Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Which is both why
and
how I summoned you here.” Puriali held up a hand to forestall protest. “No doubt you are thinking that you were sent here to carry out the vendetta of some bereaved whore with grandiose dreams. You should have understood by now that apparent free will is only a delusion.

“You were summoned here through my own arts, Kane. I knew my half-siblings hated me, plotted as one to be rid of me whenever it seemed that my arts were more of a danger to them than an asset. Why not? Together we killed our father when his usefulness was outlived. But this time theirs was the error of judgment. I was already too powerful to require their continued existence.”

Puriali withdrew a glittering coronet from beneath his robes and jammed it down upon his shock of red hair. “The ducal crown of Harnsterm,” he crowed, regarding Kane through over-bright blue eyes. “Fits rather well, don’t you agree?”

“Gold can be bent to any shape,” Kane remarked.

“Very pithy, to be sure. No doubt your unsuspected wit will provide me with much needed amusement while you serve my will.”

“You were about to explain…?”

“Why, I should imagine it is all obvious to you by now, Kane.” Puriali adjusted the crown. “Who else could have murdered Wevnor and Ostervor and lovely Sitilvon? They were far too vigilant to give me the chance.”

“And now?”

“And now you shall serve me. With the others dead I shall require a loyal henchman—one who can lead men into battle as expertly as he can weave political intrigue. For this reason I have spared you. With you to carry out my commands, Harnsterm is only the first step toward conquest of this strife-torn land.”

“An ambitious scheme,” Kane commented, “if not particularly original. However, I regret that my own immediate assignments will make such an alliance impossible.”

“Alliance?” Puriali laughed. “Not so. It is servitude I demand of you, Kane—although you will find that I am a kind master to those who serve me well.”

He rose to his feet and gestured sweepingly. “By now you will have examined the pentacle into which you so obligingly blundered. Still believe in freedom of will, Kane? I summoned you tonight, willing you to slay the others, then to come to me in my tower. You are imprisoned now within the pentacle, held there by the symbols of power that represent the innermost secrets of your existence. You cannot escape the pentacle until I set you free, Kane—and this I will do only after I have bound you to me through certain irrevocable oaths and pacts that not even you dare break.”