A Quest-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic Read online

  “The Vareishei?” Kane asked, more to prompt than to question.

  The boy answered mechanically, like someone speaking from a trance. “We thought to slip past them under cover of darkness. They caught us at daybreak. They said they would leave us here as warning to those who would cross their domain without paying tribute.”

  “And afterward?”

  “They carried away all to Altharn Keep. They took my sister.”

  “Doubtless to be held for ransom. Now, let this powder dissolve upon your tongue; it will ease the pain.”

  The first was a lie, and the last was not, for Kane was seldom needlessly cruel. The artery beneath his fingertips pulsed weakly until he had counted to twenty-seven, then the heart shuddered and stopped.

  Remounting, Kane resumed his journey to Altharn Keep. The clods of turf torn by his stallion's hooves fell soundlessly, for the dead cannot hear.

  Puriali absently chewed a tidbit of raw liver as he searched the girl's entrails. His surgery was quite precise, for all that his captive had continued to struggle until a moment gone. Her virgin blood made scarlet rivulets across the polished slab of pale pink marble.

  “There is danger for us.”

  His half-sister licked her lips. “Do you actually give credence to augury such as this?”

  “Not really, Sitilvon,” murmured Puriali. “But I know that it pleases me. And you.”

  Puriali wiped his hands against his trouser legs, mingling red with less certain stains as he stared upward into the night skies enclosing the tower's summit. “Merely a supportive exercise. The stars cannot lie. They warn of death.”

  Wenvor snorted and tightened his fist about his sword hilt. Ostervor shifted his feet and considered his wine cup. The brothers were both tall and black-bearded, though Wenvor's meaty shoulders would have made two of Ostervor; their sister might have been a clean-shaven twin of the younger brother. Puriali, who somewhat favored his mother, was shorter, slighter, with a spiky shock of reddish hair and a face too pockmarked to grow a full beard. The two brothers wore leather trousers and stained hacquetons, having shed their mail. Sitilvon had thrown a fur cloak about her ankle-length gown, but Puriali stood bare-chested despite the chill mountain wind.

  “The stars cannot lie,” Puriali repeated.

  “Another thief?” Wenvor laughed and nudged his sister. “I hope better sport than the last.”

  Ostervor did not share their mirth. “I have heard certain reports that Josin's bereaved mistress has made inquiries about Kane.”

  There was no more laughter.

  “Kane may well be dead,” Wenvor scoffed finally. “Nothing has been heard of Kane in years now. Some say he's fled the land; some say he's grown old and left his trade.”

  “And some say he's withdrawn solely to perfect his art,” Ostervor said.

  “Whatever arts they may be,” added Puriali.

  “Does it matter?” sneered Sitilvon. “Kane or any other foe—if they come against us, they die. If the stars give us warning, then let us heed them. Let him enter Altharn Keep, if he dare. Others who have tried have scarcely outstayed their welcome.”

  Puriali pointed upward. “Look.”

  As if swept over by a black wave of mist, the stars had vanished. Only a pallid sickle of moon interrupted the absolute darkness that enclosed Altharn Keep.

  III. The Summoning

  WENVOR HUNCHED HIS BROAD SHOULDERS AND BLEW UPON HIS hands. Beneath the flaring cressets, frost sparkled upon the massive stones of the merlons. The eldest Vareishei scorned cloak or gauntlets as he continued to pace the darkened battlements of Altharn Keep. Save the measured challenge of an unseen sentry, the thin scuff of his boots marked the only sound of his progress.

  Altharn Keep controlled the gorge through the Altanstand Mountains from atop a high cliff, beneath which a narrow roadway crowded passage between sheer walls of stone and thunderous white-water rapids. More than two-thirds of the fortress walls rose above a breathless precipice falling several hundred feet onto the eroded boulders where the river pounded through its bend. Approach to Altharn Keep's heavily fortified entrance curled along the steep ridge that completed its perimeter. Armies had attempted assault along this slope throughout the ages, and their bleached bones could be found entangled in the thickets of heather and rhododendron.

  No one in memory had forced the gates of Altharn Keep. Guards had always maintained harsh vigilance over those who were permitted to pass through its gates, and with the deepening civil chaos their attentions only grew less restrained. Josin had managed to scale the walls with a climbing rope, but this initial success had not repaid him. It was always possible—just possible—that an intruder might attempt to enter Altharn Keep by ascending the sheer face of the escarpment and scaling the less well-guarded battlements that crested the precipice. Over the ages a few rash fools had attempted this, and where the river had rolled their shattered bones no one knew.

  Wenvor, while he might not be his siblings' equal in guile, was never one to misjudge an enemy, and he did not discount the tales he had heard of Kane. Thus, Wenvor permitted himself a thin smile of vindication when he heard the soft clink of metal against stone.

  With surprising stealth for a man of his bulk, Wenvor closed upon the source of the sound: a darkened stretch of the parapet, a hundred feet or more between sentry posts, guarding the most treacherous face of the precipice. Only an eye alert to discover that which the mind knew must be there would have seen it: a steel grapnel lodged against one crenel.

  “I would have expected no less of you,” Wenvor said softly, even as his broadsword swung downward through the darkness and parted the taut cord of knotted silk. The cord sang like a snapped bowstring, the slack grapnel fell to the parapet with a tiny clatter, and the rush of the river swallowed the sounds of whatever might have fallen far below.

  Wenvor sighed and straightened.

  He heard again the soft scrape of metal against stone.

  Wenvor turned. The sickle moon and distant cressets together gave light enough to see the hulking figure in black, idly touching the tip of his broadsword to the battlement. Eyes of the coldest blue caught the wan light as chillingly as did the frost.

  “Your sentry,” said Kane.

  “Damn you!” said Wenvor, and lunged.

  Wenvor's only emotion as Kane's blade checked his own downward stroke was one of rage. While Kane's physical presence was formidable, Wenvor was himself a man of overawing stature, and he had never seen his equal in swordplay. Their broadswords warred together as if the storm gods gave battle above the clouds—flickering sudden explosions of bright sparks, shattering the night's stillness with tearing clangor of steel against steel. Driving against each other, their powerful two-handed blows jarred through muscle and bone with stunning force, all but smashing sword hilts from nerveless fists.

  Wenvor's breath shook in hoarse gasps, and, as he began to listen for the clamor of onrushing guardsmen, he knew that he felt fear. And with that knowledge, Wenvor's desperate parry failed by a fraction of a second, and Kane's blade drove into his shoulder with crushing force.

  Even the best mail cannot withstand stress beyond its limits; enough links held to save dismemberment, but Kane's sword bit deep into Wenvor's flesh with bone-shattering force. Wenvor's blade rang against the parapet, even as he was driven to his knees. Numbing, sickening pain racked him, and he knew instinctively that in another instant would be surcease.

  Kane, however, disdained the killing blow. Weaponless, his hands reached out for Wenvor.

  “Wenvor, come with me.”

  Ostervor held his breath, gradually increasing the pressure of his shoulder against the black oak panel. He felt his bones begin to creak in protest, then the section of wall pivoted inward, corroded hinges rasping under their first movement in more than a century. Cobwebs hung with the dust of another's ancestors curtained the aperture, but the darkness within welled outward with the cold breath of frosted night beyond.

  Oste
rvor smeared sweat from his forehead with a dusty forearm, considering the three depressed inlays in the parquetry of the chamber's floor. Reputedly haunted, the north wing of Altharn Keep had remained untenanted throughout living memory. Ostervor, who had long ago mastered the hidden passageways that crept through the other sections of the fortress, congratulated himself upon his having solved this final mystery. The doggerel inscription upon the chamber's mantel—One for the Bold, Two for the Gold, Three for to Hold—had seemed nonsensical to generations of inhabitants. Recent perusal of a centuries-old journal in Altharn Keep's moldering library had provided Ostervor the essential clue, with its archaic pun on bold and hold in reference to the coat-of-arms stylized in the parquetry. Other allusions to the treacherous pitfalls within the north wing's secret ways had determined Ostervor to pursue its exploration after appropriate deliberation. However …

  Ostervor did not discount his half-brother's premonition of doom anymore than he dismissed his own spies' reports that Josin's mistress had sought out Kane. Granting Kane a cunning almost equal to his own—if the lurid tales bore any credence—Ostervor hardly expected their nemesis to present his shield at the fortress gate. Given Kane's reputation—even allowing for the inevitable exaggerations and embellishments—Ostervor assumed that the assassin would seek to enter Altharn Keep by stealth of the most devious sort. The ancient citadel was honeycombed with hidden passageways, all of which (now that the north wing had given up its secrets) were intimately known to Ostervor. It would be a fatal underestimation of their enemy to assume that Kane would not be privy to these secret ways as well.

  Nonetheless, it quite unnerved Ostervor to discern recent footprints etched upon the passageway whose dust should not have been disturbed in more than a century.

  Ostervor hesitated, scowling at the damp boot prints that strode boldly through the smear of light his candle shed. He had already seen to the citadel's other hidden passages, most of which were known only to himself; a score of deadly traps—six of his own devising and installation—meant certain death for any intruder. Yet, here in this passageway whose secrets Ostervor himself had only lately mastered, another had already gained entry.

  Ostervor touched a finger to one boot print, recovering a fragment of lichen, flakes of frost still melting upon it. The intruder had passed this way only a moment before. Ostervor pulled off his boots and unbuckled his sword. The narrow passage was no field for swordplay, and the heavy dirk that he now drew had served him well in close quarters many times before. He placed his candle upon the floor outside the pivoted doorway. Silently, unseen, Ostervor would follow Kane through the north wing passages, trusting to his own fragmentary knowledge of its pitfalls. Kane obviously could not attempt their traverse in darkness; he must show a light, and then Ostervor would creep upon him from behind.

  Ostervor, however, had not expected the panel to swing shut as he passed through it.

  He counted slowly to fifty, his eyes pressed shut, before he moved. Other than the spectral groan of hinges as the doorway closed, there was no other sound. At least, he told himself, he wasn't backlighted by the feeble glow of the candle in the chamber behind the wall. Kane—and Ostervor had earlier peered into the passage for a gleam of the assassin's light—had likely passed beyond hearing in search of a hidden entrance to the Vareishei's private quarters. Ostervor withdrew a fresh candle from a pouch at his belt—there was yet another, and a tinderbox to strike fire—and tied a neckscarf about it for bulk. This he wedged against the now-closed doorway, marking its location. Silently counting his paces, Ostervor felt his way along the pitch-dark passageway, following the direction Kane's footprints had taken.

  He had counted only seven paces when Ostervor's outthrust fingers encountered a stone wall.

  Ostervor halted before the unexpected barrier, puzzled by its presence. He knew to expect the trapdoor paving at thirty paces, to be wary of the pivoting steps midway down the first staircase, to avoid the spring-loaded spears just beyond the second turning—these and other deathtraps were described in the fragmentary journals he had discovered. There was no reference to a blank wall, such as he now confronted.

  A later modification, Ostervor decided. At some point the citadel's master had walled off this series of passageways. And yet, Kane's footprints had led this way. It was impossible that Kane could have passed him upon returning; therefore the assassin must have known of another exit from the passage. Or had his returning footprints, no longer damp from the night beyond, left marks unnoticed at Ostervor's first glance?

  Stealthily Ostervor retraced his way along the passage, seeking Kane in the other direction. Ten paces beyond the point of his entrance, Ostervor's outthrust fingers encountered a stone wall.

  Ostervor swore silently, beginning to know fear. Feeling his way carefully across the blank wall and back down the passageway, his toes nudged the candle knotted within its scarf.

  The flicker of his tinderbox was blinding, and his hand shook as he applied its flame to candlewick. Its light was more than sufficient to disclose that the passageway had been walled up at either end.

  The doorway by which Ostervor had entered the passage refused to open for all his cunning attempts to activate its hidden mechanism, nor did the thick oaken panels yield to his frantic pounding.

  Ostervor wasted most of his one remaining candle seeking some other means of egress. Kane's bootprints, maddeningly obscured by his own footprints, somehow seemed to lead in either direction and into nowhere. Giving it up, Ostervor began to hew upon the oaken panels through which he had entered. His last candle gave light long enough to disclose the steel plating sandwiched within the paneling, but it was little joy to Ostervor that he had solved the mystery of the hidden doorway's solidity.

  In the long darkness that followed, Ostervor's kicking and pounding brought no more response than did his screams. The north wing, of course, was reputedly haunted, and seldom was it visited. In time his shouts became a hoarse croaking, his hands raw and bleeding, his body an agonizing mass of bruises from useless rushes against the unyielding walls.

  The choking dust only made his throat come upon him the sooner, so that the torture of his thirst for some time obscured the realization that the air in the passage was growing bad. Whatever circulation might exist, it was inadequate for his needs, and Ostervor was slowly suffocating inside this crypt. He lay motionless, conserving strength, only his brain furiously at work on the problem of escape. Time became a meaningless interval between useless efforts to open the door; it may be that he slept, for the choking darkness gave no indication of the hours that passed. The poisoned air now hurt his lungs worse than the agony of his parched throat.

  Rising from a hopeless stupor, Ostervor knew his strength was failing. He forced stale air into his chest for one last jagged howl of despair and flung his pain-racked body against the unyielding doorway.

  The doorway instantly pivoted before his weight, and Ostervor fell headlong into the chamber beyond. Upon the floor beside his face, the candle he had placed there was still burning.

  “Time, after all,” said Kane, reaching down for him, “is only relative.”

  Ostervor's hoarse breath melted the flecks of frost upon Kane's boots.

  “Ostervor, come with me.”

  Sitilvon liked to refer to the cellar chamber as her studio. Seated at her writing table, she stared thoughtfully at the half-covered page of parchment before her. Her pen had dried again, and she absently wet its tip with her tongue to keep it from blotting—a habit that left her with a blotchy sort of mustache when she kept late hours in her studio. She considered the now-still body of the youth strapped head down upon an X-shaped frame in the center of the chamber. Beneath his dangling head a large silver bowl was nearly filled with blood-tinged vomit. Sitilvon reread her notes of earlier that evening, then dipped her clean pen into her inkwell and concluded her notes.

  “Subject 3 is young male of sound physique and good health. Force-fed vomitus concentration from Sub
ject 2, placed upon frame. Severe convulsions observed by second hour, increasing intensity with total vomiting of stomach contents by third hour, decreasing soon thereafter. No observable signs of life after fourth hour.”

  Sitilvon frowned and continued to write.

  “There seems little point in continuing this line of study. Despite common belief, it is demonstrable that a combination of arsenic and mercuric salt does not increase in toxicity as the poison is recovered from the vomitus of one victim to the next.”

  “Obviously you were only diluting its virulence,” commented Kane, reading over her shoulder. “One might as well maintain that a blade grows sharper each time it hews flesh and bone.”

  Sitilvon's pen shook a spatter of ink upon the page, but she gave no other outward sign of disquiet.

  “The poison might have absorbed certain essences of death from each victim,” she said calmly.

  “What? Heavy metal salts?” Kane was derisive. “Rank superstition.”

  She rose slowly from her chair and faced Kane, gaining considerable assurance from the fact the assassin had not simply cut her throat once he had crept upon her unseen.

  “I had thought I had given orders not to be disturbed. Shall I call in my guardsmen?”

  “They are rather less capable of obeying you now,” Kane said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I should think you must know that answer.”

  Sitilvon knew, but she also knew that while they talked, she remained alive. She smoothed the folds of her gown across her hips and faced him coolly. While she scorned to take pains with her appearance, she knew her features were good, her figure exciting to her occasional lovers—and Kane, after all, was only a man.

  “You are no common assassin,” she told him, “or you would have slain me from behind.”