Rick Cook - Wizard’s Bane

"Will we be safe here?" Wiz asked as the trail flattened out in the valley and he found he had breath for more than walking.

"In daylight nothing dare come close," Moira told him. "Anything magic here would be immediately known to the Watchers. There are non-magic agents, of course, human and such, but…" she shrugged. "We are safe here as anywhere."

"Thank God!" Wiz said fervently.

Moira frowned. "Do not be so free with names of power."

"I’m sorry," Wiz said contritely.

The forest enclosed them until they were almost on top of the castle. The trees were as huge and hoary as anywhere in the Wild Wood, but they didn’t seem as threatening here.

"It feels friendly," Wiz said wonderingly, aware for the first time how oppressive the Wild Wood had been at its most benign.

"It is friendlier," Moira agreed. "The forest folk hereabouts are kindly disposed toward the inhabitants of Heart’s Ease. They watch over the place and those who live there." She shifted her pack with a swell and jiggle in her blouse that made Wiz’s heart catch. "Besides, this is a quiet zone. There is almost no magic here, for good or ill."

Atros returned to his sleeping chamber fuming. It had been a long, frustrating evening. Damn those elves and their impudence! They had spirited his quarry out from his very grasp, humiliated him in front of the entire League and ruined his plans. His impromptu army disintegrated once they knew the elf duke guested the two they sought.

So they had been making for the elf hill after all, the wizard thought as he stripped off his bearskin cloak by the light of a single lamp glowing magically in one corner. He did not understand it and he was too tired to really think upon it. Perhaps the one who had been Summoned was some strange kind of elf and not a man at all? True, Toth-Set-Ra’s scrying demon had called the Summoned a man, but demons could be wrong.

Too many possibilities, he thought as he pulled his silken tunic over his head. For now sleep and in the morning . . . He moved toward the great canopied bed and then stopped. There was something, or someone, making an untidy lump under the sheets. He stepped back cautiously and possessed himself of his staff. He muttered a protective spell and then moved to the bed again. Reaching out with his staff, he flipped back the fine woolen coverlet and recoiled at what lay beneath.

There on the gore-clotted sheets was a thing which had once been a man. His back was broken, his ribs were smashed, his arms and legs dislocated and cruelly contorted, and his head lay at an impossible angle. But worse, he had no skin. He had been so expertly flayed that even his nose remained in place. His pallid eyeballs stared up at the ceiling and his ivory white teeth seemed to smile out of the mass of bloody tissue that had been a face.

Even in its present state, Atros had no difficulty identifying the body as Kar-Sher, Keeper of the Sea of Scrying.

"Do you like my little present, Atros?" hissed a familiar, hateful voice. The dark-haired giant started and looked around. In the shadows behind the feebly glowing lamp a face took shape. The face of Toth-Set-Ra.

"I told one I know what he was called," the wizard’s voice went on, soft and full of menace. "Not his true name, Atros, just what he was called. And you see the result."

The old wizard cackled. "Oh, I did take his skin afterwards. I needed it, you see. It is amazing what you can do with the skin of a wizard, even a wizard who set himself so much above his station. A wizard who was such an inexpert plotter as this one."

Atros looked around wildly, swinging his staff this way and that to try to ward off an attack.

"I tell you again Atros, the League is mine!" The skull-face image said. "You, all of you, exist to serve me. And serve me you shall—one way or the other. Meditate upon that, Atros. Meditate upon it while you sleep."

The image winked out, leaving Atros alone in the chamber cold and shaking. Did the old crow mean to spare his life? Or was this just some torture designed to shake his will before he too was killed?

Atros spent the rest of the night in sleepless suspense and confusion. Plots to replace Toth-Set-Ra were very far from his mind.

A woman waited to greet them at the stockade gate. She was beautiful, tall and stately as a ship under sail. She was not young, yet not as old as her long white hair proclaimed. As Wiz got closer he saw that the lines around her eyes and mouth were those of one who had lived hard, not long.

She wore a long gown of midnight blue velvet, caught with a silver cord at her waist. The dagged sleeves of her dress fitted her upper arms tightly and swept halfway to the ground at her wrists.

Her right hand rested on the shoulder of a bent, manlike creature with a long sharp nose and huge hairy ears. He was as ugly as she was beautiful, but the contrast was not incongruous.

"Merry met and well come," she said in a voice like ringing silver. "I am Shiara, the mistress of this place, and Heart’s Ease is your home for as long as you care to stay."

"Thank you, Lady," said Moira, curtseying. Wiz hastened to bow.

"Not ’Lady,’ " the woman told her. "Just plain Shiara."

"Not plain either," said Wiz, moved by her beauty.

Shiara smiled but did not look in his direction. She’s blind!, he realized.

"Your companion is gallant," Shiara said to Moira.

"He has his moments," Moira sniffed.

"You are called Sparrow, are you not?"

"Yes, Lady. Ah, yes Shiara."

"Well, merry met at Heart’s Ease, Sparrow," the lady said. "You must both be tired. Ugo will show you to your rooms."

The ugly little creature sniffed and shuffled through the stockade gate without a backwards glance.

The ground within covered perhaps two acres. There were six or eight small buildings, huts and storehouses and a large garden laid out behind. Attached to the base of the stone tower was a large building, also of peeled logs, roofed with shingles and chinked with moss.

"Is she a wizardess?" Wiz whispered to Moira as they came up the flagstone walkway.

"She was of the Mighty," Moira said and motioned him to silence.

Ugo led them into the building and Wiz saw it was a single large room, a great hall with a huge smoke-blackened fireplace in one side and a table big enough to seat twenty people down the center. In spite of its rude exterior, the hall was richly furnished with heavy velvet drapes on the walls and massively carved furniture placed carefully about. The whole effect reminded Wiz of a picture he had seen once of J.P. Morgan’s hunting lodge.

Ugo took them down the hall without pausing and through a low stone door into the tower proper. There was a narrow stair twisting off to the right and climbing so steeply Wiz was afraid he would lose his balance. At the second floor landing Ugo opened a door for Moira and bowed her through. Wiz started to follow but Ugo blocked him with a rough hairy arm.

"Lady’s room," he said gruffly. "Come." He led Wiz on up the stairs to the very top of the tower.

"Your room," Ugo grumbled as he opened the door.

The room was small and simply furnished with a narrow rope bed, a table and single chair. But there was a fire laid in the fireplace and a basin and pitcher of steaming water sat on the table. The bed was covered with a bright counterpane and a snow-white towel lay beside the basin. Against one wall, next to the fireplace, stood a full-length mirror.

"Dinner at sun’s setting," the goblin told him. "Do not be late."

Dinner was simple but savory. Most of the dishes were vegetables and tubers from the castle garden, with wild mushrooms from the forest and forest fruits for dessert. There was very little meat, which suited Wiz.