Black wizards - Douglas Niles [108]
Tristan suddenly felt himself falling, head first. The room whirled around him as he released the king, struggling to raise his hands and protect his head before he landed. He crashed into a hard stone surface and felt the wind explode from his lungs. For a fraction of a second, he had the feeling that he, and the king beside him, were lying on the ceiling of the room. Then the force of gravity returned to normal. He had been on the ceiling. Now he crashed to the floor where he lay, stunned. A crash, somewhere behind him, told him that Daryth, too, must have been ensnared in the spell.
"Guards!" squealed the king, squirming away from Tristan. The prince found his muscles paralyzed, and his head pounded. He had nearly been knocked unconscious by the strange fall.
"Korass, Sithtu -" the wizard began, pulling more items from his robe.
"No!" cried the king, somehow scrambling to his feet and stepping in front of the wizard. "Do not kill him… yet."
Tristan could not see the wizard's face beneath his cowled hood, but the sudden tension in the mage's body signaled his annoyance with the king's order. Nonetheless, his movements relaxed.
"Very well," he said quietly. The smooth voice, Tristan thought, sounded incongruous coming from one of such arcane power.
The door burst open and a dozen guards flew into the room. "Seize them!" ordered the king, and the groggy pair of trespassers were swiftly clasped by strong hands.
"I will interrogate them myself!" he barked. "Take them to the dungeon!"
The iron door slammed shut, leaving Tristan alone in the darkness of his cell. Daryth had been taken somewhere else – the vast dungeon seemed to have no shortage of suitable enclosures.
Angrily, the prince pulled against the chains that secured his wrists and ankles to the hard stone wall. They clanked taut with his movements, but gave no further. Reaching awkwardly behind him, he felt the mounts of each of the chains. They were solidly embedded in hard, dry mortar.
His eyes adjusted to the gloom of the small cell. As in Llewellyn, a feeling of terrible suffocation threatened to choke him. This time, the feeling was intensified by darkness, and the fact that he was chained to the wall, alone in a cell.
He shouted at the darkness. Furiously, he struggled with the chains, trying to tear them from the walls with brute strength. All he gained for his struggles were chafed wrists and strained muscles.
He thought of Robyn, wishing there were some way she could know of his plight. But then he imagined her young druidic powers facing the magic of the king's wizard – a man who had the power to reverse gravity itself! Robyn, he knew, would face the wizard, unflinching in her courage and her faith. And she would be doomed by his power to a horrible death.
Only the fortuitous intervention of the High King, he felt, had saved Daryth and him. Why had the king wanted him to remain alive, after dogging their trail with assassins and sorcery? Certainly whoever had sabotaged the Lucky Duckling had not wanted them to remain alive for questioning. Nor had the assassin Razfallow with his band of killers.
And what had the wizard said when he suddenly appeared in the king's dressing room? "Perhaps it is me you seek," or words to that effect. Was his quarrel indeed with the king's wizard, and not the High King himself?
"Tristan," came the soft, musical voice.
"Huh?" he grunted stupidly, opening his eyes and raising his throbbing head. A white figure stood before him, glowing with a brilliance that hurt his eyes. He blinked several times, and saw her blond hair spilling across a silver breastplate. His heart leaped as he recognized his visitor.
"My queen!" he croaked. "Thank the goddess you have come! Please, unfetter me!"
Queen Allisynn's eyes were brighter than he had ever seen them. She was here in the cell with him. He longed to reach out and touch her, but she came no closer. The light surrounded her body, and caused her hair to glow like fire. He looked full upon her face and felt the pain in his skull melt away under