Wayfinder's Story Page 16

  Valdemar had forgotten for the moment that the demon’s life must be hidden elsewhere.

  Dactylartha, frozen in position, stared for a long moment at his two human foes, glaring with eyes that were no longer eyes, out of a face no longer even a passable imitation of humanity. And in the next moment the demon died, shrieking a great shriek, his image exploding in spectacular fashion, and yet so quickly that he was able to do no harm to Tigris or Valdemar—nor carry any reports back to the Ancient One.

  His guts hollow with fear, but his eyes and mind once more clear, Valdemar discovered Tigris down on one knee, struggling with the after-effects of the contest.

  Stumbling closer, he seized her by the arm. “It’s gone. I think it must be dead.”

  “Dead and gone,” Tigris confirmed, in a dull voice. Moving slowly, also stumbling at first, she regained her feet. Then some energy returned. Shaking herself free of Valdemar’s grip, she cursed him for a peasant coward: “I could have managed that demon without wasting Farslayer on it! But nothing else will give me a chance to kill my Master, or to break free! I will be helpless without it … Damn you! Damn you, grower of poisoned grapes! I might have coped with the fiend by my own strength! You have cost me my chance for freedom, and damned me to hell!”

  The youth recoiled, shaken. “We might get it back—”

  “There will be no time.”

  Valdemar asked humbly: “What do we do now?”

  For a moment Tigris brandished Wayfinder, as if she meant to cut him down with it. Then, in a voice bleak with depression, close to despair, she admitted: “Still I dare not hurt you.”

  Valdemar could find nothing helpful to say. The woman cried out: “Sword, what am I to do? How am I to survive?”

  Wayfinder, displaying the infinite patience of the gods, silently indicated Valdemar.

  Tigris glared speculatively at her silent counselor. Then a gleam of hope appeared in her eyes. “Is it possible that the Sword of Wisdom has allowed for your idiocy in wasting Farslayer? In that case, peasant, it appears there may still be hope.”

  “I suppose we are to travel again?”

  “Is that it, Sword? Yes, I’ll drag him with me again, wherever you command. But which way?”

  Promptly Wayfinder directed her to the griffin, which had been cowering like a beaten puppy in the demon’s presence. Now, with Dactylartha gone, Tigris was quickly able to re-instill in the lesser creature something like a sense of duty.

  As soon as she and Valdemar were airborne, Wayfinder aimed them back eastward, in approximately the same direction from which they had come. Tigris accepted the command without comment.

  * * *

  Once more they went hurtling above the clouds. Their speed soon filled Valdemar with awe by bringing on a premature sunset behind them. Both of the griffin’s passengers drew the obvious conclusion from their direction: that Wayfinder was guiding them back to somewhere near—perhaps very near—their original point of departure, at the overrun Blue Temple camp.

  Tigris said little as they flew. Her thoughts were dominated by the notion that the pair were getting closer to Wood with every passing moment.

  Once her companion was able to hear her questioning herself, or fate: “Am I to go to him, try to lie to him, defend my actions? That cannot be! As well plead with him for mercy.”

  The young man, despite his own desperate situation, felt a stirring of something like sympathy.

  The enchantress muttered several somewhat amended forms of her wish for survival and for freedom, asking the Sword for some means of protection against the Ancient One, rather than the ability to destroy him.

  “Sword, save me from him! Save me, somehow!”

  From the very beginning of her contemplated escape, Tigris had been aware of the extreme danger involved in defying a wizard as powerful as the Ancient One. And Tigris knew, far better than most people, how powerful he was.

  Even so, she now feared that she had almost certainly underestimated the truth.

  “What am I to do?” she breathed. She was looking at Valdemar as she spoke, though perhaps not really seeing him.

  He glared at her sourly. “Do you now want my willing cooperation?”

  The sorceress snarled back, “From the first moment I saw you, I have suspected that you could not be as innocent as you appeared. Very well, if you have any revelations that you have been holding in reserve, let’s have them now.

  “Or else,” she continued a moment later, speaking now as if Valdemar were not there, as if she were talking to her griffin, “some other power may be cleverly using this peasant as a catspaw.” Suddenly she faced her prisoner again. “What say you to that, grape-grower?”

  He shook his head, as calmly as he could. “Why is it necessary for me to be something other than what I am?”

  The eyes of Tigris, filled with pain and fear, seemed to be boring into him. “When one has lived with Master Wood for any length of time, as I have, nothing can any longer be considered simply what it is. It is necessary to approach every question in those terms.”

  “Why did you choose to serve him, then?”

  This, it appeared, was an unanswerable question. Tigris faced forward again, and the griffin flew on, magically tireless. Valdemar wondered if it would ever have to stop and rest, or feed.

  * * *

  When Tigris’s attack had fallen on the Blue Temple encampment, Sergeant Brod had been close enough to observe the results, and to be shaken by the experience. But by good fortune he had also been distant enough to survive, unnoticed by the attackers.

  In Brod’s estimation, the new conqueror, even if she did appear to be hardly more than a girl, was obviously powerful enough to be a worthy patron. He wanted to attach himself to her somehow, if that were possible without taking too much risk.

  Torn between fear and ambition, the Sarge considered approaching the camp, and representing himself to its new masters as a victim of the Blue Temple. But soon caution prevailed; there were events in progress here that he could not begin to understand. Later, perhaps, when he had learned more. For the time being he decided to sneak away instead.

  * * *

  Ben, hiking industriously toward home, warily scanning the skies ahead, was just saying that, in his opinion, they might be going to get away with Woundhealer after all. At that instant he heard Zoltan scream behind him.

  Spinning round, Ben was almost knocked off his feet by a swooping griffin. The thing must have come down at them from behind, and was now rapidly gaining altitude again with both Zoltan and the Sword of Mercy in its claws. While Ben stared, open-mouthed and helpless, the great beast swung round in the air, and rapidly departed in the direction of the Blue Temple camp.

  On the ground Ben ran hopelessly, shouting curses, after the rapidly receding griffin. “Drop the Sword!” he screamed at his hapless comrade. “Drop—”

  But Zoltan either could not hear him, or was powerless to obey.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the Ancient One’s most malignant suspicions of Tigris were in the process of being inflamed by a whispered report from a certain lesser, junior demon. This creature had just arrived at Wood’s headquarters with the report that Dactylartha had been slain.

  And even that was not the worst news: To the surprise of the attackers, the Sword of Wisdom had been in the Blue Temple camp—and Tigris had seized that mighty weapon for herself, and taken it away with her.

  Wood, seated now on a plain chair in a small room near his laboratory, did not move a muscle. He said quietly: “She sent me no report of any such discovery.”

  The bearer of bad news offered no comment on that fact.

  “Her official report,” the great magician continued, “was very vague. Something about ‘great success’—and that was all. I suppose there is no doubt of any of these disquieting things you tell me?”

  The creature made no attempt to conceal its unholy glee. “Absolutely none, my Master! And—no doubt of this fact either, great lord!—Da
ctylartha was slain by Tigris herself!”

  “So.”

  “With the Sword of Vengeance!”

  Wood sat listening carefully to the few additional details that he was told. His eyes were closed, his face a mask. He tended to believe the allegations against Tigris. Yet he could not be absolutely sure that his most favored aide has in fact turned traitor—this report might be a mistake or a lie, the result of some in-house intrigue.

  But with at least one, and perhaps more, of the ten surviving Swords at stake, he was certainly not about to take any chances.

  One thing that the Ancient One did secretly fear intensely, without trying to deceive himself about the fact, was Farslayer. Though he betrayed no sign of this externally, in his imagination he could feel the great cold of that steel as it slid between his ribs, or split his breastbone.

  But the Sword of Vengeance had evidently gone to finish Dactylartha.

  Wood actually did not know where that demon’s life had been hidden, except that he thought it had been at a reassuringly great distance. Well, there was nothing to be done about that problem just now.

  But Tigris. … If she was indeed now armed with the Sword of Wisdom, she would be very dangerous. He could not afford to put off action for a moment.

  * * *

  As night fell, and the stars came out above her speeding griffin, Tigris, still mounted in the saddle with her prisoner Valdemar huddled beside her in his basket, felt increasingly certain that her treachery must now be known to Wood. She knew a foretaste of the terrible punishment that it would no longer be possible to avoid.

  Her worst fears were coming true. In an abyss of terror, feeling her mental defenses crumbling, Tigris realized that nothing could keep her Master from trying to wreak terrible vengeance upon her.

  Valdemar stared at his companion helplessly. He could see by Tigris’s behavior that she thought something terrible was happening or about to happen to her, and he was afraid of what this would mean to him.

  At this point Tigris in her panic redoubled the urgency of her demands on Wayfinder. She stormed and pleaded with the Sword, that it must show her a way to escape.

  “Help me! Save me!”

  The Sword still pointed straight ahead, along the griffin’s rippling neck.

  Then, staring hollow-eyed at the Sword, the blond sorceress almost despaired. “Or is it,” she whispered, “that even the gods’ weapons cannot help me? That you can only guide me straight back to him—that he is too strong—even for you?”

  A moment later, with her passenger watching and listening in frozen horror, the terrified young woman was retracting that statement, fearful that she had offended the mighty powers ruling Wayfinder.

  Valdemar, hesitant to speak, gaped at his companion. In this raging, cursing, pleading woman there remained no visible trace of a figure he thought he had once glimpsed, a wistful girl who had once paused to listen to a robin sing.

  Suddenly some part of her terrible rage was directed at Valdemar. She glared at him and snarled.

  Turning in the central saddle, she raised the Sword of Wisdom in both hands, to strike.

  This madwoman was on the brink of killing him! There was no way to dodge the stroke. He was trying to straighten his cramped legs in the basket for a hopeless effort to seize the deadly Sword—when a sudden and violent change transformed the finely modeled face above him.

  Suddenly and unexpectedly, the last curse died in the throat of Tigris.

  Her body lurched in the saddle. Her eyelids closed. Wayfinder, which she had been brandishing for a deathstroke at Valdemar, slipped from her hands and fell.

  Chapter Twelve

  Zoltan was gone, and Woundhealer with him, and there was nothing Ben could do about either loss. Doggedly the huge man had resumed his trudge into the north. From that direction, as the bird-messengers had told him, the Prince of Tasavalta and his force were now advancing; and if all went well he ought to meet Mark soon.

  But Ben was unable to make much headway. Time and again flying reptiles appeared in the sky, forcing him to lie low, waiting in such shelter as he could find until the searchers were out of sight again.

  At night, great owls, dispatched by Mark as forerunners of the advancing Tasavaltan power, came to bring Ben words of counsel and encouragement. They kept him moving in the right direction, and helped him to remain hidden successfully through the hours of darkness. Freighted with tokens of Karel’s shielding power, the owls drifted and perched protectively near Ben while some of Wood’s lesser demons prowled through the clouded skies above.

  * * *

  Yambu lay in another self-imposed trance, placed by her captors in a newly erected tent in what had once been the Blue Temple camp. The Silver Queen’s condition was the subject of cautious probing by minor wizards who had been part of Tigris’s attacking force. These folk were prudently waiting for orders, from their vanished mistress or from Wood himself, before they took any more direct action regarding this important prisoner.

  Only partially, intermittently aware of the world around her, Yambu lay drifting mentally. Her dreams were often pleasant, rarely horrible, on occasion only puzzling. Most of the dreams in the latter category concerned the Emperor.

  As often as not, Yambu’s recent near-rejuvenation now seemed to her only part of the same continuing dream.

  * * *

  At the moment when Wood’s vengeance fell upon Tigris, a thunderbolt no less startling for having been expected, her last coherent thought was that the Sword of Wisdom had somehow failed her.

  The crushing spell aimed at her mind permitted her a final moment of mental clarity in which she gasped out some curse against the Sword. After that she was aware of crying out in desperation for her mother. And then a great darkness briefly overcame her.

  Tigris—or she who had been Tigris—was still in the griffin’s saddle when an altered awareness returned, and her eyes cleared; but when her lids opened they gazed upon a world that she no longer knew.

  * * *

  When Valdemar saw the hands of stricken Tigris relax their grip upon Wayfinder’s hilt, he lunged upward and forward from his basket. He was making a desperate, almost unthinking effort to catch the Sword of Wisdom as it fell.

  The hilt eluded his frantic grab; the blade did not. Cold metal struck and stung his hands. His try at capturing the Sword succeeded, but the keen edges gashed two of his fingers before he could control its weight.

  For a long moment he was in danger of falling out of the swaying basket. At last he recovered his balance, now gripping the Sword’s hilt firmly, in hands slippery with his own blood. Valdemar glared at the dazed woman whose face hovered a little above his own. In a tone somewhere near the top of his voice he demanded: “What happened? What’s wrong with you?”

  The young woman was slumped down in the saddle, the reins sagging in her grip. She swayed so that he grabbed her arm in fear that she might fall; but still she appeared to be fully conscious. Her only reply to Valdemar’s question was a wide-eyed smile and a girlish giggle.

  Meanwhile the griffin, evidently sensing that something well out of the ordinary had occurred, was twisting round its leonine head on its grotesque long neck, trying to see what was happening on its own back.

  Tigris giggled again.

  “Fly!” Valdemar yelled at the curious beast. “Fly on, straight ahead for now!”

  The hybrid monster, presented with these commands by an unaccustomed voice, kept its head turned back for a long disturbing moment, fixing the youth with a calculating and evil gaze, as if to estimate this new master’s strengths and weaknesses. After that long moment, to Valdemar’s considerable relief, it faced forward again and went on flying. The reins lay along the creature’s neck, where Tigris had let them drop.

  The evening sky was rapidly darkening around them. Demon-like masses of shadow and cloud went swirling by with the great speed of their flight.

  The young woman raised her head and spoke in a tiny, childish voice.
/>
  “What did you say?” he asked.

  She blinked at Valdemar. “I just wondered—where are we going?”

  Her smile as she asked the question was sweet and tentative. She looked somewhat dazed, but not particularly frightened. She seemed really, innocently, uncertain of where she was.

  The dropped Sword, the cut fingers, the sudden change, were briefly all too much for Valdemar. He felt and gave voice to an outburst of anger. He threw down the Sword—making sure it landed safely in his basket—and raved, giving voice to anger at his situation and at the people, all of them by his standards crazy, most of them bloodthirsty, among whom the precious Sword had plunged him.

  Meanwhile, the strange young woman who was mounted just above him recoiled slightly, leaning away from Valdemar, her blue eyes rounded and blinking, red mouth open.

  What was wrong with this crazy woman now? But even that question had to wait. The first imperative was to establish some real control over the griffin. Now the beast’s unfriendly eyes looked back again. The course of their flight was turning into a great slow spiral.

  The first step in dealing with this difficulty, obviously, was to use the Sword. Valdemar did so. While Tigris looked on wide-eyed but without comment, the young man asked to be guided to a safe place to land. Wayfinder promptly obliged.

  The indication was toward an area not directly below. Therefore Valdemar was required to head the griffin there. Strong language and loud tones accomplished the job, though only with some difficulty. When he thought the creature slow to turn, he even cuffed it on the back of the neck. As a farmer’s son, he had had some practice in driving stubborn loadbeasts, and saw no reason why the same techniques might not work in this situation—at least for a little while.