The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [107]
19
Perchance to Scheme
Disturbed by the noise, bats fluttered up from their accustomed rocks and flapped and swooped away. It was cold in the cave, despite the pulsing flames rising from the ring of braziers. Those flames fed the edges of a huge, slowly turning disc of flame, a waist-high floating circle of inch-thick fire that blazed away merrily in the smoky darkness.
Robed and cowled figures moved barefoot around the ring, and more than one cowl was thrown back to reveal a fanged and scaled snake-head. More than one robe, too, bulged at the back, as if a nascent tail was struggling to grow. The priests chanted as they walked, an eerie, low-pitched rising and falling recitation that slowly quickened in pace until it became strident, insistent, rising-to a moment of silence, when all the Faithful of the Serpent spread their hands in unison… and the flames receded to the very edges of the disc, revealing a scene upon the rest of it.
That bright, floating image was of a little valley in the upland Vale mountains not far from the cave, an overgrown draw that narrowed swiftly as it climbed, to end at a little pool and the crumbling shell of a riven, abandoned stone tower.
A man was riding alone up to that keep, bareheaded and yet full-armored, his face as blank as the cloudless sky above him and his movements slow and stiff.
"Try to stay in your saddle, my Lord Lackwit," one of the Serpent-priests murmured mockingly. "It's only a little farther now."
The man on the horse lurched alarmingly once or twice as the horse picked its way between loose stones and up the last, steep slope.
"So now to meet this most mysterious of mages," the priest gloated to the priestess kneeling beside him, clad only in leisurely writhing snakes, "and enlist him in the growing Army of the Serpent-or destroy him, as he chooses."
"Oh, dear," the priestess said, standing up abruptly. "I was afraid that was your intent."
The priest whirled around to face her, face darkening into a scowl-and she thrust a hand forward and touched him.
His head burst in a scarlet shower that filled the air with thousands of droplets. A moment later, all of the other Serpent-clergy around the ring suffered the same fate.
The blood-drenched priestess waded unconcernedly through the sticky wake of the dull, wet explosions, murmured an incantation, and waved a hand. One of the headless corpses rose from its bloody tangle to hang rigid in midair, hands at its sides.
The priestess gestured, and the body moved in response, until it was positioned just so. Then the priestess smiled, nodded, and moved to the next corpse.
Obediently each body in turn rose into the air and turned shoulders downmost, to hang at an angle just clear of the disc, but positioned so as to drain their lifeblood into one of the braziers that fed the disc.
The upended body of the upperpriest, straight and with its arms at its sides, floated to the center of the ring of flames, and descended to touch the scene-which vanished in spreading whorls of blood.
Then the body of the priestess grew, straightened in a sickening shifting of bulging and reshaping flesh, and became Ingryl Ambelter.
"More than one hand reaching for Aglirta's crown can be brutal in its doings," he murmured, looking around at the slaughter. "Let this meeting proceed, children of the Serpent, without your scrutiny or control."
He smiled at the floating corpses, gave them a mocking salute, and then turned away from the ring of fire and stepped into nothingness, fading away in midstride and leaving the cavern to the dead of his making.
Dismounting a few steps from the empty archway that led into Kaerath's Keep, a hold so long ruined that no one now remembered who Kaerath had been, or when or what he'd ruled, the Lord Baron Berias Loushoond suddenly stopped, shivered, shook his head violently several times, and then staggered back and looked around,