The fifth sorceress, p.35
The Fifth Sorceress, page 35
They had first gone to the kitchens of the Redoubt, where Wigg had selected provisions and Tristan had packed them into stringed leather bags that could be carried on horseback. Then they had gingerly made their way to the gravitating chamber and came back up into the library Wigg had shown Tristan that day when the prince had first learned of the Redoubt. Slowly and carefully they made their way back to the center of the palace, but nothing could have prepared them for what they were about to experience.
The scene that they encountered upon reaching the Great Hall was beyond belief.
Hundreds upon hundreds of their countrymen, civilians and Royal Guardsmen both, lay dead upon the floor. Not a single Minion corpse was among them. Severed limbs and heads lay about everywhere, and the marble floor of the hall was completely awash in the still partly liquid and partly viscid blood of the victims. Whenever the wind came up and blew hauntingly through the torn curtains and smashed stained-glass windows on either side of the room, the blood that had not already dried moved back and forth in sluggish little crimson waves of death.
The men, children, and soldiers had simply been murdered where they stood. But the women, even the elderly ones and the very young girls, lay naked everywhere, the remains of the Minion warriors’ savage carnality evident upon each of their bodies and faces.
The bodies had already begun to stiffen, and their stench permeated the air.
And there was more.
On the walls of the Great Hall the Minions had painted, in blood, the Pentangle, the sign of the Coven. The numerous five-pointed stars stared back at the two guilty survivors with a kind of haughty and sneering victory, dominating the room in silent and enduring triumph as the redness ran down the walls in streaks.
Over the entire room hung the deafening, impenetrable silence of death, the only faint movement and sound coming from the torn, bloodstained curtains as they flapped haphazardly with the incoming breeze.
Wigg had wanted to leave immediately, but the prince shook his head and, instead, jumped up on the dais. The dais, the killing ground of everyone I held dear, he thought. He had walked to the white marble altar, still covered with the partly dried blood of Nicholas. The altar upon which you murdered your own father, he snarled at himself. Tristan touched a fingertip to a small spot of still-liquid blood and gently rubbed it between his fingers, blatantly crying aloud, and finally sank to his knees in pain. It was some time before he lifted his head once again.
It was then that he saw it.
The dreggan, in a black-tooled scabbard that Kluge had somehow left behind in the melee. Tristan recognized it immediately as the same sword he had used to kill his father. It lay innocently beneath one of the wizards’ thrones. He approached it carefully, almost as if the inert sword could do him harm, and then finally reached beneath the seat and took it in his hand. He held it to the light for a time, mesmerized by its dangerous beauty. Despite everything that had happened, he was oddly not repulsed by the sword. He had never seen or held such a magnificent weapon in his life.
Tristan removed his robe. Then, gripping the scabbard with his left hand and the hilt with his right, he drew the blade. It rang loud and clear in the silence of the room, and it seemed a very long time before its mercenary song of death faded away into nothingness. The blood from Kluge’s recent victims that had pooled in the bottom of the scabbard came out with the sword and began to run the length of the blade, dripping to the hilt, his hand, and finally to the floor.
Lowering the blade, he calmly walked to face one of the thrones. He pointed the curved, single-edged sword at the back of the chair, his index finger searching for and finding the little lever that he knew was there. Without hesitation he pushed it. The blade of the dreggan shot forward at least a foot, its point going all the way through the back of the chair and out the other side. He pushed the lever again, and in an instant the blade retracted to its previous position. Lowering the dreggan, Tristan stood looking at the awful, yet wondrous thing as if in thought. Then he placed the blade against his trouser leg and pulled it back, wiping it clean of the blood. He replaced the dreggan in its scabbard, then lifted the baldric over his head and put the sword behind his back, the strap across the front of his chest, the hilt rising behind his right shoulder, the curved and ever-widening blade reaching down his back to his left hip. He then readjusted the baldric so the handle of the sword reached fairly high and close to the side of his neck, so that he could easily grab either the dreggan or his throwing knives. He walked back to the altar and stood there silently for a moment, looking down at the place where his father had died.
I will kill him with this very sword. I swear by everything that I am, and everything that he has taken from me, the winged murderer will die at my hands.
He put his robe back on and jumped down from the dais to look into the infamous raised eyebrow of Wigg. But the look of grim determination upon the prince’s face kept the old one silent. They each realized that there was no time to enter into an argument that the wizard would only lose.
Wigg turned and led them from the room.
After a brief stop at Tristan’s living quarters to retrieve all the kasi, the gold coin of the realm, that they could carry, they went out to the palace smithy’s shop, which was in an open area a little distance away from the castle. Wigg would have preferred to go to the stables first, so they could make a quick escape on horseback, if necessary, but Tristan had other ideas, and the wizard had no choice but to follow. Along the way they encountered not a single living soul. The blacksmith’s shop was utterly deserted. While the wondering wizard watched, Tristan went to the wall behind the hearth and removed several stones, exposing a hole in the wall. Reaching in, he withdrew a black satin bag and laid it upon the ground. Wigg then realized what was in it.
Dirks.
More of the prince’s steel throwing knives had obviously been hidden here against the day when the king might either have ordered Tristan to put them down for good, or else ordered the smith not to make them anymore. The old one watched Tristan as he removed a dozen dirks from the bag. Quickly the prince placed them in the quiver that now lay against his back just to the right of the dreggan. Then he handed the bag to Wigg, and they continued on.
Tristan held his breath for what seemed the entire way to the royal stables. Besides Wigg and Shailiha, there was only one other living being in the world that he loved whom he hoped had not been killed.
Pilgrim.
As they approached the stables, they saw increasing numbers of corpses of livestock. All manner of cattle, pigs, horses, chickens – indeed, almost any living creature that one could imagine to be domesticated – had died in the same grisly fashion as their owners. They came upon more than one horse that could be seen trying to get up without a hoof or a leg, screaming insanely in pain as only a horse can, eyes wild with agony and fear. Wigg always stopped before these pitiful creatures, turning up his hands and closing his eyes, giving them a painless, humane, wizard’s death.
As they walked through the gates and into the stables proper, Tristan started to become frantic. Dozens of dead horses lay all over the yard, including Shailiha’s bay mare, but the longer he looked, the more hopeful he became that Pilgrim was not among them. ‘Any two horses will do,’ Wigg told him compassionately, hoping that the prince would give up the search so that they could be on their way. Time was critical. But Tristan was adamant, and Wigg could see the same look in his eyes that had been there when he had taken up the dreggan. ‘Pilgrim shall either be under me, or I shall know that he is dead,’ Tristan said sternly, and nothing more.
Wigg watched as the prince placed two fingers in his mouth and blew a loud, piercing whistle. The Lead Wizard winced. The last thing they needed to do was to attract attention to themselves, especially if the invaders had not all left. Again Tristan blew the whistle, the one that always brought the stallion running.
But there was nothing.
Tristan hung his head, and the tears once more began to come. They have killed my horse, too, he thought, rage boiling up in him again.
And then he heard it.
Soft and low, from somewhere in the nearby woods came a single, frightened snort. Tristan looked up, not daring to believe. He placed his fingers in his mouth and again whistled, and this time, after a few moments, he heard a whinny and the sound of a hoof pawing the ground nervously. Finally, several horses stepped from the woods into the clearing of the stable grounds upon frightened, shaking legs.
The one who led them out was Pilgrim.
The dappled gray stallion appeared to be uninjured, but there was a wildness in his eyes that the prince had never seen before. Several of the others had the same look in their eyes, as well as wounds that ranged from minor to serious.
Tristan walked slowly to his horse, talking to him gently. When he finally approached and tried to touch the stallion’s face, Pilgrim reacted sharply, drawing his head back almost as if in pain. But as Tristan kept talking, the horse began to quiet down. At last the stallion rubbed the length of his face against Tristan’s shoulder, almost knocking him down, and the prince knew Pilgrim was himself again.
Wigg and Tristan quickly examined the rest of the horses. Two were injured so badly that Wigg had to put them down, but the others looked as though they would be all right. Wigg saddled a black gelding, while the prince did the same to Pilgrim. After loading their mounts with the food and the bag of dirks, they secured the other horses in one of the paddocks, then left the stables.
Despite the urgency, they had agreed to take an unnecessarily long route through the city, veering away from the palace in order to remove suspicion of their association with it in case they happened upon anyone living.
The prince felt like a stranger in his own land as they rode through the city, clothed in a robe he was unaccustomed to, the hood drawn over his head so as to avoid being identified. ‘Steel your heart, Tristan,’ Wigg had said as they started down the streets. ‘Be surprised at nothing you see. Keep your head down, avoid attention, and whatever you do, don’t stop to help, no matter how much you want to.’
Tristan had always relished the chance to be away from the castle, mingling with the citizens whenever he could, but as they entered the outskirts of Tammerland the people he saw and the city he once knew had been so horribly changed that he could barely recognize either.
Virtually every building was on fire. The men of the city had apparently long since given up trying to quell the flames, and many of them simply stood in the streets before their homes or shops, sobbing. The fires were everywhere, making it difficult to walk the horses down the streets. There were many places where Pilgrim and Wigg’s gelding simply refused to enter because of the flames, and they often had to resort to less-congested side streets or go around the flaming areas altogether.
Bodies were everywhere, both of the citizens and the Royal Guard. People had been dragged out of their homes in the dead of night and either killed on the spot, or raped and then killed. Body parts lay everywhere, and the imaginative nature of the Minions’ carnage had apparently known no bounds. Everywhere they looked, heads and bodies were impaled on hooks and pikes. Internal organs had been torn away from their hosts. Packs of dogs wandered the streets, snarling and fighting amongst themselves, and some had begun to tear into the bloated corpses that had yet to be disemboweled.
At one of the street corners they came upon a pile of human bodies, naked, all women. They had all been abused, killed, and then thrown upon the heap as if the attackers had tried to see how many of them they could take in a single day, and make the pile of rotting bodies as high as possible.
Crippled horses and livestock ran, walked, and hobbled down the city streets in a daze, many of them bleeding to death as they went. Vast volumes of blood, both animal and human, ran down the streets and dripped from the burning buildings. It seemed to have washed almost everything in a drying, red-and-brown stain that Tristan knew would never leave this land, even when it could no longer be seen. The Pentangles appeared, painted in blood, on almost every building. The arm and legs that had been used as fresh, flowing paintbrushes lay beneath the grotesque, red symbols.
But what struck Tristan as most horrible was the plight of the living.
Everywhere there was screaming. Women clutched to themselves the dead and bloody bodies of their loved ones. Men walked through the streets in a kind of trance, eyes wide open but unseeing, ears deaf, voices muted.
Some of the survivors were more rational, and Tristan was aghast when he heard what they were saying. ‘They’re all dead!’ a shopkeeper exclaimed. ‘And it is being said that the traitorous prince has taken the head of his own father! Now we all shall die!’
‘What will become of us?’ an old woman begged to the sky. She was sitting in the bloody dirt of the street, holding a dead lieutenant of the Guard in her lap – her son, perhaps. His eyes had been gouged out. ‘Who will protect us now?’ she screamed to no one in particular.
The living may yet envy the dead, Tristan thought sadly. And I am their prince, but am powerless to help.
He lowered his face in shame, trying to neither see nor hear, and simply let Pilgrim follow Wigg’s gelding at his own pace.
But his greatest disappointment of their ride was yet to come. Rounding a street corner, there came to his ears the sounds of broken glass, and more screaming.
The madness isn’t over, he realized in disbelief. Now we are doing it ourselves.
Gangs of thugs, unfettered by law or reason, had begun roaming the darkening streets, taking whatever they wanted, killing those who got in the way. They were looting the shops that had somehow survived the fire. Many of them were drunk, waving stolen broadswords of the Guard as they went. Down the dark alleys that the prince and the wizard passed by, the screams of women could be heard, and more than once Tristan saw dirty, leering men lined up at the alley entrances, waiting their turn.
Tristan spurred Pilgrim to catch up to Wigg. Alongside the wizard, he chanced a sidelong glance at the ancient profile.
‘We have to help!’ he whispered. ‘I cannot simply ride by all of this as though it has no importance to me!’
‘Look around you, Tristan,’ the old one whispered back. ‘Can’t you see what is happening? Do you think that this is an isolated event? Don’t be so naive. With the Royal Guard also went the last semblance of law and order. Look well, Tristan, and remember, for Eutracia and all that she once was is crumbling down around us.’
‘Despite that, I cannot merely stand by!’
‘You can, and you will,’ Wigg snarled through gritted teeth. ‘Would you lose your life to save one woman when your sister is in danger, and the very future of your nation depends on what you do right now? Do you think that I would not like to extend my hand and stop the madness that I see before us?’ Tristan had never seen such a look of angry frustration upon the old one’s face. ‘If we are noticed, all could be lost. You must do as I say.’ Wigg turned his ancient, aquamarine eyes upon the prince, and Tristan could literally feel the wizard’s power. Then Wigg said something that Tristan would never forget. Something that stabbed him through the heart.
‘You are not yet as strong as you will eventually become. Do not doubt me here, again, as you did that day on the dais. This time I cannot save you from yourself.’
Tristan did not speak.
I have hurt him, the old one realized. But there is no other choice. The Chosen One must survive, no matter what the cost.
It was then, just as they rounded another corner, that they first encountered the stench.
It was unlike anything that Tristan had ever smelled, and it hung visibly in the air in alternating black-and-beige layers with a kind of sickeningly sweet, yet repugnant flavor. There had been very little wind that day, and both the odor and the drifting particles that comprised it settled slowly, permeating everything it touched with its foulness. Then they entered an open field on the outskirts of the city, and heard the crackling of fire. Wigg instinctively knew what it was.
The Minions were burning their dead.
Hundreds of funeral pyres, glowing in the advancing night, lit up the sky for what seemed to be miles, the stench of the flaming corpses covering everything in a slowly settling dust of death.
As the last of the fires began to die in the gentle rain that had begun, the soft, deep rumble of thunder advanced across the ever-darkening sky. It seemed to Tristan that the entire world had begun to weep.
They rode on in the rain.
As their slow but deliberate circle began to take them back to the other side of the palace from which they had emerged, Tristan began to try to steel himself against what he knew he would encounter. He did not understand Succiu’s mind as well as Wigg did, but he had little doubt that her orders would have been followed regarding the bodies of the wizards and the royal family. As they came closer to the palace entrance, Tristan began to look around for a horse-drawn cart. He had no illusions about being lucky enough to find one that was harnessed to a still-living horse, but if he could obtain one large enough he would use Pilgrim to pull it, and walk along beside.
He would need it to move the bodies.
When at last he found one and jumped down from his horse, he could feel the old one’s eyes boring into the back of his head, as if to tell him that there was no time for this, and that they should leave. Tristan simply turned around, looking dead into the wizard’s eyes.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ he said, ‘and you’re probably right. But I will not leave here until I have buried them. All of them. You can go on alone, if you want, but this is something I must do.’ There was no need for him to fight to maintain his determination. In this he would not be denied.
And so it was that they came full circle and approached the entranceway to the palace, and Tristan had to fight back the tears and the nausea when he was finally confronted with the sight that now lay before him.
