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Chapter Five


When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state . . . 

William Shakespeare


The Ku-Mor-Mai considered life, considered death.

Over his throne hung the snarling crimson tiger banner of Coramonde. Before him knelt Midwis, a Legion-Marshal.

“What mitigation can you offer,” Springbuck demanded, “that you should not be hung from the Iron Hook Gate, and your family evicted from their lands?”

Midwis licked his lips and cast about for an answer. “Sire, I broke my ties with your enemies at the last, lifted the siege on your allies at Freegate, yea, and at the Hightower too.”

“Yes, after you’d heard I had taken Earthfast.”

“I concede it. Please, ask of me no merit; I have none, except some martial aptitude. Do as you will with me.”

Which was precisely the problem. Midwis was a much-admired officer, his battle standard weighted with campaign streamers won in service of Coramonde. His family was wealthy, ancient and influential. And, as the Marshal had said, he was a talented commander with a hardened Legion. Every resource was vital now, but Springbuck could no more let Midwis go unpunished than impose death upon him. He had a middle road in mind.

“Legion-Marshal, you and your men fought unjustly against me. Yet you may win back your honor by reverting to the sworn duty that is yours.”

Midwis looked up hopefully. Springbuck went on, “The Highlands Province suffers from depredations of the wildmen and the Druids. They are undermanned in the Highlands; it is in my mind to dispatch a Legion there. It will be a long, cold, perilous task. If the Druids use their polar magic again, despite the enchanters I’ve sent against them at Andre deCourteney’s suggestion, it may come a disaster. But there must be armed units to check the wildmen.”

Midwis was on his feet. “Give me your let to go there! Naive and wrongful in statecraft though I have been, no man can say Midwis is unschooled in conflict.”

The solution had advantages. Springbuck hadn’t enough loyal men to reinforce the Highlands Province and, left near Earthfast, Midwis’ host was potentially dangerous. If he would renew his allegiance in truth, he would be a great help, and his powerful family and friends would be well disposed toward the Ku-Mor-Mai.

“You are dispatched with these provisos. Your host goes with its colors cased, and all blazonry covered. Until you reach the Highlands Province you march with arms reversed, without trump, drum or cymbal. Silent will be your route. When you unfurl your standard in combat it will show the bar sinister. If you do well by Coramonde, that will be revoked when you are come again to Earthfast Do you agree?”

“Without qualm, Ku-Mor-Mai.” Midwis bowed, then squared his shoulders, and retreated from the throne room.

It had been a long morning, beginning with the departure of Andre and his companions. Springbuck decided to take his midday meal. Courtiers rose, and servitors. He waved them away; having foregone his formal robes of state and taken to wearing Bar at his side again, he wasn’t inclined to be pestered and indulged like a wealthy aunt.

Passing alone through an empty gallery, he heard low voices to one side, in a window-seat booth. Its curtains had been drawn, but had fallen back a bit. He squinted, crinkling his face, and made out a glimpse of brilliant red hair and milky skin. He went over, thinking to speak to Gabrielle. Then something blocked his partial view of her pale, perfect face. It was a mass of white hair and a black, chain-mailed shoulder.

The shoulder moved away. Gabrielle’s eye, fluttering open from what could only have been a kiss, fell on him. She said something softly; the curtain was thrown back. There stood Hightower, hand on his broadsword hilt.

The Warlord stopped in surprise. His hand instantly dropped from the weapon. Springbuck, too, was immobilized; only Gabrielle’s calm was unfailing.

“Yes, Springbuck?” Her eyes didn’t avoid his.

He condemned himself for not having seen it sooner. On several occasions now, she and Hightower had been absent at the same time. She’d always made it quite clear that she was her own woman.

“You did not bid good-bye to Andre,” he reminded her lamely.

“We made our farewells last evening. I mislike partings.”

He turned to go. “My Lord,” called the old warrior, halting Springbuck, “for what it may mean, Gabrielle and I had been—close, in times far back. We never did this to wound your feelings, and indeed, denied one another so long as we could. But there are ties that may not be gainsaid.”

Springbuck resolved to be as ungrudging as Van Duyn had been when the scholar had lost Gabrielle to him. “Neither of you owe me explanations, my Lord. We are all free souls.” Gabrielle’s expression, hearing that, was satisfied. It made him feel no better.

“There are matters of policy that need advice from both of you,” he continued, drawing a shaky breath. “Until later, then, good day.”

He went his solitary way. She faced the Warlord. “I said as much; he is an older man in a young one’s skin. He understands.”

Hightower disagreed. “He accepts. I doubt he understands. Be that as it may, all courses turn toward Salamá, as in days long gone. Will they hold as much tragedy as they did then?” His arm went around her. “It begins anew.”

Within the ironclad circle, she leaned against his chest. “For us, it never ceased.”


On an occasion of rare self-indulgence, in the Hour of the Drug, Yardiff Bey, satisfied with his revivified plans, drifted in reverie back across the centuries.

He saw a small boy squatting in the dust of a teeming marketplace, scene of variegated color, bewildering sounds. A wandering illusionist was playing with tongues of flame and momentary flowers plucked from the air. The watching boy’s father was the Bey, regional governor, Prince in his own right, but the boy had crept away from his manor house and teachers to watch this small magic.

The boy was fine-featured, destined to be aristocratically handsome. His cheekbones were high, lips full and dark. His eyes, watching minor enchantments with consuming interest—though he knew these were barely magics at all—were black, liquid with fascination.

It had been his misfortune or accidental lot to be born under ominous stars. The portents had spoken of disorder, ruin, cataclysm. His name would dominate the mightiest struggles. His mother had grieved for that, but the boy found it intriguing. His father discounted any words that didn’t lend themselves to his own will. It was to occur to the boy, Yardiff, later in life, to speculate whether he’d made those prophesies come true by accepting them.

The boy, being groomed for his father’s lofty station, had already decided he would never assume it. There were no magicians in his background, so it was hard to say from whence his preoccupation had come. His forebears and father were lordly, arrogant men, subtle warriors, merciless in battle. But in this generation, in this boy, under dire signs, the union of cold intellect and imperial pride had taken a new bent.

The nomadic magician was leaping and capering, half the fool, half the prestidigitator. He skipped around the circle of watching people, offering flowers that faded instantly away. He extended his fingers with tiny spits of flame that didn’t burn. Most onlookers were afraid to touch them; those brave souls who did found that the flames evaporated at once.

Until he came to the boy.

A hand extended, and the clown-magician waited, scoffing. Yardiff’s wide eyes shifted from the man to his pyrotechnic fingers, and back to the man. He put his hand forth calmly; uncertainty and apprehension had long since been driven out of him.

Tongues of fire were somehow transferred; it wasn’t clear to the crowd just how. Now he held them, but the fires didn’t disappear as they had for others. Instead they burned high, higher than for the magician himself. They flickered brightly in colors, then Yardiff waved his hand, dismissing them with a gesture of impatience. The crowd murmured. Some few dropped corns in the dust. Others covertly thrust forefinger and little finger at the wanderer, to fend off any evil he might harbor.

The magician scrambled in unseemly haste again, to gather meager pickings. People went their various ways, except the boy. When they were alone, the wanderer came to him. There was, in his features, the joy of a miner who’s found a rich gemstone. He took the small hand that had so recently accepted his fire, pressed it for a moment, left something there. Then he twirled to go, once more the capering fool.

Yardiff didn’t move, watching him until he was out of sight. Only then did he open dark, delicate fingers to see what was there. It was a plaque of malachite; picked out on it in silvery material was a flaming wheel, a mandala. The thing he’d so vaguely longed for had now found him. He tucked the token into his safest inner pocket and set out for his father’s manor house. There were deceptions to work, lip service to pay, eventual disengagement to be made from the career being forced upon him. His destiny had made itself known; he embraced it fervently.

Centuries before the Great Blow, Yardiff’s thin brown legs carried him home tiredly through sun-baked streets.


Sorcery was his contagion.

His delights were the coruscating spells that bent men and the world to his will. He rejoiced in them as viands, as he thought, for some inner hunger.

It was inevitable from the start that he should enter the service of the darker influences, the more terrible forces.

As journeyman, he’d roamed the world, contesting, learning, along the hidden orbits of enchanters. He faced spells, demons, strange beasts, and hostile men and women. He grew from each incident.

He heard of a mountain bandit who’d devised a clever means of binding men to him. Disguised, he went to spy it out for himself. The outlaw would slip a prospective follower food drugged with Earnai, then have him borne into a secret garden. There the initiate would awaken, in seeming paradise, to eat and drink his fill and take his way with compliant women. Drugged again, he’d be returned to the “mortal plane” and made the simple offer of eternal joy in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The technique seldom failed to produce a fanatically willing vassal.

Revealing his puissance to the bandit, Yardiff Bey showed him true sorcery: The bandit—Ibn-al-Yed, who later became Bey’s mask-slave—threw himself at the magician’s feet. His burgeoning realm of criminals and murderers became a keystone in Yardiff Bey’s own concealed empire.

Bey had gone from task to task, always climbing in the dangerous favors of his Liege, the demon Amon, until the mighty attempt of the Great Blow. Then, the Masters had uprooted the Lifetree and made their fearsome effort to open the way between mortal plane and infernal, to summon up hordes from Hell. But it had been despoiled, though the world had been transformed forever in the disaster, and the Unity ended.

In the wake of that failure, with the darker forces harried closely by their opponents, Yardiff Bey had risen in perilous, opportunistic service; he’d kept the Crescent Lands from driving out every vestige of the Masters’ influence. Eventually, the Five had solidified their power, and foremost among their agents stood Yardiff Bey. They’d revealed to him a fragment of his destiny, that his hope for ultimate success lay in three children he would beget, the first a girl, the second a boychild, and the third both, yet neither.

He’d subverted the many Southwasteland tribes, forging them into True Believers for his Masters. He’d brought down the vengeance of the Bright Lady on Glyffa by encouraging its king in the suppression of women. He’d distorted matters to Springbuck’s greatgrandfather, so that Blazetongue was wrongly taken from Veganá in a battle that should never have been fought. In disguise, he’d prompted Hightower into that defiance that had left him blinded, hateful and disillusioned for decades. Bey had raised the great fortress at Death’s Hold, on the westernmost shore of the Crescent Lands, and filled it with vicious armsmen, only to see it fall once it had served its purpose.

A great challenge had come, when the Deep-Rock Folk, the clans of tiny subterraneans, had cried out for protection. His name had long gone abroad; he’d answered their plea, for few heroes had survived.

The Deep-Rock Folk had been set upon by a creature from the lower Depths. Bey fought it in a lone combat through the strata of the earth, he and his adversary stalking and attacking one another in a series of duels that had lasted weeks.

Yardiff Bey’s hand came up to the silver-and-malachite ocular he wore where his own left eye had been. The price of victory had been that eye. As replacement, he’d taken the single eye of his monstrous antagonist, confining its terrible energies and making it his own with the eyepiece he’d fashioned.

Then he’d stated his price. The Deep-Rock Folk had labored for twelve years to build a vessel, an adamantine shell in which he could imprison a fire-elemental and harness it. In the end he’d had Cloud Ruler, his flying ship.

He’d insinuated his way into the confidence of generations of the Ku-Mor-Mai. At last, he put his own bastard son, Strongblade, on the throne.

Then things had begun to go wrong. First the madman Van Duyn had appeared. Next, Springbuck had escaped house arrest at Earthfast. The Five had lifted their attention from darkling meditations to a premonition of divergence. But Bey had convinced them he still controlled events, and thought he did.

Gil MacDonald had come, summoned by the deCourteneys and Van Duyn, to shake the whole network of ordinations. Bey’s plans had been destroyed before his eyes in Court at Earthfast, by magic and force of arms. Compelled to flee, he had seen his world unravel.

Yardiff Bey thought about that, in the Hour of the Drug. He recalled those last moments, striking down Dunstan and abducting him, escaping in Cloud Ruler, seeking sanctuary among his remaining supporters. At last he’d sought refuge in Death’s Hold, gathering a few loyal adherents. But exile had held no fulfillment; he literally would rather have been dead. He’d come at last to Salamá, to the Five, and been granted another chance, a reprieve. Who else but Yardiff Bey was suited to ferret out the secret of the ancient mage Rydolomo?

His plans were meshing again. It had been unfortunate that the deCourteneys hadn’t been lured north together, but at least they were separated; their whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

Better, the Heir of Veganá and the sword Blazetongue were on the move, occupying the attention of Andre deCourteney, permitting Bey to hunt out the secret he needed so badly. Once he’d secured it, no opposition would matter.

Let child and sword come south. In time they, too, would fall into his fist. He thought with special, shuddering savor of how good it would be to have the wizard, the baby, the sword and MacDonald in hand.

An eternally lucid part of him told him the Hour of the Dreamdrowse was drawing to a close. His last indulgence was a pulse of satisfaction. The endless effort would soon yield a final product.

He rose to go. There was an incredible amount to do yet, in order to become as a god among the new Masters of Reality.



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