The Reluctant Mage Read online

  Morg bared his teeth. “Speak.”

  “I am Brantone, Master.” A young man, barely bearded.

  “I am Trindek, Master.” An old bent man, mostly dressed in livid scars.

  No Feen or Manemli here, then. Like Iringa, it must be ruined.

  These kings, these ruling men, all were punished by Morg to blood and twitching, to shrieks and moaning as they bowed their heads and offered him their souls and the souls of their people.

  Sickened, Ewen waited his turn.

  I must do this. I must. Vharne lives or dies on Morg’s whim.

  But the pride in him was howling, that a man of the Vale should be so thrown down. Would Murdo kneel like this? Would he shame the king, with his kneeling?

  Murdo’s dead. I’m the king now. Tav would say to do my best for Vharne, he would.

  Today, his best was kneeling.

  And then Morg looked at him.

  He stared up into the sorcerer’s dark, pitiless eyes. Familiar eyes, with a look of Deenie in them. He cleared his throat. Forced the craven words to his tongue.

  “Master, I am Vharne.”

  They came close to cutting his throat to ribbons, those words. It came close to killing him, knowing he’d given his people to Morg.

  “You are Vharne,” said the sorcerer, and for the fifth time smiled and clenched his fist.

  The pain that ripped through him then woke the lightly sleeping pain in his beast-torn, salved face. Robb and his barracks men were watching, Deenie was watching, the girl Charis who called him Noddyhead, she was watching too, but he couldn’t stop a shout of anguish bursting from his lips. Like the four kings before him he collapsed and writhed on the cold black marble floor. Spat blood. Vomited moans. Thunder and lightning cracked the cold, cloudy air.

  “I am Morg,” said the sorcerer, releasing him, “and you kings belong to me. Your lands belong to me. Whatever is left of your runting people, they too belong to me. Every blade of grass, every pebble, every cow pat under the sun is mine. Everything in this world is mine… or shortly will be. It was a lesson learned once that your grandparents forgot to teach you. Now I will teach you, and I do not spare the rod. Get up.”

  Along with his fellow kings Ewen slowly stood, shaking. Five of Morg’s winged beasts stepped forward at his glance and next they were roughly pulled to one side of the crimson dais. Cruel pressure on their shoulders put them once more on their bruised knees. The winged beasts stood behind them, talons resting on their heads. The warning was plain.

  Protest and you die.

  “You are granted a privilege known to very few,” Morg told them, as though they should be grateful. “At this time, in this place, do I take back the last found tattered pieces of my lost and sundered self. Only by my unmatched skill have I kept them intact for so long. No other mage in history was strong enough for that. You slaves are called here to witness this. To witness my majesty. In your fallow time as I was sleeping you came to think of yourselves as free. You are not free. Here, in Elvado, freedom’s illusion dies.”

  Ewen watched the blond man, the Doranen, who was meant to have died out with the rest of his cursed kind, who was not looking at Morg, who Deenie knew, and saw something unexpected flit across his milk-pale, handsome face. Contempt? Revulsion? Grief?

  No. That can’t be, it can’t. A monstrous man, he is. Like Morg.

  At a glance from the sorcerer, Deenie’s Doranen snapped his fingers. The beasts nearest the chamber’s doors lumbered to open them. More beasts came in soon after. Was there no end to their number? Those beasts in the lead kicked and shoved their way through Deenie and Charis and his barracks men and the four kings’ servants, clearing a path to the crimson marble dais.

  And shuffling behind them, crowded together by more beasts, came a putrid, eye-watering gaggle of naked, brain-rotted wanderers.

  Within heartbeats the chamber’s cloud-thickened air was thickened further with their stench and rang with the harsh sound of their mindless mumblings and chantings. Ewen felt his throat close, bile rising, as the unhealed wound of his brother’s death stabbed him. Padrig. The men who’d come to Elvado with their kings, his own barracks men, treacherous Deenie and Charis, they choked and shivered as the wanderers shuffled between them, leaving blood and pus and shreds of rotting flesh in their wake.

  Ewen caught Deenie’s eye. Pale and sickened, holding frightened hands with Charis, she saw him staring and tried to smile. Her eyes were bright with tears, and anxious. In return, he showed her his bitter, blinding rage.

  Girl, it’s a pity you dreamed me, it is.

  The Doranen had retreated, breath by breath, to the furthest edge of the crimson marble dais. Morg hadn’t noticed. Too busy, he was, devouring the wanderers with his greedy dark eyes. Like a starving man he stared at them, a man presented with a feast.

  Reaching the dais, the wanderers stopped their mindless shuffling. A beast seized the nearest mumbling, brain-rotted wanderer and tossed her at Morg’s feet. That look came to his face again, the look of a man pumping his loins empty. He knelt beside the babbling wanderer and took her rotting face in his hands. The moment he touched her the ruined flesh began to slip from her bones. A terrible keening howl broke from her bloody mouth. The other brain-rotted wanderers howled with her, as though they felt her pain, and the captives on the black marble floor cried out in fear and wrenching disgust.

  Morg heard none of it. The rotted woman’s rotting flesh coated his fingers and slicked his rich clothes. With a soft popping sound the woman’s eyes burst in their sockets but still he stared into them, as though he would see her soul. Blood and jelly poured down her ravaged cheeks.

  And then the sorcerer threw back his head and let out a great cry. Something loathsome shivered the air, brushing sickly against all their skins. Something foul and evil streamed from the wanderer into Morg’s wide, straining mouth. He shuddered and convulsed with it. He squealed like a tumble-wench pierced to pleasure.

  The brain-rotted wanderer fell to pieces on the dais.

  Though his belly was empty Ewen heaved and heaved, and his fellow kings heaved, and their fellow captives heaved. Even Robb and his hardened barracks men heaved. The brutish beasts roared and grunted. The winged beasts behind Morg’s slave kings pressed with their talons. One move more than heaving guts and heads would be torn off.

  After that, Ewen couldn’t look. There were some score of wanderers brought here like sheep to a shambles and though he was a swordsman trained, though Tavin’s honour was at stake, he could not bring himself to look. He stared at the black marble floor and listened to the wet flesh flappings and the cries of pain and the cries of pleasure and the soft collapsing of rotted flesh and bone on more rotted flesh and bone as the pile of the discarded grew higher and higher.

  A sorcerer, this is. It’s magework. It’s the world.

  If there’d been tears to weep he would have wept them, but his heaving belly had dried him out. He couldn’t even look at Deenie. She was caught in this, she was somehow to blame. Called herself a mage, she did, and lulled him into lowering his guard. Showed him a sweet face, a brave face, made him think that she cared. She didn’t care. She’d used him. Deenie was a lie.

  And it’s a fool I was, to trust her.

  A good thing Tavin would likely never know of it. Such foolishness in Murdo’s son would break the swordmaster like a blade.

  It’s sorry I am for this, Tav. So sorry.

  One by one the rotted wanderers were consumed, until only a single babbling voice remained, chanting the same mindless gobblings he’d heard from Padrig and every brain-rotted wanderer he’d crossed paths with since.

  “The sundered parts all came together and oh there was a joining and the world rejoiced.”

  Except it wasn’t a mindless gobbling any more. This moment was what the wanderers had meant, Morg sucking them dry of the madness infecting them. Sucking them dry of himself. Remaking himself. Becoming what he’d been before, the most soulless, powerful sorcerer be
neath the sun.

  Padrig. Padrig.

  And then he felt his guts twist, as something familiar in that last babbling voice made him look up. The face before him was rotting, burst pustules and running pus and wet gaping holes in the cheeks. But despite the foul, distorting ruin, he knew it.

  Those are my eyes, they are. Those cheekbones? They’re Padrig’s. But see that? There’s my jaw. And there’s the way the hair springs sideways on my forehead. There’s the man whose seat I gave to Tavin, so I could come here and give Vharne to Morg.

  A beast seized Murdo by one stinking, rotten arm. Cast him like he was a dying dog into a small, clear space on the blood-smeared marble dais. Morg failed to notice. He seemed drunk now, glutted, his muckish face oddly blurred. His dark eyes were closed as he swayed on his feet.

  “The sundered parts all came together and oh there was a joining and the world rejoiced.”

  Hearing his words dressed in another man’s voice, the voice of utter madness, Morg opened his eyes. Smiling, he took a step towards Vharne’s rotted king. With the winged beast behind him, its talons light upon his head, Ewen felt the tilting world stand still.

  “Get away from him, sorcerer! It’s a stinking abomination, you are!”

  Morg hesitated, his greedy eyes widened in shock. As the brutish beasts howled and roared their fury, as the winged beast at his back hissed and flapped, before it could strike Ewen dropped and twisted as Tavin had taught him hour after hour after hour in the tiltyard. Scant heartbeats free of the creature he threw himself at the marble dais, at Morg. He heard a girl scream his name. Deenie. His fingertips reached the dais—touched Morg’s shod foot—touched Morg—and then the winged beast he’d evaded sank its talons into his shoulder and his hip and raised him so high he thought he might touch the black and roiling clouds beneath the chamber’s ceiling.

  Drenched in scarlet agony he heard the captives shouting, the brute beasts growling. The winged beast with its talons in his flesh was pulling him apart. He felt sinew stretch and threaten to tear, felt blood pour from his breached, battered body. He was going to die. He didn’t care.

  Sorry, Tavin.

  Then he heard the winged beast scream, and moments later felt himself falling, falling, then strike the marble floor. The winged beast fell beside him, its blue eyes open in abrupt, astonished death. Its fellow beasts were yowling, flapping wings, clashing tusks and horns. The floor shuddered beneath him as they came to tear him apart.

  “Stand back! Stand back! Touch him, touch any captive, and you die!”

  It was the Doranen. Morg’s right hand. His Dirk. The beasts obeyed him, howling their dismay.

  Stunned, Ewen blinked up at the dais, at the Doranen, whose milk-white face was a mask of rage and disbelief and—and hope. Hope? But how could that be?

  “Ewen—Ewen—what are you doing?”

  It was Deenie, dropping to her knees beside him, hauling him against her leather-covered chest, as the winged beasts and the brute beasts yammered all around them. He hated her, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Morg.

  “Kill him, girl!” he croaked, struggling to free himself, to see Murdo, as the pumping blood slicked his cold skin hot. “Kill the sorcerer! Kill Morg!”

  “I can’t, I can’t!” she said, holding him. “Ewen—”

  He sank his fingers into her arm, still struggling, ignoring the pain. “You have to, Deenie. That wanderer is Vharne’s king, he is. My father.”

  Her eyes blanked with shock, she shook her head. “No.”

  Sick with hating her, he wrenched himself free. Rolled half-over, tried to get to his feet—Father! Father!—but he was too late. Morg was feeding on Vharne’s king.

  Deenie behind him, her hands clutching his arm. The Doranen on the crimson dais, watching them, his clever mask still awry. Murdo in the sorcerer’s grip, the flesh sliding from his bones. Morg with his mouth wide open, drinking himself in. He cried out, slumping, the king tumbling through his hands. Deenie’s Doranen leapt forward to catch the sorcerer—her brother—in steady, eager arms. So much for revulsion. So much for contempt and hope.

  Cradling Morg so gently, the Doranen looked up. Looked at him, and at Deenie. The girl gasped, shivering. He heard Charis whisper her name. He heard a man, softly sobbing. It was Robb, his Dirk. But the grief of his barracks men was too shallow to touch him.

  “Dravas!” said the Doranen, his voice a carrying command. “Take the captives whence they came, not a mark to be put upon them. The King of Vharne and his people lock in a cell on their own. All but one dravas to stand guard over them. One winged dravas with me, for the Master’s chamber!”

  Crude, clawed hands claimed him, dragged him up from the floor. Dragged him with the other captives, kings and servants, barracks men and lying mages, out of the stinking charnel house chamber. He felt nothing in his bleeding, punctured hip and shoulder, nothing in the talon-wounds scraped into his face. Somewhere on that marble dais, in that towering pile of rotted flesh, was the king. The king. Murdo.

  My father.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Arlin sat on the floor, in the corner of Morg’s eyrie, back flat to the wall, knees pulled to his chest, arms wrapped around his knees. Aside from the sorcerer, he was alone. The winged dravas he’d commanded to carry Morg into his private chamber was long since dismissed. Vaguely he was aware of pain behind his eyes and in his haunches, raging thirst, and a stomach both queasy and hungrily hollow. He’d been sitting here for some time now, and despite his various discomforts intended to sit a good while longer. Until he had an answer, one way or another.

  Morg slumped on his eyrie throne, profoundly unaware.

  Floors and floors and floors below them, Rafel’s sister and her silly friend and some kind of parochial royalty they’d managed to trip over on the way to Elvado were locked in a dungeon dug deep into the earth.

  Arlin cleared his dry throat. “Rafel? Deenie’s here. Shall I tell her you’re at home?”

  No answer.

  “Rafel,” he said, sharply this time. “I shall have to speak with her. What should I say?”

  Still no answer.

  He held his breath, waiting for Morg to reappear, to chide him or beat him or burn him for trying to rouse the Olken. But Morg, it seemed, was as distant as Rafel. Indeed, he looked like a corpse sitting on his throne. Only a sporadic flicker of eyelid suggested he was still alive.

  A corpse.

  Shuddering, Arlin pressed fingers to his saliva-soured mouth. Would the day ever come when he could forget the sight of those grossly repugnant vessels? When he could breathe and not breathe in their cloying, putrid stench? The sorcerer was clean now, he’d seen to that first, but how long before the sight of his clean face would not provoke the memory of smeared blood and pus and gobbets of rot?

  I think I’m wasting my time. If Rafel is alive in there, surely he must be driven out of his wits.

  To the best of his understanding, before today Morg had taken back to himself no more than four sundered pieces of his soul at a time. And how many ruined vessels had the beasts pushed into that chamber? Nineteen? Twenty? Which meant Morg might well be in this trance for days.

  And here I sit on my arse, the great Arlin Garrick, stuffed to bursting with magic and powerless to end him.

  “Rafel, for pity’s sake!” he said, moved to sudden violence. “Make an effort, you useless Olken peasant. This could be our only chance. Well. My only chance. Chances are you’re too far gone. But I know you want to stop him. So stop hiding, you feckless coward. Come out. Come out and help me!”

  Again he held his breath, heart sickly pounding, so afraid of Morg’s resurgence he was sore tempted to say a prayer.

  Blessed Barl, this is your fault. Care to lend a hand?

  But Morg said nothing, did nothing. The sorcerer remained oblivious, too deeply lost in the arduous task of reclaiming himself. And Rafel said nothing, because he was Rafel.

  To his unspeaking shame, Arlin felt his eyes bu
rn with tears. Breathing harshly, he hid his face behind his hands. Weeping now? Weeping? When he’d not wept since childhood?

  You fool, Garrick. You fool.

  But berating himself did not dry up his grief. He was tired, so tired. Every night when he closed his eyes he saw Fernel Pintte. Every night when he closed his eyes he felt the killing dagger thud home. Saw the shock in the old fool’s eyes. Felt the life shudder out of him and heard the idiot Goose’s wailing, heartstruck cries. Every day, serving Morg, he felt another small part of himself shrivel and die. And no longer could the glory of the magic sustain him.

  This wasn’t supposed to be my life. I was not born to be a sorcerer’s lackey.

  But now he could see no escaping that fate. He was shackled to Morg, bound with chains of darkest sorcery, and though he was Lord Arlin Garrick he wasn’t strong enough to break free. Which meant he was no less a prisoner than the fisherman’s son. What a good thing his father was dead. Though his son was a man now, Rodyn Garrick would still beat him for this.

  The thought wrung fresh tears from him, a drowning wave of despair.

  “Arlin… Arlin…”

  He lowered his hands. They were shaking. “Rafel?”

  For one heart-stopping moment he thought it was a trick. There was no change in Morg’s face this time, no suggestion that the Olken was once again behind his own eyes. His eyes were barely open. His mouth remained slack. That sporadic tic tic in one eyelid was unchanging, blunt hands lax in his lap.

  “Arlin.”

  He didn’t move, in case the moment shattered. The Olken’s voice was so faint and thready, a slurred mumble.

  “Rafel?”

  A blink for a nod. “Yes.”

  “Imagine that. I thought you were dead.”

  Another blink, this time for a shrug. “Is that why you’re crying? Arlin, I’m touched.”

  Bastard. “Your sister’s here, Rafel. When Morg wakes, he’ll kill her.”