Doom of the Darksword - Margaret Weis [13]
“Says he’s supposed to go to the forge. Orders.” The guard jerked his thumb at the house.
“Then take him,” said the other guard.
“But yesterday we was told to keep ’em locked up. And Blachloch’s not —”
“I said take him,” the guard growled with a meaningful look at his fellow.
“Come on, then,” the man said to Joram, giving him a vicious shove.
Saryon watched as Joram and the guard made their way through the streets. The guards’ nervousness had spread to the populace. The catalyst saw men passing by on their way to work cast dark glances at Blachloch’s henchmen, who glared at them with equal enmity. Women who should have been going to market or taking laundry to the stream stared out the windows of their houses. Children starting to go out to play were yanked back indoors. Did the Sorcerers know about Blachloch’s disappearance or were they simply reacting to the nervous state of the warlock’s henchmen? Saryon couldn’t guess and he dared not ask.
His brain numb with exhaustion and fear, the catalyst sank down in a rickety chair and leaned his head in his hand. A loud voice made him start, but it was only Simkin muttering about cards, apparently playing a game of tarok in his sleep.
“Last trick falls to the King of Swords….”
4
Waiting
Never had a morning passed more slowly for Saryon, who tracked it by the counts of his heartbeat, the drawing of his breath, the blinking of his gummed eyes. There had been a flurry of activity in the house across the street shortly after Joram-left, and the catalyst guessed that a contingent of Blachloch’s henchmen had decided to go off in search of their missing leader. Now, every second that dragged past, Saryon expected to hear the commotion that would tell him the warlock’s body had been discovered.
The catalyst could do nothing but wait. He actually envied Joram his work at the iron forge, where mind and body — tired though they might be — could find refuge in numbing labor. The sight of Simkin, sprawled luxuriously on his cot, made every muscle in the catalysts middle-aged body ache for rest, and he tried to seek refuge in sleep. Saryon lay down on Joram’s bed, tired enough that he hoped he would sink into oblivion swiftly. But the moment he began to slip over the edge of consciousness, he imagined he heard Vanya’s voice calling him, and he started awake, sweating and trembling.
“Vanya is going to contact me again tonight!” In his excitement over Joram’s return, Saryon had shoved that threat from his mind. Now he remembered, and the minutes that had been creeping past on leaden feet suddenly sprouted wings and took off.
Locked in the prison cell, light-headed from lack of food and sleep, Saryon’s thoughts centered on this forthcoming confrontation with the Bishop, going round and round, caught like a stick in a whirlpool.
“I will not surrender Joram!” he said to himself feverishly. That much was certain. As the catalyst envisioned this meeting with Vanya, however, he began to realize helplessly that he might have little choice in the matter. Unless Vanya had ways of talking with the dead as the ancient Necromancers were said to have possessed, the Bishop’s attempt to contact Blachloch this day must fail. Vanya would demand of Saryon where the warlock was, and Saryon knew he would not have the strength to hide the truth.
“Joram killed the warlock, murdered him with a weapon created of darkness, a weapon created with my help!” Saryon heard himself confess.
How is that possible? Bishop Vanya would question in disbelief. A seventeen-year-old youth and a middle-aged catalyst destroying one of the Duuk-tsarith? A powerful warlock who could drag the winds from the skies to crush a man like a dried, autumn leaf? A warlock who could inject a fiery poison into a man’s body, setting ablaze every nerve, reducing the victim to little more than a convulsing, writhing blob of flesh? This was the man you destroyed?
Sitting on the edge of the Joram’s cot, the catalyst nervously clasped and unclasped his hands. “He was going to kill Joram, Holiness!” Saryon murmured to