Death of a Darklord

FIVE

Jonathan Ambrose sat alone in his study. His window looked down into the inner courtyard of the fort. He could see the shed that the mage had been given. Strange lights danced over the snow, spilling from the shed's windows and open door. Dust flew in gray plumes out the door to dirty the snow. A neat pile of debris magically marched itself outside to be stacked by invisible hands on one side of the door.

There was a golden radiance that shone from the small, dirty windows. Not lamplight, but magelight. How had he let them talk him into this? How? He knew better than to let a magic-user inside his walls. They were weak creatures, easily turned to evil. All of them craved power, and darkness offered easier paths to power than did light. Not more power, but less effort. Jonathan had never met a mage yet that could resist the temptation.

Which brought him to Elaine. Little Elaine. All this time, he had been harboring a mage under his roof. Jonathan sighed and leaned back in his chair. A broken table levitated through the shed door, turning itself effortlessly to fit through the narrow opening. Would Elaine be able to do that, someday?

He had known deep inside that she possessed power, but he had pretended. He had not wanted to know the truth. She had nearly died today. When he touched her, she had been icy, like the long dead. It had not been Tereza's words that had decided it for Jonathan. It had been Elaine's ghost-pale face. Her immobile hand like death in his warm one. The memory of her lying in the snow had decided it for him. If her magic could kill her, she had to be trained. He would not risk her dying because of his prejudices.

A circle of sparks like multicolored fireflies danced against the shed's windows. The question was, could Jonathan stand a mage under his roof? A trained, powerful mage in his household? He had never had children, and never regretted it. What he had not admitted, even to himself, was that Elaine, Blame, even Konrad-they were his children. Or, at least, his family.

Tereza had lost two babies in childbirth. The doctors said another might kill her, and the baby would most likely die. Thordin told of healers in his own land, those who could heal with a touch-could bring life, true life, back to the dead. Jonathan would have given much to have such a healer bring life to his dead children. To heal the pain he saw in Tereza's eyes, and in his own.

A whirlwind danced out through the shed door. In and among the swirling dirt and debris, magic lights whirled, so fast that the individual lights became stripes of glowing color. Snow blew upward in white plumes, reflecting the colors. Dirt mixed with the blowing snow, obscuring the bright lights. All that whiteness and the rainbow lights turned dark. The whirlwind rose above the snow, leaving its load of trash behind, then floated back in the open door.

Magic was like that. Pretty, even beautiful, but it dirtied what it touched. Then it floated away, untouched.

With a sigh, Jonathan turned away from the window. He scooted his chair up to his desk. The top was surprisingly clean. Tereza had recently made him go through all his papers. There had been something comforting about the familiar stacks of papers, and now the bare desktop looked somehow intimidating.

A letter lay in the center of that smooth, dark surface. The heavy velum bore only a few scrawled words. Calum Songmaster's bold, theatrical hand was reduced to a wavering line. It was the handwriting of a sick man, an old man, a dying man. Jonathan slammed his hand on the chair arm, three hard blows. It wasn't fair. It simply wasn't fair.

He shook his head, a soft smile peeking through his beard. Jonathan Ambrose, mage-finder, bemoaned the Fact that the world was not fair. As if he hadn't known that for years. It was funny, and bitter. No matter how wise in the ways of the world, some things are too awful to understand or forgive. Calum's declining days in a sickbed was one of them.

Thordin claimed there were healers in his homeland who could save Calum, could make him whole again. Jonathan shook his head sharply, as if to clear such thoughts away. Brooding would not help. Answering the letter might.

The note said simply:

Dear Jonathan,

The village of Cortton has fallen under an evil spell. They have asked for the brotherhood's help. Please aid them.

Yours in Devotion, Calum Songmaster

Jonathan reread the letter. It said the same thing. No new information appeared. It was not like Calum

to be so brief, but if it was painful to write. Still, it bothered Jonathan.

Calum was their contact, their only link to the rest of the brotherhood. It was he who passed to them assignments from the rest of the brotherhood. Jonathan had served with them for most of his adult life, but he knew none save Calum and a handful of others. That handful took its orders from Calum. The original intent had been to protect the brotherhood's leadership. If an operative were caught, tortured, he could reveal only a few names, and no one who was irreplaceable. The movement itself would not be hurt. Mow Jonathan chafed under the restriction. Calum was dying, and if he died without passing his own contacts to someone else, they would all be' cut off.

Jonathan could still battle evil, but as a vigilante going from one disaster to another. There would be no long-term goal to work toward. Fighting individual evil was a good thing to do with one's life, but ultimately useless. The evil sprang up faster than any one person or small group could destroy it. But if they destroyed the evil that infected the land, cut off the maleficence at its source, there would be no new monsters. If the evil stopped breeding, the monsters could be hunted down one at a time and killed. Even the evil magic might fade, the evil that corrupted all magic-users. Jonathan was not sure he believed that wholeheartedly. Mages were a weak lot, easily tempted. He sighed.

His thoughts turned back to Elaine. He shifted his chair toward the window. A soft amber glow filled the hut. It took a moment for Jonathan to realize it was fire-healthy, normal fire gleaming against the windows and open door. Flickering shadows caressed the snow outside the door.

The piles of debris were gone. The snow looked as if some great broom had brushed it clean. Where had all the broken pottery, the warped furniture, the dirt, the rotten cloth, gone? He shook his head. He was not sure he wanted to know. He hoped Lilian, their maid, had not been watching. If she saw how quickly magic could clean, she might be tempted.

Of course, as far as Jonathan knew, a person had to be cursed with the magic from birth. She could not simply choose it.

Gersalius came to the shed's open door. Firelight bathed him in warm colors. He had a broom in his hands.

Jonathan sat up straighter in his chair. If the old wizard was going to take to the air on the broom, Jonathan wanted to see it. He had heard of such things, but never been witness.

The wizard bent over the broom, hands a foot apart on the stick. Orange fire shadows turned the ordinary broom to gold, or perhaps that was its true color. The wizard breathed a great fog into the air-a word of command?

Jonathan stood, leaning close to the cold glass.

Gersalius propped the broom against his body, rubbing his hands against the cold. When the broom was once more firmly grasped, he began to sweep the stone stoop.

Jonathan stepped back with a snort of laughter. Perhaps the wizard heard him, for he looked up. He must have, for he waved, then went back to sweeping the snow. It had not been some giant hand that had cleaned the snow, but one old man with a broom.

Gersalius stooped and picked up a small bit of cloth. He shook it out, frowned, then made a sharp flicking motion with his hand. The cloth vanished. No light display, no wind, no tricks; it simply was no more.

Jonathan stepped back from the window so he could no longer see the disturbing old man. Perhaps Gersalius could not fly on a broom, but what he could do was bothersome enough.

There was a solid knock on the door. "Enter," Jonathan called.

The door swung inward. Thordin entered. His square shoulders filled the doorway. His round face looked too small atop his powerful shoulders. Both the roundness and the size was heightened because he was totally bald. His head gleamed softly in the lamplight. The bones of his skull seemed thick under his skin. Thordin held the door while Blaine limped in behind him.

"Blaine, you should be in bed, resting," Jonathan said.

"I haven't made my report on what happened in the forest."

"Thordin can report for both of you."

"I tried to tell him that." Thordin's voice was painfully deep. A jagged edge of scar curled under his jaw to show why his voice sounded like rough sandpaper. "The boy would not listen to me."

The younger man shook his head. "The man was under our protection, and now he's dead. I owe him at least this much: to report in person."

"The dead do not care about grand gestures," Thordin said. "They are just as dead."

"His name was Pegin Tallyrand, and he'd never traveled more than a few miles from his home. He traveled for days in the dead of winter to find us; then we let him get killed."

"We did no such thing, boy. You nearly died trying to save him."

"And you, Thordin-did you take no wounds? You are not one to let a fight pass you by."

Thordin grinned. "Ah, that is a fact." His face sobered as if a hand had wiped it clean. "I fought, but it was a great, bloody tree. You can hack at it, but you can't rightly wound it. And I thought the lightning had killed it already."

"It was dead," Blaine said, "nothing of life inhabited what we fought."

Jonathan stared up at the younger man. He had never really questioned that Blaine had a feel for the land. He knew things about what grew or crawled or flew, knowledge observation could not account for. Like Elaine's visions, Elaine's intuition was something they had relied on without questioning its source. Was it magic, too? Was Blaine a budding mage?

Jonathan searched the familiar face. The gleaming lamplight showed the same earnest eyes, the handsome, if somewhat delicate, face. Nothing had changed, but suddenly Jonathan was looking with fresh eyes.

"How did you know the tree was not inhabited by some life-force?"

Blaine shifted on his crutch, frowning. "I don't know." He tried to shrug but couldn't quite manage it with only one good arm.

"For pity's sake, Blaine, pull up a chair and sit down."

Thordin drew two straight-backed chairs from the corner of the room. He steadied one chair for Blaine to ease into. When the boy was settled, he sat on his own chair. Thordin looked too large for the thin chair.

Blaine let out a shaky breath. Lines showed at his eyes and mouth. The candlelight gleamed on the sweat on his forehead and upper lip. He was hurt, only staying upright through sheer determination. Tonight was not the time to question his abilities, magical or not.

"Make your report, Blaine, before you collapse and we have to carry you off to bed."

"I'm not…"

Jonathan waved the protestations aside. "Tell me what happened."

Blaine drew a deep breath, nodded. "We were in Chebney."

"Was the report of a monster just fancy, or true?"

"All too true," Thordin said.

Jonathan did not prompt him. He knew Thordin would continue in his own good time.

"A ghost walked the corridors of the meister-singer's house. A phantom beast with poisonous breath that had stolen the meistersinger's voice. He was said to have a lovely voice, but we heard it not, at least not from the man. The ghost stalked the halls, singing in beautiful, mournful tones, like a great ringing bell that tolled the hours of darkness. With daylight, it vanished, and the meistersinger could speak with us. But he could not sing."

"A meistersinger that cannot sing cannot defend his seat."

Thordin nodded. "That was why he was so frantic for us to come, I think. It was only a matter of time before some young upstart challenged him. Without his voice, he was lost."

"The beast had a spark of life to it," Blaine said.

"Thordin said it was a ghost. Ghosts are shades of the dead."

"The ghost had once been part of a living being," Blaine continued, finishing Thordin's story for him. "I could feel its life-force, faint, but there. It wasn't just some evil conjuration."

"Had an evil conjurer died recently?"

Thordin grinned again. "Not exactly. You might say it was the evil person who lived."

Jonathan shook his head. "It grows too late for riddles, Thordin. Just tell me." He did not like Blaine's talk of living ghosts and conjurations.

"It seems the meistersinger had poisoned his last rival, not to kill him, but to steal his voice, to close off his throat on the day of the challenge. It worked. He became leader of the city soon after the old meistersinger died of apparently natural causes. The poison had worked too well. Soon after his death, the beast appeared."

"Justice beyond the grave," Jonathan said.

"Yes."

"How did you banish the creature?"

"We got the meistersinger to confess what he had done in the public square. Once the truth was known, the beast never appeared again."

"Is he still meistersinger of Chebney?"

Thordin nodded. "Yes. There are no rules about how you win your challenge in Chebney. Even though he cheated, he is still their leader."

"It isn't fair," Blaine said.

Jonathan looked at the boy. "Life in Kartakass is not fair."

"Life anywhere," Thordin said.

Jonathan acknowledged that with a nod. "How did you meet the man that died?"

"He came to the inn where we were staying," Blaine said.

"You were not housed by the meistersinger?"

Thordin gave an abrupt snort of laughter. "After we humiliated him-hardly."

"He turned you out into the streets?" Jonathan asked.

"No, but it was made clear we were not welcome."

"The next time the meistersinger of Chebney needs our help, perhaps we shall not give it?"

"We destroyed his beast," Blaine said. "He won't need our help again."

"Evil, ambitious men make the same mistakes over and over, Blaine. If he attracted evil to him once, he'll do so again."

Thordin nodded. "He has a beautiful voice, but he is not very bright. I doubt he's learned his lesson."

"What drove this man Tallyrand out into the winter night to find you?"

"His village has been struck with a terrible plague," Thordin said.

"The dead walk the streets at night," Blaine added.

"Truly, or just tales to frighten children?"

Thordin shrugged. "You know how it is, Jonathan. A plague hits, and people are too hastily buried. They come awake in the ground, shout for help, and are thought to be fiends in the ground. It could be something as simple, and as awful, as that."

"He said the zombies didn't smell bad*. He seemed surprised at that. The walking dead don't stink in the cold because they don't rot. If Pegin had made it up, the dead would have stunk, perhaps breathed fire." Blaine leaned forward, wincing as his leg took more weight. "The story would have been embellished more. You know how stories grow."

"The man was very blunt and matter-of-fact. He didn't seem to be an imaginative sort. He talked of burying his own daughter, and a week later she was at his window trying to get inside."

"Was he sure she was truly dead?"

"Yes, of that he was sure."

"How many people have died of this plague?"

"Over half the village," Thordin said.

Jonathan shook his head. "Why did he not send for help before?"

"He heard a bard singing of your defeat of the beast of Mandriel. When the bard told him you were living and not some legend, the town decided to send for you."

"If half of them are taken, it is a serious problem, indeed, but I have had a missive from Calum. He has given us a new assignment. I can't put that off."

"I will go back to Pegin's village," Blaine said.

"Alone?" Thordin asked.

A stubborn frown made Elaine's face seem very young, like a child told he could not do something. "He died to save his village. We can't let him have died for nothing."

Jonathan sighed. There were times when duty to the brotherhood and larger goals chaffed in the face of more immediate needs. This was one of them.

"What does Calum say in the letter?"

Jonathan handed it over.

Blaine stared at the floor, anger beginning to show through the pain and tiredness.

Thordin looked up, an odd expression on his blunt face.

"What is it?" Jonathan asked.

"Cortton is the village Pegin Tallyrand came from."

Blaine looked up. "You mean the brotherhood is sending us to help Pegin's village?"

Thordin handed the letter to him. "It would seem so."

"Well, now we know what is wrong in Cortton," Jonathan said.

"A plague of the dead," Thordin said in his deep, ruined voice.

"When do we leave?" Blaine asked. Eagerness showed on his face. He sat straighter in the chair; even his wounds seemed to hurt less. They were going to save Pegin's village, repay the debt that Blaine felt, assuage his guilt at the other man's death.

Jonathan understood all that. He could watch most of it dance across the younger man's face. Blaine's face was always like a mirror. Strangely, it was Elaine who was harder to read, more private.

"A few days to gather supplies and pack, to let you heal. To try and determine what caused the great tree to come to life. If there is some evil magic coming so close to our home, we must know of it. I don't want to leave the others behind in danger."

"If we cannot determine what happened, what then?" Elaine asked.

Jonathan had to smile at his enthusiasm. "Then we leave for Cortton in three days' time, with or without that particular mystery solved. If we huddled at home before we had deciphered every evil that befell us, we would never leave these walls."

Elaine grinned. "Good."

Jonathan looked at the younger man's eager face. Had he ever been that young? No, he decided, he had not. There was an answering gleam* in Thordin's eyes. Looking forward to the next battle. Perhaps Thordin had been that young; perhaps he still was.

Jonathan stared at the two warriors. Perhaps those who lived by steel, like those who lived by magic, suffered the same delusion, that their abilities could solve every problem. Come to think of it, once upon a time, there had been a certain mage-finder that thought his abilities were proof against all evil. That had not been so long ago. Before Calum's illness-a few months.

He wanted to touch Thordin and Elaine, to shake them until the eager light died from their eyes. Didn't they realize that steel was not always enough? Magic was not enough. Intelligence was not always enough. There were some horrors for which nothing was enough.

They had fought the walking dead before and conquered. But a plague of the dead? Half a village brought to unholy life? Would they finally meet something they could not overcome? For the first time, a tiny worm of doubt began to gnaw at Jonathan Ambrose, mage-finder. Doubt. and fear.