The Fatal Gate Page 6

  There was nothing she could do to help; she had to keep the sky ship head on and the airbag buoyant enough to lift them the moment the skid was freed, but not so buoyant that it would hurtle up, leaving him behind.

  Yggur let out a roar and the left side of the cabin lifted a foot, the skids scraping on the ice, but fell back with a crash that sprang half a dozen compartment doors and tumbled blankets, cutlery and packets of food down onto her head and shoulders.

  He roared again and heaved again, with the same result. Karan waited for the next heave but it did not come. A minute passed, then two, and three. Fear clamped around her heart like frozen tongs. Had he fallen into the crevasse? If he had, there was no way to rescue him.

  No way for her to get out either. If he died or was knocked unconscious, the flow of power would stop and the sky ship would fly no more.

  9

  I DIDN’T LET HIM ESCAPE!

  Tallia hurtled into the clearing as the sky ship disappeared over the treetops. Half a dozen furious Aachim were clustered there, waving their fists. Malien was silent but her face wore a very ugly look.

  “What’s going on?” said Tallia.

  “Karan stole the sky ship,” said Nadiril. “And Yggur helped her.”

  “Yggur!” Tallia said incredulously.

  “It seems he’s better now.”

  “About bloody time!” said Lilis with uncharacteristic venom.

  “Why did she take it?” said Tallia. Nothing made sense any more.

  “The Whelm saw Gergrig coming through the gate,” said Malien in a drear voice. “They want him for their master … and they’re prepared to betray Sulien to seal the deal.”

  “And Gergrig will kill her to protect their secret. Kill that gentle little girl …” Tallia felt the pain in her own heart. She had always wanted a daughter and, fearing that she would never have a child, had focused her own hopes and dreams and burning love on the girl she knew better than any other. “I suppose … if Sulien were my child … I might have stolen the sky ship too …”

  “It’s futile!” Malien choked. “Sulien will be dead before Karan goes a hundred miles. And without my sky ship we can’t do anything to stop the Merdrun.”

  “Making matters worse,” Nadiril said quietly, “it’s Shand who’s been betraying our plans to the Merdrun.”

  “What?” bellowed Malien.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Tallia. “Where did this come from?”

  “Karan,” said Nadiril, “when she came back from Cinnabar after killing the magiz. She said the magiz was boasting about her pet traitor and how she put a link into him when he went to Carcharon a month ago.”

  He looked around at their shocked faces. “It’s been clear for a long time that Shand was susceptible to the emanations from the summon stone. They changed him, weakened him and set off those rages we all saw. It’s also been clear that someone was betraying our plans to the Merdrun—plans only known to me, Yggur, Tallia, Shand and Lilis. But only one of us was at Carcharon a month ago: Shand, when he was looking for Maigraith, fearing that she was dead. Then, when he was at his weakest emotionally, and the effects of the drumming were strongest, the magiz got to him.”

  “But Karan killed her,” said Lilis. “Surely—”

  “The link to Shand may have survived,” said Malien. “And when the Merdrun create a new magiz she or he may be able to reactivate the link.”

  “Can’t you remove it?”

  “It’s unknown mancery; I wouldn’t know where to begin.” She swung around to Tallia, eyes glinting. “Since the drumming began, you old humans have been a squabbling rabble, and it can’t go on. Sort yourselves out or—”

  “Or what?” said Nadiril coldly.

  “Or we go our own way,” said Malien.

  Tallia’s heart gave a painful thud. How could things have fallen to pieces so badly, so quickly? “Malien, we’ve got to work together. It’s our only hope.”

  Malien folded her arms across her chest. “If you can put your own house in order, I’ll consider it.” She stalked back to her own people and they headed down a path through the forest.

  “She’s right,” said Nadiril wearily. “You’ve got to deal with Shand right now.”

  But how? He had once been one of the greats, and though he had renounced most of his powers after the bitter rejection by his lover, Yalkara, Tallia was sure he could get them back if he needed to. He had long been a friend and she quailed at the thought of taking him on. What if he attacked her? Could she strike to hurt, even kill, if it came to that? And what if he beat her? The allies’ position would be desperate.

  She headed through the forest, overwhelmed.

  “What are you going to do?” said Lilis, falling in beside her.

  “After I ‘deal with’ Shand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lead!” Tallia said firmly. “Though I’m not a commander of armies …” She mentally ran through a list of generals, discarding them one by one until only one remained. “To fight the Merdrun we need the best, and the best is Janck.”

  “Dedulus Janck?” said Nadiril. “Isn’t he a bit of a piss pot?”

  “He’s a lot of a piss pot,” she conceded, “but he’s a brilliant tactician and an inspirational leader.”

  Nadiril frowned. “Never trust a fat general.”

  “Or a scrawny old librarian!” she flashed back.

  “Touché!” Nadiril grinned.

  She stopped. “Might be an idea if you two stayed back while I talk to Shand.”

  He waved her on. Tallia crept up the path, agonising about the coming confrontation. Shand had supported her ever since Mendark had taken her on as his assistant at the age of eighteen, and she had been utterly out of her depth.

  It was a cool night yet, as she entered the dimly lit clearing, she was drenched in sweat. Ussarine lay on the ground on the far left, a blanket wrapped around her upper body. Her long legs, both broken below the knee when a marble column had fallen across her, were encased in wooden splints, Aachim work. She was asleep, probably sedated against the pain.

  A compact figure sat slumped on a log under the trees to her right, pack on his back, head in hands, stray gleams of firelight reflecting off the top of his sparsely-haired head. He was swaying from side to side; had he had some kind of a turn? Tallia stopped on the other side of the campfire.

  “Shand, are you all right?”

  He raised his head. His face was blotchy and a large flask lay on the ground beside him.

  “Been expecting you,” he said thickly.

  Smoke stung her eyes. “I’m really sorry,” said Tallia. “I would have given anything—”

  His eyes glinted. “Get on with it.”

  “I’m taking you into custody until we can free you from the magiz’s link. It’s not that we don’t trust you …” She sounded weak and cursed herself for it. She had to harden herself.

  “It is that you don’t trust me,” grated Shand. “I’d have thought you, of all people, would have had faith in me after all the times I propped you up when you weren’t up to the job. How can you do this to me, on her word?”

  Clearly he was going to make it as hard as possible. “Karan has got nothing to do with it.”

  “Maigraith was trying to help Karan,” said Shand. “And Karan betrayed her! She dosed Maigraith with hrux, which is perilous to people of Charon descent; it drove her out of her mind for weeks. Then Karan and Llian met Maigraith in Alcifer, and Maigraith vanished. What did they do to her?”

  “That’s not the issue, Shand. You’ve been betraying our secrets—unwittingly I’m sure—but—”

  Shand stood up abruptly. “Karan is the issue! She’s the traitor; she proved it by stealing Malien’s sky ship, the one hope we had of rallying an army to defend ourselves. And you take her word against mine?”

  Tallia’s resolve wavered. What if he was right? But she knew Karan even better than she did Shand. He was a moody, unpredictable man and over the past month she had s
een at first hand his rages, his irrational accusations and the results of betrayals that could only have been perpetrated by him, witting or unwitting. Karan was honest and straightforward; it was inconceivable that she would make up a false accusation against anyone, least of all Shand.

  “Your silence is eloquent,” said Shand, raising his right hand. “Take me, if you dare.”

  She was running towards him when the campfire exploded like a barrel of fireworks and multicoloured sparks struck her in the face and body. She staggered back, beating out the sparks on her clothing, so dazzled that she could not see.

  Ussarine woke with a cry, thrashed, then screamed from the pain.

  Someone hurtled into the clearing. “Bend over!” cried Lilis. “Your hair is smoking.”

  Tallia could feel the heat on the top of her head. She fell to her knees and Lilis’s little hands whacked at her hair.

  “Allow me,” panted Nadiril. “Douse!”

  A deluge of cold water struck the top of Tallia’s head, drenching her. She stood up, coughing and dripping. Lilis knelt beside Ussarine, stroking her forehead and trying to soothe her back to sleep.

  “Where’s Shand?” said Tallia.

  “Gone,” Nadiril intoned.

  “He just … vanished,” said Lilis in an awed voice. “One minute he was there, the next … not.”

  “How could he make a gate so quickly, so easily?” said Tallia.

  “I don’t think it was a gate,” said Nadiril.

  “Then how did he escape?”

  He shrugged. “There’s a lot about Shand we don’t know. Like what he did in the long gaps in his life where he dropped out of sight. And most of all, what gifts of mancery Yalkara, one of the greatest Charon of all, gave him when she terminated their relationship.”

  “She gave him an extra-long life,” said Lilis.

  “And secret Charon mancery no one else knows,” said Nadiril. “Or will ever know, now they’re extinct. Mancery that would greatly aid us if he could be brought back into the fold—”

  Malien appeared silently from the trees on the other side of the clearing, her Aachim ranked behind her. “Or utterly ruin us if his treachery isn’t curbed. You were supposed to deal with Shand, but you let him escape.”

  “I didn’t let him escape!” snapped Tallia. “He used mancery that—”

  “That you, the great Magister, could not counter, or were afraid to.”

  10

  THEY WOULD CEASE TO EXIST

  Nadiril drew himself up to his full beanpole height. His withered flesh thickened, his chest filled out and his clouded eyes smoked in his wrath.

  “Enough!” he said in a roar that made Malien take a step backwards. “We’re at war, Malien, with a merciless enemy that will be the end of Santhenar unless we stand united against them. Shake hands with Tallia and apologise.”

  The Aachim were a proud and imperious people, quick to take offence and quick to anger, and for a long moment Tallia thought that Malien would storm away.

  Then she said stiffly, “Magister, please accept my apologies—it’s been a troubling day …” She bowed to Tallia, though not very low, extended her hand and they shook, Malien’s extraordinarily long Aachim fingers wrapping right around Tallia’s own hand.

  “Malien?” said the yellow-haired Aachim Xarah, who was carrying her scrying board, a device with concentric brass rings, and brass pointers that could be slid around them, mounted on a circular wooden base a foot across. “Shand didn’t use a gate.”

  Tallia frowned. “What are you saying?”

  “He disappeared, but he’s still in the area.”

  The hairs rose on the back of Tallia’s neck. “He’s gone after the Command device, and then he’ll head for our boat!”

  She bolted down through the trees towards the triangular island in the little lake. The quickest path to the cove ran across the westernmost of the island’s three bridges, around the southern shore and across the eastern bridge.

  The island had been a beautiful, tranquil place, but now, lit by fires here and there, it was ruined and littered with the bodies of Snoat’s personal guard. From here she could see the shoreline of the cove a quarter of a mile away. Something was burning there too; firelight reflected off the water and the sails of Snoat’s huge flagship, anchored offshore. The anchor chain was rattling. He was preparing to leave.

  Tallia hurtled across the eastern bridge and down onto a broad expanse of paving, then froze, staring around her in the semi-darkness. Shortly Malien skidded to a stop beside her. Four Aachim men were behind her, and Lilis, scarlet in the face, then more Aachim.

  “What’s … the … matter?” panted Lilis.

  “Something’s very wrong.” Tallia could feel radiant heat on her face, coming up from the stones, and smell charred flesh. “Malien, send your strongest people down to the jetty. Stop Snoat’s ship any way you can.”

  Malien issued quiet orders and four men ran for the jetty. Tallia created light with a fingertip and walked towards the source of the heat. A bloody body lay across it, on its belly, its arms wrapped around something. She took a closer look, and flinched.

  “Snoat.” His head and legs were intact but his torso was a bloody ruin.

  “His middle has been turned inside out,” said Malien.

  Tallia had seen many violent deaths in her time as Mendark’s assistant, then as Magister herself, but this was one of the more unpleasant ones. “What’s he trying to protect?”

  She prised one of the bloody, scorched pages out of his hand and held it up to the light. “Beautiful calligraphy.”

  Lilis crept forward, trying not to look at Snoat’s gruesome corpse. “It’s Llian’s manuscript for the Tale of the Mirror—what’s left of it.” She gathered the pages.

  There were two more bodies. Tallia headed towards the closest, dreading that it would be Llian’s, but it turned out to be a one-armed man with a narrow face, rather larger on the left side than the right, a bulbous jaw and sagging, wrinkled ears. “Snoat’s mancer-for-hire, Scorbic Vyl. He’s no loss.”

  His snake-headed staff lay some distance away. She picked it up; it was a dangerous object and could not be left lying around. Not far away was a leather bag full of old books. She drew one out, then another. They were the manuscripts of the first twenty-two Great Tales, all but one of Snoat’s once-perfect collection.

  “I’ll take charge of them,” said Lilis, putting what was left of Llian’s Great Tale in and heaving the heavy bag over her shoulder. “They must go back to the college.”

  “Not while Snoat’s lackey Basible Norp is running it,” said Tallia.

  “They’d better go to the Great Library then.”

  Tallia headed to the third body, a young woman with blonde hair, Esea. Her throat and chest were peppered with small, bloody wounds though she was otherwise unmarked, and her lovely face had a serenity that Tallia had never seen while she was alive.

  Tallia probed several of the wounds, which had been made by jagged shards of brass.

  “Where’s the Command device?” said Nadiril, who had just tottered up.

  Mutely, Tallia held out several bloody shards.

  “It’s dangerous,” said Nadiril. “Gather up every piece.”

  Malien gave an order and her Aachim formed a line, moving slowly forward across the paving stones and picking up every object they found. Tallia crouched beside Esea’s body and picked out the rest of the shards. What a waste!

  Xarah was walking back and forth, moving the little brass pointers on her scrying board and making notes on a slate. Malien conferred with her, then said, “I’d say Esea attacked Snoat and Vyl, perhaps trying to make up for her failure up at the pavilion. She used a reshaping spell to transform the Command device—”

  “Or destroy it,” said Tallia. “And them.”

  “Perhaps. But the spell killed them and the device exploded, killing her.”

  “But where are Llian and Hingis?” said Tallia. “And Ifoli, for that matter?�
��

  “On Snoat’s boat?”

  “Ifoli loved books with a passion,” said Nadiril. He choked. “She would never have left them behind.”

  Tallia stared at him. “How do you know? Out with it, old man.”

  “Ifoli is my great-granddaughter and she’s been my spy in Snoat’s camp for the past year and a half.”

  “Your great-granddaughter?”

  “I did my damnedest to dissuade her … but she seemed to have something to prove—”

  There was shouting from the jetty. The Aachim had failed to stop Snoat’s flagship, which was a hundred yards out in the cove and moving swiftly away under full sail.

  “The captain must have got wind of what happened here,” said Malien.

  Tallia swore fluently. “Snoat’s fabulous war chest will be aboard—and we need it desperately. Can anything else possibly go wrong?”

  Wordlessly, Lilis pointed to the little inlet half a mile north of the cove, where flames had suddenly leaped as high as the treetops. “That’s our boat.”

  The beautiful little yacht that had brought them here from Vilikshathûr, successfully racing Snoat’s flagship all the way, would be ashes within minutes.

  “How the hell are we going to get home?” said Nadiril.

  Tallia could not speak; the loss was too crushing. Vilikshathûr, where they had a small army, was a hundred and fifty miles to the north by ship, though a lot further on foot. The coast road was rough, winding and hilly; they would be lucky to reach Vilikshathûr in ten long days. And in ten days, with no opposition, the Merdrun might have taken Santhenar.

  She jammed Vyl’s snake-headed staff into a crack between the stones and conjured bright light from it. “What have you got?”

  The Aachim put their fragments down on the pale stones. Tallia laid down the bloody pieces of brass she had taken from Esea’s wounds. Malien squatted and, after a few seconds’ thought, began to put the pieces together as if she were assembling a puzzle. The brass casing of the Command device took shape. It had been roughly the size of a large beer tankard, though the metal was curved now as if it had been forced into a sphere then had partly sprung back, and a third of the casing was missing.