The King's Justice (11 page)

The hierophant's knowledge is not as complete as Black feared.

Haul Varder is unconscious now, or he has fallen into the compliance taught by his mother's harsh love. He does not struggle as he is wounded with Black's inlays and the wounds are sewn. He does not protest as Sought's cuts proliferate on his chest and belly, his arms and shoulders. He does not resist drinking Black's blood.

While the wheelwright is shaped, Black risks more obvious efforts to loosen the bolt. He knows that he has little time. Sought's ritual approaches its culmination.

Still the grit falling from the bolt is not enough.

For the first time, Black hears Sought speak to his men. “I must pause,” he says. With studious care, he mops blood and sweat from Haul Varder's torso. “One more inlay will be enough. More than enough. But the last cuts are crucial. I must see clearly what I do, and I am old.

“Ready the organs while I rest. Scatter the powders I have prepared on them. Say the words I have taught you. Then bring our harvest out. There must be no delay at the end.”

Two guards enter the wagon. They do not return quickly. When they do return, they carry between them a large wooden tub crusted with old blood.

The organs, Black thinks, straining his right arm until the muscles and sinews threaten to tear. The lungs and livers. To
invoke heat and air. To rule them. Not the fierce heat from the crevice. Not the comparative cool of breezes from the tunnels. Rather the elemental energies themselves, the gods of heat and air. Concentrated here as they are nowhere else in the kingdom, or in the known lands.

Still Black does not believe that Sought can draw force from air. The hierophant needs lungs only to stoke the fire in the rift, to fan the flames like a bellows. His ritual will evoke the sorcery of heat.

When the old man stands before him again, Black summons his last desperation.

Another inlay Sought cuts out of Black, this one from Black's lower abdomen near his groin. Playing his charade, Black stretches against his bonds like a man on the rack. But he does not exert his full strength. He allows his growing weakness, the effect of his losses, to affect him. When this silver is gone, and his blood has been collected, he slumps in the posture of a man defeated.

He waits until Sought has returned to Haul Varder, until the wheelwright is being cut, until the old man's eagerness and the attention of the guards regard only the ruined man. Then Black puts all that remains of him into his right arm and
pulls
. He pulls until his heart threatens to burst.

Grit trickles from the hole made by the bolt. The bolt wobbles. For an instant, its resistance is greater than Black can endure. Then a cruel effort draws the iron from the stone.

His arm is free.

He is close to fainting, but he does not hesitate. One guard notices his success. Sought himself notices. They will act. One two three, Black slaps the places on his marred body that demand the King's awareness. And with his summons, he sends a piece of his soul. He cannot do otherwise. It is his soul that the King will hear, his soul that the King will understand.

By so doing, Black commits himself to death. Even a shaped man cannot live long when so much of his soul is gone.

Still he regrets nothing. He is near the end of all fear.

And he does not falter in his purpose. A guard rushes toward him. Sought turns in surprise and outrage. Black responds as swiftly as his failing strength allows. He claps his hand to the glyph on his hip that manifests his longsword. With the hilt in his grasp, he swings outward. The tip of his blade catches the guard's throat, but Black does not pause to observe the effect of his slash. His return stroke hacks at the rope binding his left hand to its bolt.

The rope is tough. Though it is damaged, it does not part.

The old man is shaken to the core of his ambitions, his hungers. He knows what Black has done. He knows his peril. But he also does not hesitate. He has come too far for too long to draw back. He snarls an instant's incantation. With one trembling hand, he sketches an arcane symbol across the air.

Black's longsword becomes smoke in his hand. It dissipates quickly, tugged away by the breezes from the tunnels.

The guard is on the floor. He clutches at his neck. Blood
gasps from the severing of his windpipe. Already he is too weak to seek help from his master. In moments, he is dead.

Two servants remain to the old man. They await his bidding.

“Curse you!” Sought yells at Black. He is incandescent with rage. “Curse you to all the hells that were, or are, or will be! Curse you eternally!”

Black replies with a smile that does not encourage confidence. He has taken the hierophant's measure now. He knows that Sought's knowledge is incomplete. He knows the ways in which that knowledge is incomplete. And he knows that the old man's hungers will overcome both his outrage and his danger.

Also Black knows that his own task is not done. His purpose demands more of him.

Writhing in his robe, Sought masters himself. He has only one hope left, and his craving for it is endless. He turns away from Black. To his remaining men, he shouts, “The organs first!
Quickly!
We must complete the ritual before the King can intervene!”

The guards do not delay. They have no personal fears. Despite their great skill with weapons, they are Sought's puppets. As one, they turn to the tub of lungs and livers. Carrying it to the crevice, they heave it and its contents into the depths.

A roaring from the fissure answers them. Black hears louder boiling. He sees flames at the lip of the rift.

“
Now the wheelwright!
” shrieks the old man. “Let him see how I keep my word!”

The guards obey. Returning to the wall, they lift the cross between them. Haul Varder attempts some weak protest, but he is not heeded. Carrying him bound to his crucifixion, Sought's servants approach the fissure. Without ceremony, they drop their victim into the seething heat, the flagrant light.

The roar in the rift resembles the priest's eagerness. It resembles his hunger. A gyre of flame rises into the cavern, circling itself until it is sucked into the funnel of the ceiling.

“Now!” Sought exults to Black. “Gaze on what I have wrought! Gaze and know despair!”

His men stand as though they have forgotten themselves. One or both of them can kill Black now, but they do not move. They have come to the end of their instructions. They wait for their master's commands.

Black does not know what preparations the hierophant has performed in secret. Like the guards, he waits.

The roar has a voice. Black almost understands it, but its meaning is confused in the fissure, in the deep boiling, in the tremendous increase of heat.

A hand of fiery stone grips the rim of the crevice. A shape of flame climbs into view. Black sees a head that may once have been lava. He sees shoulders as heavy as boulders, yet as liquid as molten wax. A second hand grasps the rim. It melts purchase for its fingers in the rock.

Loud in ecstasy or agony, the outcome of Sought's promise to Haul Varder heaves upward. A knee that mars what it touches
braces itself on the floor. The voice howls, “
At last!
” Another heave brings the old man's creation to its feet at the edge of the rift. “
Now I am made FEARSOME!
I am fear INCARNATE
.

“She will not hurt me again!”

Haul Varder has become lava, or the lava has become him. He retains the shape of a man, though he is twice Black's size. His eyes are the blaze in the heart of a forge. His voice is living heat, and his hands are formed to incinerate lives. His proximity alone turns flesh to tinder. Standing where they have been left to wait, Sought's last servants burn like fagots.

He is Sought's triumph, and his own. No human force can stand against him. He will make infernos of towns and forests. He will burn entire lands to ash. He is ready to rampage wherever he chooses.

For a moment, the old man regards what he has achieved, exulting in his own greatness, and in his creation's. He has proven himself. He has done what no man before has or can. At another time, he would be content. Now, however, seeing the fruition of his life, he wants more. He wants to prove himself against the King.

Then Haul Varder's heat drives Sought back. And when he turns away, he perceives that the crisis of his ambitions has found him. Black and Haul Varder and the smoldering corpses of the guards are not alone.

From the tunnels on one side of the cavern, darkness pours inward. It flows like water over the stone. It is colder than the
oldest ice, deeper than the gulfs between the stars. Though it only flows, and does not seek or act, its presence spares Black the worst of the wheelwright's fire. When it reaches Haul Varder's feet, it begins spilling into the crevice, where it or the lava cease to exist.

At the same time, the tunnels on the far side grow brighter. The brightness emerges in globes of purest radiance. Some are smaller than others, but all resemble instances of the sun's best light. They float in the air without apparent aim, riding the breezes. Some are carried upward and swept away, funneled into the night above the mountain. Others bob here and there, avoiding only the flow of darkness on the floor. Those that collide with Haul Varder's fire do not harm him. They are not harmed themselves.

Driven by fear and eagerness, the hierophant retreats to the wall of the cavern. There he watches to see what his creation will do. He has no need or desire to control Varder. He has written his own protection into the man's chest. Now he feels a student of power's desire to learn where his efforts will lead.

The wheelwright peers at the eerie manifestations. He stamps a foot into liquid dark. He swats at floating bright. Then he laughs like thunder. The sound of his mirth and scorn stuns Black's hearing. It shakes the organs in Black's chest.

“Is this how your King responds?” Haul Varder asks. His voice is sure triumph. “He is a fool! These forces are mindless. They have no purpose. They cannot harm me. They cannot stop me.

“When I reach him, I will hold his terror in my hands!”

Sought tastes fulfillment. The King's powers do not hurt his creation. They cannot.

Nevertheless Black smiles once more, a smile that would chill the heart of any man able to recognize it. “You are mistaken,” he replies to Tamlin Marker's killer. “They do not need minds. They have mine.”

The sound of Varder's laughter scours the cavern, but Black does not heed him. With sigils, glyphs, and scarifications, the King's Justice reclaims his longsword. For this sorcery, evaporation and distance are not obstacles. The remaining fragments of his shaping suffice. They enable him to recall his blade from the ether of its dispersion.

Cooled by the frigid touch of dark, he has strength enough to cut the rope that holds his left wrist. Made brittle by flowing cold, the bonds that secure his ankles part more easily. Though much of his soul and his vitality are gone, he is able to stand.

Under his breath, he prays, “One last effort, my lord. With your help.” Then he moves toward the wheelwright.

In a staggering run so that Sought's creation of fire and stone will not have time to slap him aside, he thrusts the length of his sword deep into Haul Varder's belly.

While the transformed man roars heat and fury, Black collapses to his knees. But he does not release his grip on his longsword.

Too late, Varder reaches for Black. He means to fling his foe into the fissure. He means to pluck the blade from his belly and shatter it. He is strong enough to crumple the finest steel, and his
wound is no more than an annoyance. But before he can strike, dark flows up Black's body and arms, and a globe of bright bursts in the wheelwright's face. Dark secures Black's hands to the sword's hilt. The utter cold of dark follows Black's longsword into Haul Varder's vitals. And bright enters Varder's throat when he tries to roar. A light that lava cannot consume is agony in the wheelwright's gullet, the man's chest.

Stricken by more pain than his made flesh can endure, Varder topples backward. He falls into the fire and fury of his shaping, and does not rise again.

Black does not hear the old man's wail of frustration and terror as Sought flees from the cavern. Kneeling near the lip of the rift, Black smiles for the last time. But this smile threatens no one. It is glad and grateful, and it is all that he has left.

When he falls himself, slumping into the embrace of dark and bright beside the fissure, he is not afraid.

H
e does not know that time passes. He does not know how long he is unconscious. Yet by small increments he becomes aware that he is at peace. He has no fears and is not driven. For this he feels gratitude. He does not question it.

Eventually, however, his pain returns. Blunted at first, then more sharply, jagged distress reclaims the back of his skull. He has been maimed of several of his inlays, some of his
scarifications have been damaged, and one or more of his glyphs and sigils have been ruined. His right arm tells him that it has been wrenched in its socket. Also he has many bruises. If his soul is at peace, his body is not. Each beat of his heart forces him to acknowledge that he is alive.