Keeper of the Keys, Page 2

  She was still staring at the stirrup when the horse-boy returned. 'Here,' he offered gruffly. Before she could protest, he caught her around the waist and tossed her slight body into the saddle. 'Go before the sentry wakens.' And he punctuated the advice with a clap on the mare's hindquarters. The animal leapt into a trot, stirrups jarring painfully against Taen's ankles. Skewed sideways, she grabbed the mane with both hands, and barely caught the boy's parting shout.

  'If you're still here when that sentry recovers, he'll be honour-bound to put a spear through your back.'

  Jolted, gasping, through the gates into wind-tossed dark, Taen made a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh. Once she centred herself precariously within the saddle, spears became the least of her concerns; the Kielmark's rages and the ferocious loyalty of his men at least were predictably certain. The reactions of Ivainson Jaric were not. Wistfully Taen wished for the advice of her mentor on the Isle of the Vaere; for Jaric rode now to return the Keys to Elrinfaer to the Stormwarden, Anskiere, believing that once his errand was accomplished, his bond to the sorcerer would be ended. What he did not know, and what Taen had no gentle way of telling him, was that Anskiere now was sealed beyond reach within his wards beneath the ice cliffs. Without the presence of a firelord's skills, the Keys could not be returned to their rightful master. They could only be guarded, and perilously at that, for the demons would again seek control of the Keys they had narrowly been thwarted from gaining. Worse, if Kor's Accursed ever guessed the fact that Ivain Firelord had left a living heir, Jaric would become the prey in a ruthless hunt for survival, since his latent potential for sorcery might come to threaten their plots against humanity.

  Taen gripped the reins. In an agony of fear and courage, she kicked her mount into a canter, and sent it clattering through the gates. Torchlight and the inner fortress fell behind. The mare slid, scrambling, down the broad stone stair which cut through a slope of thorn and olive trees. Below lay the town, a sprinkling of lights between the dark bulk of the warehouses. The harbour beyond was a scattered patchwork of silver and black shadows, the moored brigantines of the Kielmark's corsairs. Yet Taen did not head downward to the townside gate. Instead she tugged the mare to the right, through the northern portal that led to the ridge road.

  The sentries let her pass with alacrity, since Jaric had passed that way earlier. The mare's gait proved gentle on level ground, and since she showed no untrustworthy tendency to drag on the bit and run, Taen gradually relaxed. Her feet found the stirrups, and the rhythmic ring of hooves eased her mind enough to free her dreamsense. A nagging jab slapped her intuition in the night-dark lane before the outer gate.

  She hauled the mare clumsily to a halt, at last giving way to irritation; a check on affairs back at the great hall revealed the Kielmark in a seething temper, bellowing orders to men at arms who scattered running to seek weapons, helms, and horses. Never doubting that Jaric and she were the cause, Taen narrowed her focus and sought the single white-hot thread of consciousness that mattered.

  Thought answered her probe, sharp as a whipcrack, 'Enchantress! Meddler! What have you done this time? Where is Jaric?' Dangerously unstable at the best of times, the Kielmark's mind now blazed with raw fury. Taen encompassed the essence, though it burned cruelly. Sweating with the effort of her talents, she bent impatience into calm, deflected violence into confusion, and madness into a hole wide enough to send coherent communication.

  'Call off your men at arms. I will look after Jaric.' She sorted the spikes and angles of the Lord of Cliffhaven's thoughts, and observed that he already guessed the boy had gone to seek Anskiere. The ravening desire to deploy an armed patrol still overruled any attempt to instil temperance. Sad, now, Taen countered with the one fact that might restrain him. 'Let the boy be. He won't find what he most wishes to obtain.'

  Surprise answered, followed by calculation, followed by some keenly intuitive guesswork. 'The Stormwarden is helpless, then?'

  Taen sighed in the windy darkness. Mad, but wily as an old wolf, the Kielmark made few mistakes when it came to assessing Keithland's weaknesses. As his thoughts shifted rapidly futureward, to planning and intricate countermeasures, the Dreamweaver released the contact. She urged the mare on into the scrub pines on the heights, certain now that the men who ran to fetch swords would be called back to their beer. The Kielmark would allow her to seek Ivainson Jaric without interference, and since the ways of enchantresses could be expected to foul even the most carefully laid network of patrols, probably the sentry would get by with a tongue-lashing.

  Yet barely a mile farther on, with the trees tossing around her and the first raindrops spattering in the dust, Taen heard a drum roll of hoofbeats bearing down from behind. Not a patrol; the men who kept watch on the island's outposts never reported alone, and a relief watch would number five. Annoyed now, and chilled by the wet, the enchantress reined up and waited as the rider overtook her. Expertly slowed from a gallop, his horse clattered to a stop. Sparks shot from the concussion of steel shoes on stone, and Taen's mare sidled.

  She controlled it, mostly by accident. Her reins tangled uselessly with her fingers, and her legs swung, clumsily inept. Still, she managed to keep her seat, even when the man she recognized as the sentry from the bailey jostled his mount against hers and tossed the heavy folds of a cloak into her hands.

  'Kielmark's compliments,' he shouted breathlessly. Then he grinned. 'Said his patrols could see you weren't ambushed, but damned if he'd have you perish of cold.'

  Taen grinned back, recognizing Corley's deft manipulation behind the gesture. Then, as she flung the wool over her shoulders, her hand caught on the huge ruby which adorned the brooch at the collar. The most feared and powerful man in Keithland had sent her his personal cloak, and not as an after-thought. In sparing his fortress from Kor's Accursed, Taen Dreamweaver had earned something more complex than the Kielmark's gratitude. She strove to wring comfort from that fact. Ahead of her, the troubled heir of Ivain Firelord had a decision to make that would affect the continuance of humanity; and behind, painfully abandoned at Elrinfaer, was the brother she had lost to the demons.

  * * *

  For Marlson Emien, hope no longer existed. Collected from the sands of Elrinfaer by the unsuspecting charity of two fishermen, he lay limp beneath a shelter jury-rigged from tarpaulins as the first fall of rain pattered over the sloop. The brothers who took him in had treated his palms, unaware that his burns were a caustic reaction to bare-flesh contact with a solution of demon-controlled Sathid crystal. Neither did they guess that his fever was no illness but the effects of transition as the entities he harboured melded and established mastery over his mind. Irrevocably possessed by Kor's Accursed, Emien did not hear the foaming rush of the sea, nor the thump and rattle of planking as the sloop tossed, spume-drenched, on her heading. Cold did not touch him, even when run-off from the tarps leaked down his shoulders and back. His opened eyes stayed blind as marbles, his limbs still. Only his mind knew agony. As the Sathid coursed through his body, his awareness twisted in a pocket of nightmare, utterly powerless to win free.

  The sister who sorrowed at Cliffhaven would never have recognized him now. Demon thought-forms overran his humanity and alien desires ravaged his spirit. Emien had known hatred; but never in life had he experienced the depth and intensity of spite which racked him as his new overlords raged over the loss of the Keys to Elrinfaer. A decade of intricate plotting had failed them, and once more their hope of exterminating humanity had been thwarted. Only one part of the grand design remained to be salvaged: a new pawn had been gained to replace Merya Tathagres. As the Sathid entity assimilated Emien's personality, the demons explored their find.

  Voices rustled in the boy's mind, dry and numerous as dead leaves whirled by wind. The words were in no human tongue, and the speakers far distant, conferring in a place beyond the north borders of Keithland. Yet through the bridge of the Sathid-link they were a part of Emien, and Emien a part of them. Comprehension required no tr
anslation.

  'Who, tell me, who is he?'

  Another voice answered, gruffer, and curt with authority. 'Man-child, forsaken-one. Called Marlson Emien, but ours now, destined to become the bane-of-his-kind.'

  'Knowledge, fast-tell-me, what memories does he possess?'

  Demon thought-probes jabbed into Emien's mind. He moaned faintly under the tarp, powerless to hinder as demons rummaged ruthlessly through his being. Most of his past experience they discarded as meaningless, but not all; where his new masters had interest, they poked and pricked and prodded, pitilessly sorting out what information they wished. They examined his childhood, the poverty and the shortcomings and the discontent he had known as a fisherman's son on Imrill Kand. No nuance escaped scrutiny. Demons knew the rough wooden loft where he had shivered in the misery of his nightmares, and the quiet, careworn widow who had raised him. They knew the peat smoke and tide wrack, and the sour smells of nets drying through twilights smothered in fog; and not least they knew Taen, the sister who had collected shells on the beaches, and run dancing through wildflowers with the goats on the tor until the day the accident had left her lamed. When at the last she had found her cure, her family lost her; for the Stormwarden, Anskiere, had stolen her loyalty and sent her for training to the Isle of the Vaere.

  Here the demon probe paused, sharpened to cutting interest. Emien flinched. Unnoticed by his fisherman benefactors, he quivered and sweated in the sloop's damp bow, while the enemies of humankind pursued details of the sister's existence more thoroughly. The voices reached a fever pitch of excitement in the dark.

  'Behold, this-proof, another Vaere-trained enchantress walks Keithland, to our sorrow.'

  The probe twisted, gouged deeper, and exposed Taen's presence in the battle that had prevented Cliffhaven's conquest. 'Vaere-trained, yes, most certainly Dreamweaver gifted.' Now the grip in Emien's mind tightened and focused with cruel clarity upon the sister as he had seen her last, standing windblown upon the heights by Elrinfaer Tower. She clung, trembling, in the embrace of Ivainson Jaric, the Keys to Elrinfaer gripped in her whitened fingers. Her shift was torn, and her skin spangled with salt from an ocean crossing. The pallor of her face accentuated her exhaustion, and her black hair tumbled in tangles over shoulders grown gaunt with stress. Yet where human vision ended, the enhanced perception of demons gleaned more: a halo of greenish light shimmered around Taen's form, tangible effects of the Sathid-enhanced powers she had challenged and mastered. The voices whispered over this, and refined their scrutiny until patterns became visible in the aura, and abruptly their concern dissolved. The demons' murmured commentary transformed to ridicule that sang and echoed through Emien's being.

  'She is undone, this Dreamweaver trained by the Vaere. Too soon sent to defend: see! The aura is distressed. Her crystals are yet immature, and imminently dangerous.' An interval followed, dense with murmurs of agreement. 'The compact need not fear Marlsdaughter Taen, Emien-sister. Doom stalks her, even-as-we-speak. The Sathid she mastered to gain her powers shall soon seek replication, and the changes effected upon her body will assuredly kill her.'

  Chilled, and now utterly still upon the rain-sleek planking of the sloop, the conscious spark that remained of Marlson Emien pleaded inwardly for explanation. The voices quieted, considered, and with a bitter flash of malice granted his request.

  Their answer came shaped in dream-image. Emien observed a sorcerer who had served as Grand Conjurer to the Kings of Felwaithe seven generations in the past. Yet demon recall spanned centuries; the memory was replicated with a clarity faithfully sharp. During a time of war, a devastating assault by demons had brought this man to attempt an unsupervised bonding with a Sathid crystal. The sorcerer had survived to win mastery, only to perish afterwards, as the entity he harboured cycled to reproduce itself. Granted vision by demons, Emien saw the man writhe in torment, his sickbed the flinty, lichen-crusted stone that comprised the fells beyond Keithland. He quivered and sweated, all control of his sorcerer's powers overturned by the nightmare throes of delirium. Even as Emien watched, the man's flesh became suffused and discoloured, muscles tortured into knots of tension and agony. Then, in the hours before daylight faded, his shivering ceased. The congested purple of his bruises opened into ugly weeping sores. Sickened, gasping in the throes of his own horror, Emien saw shards of crystal erupt through the dying sorcerer's flesh. The man screamed. His piteous cries were swallowed without echo by the empty fells, as bit by bit his vitals were lacerated from within by knives of glittering mineral.

  In the end, only crystal remained, a jagged-edged remainder of what once had been human. Agony seemed inscribed in the very form, here the suggestion of clenched hands, and there the contorted arch of the back. Taen would die so. She carried within her the seeds of a crystalline entity that should have been safely separated from her flesh before it acquired full maturity.

  Yet the Vaere had dismissed her prematurely, or so Emien believed, so that she could counteract the plot of the demons who threatened Cliffhaven. Ultimately, the Stormwarden who lured her away had betrayed her. For that, the voices in the shadows agreed that Anskiere of Elrinfaer should be made to suffer payment.

  The assurance had a calming effect. Emien no longer tossed in discomfort as his overlords resumed their analysis of his mind. Instead he subsided into feverish sleep, the whispers and the voices a litany against a background of dreams while the probe of Kor's Accursed turned from remembrance of Taen Dreamweaver to focus next on the boy who comforted her.

  He was blond, salt-stained as she, and as confused. His shirt and tunic had torn on the briar; the limbs beneath were well muscled and tanned from long days at a sailboat's helm. Yet for all his wiry strength, this boy carried himself diffidently. He had thrown down the sword he had used to win the Keys to Elrinfaer, but his hands shook through the moment of his victory, and his sun-bleached hair blew back to reveal tear-streaked cheeks.

  'Who?' demanded the voices. The touch of demons prodded and tore at Emien's memory until the slight, untrained heir of Ivain Firelord was identified.

  Silence resulted then, stillness that hinted of rage and resentment. Vaere-trained sorcerers were ever a threat to demons, but, among them, Anskiere and Ivain Fire-lord had caused the fiercest damage. The former was prisoner, trapped by his own wards in the ice cliffs. But the revelation that Ivain had left an heir with talent and potential to match his skills caused consternation and anger and a raw desire to destroy.

  'The boy must be hunted down,' fretted the first voice.

  'Killed,' chimed in a second.

  'Destroyed, most-utterly,' wailed a third, and the howl of multiple companions made Emien's mind ring with hate. He lay twitching in reaction, even as his demon overlords instructed the Sathid which directed his fate. 'Call in the captured pawn. Compel him, the moment the sickness of bonding relents enough to permit him to act. Let the man-child steal the boat from his fisherman benefactors and sail north to Shadowfane. Scait Demon-Lord must sample his mind and memories. Then shall the hatred of Marlson Emien be granted training and weapons; and Ivainson Jaric, Firelord's heir, shall be hunted down and slain.'

  II

  Keeper of the Keys

  Jagged, icy rocks tore Jaric's hands as he climbed. In darkness the escarpments beneath the ice cliffs were steeper and more perilous than he recalled, despite the storm which had harried him the first time he made the ascent. A wave thundered over the reef below. Spray sheeted his back and subsided with a hiss into the sea. The soaked wool of his tunic clung to muscles which quivered with fatigue, yet he groped for a fresh hold and clawed upward. One shin banged painfully into granite before the boot found purchase; pebbles skittered under his sole, the rattle of their fall swallowed by seething surf below.

  The Firelord's heir winced and clung gasping to an outcrop. Neither danger nor discomfort could deter him. Until the stormfalcon's feather and the Keys to Elrinfaer were returned to the Stormwarden who was their rightful guardian, no portion of Ivainson Ja
ric's life could be called his own.

  The boy shook sun-bleached hair from his eyes and reached for another hold. Scant yards above, he saw a rim etched faintly against the night sky: a ledge cut across the rock face. He jammed his foot in a cleft, thrust higher, and fumbled with scraped hands until he found a fingerhold overhead. A breath of cold washed over him. Jaric shivered in the darkness and transferred his weight. Inured to the pain of stressed tendons, he wrenched his body upward and hooked his forearm over the ledge. Above loomed the ice cliffs where abided the Stormwarden, Anskiere.

  Although elsewhere spring thrust wildflowers through the thornbrakes of Cliffhaven, here the ice glistened silver by starlight, towering cascades arrested in mid-fall by the relentless grip of winter. The view could dizzy the senses with its splendour, leave a man stupid and staring with awe until the cold stiffened his limbs. Jaric clenched his jaw and kept his eyes on the rock face. Although the cliffs had frozen barely a year past, sailors' tales already made a myth of them, fancifully describing galleries filled with riches, and jewelled chambers where Anskiere worked his spells in solitude. In fact, the glassy ramparts shaped a prison more secure than any dungeon fashioned by man. Here the granite was smooth, as if the escarpment itself was hostile to human presence. Jaric found neither crevice nor outcrop sufficient to bear his weight.

  Aching with fatigue, he hitched his body closer to the stone. Defeat never entered his mind. Too many times the debt inherited from his father had ripped his life into loss and hardship; with the promised release from that bond waiting only yards above his head, Jaric ran his hands over rock and hooked a sloping edge. The hold was inadequate for the move he intended. Yet a fall on to the reefs below was less risk than guarding the Keys through the night. Demonkind had plotted and killed to acquire the powers Elrinfaer Tower safeguarded. Only a fool would believe they would not try again. Jaric set his weight on the toe left wedged in the crevice, tensed his fingers, and thrust.