The Vacant Throne - Ed Greenwood [80]
Glaring at the boulder, he snarled in fresh fury, "Oh, no! Barons trust none, and throw away wizards in droves before it's time to empty their next goblet! And always-always-they must have great armored dolts standing around to menace serving wenches and their fathers, the old farmers… oh, yes, and every last passing wizard, too! Mustn't let men of real learning and skill forget their place! So it's lumbering stoneheads in my way, jostling past every few breaths with their sneers and their cold looks, hefting their swords meaningfully as they scratch themselves and belch and cover me with their stink and their foul breath and their flatulent, brutish arrogance! Garrrrghhh!"
The furious wizard dashed the skull against the nearest rock, snarled at the bone shards that burst up into his face as it disintegrated, and shook the stump that should have been his right hand at the sun.
Then he fell silent, breathing heavily, and glared around at the trees falling away down the hillside below him. Birds mewed and shrieked farther along the cliff, but there came no shout or footfall in the wake of his outburst. He was alone in the wilds of Aglirta, high in the rising hills above what had once been the barony of Blackgult, trembling in the weak aftermath of his fury.
So rarely in their lives did wizards dare to lose their tempers so. To let control slip, with every last stableboy fearing and hating you, and leave yourself so unguarded… it had been years since the Master of Bats had let rage take such firm hold of him. Now, shuddering at his folly and in winded exhaustion, he stared at the raw end of his right arm and gathered his will, letting resolve grow slowly cold and hard within him.
He raised his stump to the sun once more, and with slow, deliberate care pronounced words over it. His will was as iron, or harder-as durable as the cold, hardened flows of stone that surround smoking mountains. Huldaerus would prevail. His will had always carried him, from sullen boyhood to mastery of magic, through firespells and treachery in plenty, to here.
Here and one more defeat. Not his, the blame for this one-and that was good, for it was a defeat born of utter stupidity.
Careless, arrogant stupidity. About the only good side of it all was that the wellhouse walls had hidden his fall from the villagers. Letting the common clods know just how quickly and easily a mage could be struck down-with a pitchfork, say, or even a hurled log from the fire-would not have been a wise thing.
Magic rose in his throat as the wizard Huldaerus spoke the last words of the incantation, surging up warm and clear, pushing aside the sick feeling and wavering resolve that the pain had brought. The spell reached out…
… And suddenly the Master of Bats had a skull adorning the ruin of his arm once more. It was fresh and still slick with blood, a little larger than the one he'd just shattered, and there was nothing about it to tell the eye that this was not the discarded brain-bones of a commoner nor yet a wizard-but was instead the spell-restored last leaving of Baron Faerod Silvertree.
Huldaerus snarled fresh curses and rebukes at it in a quieter, almost weary voice, as he reached out with his good hand and tugged the boulder open a little more. The skull, as he'd expected, replied but little.
A crack appeared as he strained, a revealed space behind the pivoting stone that grew wider as the wizard set his shoulder against the stone and shoved, clenching his teeth to keep from groaning aloud in pain.
The crossed branches within were sagging a little, and so rotten they crumbled at his touch, but they'd been just as he'd left them; nothing larger than, say, a fox had passed this way. Not for the first time, the Master of Bats gave thanks for two things: that there were no mines in the rising mountains above Blackgult, and that he'd been the one to find this old