Winds of Fury (4 page)

Steady now; control and command. You rule the power. Shape it to your will, keep it in your hands
.

The interior of the bookcase warped away from him and vanished, leaving behind a lightless void. He began to lose strength, as if his life were bleeding away into the void.

Then came the unexpected.

The portal's edges pulsed, then extended tendrils in all directions! Lightninglike extrusions of power began spinning out from his carefully-wrought framework, waving aimlessly, as if they were searching for something.

Then, as a thread of fear traversed his spine, they reacted as if they felt that fear, and began groping after
him!
And he was paralyzed with weakness, unable to move from his chair!

He couldn't tell what had gone wrong, or even if this was somehow what was supposed to happen—

No, this couldn't be what was “supposed” to happen; if those tentacles touched him, they would suck the rest of the power from him before he could even blink. He could tell by their color, they
had
to be kept from him. Something had gone wrong—very, very wrong. This was worse than when he had touched the node—for this
thing
he had created was part of him, and he could no more cut himself off from it than he could cut off an arm. What now?

The life-energy tentacles reached blindly for him, threatening to create a power-loop that would devour him. All he could think of was that an Adept would know what to do if this spell was going wrong. At this point, he would gladly have welcomed
any
Adept; Hulda, an Eastern mage, even one of the disgustingly pure White Winds Adepts.
Anyone,
so long as they knew what this thing was and how to save him from it!

At that moment, the groping tendrils stopped reaching for him. They hovered and flickered, then responded to his panicked thoughts and reached instead into the void, growing thinner and thinner. . . .

Suddenly there was no strength to spare even for a thought; his strength poured from him as from a mortal wound, and he collapsed against the hack of his chair. His head spun, his senses began to desert him. and it was all he could do to cling to consciousness and fight the thing he had created.

Then, between one heartbeat and the next, there was a terrible surge of energy back
into
him and through him. Soundless light exploded against his eyelids: he gasped in pain.

That was too much; he blacked out for a moment, all of his senses overloaded, all of his channels struggling to contain the power that had flooded back into him.

Finally, he took a breath. Another. His lungs still worked; he had not been burned to a cinder after all. He blinked, surprised that he could still see.

And as his eyes focused again, he realized that he was no longer alone in his tower room.

There was something—some kind of not-quite-human creature—collapsed at his feet. The portal was gone, and with it, the back and shelves of the empty bookcase.

His first, fleeting thought was that it was a good thing that he had chosen an
empty
bookcase for his experiment. His second, that whatever it was he had created, it had
not
been the means to tap into the nodes that he had thought it would be.

His third—that he had somehow
brought
this creature here. Was that why the manuscript had called the construct a
portal?
Was it a door to somewhere else, not the nodes? If it was, this creature he had somehow summoned through it was from a place stranger than he had ever seen or heard of. It was unconscious, but breathing. He turned it over, carefully, with his foot.

It? No, indisputably “he, ” not “it.
”

Whatever he was, this strange creature, he was in very bad condition; in the deep shock only handling too much mage-energy could produce, the shock that Ancar himself had only narrowly escaped just now. He was manlike, but had many attributes of a huge and powerful cat—a golden pelt, manelike hair, the teeth of a carnivore—and the more Ancar examined him, the more certain he became that those “attributes” had been created. This being had somehow been involved in changing his own shape, something that Ancar could not do, and had only seen Hulda do once. This was a more useful ability than a spell of illusion, which could be detected or broken.

Wait a moment, and think. He might have been born this way, and not something changed by magic. Or he could even be a different race than mankind altogether. This could be the creature's natural shape
.

That thought was a trifle disappointing, but if it was true, it still meant that the creature was from so far away that Ancar had never even picked up a hint of anything like it before. It had to be involved in magic to have gotten into that void between the Planes. And together, those two facts meant that it must know many things that were not in the magic traditions that Ancar had been using.

And that meant things entirely outside Hulda's scope of knowledge.

Ancar smiled.

He drew upon the energy of his imprisoned girls below, and gained the strength to rise and examine the creature sprawled across the wooden floor of his tower room.

Carefully, warily, Ancar knelt beside him and touched him, extending his own battered probes to the mind and the potentials within that mind.

Whatever shields the creature had once possessed were gone; all of his remaining energies were devoted to simply staying alive. That left him completely naked to Ancar's probes, and what the King found as he explored the creature's potentials startled him into a smothered shout of glee.

The odd half-beast was an Adept! It was clear for anyone of Master rank to read, in the channels, in the strength of his Gift. And a powerful Adept as well . . . that much was evident from the signs all ever him that pointed to constant manipulations of mage-energy on a scale Ancar had only dreamed of.

And with his shields gone, his mind open, he was entirely within Ancar's power. Here it was, exactly what he had been longing for. The power of an Adept was what Ancar wanted; whether it was within himself or in another, it did not matter—as long as it was in his control.

The beast stirred and opened his eyes. Slitted eyes, with rings of gold and green, blinking in a way that could not be counterfeited. The creature was dazed, disoriented, and so weak he could not even manage a coherent thought.

Quickly, before the strange creature could do anything to orient itself, he flung the simplest controlling spell he could think of at it, sending it to sleep. Clumsy with excitement, he lurched to his feet and ran down the two staircases to the room at the base of the tower.

There was no time for finesse, and no time to worry about subtlety. He unlocked the first cell with a touch of his finger, and dragged the shrinking, terrified girl huddled inside out into the light.

She wore a collar and nothing else; a red collar. Good, she was still a virgin.

He snapped a chain onto her collar, and hauled her up the staircase behind him.

 

Ancar flung the knife aside, to lie beside the lifeless body of the girl he had brought up from below. He had been a little disappointed in the amount of power he had been able to drain from her before she died. He hoped it would be enough.

He raised his hands and held them palm-down over the creature at his feet. The runes of coercion gleamed wetly on his golden pelt, drawn there in blood while the girl's heart was still beating. This, at least, he had done many times.

He recited the spell under his breath, and chuckled in satisfaction as the runes flared up brightly, then vanished, along with the girl's body. He stepped back a pace or two, then settled himself in his chair again, without once taking his eyes off the body of his new acquisition.

Once he was comfortable, he banished the spell that held the creature unconscious, and watched as the golden eyes flickered open again.

This time there was sense in them; sense, and wariness. But no strength; the creature tried to rise and failed, tasted the strength of the coercive spells binding him, but did not even attempt to test them. Ancar had taken a small risk with one of his spells; he had substituted the glyph for “sound” for the one of “sight” in the only translation spell he knew. He hoped it would enable this strange creature to understand him, and be understood in return.

“Who are you?” he asked carefully.

The creature levered itself into a sitting position, but did not seem able to rise any farther. The man-beast stared at him for a long moment, while Ancar wondered if the spell had worked, or if he should repeat the question.

Then he saw the flicker of sly defiance in the eyes.

. . .
or perhaps a little coercive pressure
.

He exerted his will, just a trifle, and had the satisfaction of seeing his captive wince. The sensuous mouth opened.

“Falconsbane.” The voice was low, and Ancar had the feeling it could be pleasant, even seductive, if the owner chose. “Mornelithe . . . Falconsbane.”

Oh, how pretentious.
At least the creature understood him. “Where do you come from?”

A very pink tongue licked the generous lips; Ancar stared in fascination. This Falconsbane had tremendous powers of recovery! He had gone from comatose to speech in a much shorter time than Ancar had expected, even with the magical assistance of the girl's life-force. But the question seemed to confuse the creature.

“Never mind that,” Ancar amended. “What are you? Is that your natural form?”

“I am . . . changed,” Falconsbane said slowly: “I have changed myself.” The words were dragged out of him by the coercion spells, and Ancar clutched the arms of his chair in glee. This had tremendous potential, oh yes, indeed.

Ancar spent as much of the creature's strength as he dared, extracting more information. Some of it he did not understand, although he expected to at some point, when he had time to question Falconsbane in detail. What was a “Hawkbrother,” for instance? And what was a “Heartstone?”

But the initial information was enough. Falconsbane was an Adept; he understood the spell that Ancar had botched, although it was fortunate that he
had
botched it, and Ancar had no intention of revealing his inexperience. It was called a “Gate” and Falconsbane had somehow gotten caught in the backlash of a spell that had sent him into the void between Gates. Ancar had hauled him out of there, with his very wish for an Adept to come to his rescue! Falconsbane was not only an Adept, he was probably more powerful and knowledgeable than Ancar had dared to imagine. He had enemies—the “Hawkbrothers” he had mentioned, and “others from his past.” He had a vast holding of his own, and Ancar guessed from descriptions that it was to the south and west of Rethwellan, out in the lands purportedly still despoiled by wild magic. He sometimes referred to himself as a “Changechild,” and had said things that made Ancar think that what Falconsbane had done with his own body he could do with others. That was an exciting possibility; it meant that Ancar could infiltrate spies anywhere, simply by substituting his own changed men for people in positions of trust.

And Mornelithe Falconsbane was Ancar's entirely. He was, however, not in very good condition. Even with Ancar's sorcerous support, he had begun to waver during the last few questions. His strength was giving out, and he was still very disoriented. His answers had all come from memory; in order to have an effective servant, he would have to be able to think, and that would require a certain amount of physical recovery.

I am going to have to get this creature back on his feet—and hide him from Hulda. If I am very, very lucky,
she will have attributed the tremors in the fabric of mage-energy to her own passions. If I am not, I shall have to think of something else I could have done that would make the same ripples in the energies
.

He had no doubt that if Hulda got wind of Falconsbane's existence—at least up until the Changechild was capable of defending himself—the creature would either vanish or end up in Hulda's control. It was
much
easier to break coercion spells from outside than it was from within them, and Hulda was still stronger than Ancar.

He left Falconsbane slumped in the middle of the floor, and hastened down his staircase to summon more of his hand-picked servants. More members of his personal guard; men Hulda never saw, who masqueraded as stable hands and acted as spies among the lowest servants. On his instructions, they brought with them robes and a litter, bundling Falconsbane into it and covering him as if he were sick or injured. Their eyes showed not even a flicker of curiosity at the strange creature. Ancar smiled in satisfaction.

“Take him to the house of Lord Alistair,” Ancar told them. “Tell Lord Alistair that he is to take care of this man, and see to it that he receives the best possible care, under constant guard.” He pulled off his ring and handed it to the ranking officer. “Give him this; he will understand.”

“Lord” Alistair was one of Ancar's own mages, a man he had recruited himself, and on whom he had so many coercions he did not think that Alistair would even be able to use the guarderobe without permission.