Dread Empire - Shadow Of All Night Falling Part 21

Briefly, he wondered if Varthlokkur were truly his father, and if he had judged Nepanthe wrongly. Then darkness closed in.

The Old Man, during Mocker's flailing at Yo Hsi, saw the opportunity he had been awaiting. He strode briskly across the chamber, seized Varthlokkur's wand, stepped into the heart of his friend's creation.

Before the sham battle reached its inevitable climax, he had completed Varthlokkur's work.

"Come along," said Yo Hsi, when finished. "You have things to tell me. Dawn-time things. Secrets known only to yourself and the Star Rider.""I have nothing to tell you save this: you're doomed. As he promised."

Laughter. "You're presumptuous. That'll change. My torturers have a way with wills."

"But they'll never see me. You won't leave this room. Varthlokkur told you that he had prepared for you.

He was right when he said that you'd lost."

"He had no magic. Great he was, yes, but distracted. My Tervola and I have leeched his power for months. Tonight he couldn't control the weakest ghost. Come."

"Take me."

Irritated, Yo Hsi started toward the Old Man. After three steps, however, he encountered an impa.s.sable barrier.

"Varthlokkur may have lost his ability to fight you, but his researches gave him a means to contain you.

This thing surrounding me draws on new sources of Power. No agency, no man alive, can free you now.

Not even he whom you call my master. You can sustain yourself by your arts, but to the world you're dead. Your powers have been jailed. You'll never leave that cage alive, nor will your magicks. I only wish that Varthlokkur hadn't been distracted by the woman. He might have lived to see his greatest moment, the fall of the evil that made him. That would've finally soothed his torment."

Yo H si tried his cage with physical strength and magic. Intolerable fires burned therein. Shadows fought.

But nothing yielded. So he tried bargaining.

"You're old, Yo Hsi, and cunning," the Old Man retorted after hearing mighty promises. "But I'm older.

Only the Director could sway me now. So let it be. Go gracefully, silently. Or else..." He stroked a symbol in the plane of a pentagram, suspiciously liverish in shape. Yo Hsi groaned, clutched himself. "I have my tortures too, and my magic can pa.s.s the cage's walls."

"Go gracefully? No! I'll have something." Yo Hsi's good hand flashed out like the strike of a snake.

Taking advantage of the cage's only weakness, that of pa.s.sing inorganic matter, a dart, poisoned, shot from an apparatus attached to his wrist.

The Old Man dodged, but not quickly enough. He gasped, held his wound, presently staggered, fell slowly to his knees. He smiled once, mockingly, at Yo Hsi, then again, happily, at something invisible.

"So long you've waited, Dark Lady." He toppled onto his face, half in, half out of Varthlokkur's magical structure.

Yo Hsi raged from wall to wall of his cage once more, blasting it with the most potent eastern magic, but there were, as he already knew, no exits.

NINETEEN: A March of a Domain of Shadows

"Varthlokkur?" Nepanthe reached for his hand. She peered dazedly about the room. Yo Hsi stood stiffly silent a dozen feet away. The chamber was quiet. Nothing moved but the symbols in Varthlokkur's device. "What happened?"

There was a sound. Yo Hsi turned. In the door stood a shadowy someone who might have been the easterner's twin. "Nu Li Hsi." The shadow was his twin. Long ago, they had murdered their father, Tuan Hoa, for his throne, and had brought the Dread Empire to its present schizophrenic state.The newcomer bowed slightly. "You've slain them all?" Varthlokkur stirred, groggily sat up beside Nepanthe. He didn't say anything.

"As you can see," said Yo Hsi. "We still have a draw."

"Even my Ethrian?" Nu Li Hsi, who was called the Dragon Prince, took a step into the room, peered about warily. "There's something strange here.

Something not quite right."

"The Old Man must've closed the cage for me," Varthlokkur grunted.

"You probably sense that." Yo Hsi indicated Varthlokkur's Winterstorm construct. "It's something new."

"Ah. No doubt." Nu Li Hsi regarded the Winterstorm with an, obvious professional admiration. He stepped closer.

"He doesn't know." Varthlokkur crowed. "Yo Hsi just might lure him in."

Yo Hsi stiffened momentarily. Varthlokkur could almost read his thoughts. Could something organic pa.s.s from outside the cage in? He couldn't let Shinsan go to his brother by default. He struck an exaggeratedly relaxed pose.

And Nu Li Hsi entered the cage, pausing only momentarily to bat the air before his face, as if brushing off a gnat.

"And I prayed that I could trap just one of them," Varthlokkur said. His face became beatific. "Haifa world liberated in minutes." He snapped his fingers. "That simply."

The wizard was kidding himself. He knew better. The Princes Thaumaturge would be replaced. The Dread Empire would endure. Impatient heirs already awaited the intercession of Fate.

Mad laughter a.s.saulted the air. "It's the end, brother. You're doomed." Less maniacally, "We're doomed.

It agonized me to think that I had to leave the Empire in your filthy hands."

"What the h.e.l.l are you raving about? I'd heard rumors that you were losing your mind."

"It's a trap. Our pupil has undone his teachers. We can't leave." He laughed crazily again. "He's turned the tables on us, dear brqther."

Frowning, Nu Li Hsi tried going to the Winterstorm.

Something barred his way.

Nervously, he retreated toward the door.

Again, something stopped him.

Panicking, Nu Li Hsi made a thunderous trial of the cage's walls. Without effect.Like animals, the brother-princes hurtled at one another, each shrieking out half a millennium's frustration.

They fought with sorcery, blades of bronze, hands, feet, and teeth. All to no conclusion. Each retained his unbreachable defenses, his superb reflexes and combat skills.

They might enjoy one another's company forever.

Varthlokkur rose, approached the trap.

"Don't get too close," Nepanthe warned. "They'd love it if they could get you in there with them."

"Don't worry. I'll look out. Though they couldn't hurt me now. They'd have to be able to see and touch me first. Look there." He pointed.

She looked. And screamed.

"That's us? We're dead?" Nepanthe and Varthlokkur corpses lay in b.l.o.o.d.y, tumbled, sweat-wet furs. "I don't want to die!" Hysteria effervesced from the edges of her voice.

Varthlokkur pulled her toward him, tried to comfort her. But he was frightened, too, and she sensed it.

She wanted to run, run, run, as badly as she had on that next-to-last night on the Candareen. But from this there was no escape. The swordstroke had fallen already.

How had she come to this? What evil Fate?... She stared at her corpse, morbidly fascinated. Her death-wound was scarcely visible, tricking the tiniest line of scarlet across one breast.

"What happens now?" She wasn't religious, and had never truly believed that death was something that could happen to her.

"We wait. Don't worry. Everything will be all right." But his quavering voice betrayed his lack of confidence.

"You're all right after all?" The Old Man had risen, was coming toward them. He sounded puzzled. His ashen face was frozen in startled ecstasy. That expression quickly transmogrified into confusion.

"All right?" Nepanthe responded to her panic. Feeling foolish, yet unable to stop herself, she snapped, "Wonderful. For a corpse."

The Old Man retreated before her intensity.

"Calm down," Varthlokkur pleaded. "Varth..." At that moment, when most people would have needed someone to hold and comfort them, all she wanted was to be left alone. She tried to explain. "It's just the way I am. It's the same when I'm sick, or have a headache."

"Nepanthe, we've got to face this together." He couldn't say / need you. "Picture waiting alone."

"Waiting?" the Old Man asked. He was more perplexed than ever. "Waiting for what? What's happening?"

"You don't remember?" The wizard pointed. The Old Man turned. He stared at his corpse. His eyes widened as the truth gradually dawned."Son of a b.i.t.c.h. After so long." He went to his clay, carefully avoiding the cage, and stared into his own dead face. Gently, he touched his body's cheek, ran fingertips over its ecstatic smile. "She came lovingly... Those two... Who's the other one? Are they trapped? Alive?" "Yes. Both of the Dread Empire's tyrants, caged in one fell pa.s.sage of the shuttle across the loom of the Fates." The Old Man's expression called the price too dear. But when he spoke, he said, "This may cause more rejoicing than your destruction of Ilkazar. Maybe there'll be a holiday in our memory." That he said sourly. Transitory facial expressions reflected the war going on within him, the struggle which had driven him both to seek immortality and to long for the peace of death.

Nepanthe started crying. Everything had happened too quickly, unexpectedly, shockingly, for her to understand. And she still bore her gigantic burden of guilt. She looked at Mocker, who hadn't yet stirred.

There lay the father of her son...The child who, now, would never be born. How could she explain? How could she make him understand that she had tried to buy his life?

How could she obtain his forgiveness? That she had to have, or her shame would be unbearable.

Varthlokkur drew her to him again, offering comfort. This time she entered his arms, drawing support from his embrace.

"So. Even death does not end high treachery."

Nepanthe and Varthlokkur jerked apart. Mocker faced them, hands on hips, lips snarled back over clenched teeth. His dark face had grown darker with rage. He had arisen suddenly, had a.s.sessed his situation, and apparently had accepted his own destruction.

Nepanthe forgot her death-terror as shame, and fear of and for her husband engulfed her.

"What is trouble?" Mocker asked. "Would simpleton self, being noted fool, easily manipulated by adultress wife, harm single hair on head of same? Woe! Am stricken to depth of depthless cretinic soul by very thought."

His remarks only made Nepanthe feel all the more the harlot.

"Who did the killing?" Varthlokkur demanded. "It was a matter of destiny," he tried to explain.

Mocker wouldn't listen. Nepanthe suspected that, though intellectually aware, he hadn't yet made an emotional accommodation to the despair of his situation, that the full, absolute truth hadn't yet dawned on him.

Humming, an elderly man, bent as if by the burden of millennia, entered the room. He skirted the invisible cage deftly, deposited a heavy bundle atop the table.

An absolute silence descended upon the room.

The easterners watched him hungrily, their eyes burning with the pa.s.sion of wolves' when catching sudden sight of unexpected, especially delicious prey. Both quickly babbled pleas for aid.

The elderly visitor squinted, chuckled, glanced at the four corpses, nodded to himself, returned to his bundle.

"The Star Rider," Varthlokkur murmured. He was awed and surprised. "Of all people, why did he turnup here?"

His question had occurred to everyone else. The easterners, having recognized the interloper, had fallen into a tense silence.

The Old Man muttered, "There is, after all, someone older and more cunning than I am." There was something in his tone that made Varthlokkur glance his way suspiciously.

The elderly gentleman spoke to his Horn. A flash blinded everyone watching. When sight returned, two tall, steely suits of baroque armor flanked the Star Rider. "His living statues," Varthlokkur said softly.

There was a place of mystery east of the Mountains of M'Hand, near the Seydar Sea, called The Place of A Thousand Iron Statues. It was believed to have been created by the Star Rider as a place of refuge, a place where his secrets would remain inviolate. No sorcerer yet had been able to fathom the magic animating the living statues guarding The Place's secret heart.

"The bodies," said the Star Rider. "Lay them out here." He indicated the floor immediately before him.

Working swiftly, the dark things moved the corpses. Then they moved back against a wall, becoming as motionless as dead metal.

"What's he doing?" Nepanthe asked. The Old Man and Mocker moved closer to her and Varthlokkur.

They eyed one another warily.

"I think he's going to try to recall us," the Old Man replied. Hope had exploded into his voice. He eyed them uncertainly. "But why?"

Yo Hsi and Nu Li Hsi reached the same conclusion. "Forget the dead!" they demanded. "Take care of the living."

"Free us," Nu Lu Hsi concluded. The Star Rider mumured to his Horn, setting spells on each of the corpses before paying the slightest heed to the brothers. Finally, squinting, he faced them. "You know who I am? What I am? What you are to me? And you still want my help?" To his Horn, "They're greed and wickedness."

Greed and wickedness. Modern legend said that for twice the age of the Old Man this strange being had walked the earth, appearing randomly. No one knew the why of his name, nor his purpose, but it was certain that each of his appearances omened a startling shift in the course of history. Another of his names was Old Meddler. Who was he? Where had he sprung from? And why did he tamper?

The theory currently favored by the scholars of h.e.l.lin Daimiel was that he was a tool of Right, or Justice.

The known historical indicators pointed that way.

He chose that role now, teasing the two dread easterners, whose crimes had been old when llkazar was young, into asking for justice. He taunted, questioned, played their fears, maneuvered them into making the plea.

"Justice?" he cackled gleefully. "Then justice I'll give you!"

His hand twitched. The suits of armor stepped forward. He tapped one, pointed. It strode into the trap, seized a startled Yo Hsi. In a workmanlike manner, despite the hideous defenses and sorceries at the Demon Prince's command, the living statue slowly strangled its victim. An unstirring Yo Hsi appeared on the level of reality in which Mocker, Nepanthe, Varthlokkur, and the Old Man already existed. He soonrecovered from his death-shock and tried his prison again. Again he had no success.