[Cenotaph Road 05] - Fire and Fog Page 17

  “Sorry,” she said. “I only meant to say you seem to be… more. More than you were.”

  “I am.” Like a blazing star blossoming in the night sky, revelation came to him. “I have powers undreamed of. And I know.”

  “What, Master?”

  “I can shift from world to world without a cenotaph. And I can do it without using Claybore’s Kinetic Sphere, also.” He walked around the chamber, his eyes glazed. “It’s so obvious. The chant, the spells, the weavings of power. It’s all so clear to me.”

  He began the chant and simply winked out of existence. Kiska roared in rage and raced forward, hands groping to find him.

  “Come back!” she shrieked. “You can’t leave me like this. You can’t do it, damn your eyes!”

  A tiny pop! betrayed his return. Lan sat on Lirory’s work table, laughing.

  “So simple. I was again atop Mt. Tartanius. The shrine to Abasi-Abi stands and his son still tends it. I did not speak to him. I noted his presence and left before he took heed.”

  Lan experienced a dizziness that quickly passed. He knew of powers and places of which even Claybore was ignorant. To defeat the other sorcerer would be child’s play. So easy, so very easy. Lan’s laughter filled the chamber and echoed along the phosphorescent moss-illuminated corridors of Yerrary.

  * * * * *

  Krek slumped into a brown heap on one side of Inyx’s room. Broit Heresler and Ducasien spoke softly, not wishing to disturb either the woman’s or the spider’s foul mood.

  Inyx rose and went to sit beside Krek. She leaned against the hard thorax and placed her head back so that she stared up at the ceiling. The lack of shadows within the room due to the moss growing on walls and ceiling had bothered her at first. No shadows, no texture. The light softly thrust its way everywhere, causing everything to look soft and bloated.

  She shook herself free of such thinking. She avoided the real issue by occupying her mind with trivial things.

  “Krek,” she said. “What are we going to do?”

  “About what, friend Inyx?” he asked.

  “You know what I’m talking about. Lan. He’s so different. Look at the way he allows Kiska k’Adesina to hang around his neck all the time. Not so long ago she was trying to kill him. Now they… they—” She bit off the words as tears rolled unashamedly down her cheeks. Inyx had told no one what she had seen down in the Resident of the Pit’s chamber. It had hurt her too badly.

  “You leak water from your eyes. I find it distressing when you do that. Almost as distressing as when I do it.”

  “Can’t help it,” she said peevishly, wiping away the tears. It did no good. More formed.

  “You feel betrayed, also. What is it you saw when you went to find him?”

  “Nothing, Krek. Forget it.” The woman crossed her arms over her breasts and began squeezing down powerfully on her own upper arms. Inyx felt bruises forming and didn’t care. Maybe pain would erase the sight of Lan and Kiska making love.

  If he had raped the woman, Inyx could have accepted that. But this had been no rape. It was a mutual lovemaking, mutually initiated, mutually enjoyed.

  “You saw them together. I witnessed the peculiar human mating rituals starting. Consummation occurred and you saw it.” The spider spoke in an offhand way, as if it didn’t make any difference to him. “He has betrayed you just as he did me.”

  “That was in the heat of battle, Krek. He sent a spell of some sort to get you out of danger. He didn’t mean for you to permanently leave him alone—just then.”

  “Nor did he mean for you to discover him with Kiska. He just wanted you to leave him alone, just then.”

  “Quit mocking me, damn you!” Inyx raged. She started to get up but a pair of hairy legs trapped and held her. She struggled and saw her efforts weren’t availing her anything. Krek was too strong.

  “He was our friend once. Will he be again?” the arachnid asked. Before Inyx could answer, Krek went on. “I feel the powers he gains are turning him into someone other than the Lan Martak we knew. The goodness within has been hidden by a darker side. Does power always corrupt? I made a fine Webmaster and did not allow the position to sway my thinking. Why is he so different?”

  “He’s the man who rescued me when Claybore abandoned me between worlds. I lost count how many times he’s risked his life to save you.”

  “We have done likewise for him.”

  “Of course we have. And… and I love him.” Inyx’s words were tiny, almost inaudible. She remembered the first shock when she realized there might be a man in her life other than her long-dead husband Reinhardt. Inyx’s shock grew when she and Lan made love and found they shared more than bodies. Their minds met and merged in ways she still found frightening and wonderful. His burgeoning power had forced this link and it had been something she wanted, needed. A warrior had to remain aloof. Becoming too friendly with another only caused intensified feelings of loss when the companion was killed. And Lan had shown her that this was totally wrong.

  They were closer than man and woman. They were more than one, they were more than two, they were transcendent together.

  “And he chooses her over me,” Inyx said self-pityingly.

  “I sense magic, as you well know,” lectured Krek. “You mentioned it. I believe Lan Martak has himself some inkling of the problem. Claybore has set a geas of subtle and cunning power on him. It must have something to do with Kiska k’Adesina.”

  “You think this is Claybore’s doing?” The hope rising within couldn’t be held down. Inyx wanted to believe the spider.

  “It is a more plausible explanation.” Krek fell silent for a moment, then added, “Unless he has indeed become corrupted by the power he wields. I have seen it happen in the Web, of course. A hatchling is promoted too rapidly and assumes great duties of importance.”

  “What?” The woman was confused at how Krek had jumped from Lan to spiderish politics.

  “They think respect is due the position rather the individual in that authority spot. Any order they give, no matter how absurd, must therefore be a good one. A sorry state. They become bloated with their own self-importance.”

  “What happens then?”

  “We eat them.”

  Inyx shivered. Krek’s logical thought processes never failed to give her a pang of cold, gut-clutching fear. He spoke so easily of devouring his comrades.

  “You think this is the way to handle Lan?” she asked.

  “No. Lan Martak is too powerful. He would fry us long before such a course could be carried out. Or drown me. No, he would set fire to me. That is a hideously favorite spell with him.” The huge body quaked at the very idea of being turned into a torch.

  “What are we to do? I won’t give him up. Not to the likes of her.”

  The spider said nothing.

  Inyx didn’t have any good answer to her own question, either. The best they could do for the moment was sit, wait, and then seize whatever opportunity presented itself. That waiting would be the most difficult she’d ever done, but it had to be done.

  The woman turned and looked at Ducasien and experienced even more confusion. What exactly was it she wanted?

  There seemed no easy answer.

  “I must go,” Lan Martak said, rising from the throne. He reached out and gestured with his hand to summon his light mote. It orbited in from the far reaches of the universe, ready for battle.

  “What’s happened?” demanded Kiska k’Adesina. “Claybore’s attacking?”

  “The legs. I go for them. I see how Lirory wanted to use them. It came to me—like so many other things do now.”

  “How? How would he have used them?”

  Lan’s gaze turned outward, penetrating stone and changing from physical sight to a scrying with his magical powers. The legs glowed within their individual cases, hidden away in the deepest recesses of Yerrary. Lirory Tefize had hidden them well, but Lirory had lacked Lan’s power. To Lan they were apparent.

  And to Claybore, as wel
l.

  “Like a battery,” Lan said, starting off. Kiska trailed behind, clutching at his sleeve. He brushed her off. He started to empower a spell to freeze her to the spot, but it refused to form on his lips. The tongue resting inside his mouth felt cottony rather than metallic every time he began a spell to subdue Kiska.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Lirory intended to place a leg at one corner of this pyramid-shaped chamber and the other leg at still another corner. The arms each went into the other corners. Sitting on his throne placed him equidistant from the four limbs. He would draw on the power focused on this special spot.” Lan indicated where the throne had been before Claybore destroyed it.

  “But he had the arms and legs. Why didn’t he do this when he had the chance?”

  Lan smiled. Everything was so obvious to him now.

  “He needed one further part. Any bodily part. In the ceiling of the chamber. Placed there, it completed a pyramid of power. I suspect he desired most the Kinetic Sphere, but Claybore had retrieved that.” Lan felt a passing bitterness when he realized he had allowed it to fall into Claybore’s hands. “If Lirory had known I had Claybore’s tongue in my mouth, he might have succeeded. Instead, he banished me, thinking the fog outside the mountain would kill me. The tongue would have sufficed as well as the Kinetic Sphere.”

  “He didn’t sense the tongue,” said Kiska in a hushed voice. She now understood, also.

  “His powers were great, but not great enough. If Lirory had formed the battery of Claybore’s parts, his abilities would have been enhanced to the point not even Claybore could have withstood him.”

  Lan laughed aloud now.

  “You can defeat him, can’t you?” asked Kiska.

  Lan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The answer, like all else, was obvious.

  “Are you able to wrest the legs from Claybore?” she pressed.

  “Stay here.”

  “I have to be at your side,” Kiska said, her voice turning shrill with urgency. The brunette forced her way up and next to Lan. He tried once more—in vain—to form the spell to hold her back. “I’ve come too far not to see this through to the end.”

  “But you—” Lan couldn’t even say the words he wanted.

  Kiska k’Adesina was Claybore’s commandant. She commanded legions on a score of worlds and had perpetrated crimes so ghastly his mind recoiled thinking of them. Entire cities had died on the world the pair of them had walked prior to coming to Yerrary. Only one city survived—barely—when she and Claybore had finished. Kiska k’Adesina was his sworn enemy and still he not only allowed her to come with him on this most dangerous and vital of missions, but he spoke freely to her of Lirory and of the gnome mage’s discovery, how he himself had come across dozens of small clues and turned them into weapons against her master, and Lan even gave her information which could be turned against him.

  And he loved her.

  An addict dependent on drugs, a mage linked permanently into spell dreams, a man in love. All produced the same result, and Lan Martak found himself caught in the trap. He loved Kiska k’Adesina against reason and sanity.

  “Stay back. This will be dangerous. Lirory Tefize laid traps of subtle and diabolical design.”

  They pushed into territory alien to Lan, but he knew it as well as he did the forests on his home world. He saw, not only with eyes but with magic—and burning like a campfire in the night were Claybore’s legs. Locked onto that, Lan couldn’t be turned away.

  “Where you go, I will,” said Kiska, but her lips curled back in a sneer that Lan failed to see. Her fingers lightly stroked a dagger hilt. She started to draw the sharp-edged weapon and sink it to the hilt in the mage’s broad back, but something stopped her.

  The sneer turned into a broad smile. Claybore had promised that there would come a proper time for Lan Martak’s death and that it would be at her hand.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “You can’t go,” cried Kiska k’Adesina, gripping at Lan’s sleeve.

  He shrugged her off. Even if he couldn’t use magics against her—for whatever reason—he was still physically stronger. Lan Martak stopped and considered his best course of action concerning her. Was it possible to bind Kiska in such a way she couldn’t follow? He made the effort and failed, not because she tried to elude him, but because his muscles began shaking as if from some huge exertion.

  “Claybore has baited a trap and waits for you,” Kiska told him. “You will die if you try to recover the legs.”

  “How do you know?” he demanded.

  “It’s all part of Claybore’s master plan. He wants you out of the way. If you rush in foolishly, without planning, without taking enough precautions, then you will be… no more.”

  “What do you care?” Lan raged, more at his own impotence in dealing with Kiska than at the woman.

  She didn’t answer. He worried that this failure on his part might carry over into actual dealing with Claybore.

  While it struck him as odd that he had come to be so closely linked emotionally with Kiska, he didn’t question it deeply. Lan’s true worry lay in fighting Claybore. The other mage had eons of experience to draw upon—and Lan couldn’t forget the shadow hound.

  The interdimensional beast had been easily dispatched, but he felt the complexities in the spell conjuring it up. Given the time, Claybore might summon an even more intricate monster, one not easily sent back into the nothingness between worlds.

  The slightest pause, the most minute of hesitations, and he would lose this coming battle.

  And at the center of it lay Claybore’s legs. Lirory had died to protect his ill-gotten treasure trove of limbs. Lan did not wish to follow that path trying to obtain them for himself.

  Destruction seemed the wisest course. With Claybore in possession of his arms, any chance for completing the magical battery envisioned by Lirory Tefize was at an end. Destroy the legs, destroy them for all time. He had the power to do it—as long as they weren’t attached to Claybore’s body.

  “I know the way is dangerous. That’s why I want you to stay in Lirory’s chamber. It’s safe there. The gnome set ward spells Claybore can circumvent—but only after some effort.”

  “I stay with you,” Kiska maintained stoutly. Her usually brown eyes took on highlights of green from the moss glowing in the corridor, giving her an evil, alien aspect that disquieted Lan. But was he so human himself? He had come far. The Resident of the Pit and Claybore both admitted he was now immortal, thanks to the powers he had discovered. Inhuman—unhuman.

  And power!

  Currents of raw energy hummed and pulsed within his body. No mere human felt like this. He hadn’t when he was only a hunter in the forests of his home world. He transcended the norm and developed into more—much, much more.

  Lan Martak said nothing as he spun and started through the maze inside Yerrary. The gnomes had spent centuries chewing out these corridors and had created a twisting domain that was as much a part of their heritage as the forests were his. Lan quickly forgot ordinary sight and depended more and more on a magical scrying spell to lead him through the turnings.

  At first he walked with faltering steps, then became more confident and strode with his usual ground-devouring pace. Kiska struggled to keep up with him but said nothing. She would doggedly follow him into the mouth of the Netherworld.

  Lan’s mind quickly turned from figuring out why his bitter enemy showed such devotion now to examining the hall they took. Tiny spots glowed more brilliantly in the walls than could be accounted for from the phosphorescent moss.

  “Traps,” he said, pointing. He knew the woman saw nothing. How could she? He was the mage. He had the power. The power!

  Lan moved his light mote into the center of the corridor, then split it in half. Each section of his familiar blazed a fiery path for the spots on the walls. Incandescent heat filled the tiny space the instant the two motes touched stone. The trigger spell released vastly more potent magics.

&
nbsp; “Lirory was a clever sorcerer. The true power is hidden away. Little energy is revealed, might be ignored. But once the trigger is touched, that is the result.” He pointed.

  Heat still billowed from the corridor, but the magical maelstrom had spent itself. Walls had turned to slag and the floor was eaten away by the intensity of the heat blast. Lan reunited his light mote, used it to smooth over the floor for Kiska’s benefit, then walked on, alert for more traps.

  And he found them. Subtle ones, obvious ones, traps and spells and mind-confusing paths of all varieties. After a while, it became a game to him and little more. He pitted his wit and magical ability against the now-dead sorcerer gnome. He played the game and won repeatedly. As each obstacle was overcome, he sensed a growing within himself until he could barely withstand it. The pressure of power needing to be used bloated him.

  Once, he had been like Kiska and Inyx and Ducasien and all the others. Once. No longer. He had become more now. And he would strip Claybore of his power and rule along the Cenotaph Road. It was destiny. It was his destiny!

  “The chamber we seek is near,” he said.

  Kiska clung to him, barely noticed. Lan Martak moved on for the final confrontation. Claybore could not permit him to enter that chamber unopposed. To do so meant the disembodied sorcerer had lost all.

  A faint smile curled Lan’s lips. This was the moment he had been born for.

  “What!” cried Inyx. “The fool has gone off to destroy the legs without telling us?” She sagged against the wall at the enormity of what Krek told her.

  “So it would seem,” the spider said. “Lan Martak has developed a cockiness bordering on overconfidence. Perhaps it is due to his exposure to the fog outside.”

  “That’s not it, Krek. There’s more to it,” said Ducasien. The tall man stood, hands on narrow hips, his wide shoulders almost filling an entryway. “He thinks he is invincible.”

  “He might be,” said Inyx in a choked voice. “He might not need us any longer.”

  Ducasien laid his hand on the woman’s shoulder, squeezing gently. She smiled wanly, putting her own hand atop his. She barely kept her sanity these days. Loving Lan put a strain on her that became harder and harder. He ignored her—and all his friends—and obviously garnered much from Kiska k’Adesina’s company. Inyx tried to rationalize that this was a ploy on Lan’s part, a way of getting past Claybore’s guard.