The Kingless Land - Ed Greenwood [112]
Paling, Markoun opened his mouth and then shut it again and shook his head.
The baron nodded slowly. "Better," he snapped. "Yet I think it's time for a little bald reminder. Relics belonging to all three of my most loyal mages-and vials of blood, recall you?-lie hidden around this castle in such profusion that I enjoy complete control over Ingryl, Klamantle, and Markoun. If a relic and so much as a drop of that blood touch each other, the mage from whom both were derived will forthwith experience a long, slow doom. A death of howling, convulsing agony, if my memory of another foolish wizard still serves me. Now get to work."
The eye watching from the carving might have judged Klamantle and Markoun both chastened and fearful as they hastened to their worktables-but if that eye had chanced to intercept either of the glances those mages threw in the direction of Spellmaster Ingryl, the judgment might well have been altered, to "murderous."
Sarasper. The voice in his head was back.
The healer drew in a deep breath. Keeping watch here in the deep woods was largely a matter of still wakefulness spent listening to chirruping insects-or rather, to sudden silences in their songs. Sarasper, have you forgotten me?"
The sharply listening singing in his head built quickly into impatience. No, Old Oak, the healer replied.
Well and good, for there is a task.
Sarasper smiled into the night. Of course.
Less mockery, mortal, and more awe would become thee rather better.
The healer spread empty hands. I am what I am. How can I serve thee?
The sorceress Embra Silvertree lies under a curse. Remove it.
Without guidance, Sarasper thought, I cannot even begin.
A beginning is all you can hope to accomplish this night. Hear me and heed.
Old Oak, command me, Sarasper responded, and then did with his hands and his energy what the pictures and whispers in his mind showed him.
Hours passed as he labored, sweat running down his face like a spring racing over rocks. Craer and then Hawkril in turn stood watch, while still the old healer sat with his fingertips hovering over Embra's brow. By unspoken agreement, they never wakened the sorceress to take her turn on watch.
It seemed to Sarasper that destroying the curse, once they found the bright threads of enchantment in the dreaming mind beneath his fingers, should be a simple thing… but the voice in his mind guided him into shifting this thread and altering that one, in an endless and ever-more-complex web of rootings and twistings. Near dawn, with Hawkril listening intently to something that prowled nearby but never actually approached their hollow, the exhausted healer could not help but think that all of this tinkering with the curse was doing little more than hiding it from the one who'd cast it, burying it more deeply in Embra's mind… and making it answer a new and different master.
And what need would Old Oak have of a curse that made one human sorceress pay with a shred of her life for every spell she worked?
As if that thought had been a trigger, a scene unfolded in Sarasper's mind, of a door in a curving, crumbling stone wall. It faded into another scene, a domed circular building, long disused and partially overgrown with clinging vines, its walls matching those of the first scene. The library of the wizard Ehrluth. Seek within for the Stone.
And then the scene seemed to recede down a long, dark tunnel, and Sarasper was falling away from it, down, down into black and waiting oblivion…
"Longfingers," some men called him. "Little Lord Spider" he was to others; "that rat" he'd been to a few. But never before this night, Craer Delnbone reflected, as the strange restless, swelling feeling that had awakened him swept over him like a warm breeze, sweeping his dark armor of mockery aside for a while, had he been called "savior."
And by a sorceress of noble blood at that, a woman of power and such beauty that gazing on her left his mouth dry, even when she was shorn of garments, with her hair atangle and her face pinched with pain. Ahem; that'd be