The attack failed, for the force never reached its target. Maloch’s protective magery diverted the flashes towards the rear of the temple, shattering several columns and causing the corner to collapse in a great tumble of blocks and cylinders of limestone.
Grandys folded his arms, smiling contemptuously, then leapt twenty feet across the temple and struck, wounding Lyf in the shoulder, then the chest. Lyf screamed as the accursed blade parted his flesh. Maloch struck again, shattering the little heatstone case and scattering ebony pearls across the marble flagstones. Grandys swooped on the bouncing pearls, caught two and held them up, roaring in triumph.
Lyf let out a shriek of dismay, called the other two pearls to his hand, then dropped his crutches and fled across the sky, trailing blood. His guards and generals, and the three matriarchs, stared after him, unable to comprehend how the reversal could have come about so easily. Neither could Rix. This changed everything.
The wizened, hunchbacked chancellor approached, extending his hand to Grandys. If they joined forces, could they turn the war Hightspall’s way?
“That was well done, Lord Grandys,” said the chancellor, gesturing to his own party. “If you would come this way, we have much to talk about.”
Grandys looked the chancellor up, looked him down, then spat on his black boots. “I have only one policy, and it is war. War until the enemy have been eliminated from the world.”
Turning his back on the apoplectic chancellor, Grandys checked the temple, evidently decided that all threats had been eliminated, then focused on Rix again.
“Since Maloch allowed you to use it, you must be my kinsman.” He touched Rix on the chin with the sword. “Follow me.”
This time Rix felt a compulsion to do so, but he fought it, just as he had fought the compulsion Lyf had put on him as a child, through the heatstone in Rix’s salon in Palace Ricinus.
“Nope,” he said, as insolently as he could manage.
Grandys pointed Maloch at Rix’s heart. “With the magery of this sword, I command you to follow.”
The spell struck Rix like a physical blow, so hard that he almost went over backwards and his knees turned to water. It was all he could do to stay upright, and he could feel the command beating at him, undermining his free will and trying to take control of him.
Few men could have fought such a spell, but Rix had spent the second ten years of his life fighting Lyf’s compulsion, and the struggle had developed an inner strength in him, a resolution that no one not forged in such fires could have had. He drew on every ounce of that strength now, directed it against the command, and broke it.
“Ugh!” grunted Grandys, as if he had taken a painful blow to the midriff. His opaline cheeks flashed red and black. He pointed Maloch again and, groaning with the effort, repeated, “I command you to follow.”
Again Rix tried to fight the spell, but this time it was stronger. Too strong, for he had given his all the previous time and had nothing left.
“Rix?” Glynnie shouted. “He’s ensorcelled you. You’ve got to fight him.”
He wanted to, but Rix could not. It was over. He lurched across on rubbery knees and stood behind Grandys.
“I always win,” said Grandys.
He leered at Tali, who was standing on the red circle holding Rannilt’s hand and looking as dazed as everyone else. “I have great need of a woman,” said Grandys. “You will come to my bed tonight.”
Rix felt his outrage rising like a thunderhead, but he could do nothing about it. Tali wouldn’t be able to resist his magery either. No one could.
Her jaw knotted. The sinews stood out in her neck and she let out a great groan, then cried, “I will not.”
Grandys looked at her in astonishment, as though such a rejection had never happened before. “Who are you?”
“I am Pale,” she said proudly.
He frowned, and Rix gained the impression that Grandys was trying to remember where he had seen her before. Tali was trembling all over.
Then Grandys’ lip curled. “You’re an unworthy slave. The command is revoked. Follow me, Ricinus. We’re riding to war.”
He mounted the largest horse there, ordered Rix to take another, then rode away, leaving a shattered silence behind him.
As Rix followed numbly, he could see the terror in Glynnie’s eyes. It was mirrored in his own, for he was starting to realise what a brute Grandys really was. Rix kept fighting the command spell, but it did not relinquish its hold for an instant.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 71
Rix looked sideways at the man who was now his master, and shuddered.
No one would have called Axil Grandys handsome. He was a huge, fleshy man with a red, bloated face, lips as swollen as a burst blood plum, and fists the size of grapefruits. He was boastful, swaggering, supremely confident in everything he said and did. And, Rix had read in one of the books Swelt had given him, that Grandys’ appetites were prodigious. All of them.
A mile up the road from Glimmering he dragged Rix’s horse, and Rix, sixty yards to a rock platform that looked out over the lake. To the south-west, twenty-odd miles distant, the trio of volcanoes called the Vomits fumed and flowed. South-east only a handful of miles away, a scatter of lights were all that remained of the city of Caulderon, which Lyf’s armies and his Hightspaller slaves continued to tear down.
In every other direction, there were no lights.
Grandys took Rix by the throat, heaved him off his horse and forced him to his knees on the brink of the platform. It was several hundred feet down to the water.
“Swear to me, and me alone!” bellowed Grandys, putting Maloch to Rix’s throat. “Swear or die.”
The sword was quivering, Rix’s no longer. Grandys was its master and, no matter what loyalty it had offered to Rix before, no matter what protection it had cast over him, it would quench its blood thirst on him without a second’s thought.
He was so sickened at being forced to follow this brute that part of him wanted to take Grandys’ second alternative. A part of Rix had craved death ever since the chancellor had forced him to choose between loyalty to his country and betraying his parents. Death meant an end to pain, an end to torment.
Another part longed to be relieved of the burden of responsibility he felt so unsuited to, and simply follow a great leader. Grandys’ command spell found the conflict between the two and twisted the knife. Rix, in his turn, twisted to avoid it. What if he hurled himself at Grandys and dragged him over the edge?
The fall would certainly kill Rix, but would it kill a man who had been stone and was now a stone-armoured man? Rix wasn’t sure it would.
“Swear a binding oath to serve me, unto death,” said Grandys.
Reluctantly, but under his sorcerous thrall, Rix swore.
“What do you know about Lyf’s king-magery?” said Grandys that afternoon. They were still riding north up Nusidand Peninsula, which extended into Lake Fumerous for seven miles.
“I know little about any kind of magery,” said Rix thoughtlessly, “and want to know less.”
Grandys’ backhander lifted Rix out of the saddle and the impact with the ground drove the breath out of him.
“I’ve got to have it,” said Grandys. “Tell me all you know.”
Rix spat out blood. He’d bitten his tongue. “You rotten mongrel. I’m going to kill you for that!”
“You want to,” grinned Grandys. “But you never will. I control you, body and soul. Now speak!”
“The dying king has to go through the death rituals so the king-magery can be released and pass to his successor. But no Cythian knew what had happened to Lyf, or how he died, so he couldn’t be given the rituals, and the king-magery wasn’t passed on.”
“I know all that,” snapped Grandys. “What happened to it?”