Eric Flint - This Rough Magic

Emeric gave a little crow of laughter. "I want those letters. We shall have to see to a way of getting them into the captain-general's hands. He may wish to change sides." He rubbed his hands gleefully. "Any news out of Constantinople?"

"The Golden Horn enclave still holds out. Vessels are not expected back from Trebizond yet, Your Majesty. The Greek emperor is nonetheless pleased with some of the prizes he has taken from the ships sailing from Acre."

The king muttered something about Emperor Alexius. It could have been "Useless ass." Then he turned to the Croats and Magyar. "And the peasants? Are they getting back to the land? I want yields as well as loot."

The Croat nodded. "I had to hang a few men to get the message home. But there are more of them working their fields."

The Magyar captain cleared his throat. "There are some of the Corfiote nobility we've caught-what the Venetians call the 'Libri d'Oro.' Most of them are inside the Citadel, but some were still loose in the countryside. They're not worth ransom, but I thought we might make them into collaborators, Your Majesty. They can find and drive the peasants for us."

The king nodded. "An excellent idea. See to it."

"Your Majesty… there are several towns, too. Fortified ones in the north. We have them under watch but they're not besieged yet. When the Citadel falls, of course, they will be easy to take. But in the meanwhile…"

"Offer them terms. Once we're inside the walls, we can change our minds, can't we?"

All the officers standing about laughed heartily. They knew Emeric well enough to know the king admired his own sense of humor-and frowned on those who didn't.

Emeric had chosen a bare hilltop overlooking the Citadel from the southeast for the ritual he had to enact in strict accordance to the instruction from Countess Elizabeth. Initially, he had been pleased at extracting help from her; now, in retrospect, he was no longer as pleased as he had been.

Elizabeth Bartholdy had a way of bringing the kings of Hungary under her control. Emeric had watched the effect on his own father, over the years. By the time his father died, he had been no more than a shadow of the man Emeric remembered as a boy.

He wondered just how many strings were attached to this particular "gift." Elizabeth never did anything that was not to her advantage. And, yes, he made use of the darker powers himself, but not to the extent that she did. Nor did he meddle with the powers that she dared to.

But…

He had the damned thing, after all, so he might as well make use of it.

He went out to his picked site in a grim state of mind. He ensured that his men would cooperate by stationing guards around a perimeter that was far enough away that no one would be able to see what he was doing except for his special assistants. Those assistants had been provided for him by Elizabeth, also. The ritual that needed to be enacted here could not be done by one person alone.

The weather had decided to cooperate, at least. Storm clouds gathered and built around Pantocrator. The wind whipped angry flurries of dust from where the assistants had been assiduously clearing every scrap of living matter, even lichen and tiny rock plants, until there was nothing but sterile, barren rock. Another was sharpening the bronze knife.

The patterns and sigils Emeric would do himself; he trusted such things to no assistant, even ones trained by Bartholdy. The fact that he kept such iron control over important matters, delegating them to no one else, was one of the things he thought his great-great-aunt respected about him. The brushes and pens for that work he kept in a special case-an ancient thing she'd given him many years before. It was made of hide and bone. The hide was curiously dark and iridescent, the bone… jet black. Neither part came from any earthly creature, and neither did the fangs, which served as a sort of semi-living lock and guardian. They opened only on certain words, treacherously closing on the hand if a mere intonation were wrong.

Of course, the king needed a suitable supply of ink. That was what the knife was being sharpened for. These rituals were designed to constrain the nonhuman and to protect him from it. They had to affect the homunculus he was about to release. Elizabeth had supplied the nonhuman blood from her captive stock. And Emeric and his assistants would have to give of their own to protect themselves.

So, when the knife had been honed to an edge that would wound the wind, each of them carefully slashed his forearm in turn, beginning with Emeric. Each of them funneled the scarlet blood that ran from the slash into the bottle that Elizabeth had prepared, while Emeric recited the guttural phrases Elizabeth had provided him. The sky darkened and the wind whirled around the hilltop, shrilling in their ears. There were two bottles now, one of red "ink," and one of black. Taking the first brush, Emeric began to paint the body and face of his first assistant with an intricate interweaving of sigils and symbols. The first went to build a fire in the center of the cleared place-only the fuel was bone, human and unhuman. When he was done with the last of them, and only then, did his most trusted assistant take the brush and complete the job on his master, Emeric. Then Emeric took up the knife and cut the first of thirteen protective circles into the bare earth.

At length, when the summer storm had formed into a huge dark tumbling mass, with Pantocrator shrouded in rain and distant thunder growling and cracking closer, they were ready. Stripped to the waist and painted-only their eyes showing in the masks of lines of alternating black and red-the nine began their chanting. The bone-fire was lit, the fungus that Emeric had piled atop it burning with a greenish flame.

Lightning lashed the earth, as if it was trying to strike them, but inside their protective circles it could not touch them. The assistants were made of stern stuff; though the very earth outside their hilltop smoked with the strikes, and the thunder threatened to shatter their eardrums, they did not even falter for a moment in their chanting.

Then, when the winds began to roar and the flames were near horizontal and the first heavy drops were splashing down onto the sun-dried earth, Emeric picked up the glass jar and threw the container into the flames. By the time the jar left his hands, the creature inside was fully aroused. The King of Hungary could sense the malevolent rage emanating from it.

The jar shattered. The liquid ran out of the fire in little coruscating, hissing rivulets.

The earth shook, angrily. If Emeric and his assistants had not been warned of the effect and braced for it, they would have been knocked to the ground.

And then the screaming began.

The scream seemed to go on and on; it pierced the very brain. It was full of rage, and pain. And for one, terrible moment, even Emeric wondered if he had let something loose that should never have seen the light of day.

The mighty cloud above them was lit with sheet lightnings. And the rain, advancing moments before, slacked off. The scream thinned and faded, receding into the distance, leaving a strange taste in the back of the mouth, and somehow, in the mind.

Well. Whatever had been turned loose was no longer his problem.

Emeric stood triumphant, smiling toothily in the flickering firelight. The truth be told, high magics were something he followed by rote. He enjoyed the powers conferred on him, the use of which required no effort on his part, but he was always nervous about these tasks.

Suddenly the earth itself trembled. He was flung from his feet. The rock beneath the fire burst explosively, scattering flames and ash over them. The ground shook beneath them, again and again.

The ground shook like a dog, flea-bitten. "What was that?" Svanhild clung to Erik. First the storm and now this! She wished for Cahokia.