“Remind me to recommend you to the Stablemaster,” said Kerim, his voice tight with pain. “You need to find more honest work than thievery.”
“Honest?” questioned Sham, pressing deeply into his back with her thumbs. “I’m the most honest thief in Purgatory, just ask the Shark. I pay him a copper a week to say so.”
Kerim’s laughter was broken by a gasp as another muscle spasmed. Sham moved up where it seemed the worst and poured more liniment onto her hands.
She’d heard somewhere that it sometimes helped to distract a person in pain. “I’ve answered some of your questions, would you mind if I ask you a question or two?”
Taking his grunt as consent, Sham set the liniment aside for fear of burning his skin with it and rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you really believe Altis has awakened? That this religion of yours wasn’t just created by men to fulfill their own purposes?”
Kerim drew a deep breath and shifted his head. “Once,” he said, as if he were a storyteller, “there was a young boy, the bastard son of a great lady. He was born a year after the Lady’s husband left on his never-ending pursuit of the perfect battle—nine months after a warrior, traveling to another land, stayed briefly at the manor where she lived. Bastard son of the Lady, but no kin to the Lord, the boy learned early to keep himself out of everyone’s way. He was no one and less than nothing.”
“One day a young man came to the village near the estate where the boy lived. He spoke of a wondrous vision he had been given by an ancient god; a vision that foretold how the small war-torn country that was the boy’s homeland would be powerful, as it had been in the distant past. At last the boy’s life took on a purpose. He would become a great warlord, and his family would honor him for his skills.
“That night he dreamed he was visited by Altis, who told the boy he would indeed grow to become a warrior of legends, that he would lead an invasionary force such as had not been seen on the face of the earth for many generations. Altis bestowed on the boy the gifts of agility and strength, but told him that he must win skill on his own. A man would come, capable of teaching the art of war.” Kerim’s voice gave out briefly as Sham put pressure on a particularly tight area.
“Two days later a man came looking for work. He was a soldier, he said, but willing to work in the stables if that were all an old man was good for. As it happened the stable had need of workers, and the man was given the job. He wasn’t big, this man sent by Altis, but perhaps because of that he had spent much time studying fighting skills. He taught the boy—me—how to battle and, more importantly, when. When the Prophet of Altis called upon the people of Cybelle, I went to him and followed where he led. I fought for Altis with the zeal only a boy is capable of; for him I became the Leopard. As you believe that magic is real, so I believe that Altis is real.”
“You don’t have any of the trappings that most of the followers of Altis have,” she commented. “There are no altars in this wing. I have seen how you revere the High Priest Brath.”
Kerim snorted with what might have been a laugh. “Altis is real, but he is not my god anymore. A man learns things with age, if he is lucky. I woke up one morning and saw a field laden with bodies, and listened to His prophet dedicate that bloody field to Altis. I asked myself what Altis had done to deserve the lives of so many and whether he had done me a favor by creating the Leopard who had wrought such carnage. But I finished what I had started, fought to the last battle.
“After it was over—as over as war ever is—the prophet called me to him and told me to ask for a reward. It is not wise to refuse such an offer. Refusing a reward makes the ruler wonder if you are not looking for greater things—like his position.”
Her massage seemed to be having some effect; he wasn’t tensing against the pain and his voice had recovered its normal tone. “I told him to send me somewhere a warrior would be of use. Hurt that I didn’t ask for a position at his side, he sent me here, among the barbarians, if you will forgive the designation, while he rules the glorious Empire from Cybelle.” Kerim turned his head and granted Shamera a wry smile. “Why are you interested in Altis?”
“It occurred to me to wonder if Altis would permit a demon to worship in his temple,” said Sham slowly—though she hadn’t thought of that until he’d been almost finished.
The Reeve considered her words briefly before shaking his head. “I don’t know. Ican tell you that there are any number of people who donot worship Altis: the Southwood nobles, like Halvok, Chanford, or even Lady Sky. For that matter most of the servants are Southwoodsmen and there are even a few Easterners, like Dickon, who decided that worshiping gods is a thankless task even before I . . .”
Kerim broke off speaking as a wracking spasm took his breath. Horrified, Sham saw the muscles tighten and cramp, worse than it had been before. His back bowed impossibly; she expected to hear the crack of bone.
Discarding mundane methods, Sham traced the lines of the rune of health on his back where the turmoil seemed to be focused. She closed her eyes, seeking to visualize each muscle relaxing, forcing herself to draw the rune slowly so she would make no mistakes. Finished, she straightened, looking with magic-heightened senses at the rune she’d completed.
The symbol glittered in orange and then began to fade, just as it ought. Kerim sighed and relaxed gradually. When only a faint visible trace of the rune left, it flared brightly, fading to a sullen red glow.
“By the winds of the seven sea gods. . .” muttered Sham with true perplexity. The rune should have faded completely . . . unless the cause was unnatural.
It wants the Reeve more than it has wanted anything in a thousand years.The words of the blind stableboy echoed in her thoughts. The Reeve had begun losing his health near the time that the first slaying started.
Sham watched, thinking furiously, as the symbol darkened to black and Kerim’s back began to spasm once more. Urgency lending cleverness to her fingers and power to her work, she traced another rune: a warding against magic. As she toiled, she could feel the rune touch a spell of binding that was beyond her ability to sense otherwise. Startled, she worked another spell.
Slowly, as if it were reluctant to show itself, thin yellow lines appeared. A rune drawn on living flesh had more power than was usual for such things, and this one was drawn by a demon. As the curls and line of the rune became clearer, she was able discern a rune of binding—source of the spell she’d detected—though much of it she didn’t recognize.
A harsh sound was driven out of Kerim as the muscles in his back tightened further. She set her hand tentatively on the demon’s rune and began unweaving it. After several attempts, she realized it wasn’t going to work. But there was another way, if she was fast enough and if the demon was slow enough.
Quickly, she began retracing the demon’s rune, displacing the demon’s power with her own and binding the rune to her. She had completed half the pattern, not nearly as much as she needed, when the demon began to steal back its work. It surprised her at first; she hadn’t known that anything could work runes without being present. After only an instant’s hesitation she started adding touches to the pattern, small things, nonsense things, parts of the rune that were wholly hers. Things the demon couldn’t see.
Sweat beaded on her forehead as Sham struggled to break the demon’s hold. For only an instant the demon became caught up in one of Sham’s useless twists, but it gave her time to finish the rough outline of the main rune. The master pattern hers; she was able to dissolve the complications that blurred the simplicity of the rune, small additions belonging to her weaving and the demon’s, destroying the demon’s hold on the binding rune completely.
The moment the demon’s hold broke, Kerim relaxed limply on the sheets. The hand Sham used to push her hair out of her face shook with fatigue. Taking a deep breath, she unworked the last of the rune, leaving Kerim free of any binding. That done, she stared at the room assessingly.
She had expected the demon to come to the chamber, but it had not needed to do so. Mag
ic didn’t work that way. Magic—all magic—was subject to a few laws, one of which was that a mage could only work magic where he was physically present—unless . . . the demon had a focus rune in the room.
“Shamera?” questioned Kerim softly, without moving from his prone position.
“Ssst.” She hushed him, staring out at the room.
The rune mark would be somewhere hidden from view, she thought, somewhere a mage wouldn’t be likely to glance at casually. Her gaze fell on Kerim’s wheeled chair. She rolled off the bed and tipped the chair over.
Kerim turned his head at the clatter of the chair hitting the floor. “Shamera? What are you doing?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” she muttered staring at the underside of the chair’s seat.
The focus was easy to find. It was not drawn with chalk or cut into the bottom of the seat as she would have done it, but scribed deeply with magic, invisible to anyone not mageborn.
With a foul comment, Sham pulled aside the fire screen and rolled the chair into the huge fireplace. The flames drew back, as if the very nature of the mark repelled them.
She raised her arms over her head, chanting a lyrical incantation to aid the fire with the force of her magic. The flames grew suddenly brighter, licking with fierce hunger at the chair. Neither the theatrical gesture nor the chant had been necessary, but it suited her mood.
Howstupid of her not to consider such an explanation of Kerim’s “illness” especially after the selkie, Elsic, had practicallytold her that Kerim was the focus of the demon’s attack. Human magic was not suited for such use, but she had known that she was dealing with a demon. She knew there were creatures that fed upon pain and despair; certainly the demon had not consumed its other victims in a physical sense.
As she watched the orange tongues flick at the chair, she thought again of the selkie’s warning: . . .more than it has wanted anything in a thousand years.
She spoke a spell that would expose any more runes such as she had found on Kerim, but there were no more in the room. A focus rune, though was much less powerful than an active rune unless it was being used and would not reveal itself easily to her spelling, nor would any other simple rune.
There was no real reason to suspect a second focus rune. They were uncommonly used, for the same reason familiars were avoided—if destroyed they could seriously hurt the mage whose creatures they were. All the same, if the Reeve’s selkie was right, Kerim was important to the demon. She turned on her heel and strode back to the bed.
“Shamera, why did you throw my chair into the fireplace?” Kerim’s voice was abnormally reasonable.
Ignoring him, Sham yanked on the heavy down-filled tick that had settled at the foot of the bed. She searched it thoroughly before throwing it onto the floor. Muttering nastily, she started to tear away the sheets, and her hand touched a section of the robe Kerim had been wearing. With her heightened senses she could almost see the magic imbued in the fabric.
The rune on the robe was a lesser one, not a focus rune but another binding rune—far simpler than the one Kerim had worn. It was the sort of thing one would put on a animal so that it would not wander away. Far easier, she thought, to turn such a simple rune into a stronger, more powerful sign than to try it from scratch. The great mages, she knew, used to transfer a rune from one surface to another. The means had been lost to time, but perhaps the demon still knew the method. Kerim could have been ensorcelled again by morning.
As she stepped through the assorted bedding on the way to the fireplace with the remnants of Kerim’s robe, Sham’s foot knocked her knife from the folds of the tick and sent it clattering across the floor. She scooped it up and continued on her way.
The flames were still spitting high with the magic she’d fed them earlier. With the addition of the bedrobe, they turned purple and shot up through the chimney with such force that it dislodged months of old ashes. As the soot fell into the fireplace, it was consumed in the superheated flames, creating a shower of bright sparkles like a thousand falling stars.
Sham started back toward the bed when she heard the slight scuff of the “secret” panel sliding open behind her. She jumped sideways with reflexive speed, holding her knife in a fighter’s grip as she turned to face the gaping opening in the wall.
For a moment nothing happened, and she took a cautious step toward the dark passage doorway. The dim glint of light on metal was her only warning as a sword swept through the air.
Frantically, she threw herself to one side, rolling over the top of a waist-high table to put it between her and the sword wielder. As her attacker stepped toward her, the firelight threw his face into high relief.
“Ven?” said Kerim, incredulously.
Even knowing that this could not possibly be the Reeve’s brother, Sham couldn’t detect anything about the man that appeared unnatural, not even the aura of magic that she’d felt when the demon had attacked her before.
“What do you want?” she asked, snatching a heavy, leather-covered shield from the wall and heaving it at the golem as she tried to get some distance between herself and the creature. The knife she held was balanced for throwing, but she didn’t want to use it and lose her only weapon.
“Mine. He is mine,” hissed the thing that wore Lord Ven’s body, knocking the shield aside easily as he slid over the table that blocked his path.
“No,” answered Sham as the creature started toward her in a trained warrior’s rush.
She took three steps back and rumpled the rug under his feet with a touch of magic. He stumbled heavily, but recovered faster than she’d hoped: many automatons were clumsy things. Twisting and scrambling, she evaded him, managing to nick his arm with her knife as she slipped past him. She saw the blood on his arm, but knew it had been chance more than skill on her part.
He held the advantage of reach and strength. Sham’s lowborn knife-fighting skills meant nothing unless she risked breaking through his guard and closing in with him. She was deterred by the recollection that one of the attributes the golem enjoyed was disproportionate strength. As if to confirm her thoughts, a blow of his sword reduced a sturdy oaken chair to a broken shadow of itself and she decided to try magic instead.
She began to weave a spell to cause the cloth on his body to stiffen and imprison him in its hold, but she was just an instant too slow. Lord Ven closed in and swung his sword at her throat. She managed to deflect his blow with her knife, but the force of his strike wrenched her wrist painfully.
Sham lost control of the magic she’d gathered and the embroidered chair that sat by the fireplace burst into sudden flame. She took a quick step back and hit her elbow painfully against the wall—there was no more room to retreat.
Breathing hard, Sham ducked under Lord Ven’s second strike. As she ran under the blade he reversed his stroke, catching her brutally on the back of her wounded thigh with the pommel. The blow drove her to the ground where she hit her chin on the floor with stunning force.
Face down, she missed exactly what happened next, but there was a shrill cry and the sound of sharp metal imbedding itself in flesh. Frantically, Sham scrabbled forward and then twisted to her feet.
Lord Ven stood facing her with an oddly blank look and something dark pushed out of his chest; Kerim swayed unsteadily behind him—though he stood without aid. Sham jumped to her feet as the Reeve collapsed to his knees, sweat beading his forehead as a tribute to the effort it had cost him to stay on his feet so long.
The demon’s creature fell limply forward, and the great blue sword slipped out of its back and sang out as it hit the floor. Sham stared at the motionless body, gasping hollowly for breath.
“You’re not hurt?” rasped Kerim.
She shook her head. “No, and I have you to thank for it. I wouldn’t have lasted much longer against it.” She chose the neuter pronoun deliberately in order to remind Kerim, if he needed reminding, that the thing he’d just killed had not been his brother.
Nodding, the Reeve collaps
ed backward until he was seated on the ground with his back supported by a heavy chest. He tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
“Shamera, would you get Dickon? His rooms are down the hall. I think we could use his help to take care of the body.”
“Right,” she replied, frowning with worry as she looked at Kerim’s pale face.
She didn’t realize until she was halfway to the door that she still held her knife in her right hand. Shaking her head at herself, she started to set it on a table. It wouldn’t do for the Reeve’s mistress to run about the Castle at night with a knife.
“Shamera!”
The urgency in the Reeve’s tone caused her to spin around.
Kerim’s blue sword in one hand, Lord Ven’s simulacrum advanced with a stealthy gait that changed to an awkward run as she finished her turn. Almost without thought she ducked under his swing and imbedded her knife deeply into the creature’s eye.
“Plague’s spawn!” spat out Sham in revulsion as she was carried to the floor in the thing’s embrace. She scrambled frantically until she was free of its convulsive movements, jerking her knife out of the body so she’d still have a weapon if it came at her again. “Tide take it! Why can’t this thing just stay dead?”
As she spoke the body, still writhing, vanished with a loud cracking sound, leaving the blue sword behind. She lunged to her feet and spat a filthy word, wiping her forehead with the back of the hand that held her knife.
“Is it coming back?” inquired Kerim in a suspiciously mild tone.
Sham shook her head, but there wasn’t a lot of assurance in her voice as she said, “I don’t think so. I’ll go get Dickon.”
“No, wait,” said Kerim. “I think . . . I need an explanation of this night’s events before you go. I feel like I have been thrown blindfolded into a pack of wolves. You might start with what it was you did to me that allowed me use of my legs.”
Sham sank wearily to the floor opposite Kerim’s position. “I think I need to ask you a few questions before I understand enough of it to tell you what’s happened.”