He shucked his tunic off, the silken material seeming to hang in the air briefly as the human was bared. Then, inches ahead of his pursuers, he made a clean dive, plunging into the cool, deep water with barely a splash. He disappeared beneath the waters as the knights shouted and pointed and waded in different directions. But Blayne was halfway across the creek before he surfaced, swimming with amazing speed downstream, toward Vingaard Keep. The magic propelled him. Arms churning, legs kicking, he seemed to swim even faster than a man could run.
“Archers! Ready a volley! He can’t outrun an arrow!” shouted an enthusiastic sergeant of longbows. His men, some fifty of them, had been standing guard duty, so their bows were already strung. They put arrows to the strings and drew them back. The sergeant raised an eyebrow, looking at the emperor.
Jaymes frowned and shook his head, a very slight gesture but enough to cause the sergeant to hold his command.
“Let him hie back to the castle,” the emperor said calmly. “We’ll catch up with him later, when we conquer the place.” He looked down at Lord Templar, who was gently closing Lord Kerrigan’s eyes.
“I am sorry, Excellency,” the clerist said. “His heart was pierced-there was naught that I could do.”
The emperor nodded, turning to the other prisoners. The Vingaard priest, squirming in the arms of two brawny Freemen, looked at Jaymes with eyes spitting hatred.
“So you’ll take Vingaard?” he challenged, looking helplessly at his slain duke. “You have killed our lord! You will destroy our keep! And then what? Thelgaard? Solanthus? Palanthas? How long are you going to make war on your own country?”
“As long as it takes to build the future,” Jaymes replied.
“You have no sense of honor, no sense of tradition-you mock the greatness of this country. You’re a blight on Solamnia.”
“And you think it’s honorable to withhold taxes and men, the lifeblood of the nation, from its lawful ruler? Is that right? Is that the kind of virtue you espouse?”
“Est Sularus oth Mithas!” declared the priest stiffly.
“Your honor is your life?” Jaymes repeated the oath contemptuously, his tone drawing looks of unease from several of the knights in his own entourage. He ignored their expressions.
“That’s your luxury, then-worry about your honor, your life. As for me, I must look out for the greater good.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Everywhere loomed chiseled faces of granite, their color so dark a gray that it almost looked black. The mountains offered no sheltered groves of aspen, no rounded shoulders gently cloaked in a mantle of firs or pines. The open rock faces seemed to have been assembled without a pattern: one summit was a knife edge of two cliffs rising back to back; the adjacent peak was nearly flat at the top, a broad smooth shelf of rock dropping off on every side like some great towering cube. The gorges were deep, shrouded with shadows, sometimes slashed by raging torrents of icy water.
Snow still lingered in the shadowed couloirs and swales, but it was a dirty kind of gray slush, thick and wet and slowly melting away. There was water in the mountains, but it mirrored the colors of the rocks. Lakes and ponds were flat and the color of slate, lacking reeds at the shore or lilies in the sheltered bays. The streams connecting those pools were the only breaks in the monotonous landscape: they tumbled through cataracts, over falls, through rock-choked chasms, like ribbons of froth against a backdrop of ash.
There were no houses in the heights of the mountains, not a farm or village, not so much as a single herdsman. Anyone who tried to live off the land would find a world that was barren, cold, and to all appearances lifeless. Even the sky was gray, like a lid of cold iron pressing close above the mountain summits.
There was one lone structure, an eminence rising from the mountain’s gray stone. The color of the structure closely matched its surroundings, yet the sheer walls, looming gate, and lofty tower marked that building as a thing that had been constructed.
The dark castle occupied a cleft in the dark range. A deep moat, with a bottom lost in shadow, surrounded the entire fortress. The moat was spanned in one place by a long, slender bridge that had been built upon a single arch, with the span anchored at each side of the deep barrier. Tall, sheer walls looked down on the moat and the bridge, and the small valley beyond. A single keep rose within those walls, and that building was dominated by a tall tower-which was just a slight shade darker in color than the rest of the castle and the surrounding landscape.
A man stood in the window at the top of that tower, gazing out on the castle and the valley, the mountains, perhaps the whole world. He too was as dark and gray as the mountains, his skin swarthy, his once-black hair growing thick at the brows and on top of his head streaked with enough white to render it gray. A gray cape hung near where he stood, on a peg in the wall.
He wore a black cloak, wrapped like a toga about him, as he stared wordlessly, for a very long time, from his lofty perch. Leaning forward, he let one hand rest on the stone sill of the window, allowed the cool air to brush his features, chilling him as it evaporated the sweat beaded onto his forehead. He looked at the slate sky, at all the gray facets of his world, and he frowned.
“Hoarst? Why don’t you come back to bed?”
Hoarst turned slowly to look at the woman who had spoken. Her shock of hair, snowy white, spilled across the pillow as she stared at him, lazily lying on her side. Her skin, as white as her hair, looked as cold as ice-though he remembered its heat against his flesh. She was Sirene, and she pleased and served him in many ways, willingly giving him her body, even sharing drops of her blood when he needed them for various spells and potions.
At that moment, she simply repelled him.
“Leave me,” he ordered. “I will have need of you, but not until later.”
The albino woman’s eyes widened slightly, but she quickly scooted away, out the far side of the bed, gathering up her clothes and, barely taking time to throw a robe over her slender shoulders, darting out the door. Even in her haste, she remembered to close it very gently.
Hoarst exhaled slowly, relishing the precise control over his breathing. Disdaining the use of magic for now, he took an inordinate amount of time to wash and dress himself, heating a metal bowl of water over a small brazier, cleansing his face and hands, shaving carefully. He smoothed the wrinkles from his gray tunic and leggings before donning them and even buffed, slightly, his worn and comfortable boots. He took pleasure in the mundane tasks, which he could easily have accomplished merely by casting a few simple cantrips. He was saving even the tiniest expenditure of his power for something, anything, more interesting than his ablutions.
He picked up a gray robe and draped it casually over his arm as he finally emerged from his chamber in the high tower. He took the steps one at a time, counting them silently as he rounded the spire again and again in a descending spiral. At one hundred four steps, he reached the door at the bottom, drew a slow, contemplative breath, and emerged into the heart of his stronghold.
What had once been the keep’s great hall, Hoarst the Thorn Knight had converted into a huge laboratory for the working of his magic. A great oven had been installed along one wall, with benches of burners, centrifuges, glass vials, and a myriad of components arrayed on both sides. A pipeline of water had been diverted to run along the length of his primary workbench, with several spigots operated by hand screws, so he could turn on a flow of water at any one of them simply by adjusting the valves.
The other side of the room was devoted to rows of tall cabinets, which stood like wardrobes, each stocked with the odds and ends of magical experimentation: bats and rats and bugs, sometimes dried and whole, sometimes divided into useful components such as eyes, livers, and tongues. There were more than a dozen live birds, some of them tropical creatures of colorful plumage, but including a scruffy crow, several hawks, and a leering vulture, all caged in one corner of the room.