Terry Brooks - Witch Wraith

Domination over not only the Federation but the remainder of the Four Lands, as well.

It was an end toward which she had been working long before she became Prime Minister of the Federation, or even before she knew for certain how she would achieve what she was trying to accomplish. Like most members of the Orle family—or at least those who practiced magic—a certain mysticism governed her decisions and actions. It was in the nature of magic users to rely on the unseen and the unknown. It was a sort of trust in the belief that if you wanted magic to perform in a certain way badly enough and you were willing to put aside what was said to be impossible, you could always find a way.

She supposed, in that respect, she was not so different from Drust—save for the all-important fact that she had the means and the skills to achieve what she wanted and he didn’t.

On the next level of her descent, she turned down the hallway and went to her personal quarters. Her bedroom was lavishly decorated with fine furniture, carpets, silk throws, tapestries, and paintings. Racks of clothing filled a series of deep alcoves that lined one wall, and a bureau made of teak and black maple displayed bottles of exotic liquids. Cinla was sprawled on her sleeping pad at the foot of her bed, but she lifted her head as Edinja entered.

“Beautiful Cinla,” she cooed as she reached down to stroke the cat’s silky neck and ears. She spent some time giving her special attention, speaking soft nothings to the big moor cat, listening to the sounds of pleasure she made at her touch.

When she was finished caressing Cinla, she moved over to her clothing racks to choose a garment for her appearance before the Coalition Council. She was vain and prideful and not in the least reluctant to admit it. She knew how to sway men and women to her cause and how to keep troublemakers at bay. And how she looked was a part of the process.

She dressed slowly, thinking about all she had accomplished over the past ten years and reveling in the sense of satisfaction it gave her.

It started with her experiments at changing humans into creatures that could better serve her purposes. Such efforts had been a part of the Orle canon of magic through the centuries, but she had managed to advance the study to heights previously unattained. Not only did she discover a combination of chemicals and magic that would create obedient servants, but she also found a way to turn them into thinking creatures capable of making decisions within the framework of a set of commands she provided in advance.

It took years to achieve this. It took countless experiments—all of which ended in failure but nevertheless brought her ever closer to her goal. She was a skilled and powerful sorceress, and her ambitions were buttressed by her firm belief that the ends justified the means. Expendable lives were plentiful and cheap in Arishaig, especially among the poor, and she was never at a loss for human subjects on which to experiment. She was willful and determined, and the lives of others had never meant much to her. If you weren’t a member of the Orle family, you were a lesser life-form. Other people were there to be used in whatever ways she saw fit. Other people didn’t really matter.

The real breakthrough in her efforts had happened by accident. She had mixed magic and chemicals as usual, but at some point in the effort both got away from her and produced an entirely unexpected result. She ended up with a creature that could change shapes at will. It could be anything it wanted. Even better, it was incredibly smart. Unlike almost all of the others, it was capable of independent thought and action. It knew how to weigh choices and make decisions. It could reason and act on that reasoning.

Best of all, it was loyal to her—totally devoted and obedient to her commands.

She knew at once what she wanted of it, exactly how it would be used. For a long time she had been looking for a way to get a spy into the Elven hierarchy. A well-placed spy in Arborlon would give her access to secrets of state and magic that would both help advance her own interests. There was no way a Southlander could accomplish this, but her changeling creature could.

So she sent it to take the place of someone who would have access to information she might want. She had familiarized herself with the Elven royal family long before and chose her victim carefully. She had no idea at that point in time exactly what sort of information she was looking for, so she gave her creature a set of parameters on which to rely, a sort of checklist of possibilities. She taught it to communicate using the arrow swifts, and to distinguish between those dispatched by her and those from a handful of others she trusted to act as go-betweens. She sent it there to live out its life, to serve as her eyes and ears, to become her surrogate in her incessant search for ways to acquire power.

For two years she waited in vain for the one important discovery that would change everything. She learned much about the royal family and the members of the Elven High Council. Now and then, something would happen that gave her fresh hope. But none of it ever came to anything.

And all the while, she sought to re-create the mixture of magic and chemicals that had produced her greatest success, but she could not. She tried everything, heedless of the number of failures, the lives sacrificed. Some of those victims found death quickly, and some found it through enduring unspeakable perversions, lingering pain, and eventual madness. It was all the same to Edinja. Nothing she did produced the results she wanted, and the detritus of her failed efforts was washed down the drains and out into the sewers.

But now, out of the blue, a miracle had occurred. The miracle had really begun weeks earlier when her creature discovered, quite by accident, that Aphenglow Elessedil had found something important enough during her search of the Druid Histories for her to hide it in her clothing and take it from the archives. An attempt to steal it from her while she sat reading it later that same night failed, as did several later attempts. But whatever it was had taken Aphen to her grandfather, the King, in an attempt to gain possession of the Elfstones, and it had brought a Druid expedition into the deep Westland which had resulted in most of the order being exterminated.

Now there was this business of the Ellcrys failing and its seed being presented to Aphenglow’s sister and then having been stolen—possibly by the couple that had found her and brought her to the unfortunate captain and crew of the Federation warship that had carried Stoon and her three mutants in search of the sisters. The crumbling of the Forbidding, the dying-off of the Ellcrys, and a desperate effort by the Elves to put the wall back and keep the Faerie creatures imprisoned from breaking free—it was all connected in some way, and she was going to find out how.

She finished dressing and studied herself in the mirror. Severe, proud, and beautiful in a cold sort of way; she was looking at a woman who was very much in control of her own fate.

She smiled. Of one thing, she felt certain. Good things were coming her way.

After Edinja Orle departed the bedroom, Arling Elessedil waited several minutes before she quit pretending. She waited for the snick of the lock on the door, counted to one hundred, and then quit crying. Not that she wasn’t distraught and frightened; she was. She just wasn’t quite as hysterical and out of control as she wanted Edinja to think she was—not after all she had been through in the past few weeks. She had never been the sort to give in to her fears; never the kind to panic and lose control. But letting the other woman believe she was completely terrified might cause her to let down her guard.

Arling sat up on the bed and took a deep breath. All that screaming and crying had hurt her throat, but she wasn’t about to drink any more of the water—or any other liquid, for that matter—until she was out of this house. She knew whatever she was given to drink would likely contain more of the same stuff she had already been fed—a drug that would make her tell Edinja anything she wanted to know. As of right now—she had decided this on her way up from the cellar and its horrors—she was done doing what Edinja Orle wanted. Before the day was over, she was going to find a way out of there.