Wrath Of The Medusa (Book 2) (51 page)

It was quiet in the workroom.  Haselrig was lost in seeming contemplation of one ancient tome, but Udecht knew it for a charade.  The antiquary had not turned a page in an hour or more. 

The B
ishop felt strangely calm, more at ease than he had on any day since the fall of Sturmcairn, long tortured months ago.  The citadel had lost its frosty coating.  The orcs and outlanders still bustled about the corridors in frantic activity, but without the sense of headless panic which had characterised the previous night. While the chilling intensity of Maelgrum’s thwarted fury may have dissipated, Udecht did not doubt that there was a reckoning yet to be had.  

Haselrig sighed and reached for the flask on the table.  He raised it to his mouth, tipping it as far as it would go, shaking it to loosen whatever drops of golden oblivion still clung to its surface, and then set it down again in some disappointment.

“You should not drink too much, Haselrig,” Udecht admonished him.  “You will need your wits about you.”

“Wits!”  Haselrig tried to push the book off the table, but misjudged the move, the sweep of his arm only crumpling and tear
ing the open pages.  “When the Master is finished with me, I’ll have neither wits nor a body to use them.  I have failed him.  What can have gone wrong?”

The door was flung open again, and Rondol stood before them.  The tall sorcerer bristled with the restoration of his arrogant self-assurance.  The frostbitten fear of the previous night had gone, and
the broad grin which lit the man’s face told of a task he was about to enjoy.  At the sorcerer’s side stood two of the burliest outlanders in Maelgrum’s service, bearing as many weapons as scars.

Haselrig stumbled backwards, hand to
mouth, mumbling desperately to himself.

Udecht stood straight.

Rondol’s finger shot out, pointing at Udecht.  “You priest, come with us.  The Master would have words with you.”

Udecht did not obey at first. H
e turned instead to the antiquary.  “Tell my daughter I am sorry and I loved her, from afar maybe, but always.”

Haselrig blinked, puzzlement and fear chasing each other across his features.  “Why are you telling me this, Udecht?”

“Who else would I tell?”

Then the outlanders seized Udecht’s arms, pinning them behind him and frogmarching him from the room.  He twisted in their grasp to look over his shoulder at the mystified antiquary.  “Remember, Haselrig, Remember,” he called.  But then he was through the door and Rondol had pulled it closed and Haselrig was gone from his sight.

The refreshment of Chirard’s powers
, at the expense of the felled harpies, had injected extra pace to their journey.  The fortress of Listcairn had just passed beneath them and the Palacintas loomed larger than ever ahead of them.  In a few moments more they would be over the land of Medyrsalve and safety. Well safety provided they could get on the ground.  The conundrum vexed Niarmit.  They would need Chirard’s co-operation to land, but the Kinslayer was unlikely to give it, knowing that her first act once in a place of safety would be to remove the Helm and escape from both its Domain and his clutches.  However, the only counter threat she had to ensure his compliance was one of self-destruction by removing the Helm while far from the ground.

If she could perhaps steer him towards one of the peaks of the Palacintas, then she might make the fall a smaller one.  The last harpy had survived it
s final tumble, though not the Kinslayer’s spell of immolation. 

Though Chirard had control of her body, she was not sure which muscles he used to maintain or direct their flight.  She had been observing carefully, sensing the slight flexing of arm or leg  which had accompanied each change of speed or direction.  She tried now, a little nudge of assertion over a body
which she had allowed Chirard to control.  They veered slightly to the right. Could she change the direction without Chirard realising it?

“What are you doing, Thren-spawn bitch?”

Apparently not.

“There will be no tri
ckery here, scion of a traitor, of a long line of traitors,” Chirard spat and they shot higher upwards, the detail in the ground disappearing from view. She could feel the cold intensifying at the greater altitude.  Kaylan on her back would have no better protection than she. “This stalemate will soon come to an end bitch and you will have to choose between death and my demands.”

“Your demands,
Kinslayer?”  She tried a lighter tone.  “And what would they be?”

“I have a plan
, bitch. I have not been idle these last hours, as you seem to have been.  Would you like to hear it?”

Niarmit
shrugged on the gilded throne, trying to hide her own awareness of her parlous position.  She had to get back to Laviserve and to do so urgently.  She had been such a fool, leaving those she loved in such peril, but here she was. Her body was a thousand yards up in the air, her spirit entirely in the hands of the maddest of her ancestors.

And then, in the midst of her anguish, her heart exploded. 

Or at least it felt that way.  A burst of fire against her chest, a flaring heat so intense it stole her breath and set her nerves aflame.  She clutched at the spot.  The ankh, the ankh was hot within her hands.

Without realising it she had taken her spirit hands from
the Helm and was clutching her avatar’s chest, panting, oblivious to anything but the throbbing fire in the gem of the ankh, not daring to think what it might mean.

She barely noticed that Chirard had risen from his throne, a thin smile upon his lips.  There was a rushing of wind in her ears, the scream of Kaylan on her back.  They were falling.  Chirard had
broken the link to her body which his seat on the plain stone throne sustained. The power of flight was gone.  But he was approaching her on the gilded seat, intent on seizing again a much more direct control.

And all she could do was gasp at the searing heat against her skin.

Giseanne
handed the baby Andros back to the nursemaid and turned to face the Deaconess. 

Rhodra looked tired.  The halting limp had gone.  One had to look closely now to see any trace of the weakness which had afflicted her left side.  The hair, while still worn uncommonly short for a priestess, had grown enough length to be fashioned into a seemly and more even style.  Her figure too was filling out to once again approach the fuller proportions to which her vestments had been cut.  But still she looked tired, deep shadows beneath her eyes.

“And Mistress Elise,” Giseanne said.  “What of her?”

“Your husband is most insistent about the
Torpens Mentis juice, my Lady. He wants her mind too numbed for spell weaving. Bishop Sorenson and I have had sole charge of ensuring she is quite properly dosed and daily.”

Giseanne nodded, thin lipped.
“And how has she subjected to this indignity?”

“She does protest, my Lady, but with the guards in attendance there i
s little she can do.  Her physical injuries are healed, but she faces a long incarceration before there is going to be an opportunity to send her into exile. Indeed, if ever.”

“And she has had no opportunity to see the
Princess?”

Rhodra shook her head.  “The guards have been most particular on that point.  It was your husband’s clearest instruction.”

Giseanne frowned.  “Rugan is so anxious to protect me from harm, I do believe love can quite blind a man to what stands before his very eyes.”

“Yes, my L
ady.”

The Lady Regent’s eyes suddenly widened in shock and she raised her hand before her face, gazing at the great sapphire embedded in her ring.  She wafted her over hand over it, not touching it, eyes half closing and then she opened them again.  “No!” she cried.

“My Lady?” Rhodra reached out a hand to support Giseanne as the Lady Regent slumped into a nursing chair.

“No,” Giseanne repeated.  “Not little Udecht!”

In the
Domain of the Helm, Niarmit’s spirit howled, finding an echo in the material plane as Kaylan and she both screamed aloud, their bodies plummeting with dizzying speed towards the rocky foothills of the Palacintas.

As they fell the audience chamber in the
Domain of the Helm remained rock steady and Chirard had his foot on the first step of dais reaching out two handed to seize the Helm from Niarmit’s head.

“Your Majesties!” a thin voice called with the tremor of one unused to issuing commands. 

Chirard was swayed for a moment, his face turned to the Steward who had entered by the far passage.  Niarmit, half blind with pain, saw little of what followed.  A figure barrelling through the near passage, knocking down the robed Kinslayer.  Then, as Chirard’s head turned, the figure delivered a fearsome punch that wrought a double crack of fist on chin and head on stone step and the Kinslayer lolled insensible on the floor.

“Never met a mage yet, as didn’t have a glass jaw,” King Gregor said rising to his feet and shaking his hand.

“Your Majesties,” Santos pleaded.  “We have not much time, his other Majesty will not sleep for long.”

“Falling,” Niarmit gasped at last. “We’re falling.”

Another man, slightly built and dark haired stepped past Santos and slipped into one of the vacant thrones.  “Give me your hands, girl!” he commanded in a voice that reminded her of the dead servant Fenwell.

Niarmit felt him take command of her body, and she let him.  There was nothing else she could do as she and Kaylan spiralled headfirst earthwards, the thief clinging to her back now, the ground rushing up towards them for a terminal embrace.

Her fingers moved in a delicate gesture, its intricacies hampered by the rushing wind of their fall, and then they were slowing.  A lurch of her stomach told of the fierce deceleration and suddenly their positions were reversed as Kaylan shot past her, pulling her body round, his scrambling fingers sliding down her waist and legs, until he was clinging two handed to her ankles.  She looked down past him to the snow covered rocks.  She had lost all sense of speed, they seemed to be crawling down now, yet still the distance between them and the ground was being eaten up at an alarming rate.

She let her concentration shift back to the
Domain of the Helm.  The newcomer was still sitting on his chosen throne, lips compressed into a thin pale line, his brow sweat speckled with concentration in a visage that did not bring confidence all was going as it needed to.

To the left Gregor was wrapping thick
rough-hewn ropes around the unconscious form of Chirard, while Santos wailed, “Your Majesty, those will not hold his other Majesty.  When he awakes he will just dispel them.”

“It took
me ages to imagine these bloody ropes,” Gregor swore.  “We’ll just have to make sure the bastard doesn’t wake up!”  He gave the slumbering wizard another crunching haymaker.

“How deep do you think that snow is?”  The newcomer asked, through gritted teeth.
Niarmit placed his accent, the twang of the Eastern lands.

She let her gaze
refocus in the material world where she and Kaylan were falling in a human daisy chain to Earth.  Slowed as they had been, the cliffs were flying past at quite a rate and beneath her feet she could see the patch of snow between bare rocks that the newcomer was aiming for.  Would it be deep, or would it be an inch thick crust of whiteness on a block of granite beneath?

“Get ready to roll, Kaylan,” she shouted down at the thief clinging to her ankles.

It was more than an inch, but less than they needed.  Kaylan crashed through the snow first, knees buckling as he hit the rock beneath, then he crumpled with the burden of Niarmit’s weight landing atop him.  She felt the winding violence of the forces that arrested her motion, and knew the same magnitude of bludgeoning blows would have been felt by the thief crushed beneath her.

She rolled off him, wheezing for breath.  The drift was little more than three feet deep, enough to seriously hinder movement across ground but not quite sufficient to cushion a fall from so precipitous a height.  

“Kaylan!” she called.

The thief groaned in reply.  Groaning was good.  Dead men don’t groan.  “My leg, my Lady. I think it is broken, I think they both are.”

“Oh shit!”

Niarmit looked across the frozen landscape.  They had landed on the lower slopes of the Palacintas, a little south of the Eastway.
On the far side of the river Saeth, the towers of Listcairn stretched skywards.  Dotted across the plain inbetween were the dispersed tents of the diverse tribes of orcs in Maelgrum’s service.  She squinted against the blinding whiteness of the snow and saw some movement in the nearest tents, heard the howl of a wolf.

“Oh crap!”

She shifted her focus to the Domain of the Helm, where her father’s new found companion was rising from his throne.  “You are well, I see,” he said.  “The spell of feather falling is one all wearers of the Helm should know.  Falling from a great height is one of the few dangers that its dweomer does not protect you from.”  Again that Eastern twang.

“
Thank you, and forgive my impertinence but I have need of further succour, your Majesty,” she bowed her head to a man she knew could only be one of her royal forebears, despite his unprepossessing appearance.

The slight man waved her courtesy aside.  “No need for such formality, Niarmit.  My name is Thren, Thren the seventh, if ever you should need to make a distinction between those who bear the name.”

“Then you are my?”  She wrinkled her forehead as she tried to retrace the family trees she had seen in the history books which her tutor had imposed on her.

“Don’t try to work it out, girl,” Gregor growled from the floor, where he sat upon Chirard’s frame.  “It would take a genealogist several hours to unravel the connection, hours we don’t have.  You must leave this place before this bastard comes r
ound.”  He gave the unconscious Kinslayer another cracking blow.

“Your father is right,” Thren said more mildly.  “We were fortunate.  Santos summoned us and the concentration Chirard had on you and his
task, meant we could for once, just once, surprise him.  But we, who arrived in this place after him, will never have the power to subdue him entirely.  You must leave.”

“But what of you, where will you go?”

“There are safe places in this realm, recesses that Chirard’s power cannot reach,” her ancestor assured her.

“Take Santos with you
,” she said.

“My place is here,” the servant insi
sted.  “I must serve all their Majesties, and accept punishment whenever and wherever I fail them.”

“Don’t be an arse
, Santos,” Gregor muttered.  “Come with us.”

Suddenly Chirard erupted from the floor with a cry of rage.  Niarmit saw he had been feigning the last few moments of unconsciousness, recovering his strength and
finding his moment and now the Kinslayer struck. Gregor was flung awkwardly across one of the stone thrones.  Santos wailed and ran.  Thren summoned a gleaming disc of multi-coloured light which splintered as Chirard bombarded it with a stream of glowing missiles from his finger-tips.

“Flee, girl,” Gregor cried out.

In that instant, Chirard saw the danger, he turned and lunged towards Niarmit reaching for the Helm.  In that instant, Niarmit lifted it from her head and she was back entirely body and soul in the material world, next to a shivering Kaylan, assailed not just by cold but by the shock of jarred and broken bones.

There were black specks moving at the nearest orc encampment.  She glanced round at the mountainside looming behind her.  Steep slopes and sheer cliffs, hard enough to climb alone and on foot, still less with an injured companion and baying wolves at your heels.

“Come on Kaylan,” she urged.  “We’ve got to move.” She pulled the holy crescent from around her neck.  She was tired and cold, and broken limbs took so much healing.

Then she saw it and blinked in surprise.  She had seen its like once before.  A disembodied eyeball hovering inches above the snow about six foot away.  It looked at her with a steady stare.  Then it moved closer, rising up to stare into her face.  She caught it in her hand.  There was a tug as it tried to move, but she held it close and called into its unblinking orb.  “Send someone, Thom, send someone.  Kaylan is here.  He is hurt. The orcs are coming.”   She tried to speak slowly, to emphasis her words through the shape of her mouth.  She knew he could not hear her, but hoped he would sense her urgency.

“Look my Lady,” Kaylan murmured, pointing a trembling finger. “Look!”

She followed his gaze to an outcrop of rock half a mile further North and East. The crag stuck out boldly from the surrounding mountains and atop it there blazed a bright lilac light, a light that moved and swung down the mountainside.

“Tordil,” she wept.