Part 46 (1/2)
The girl tensed and thrashed in his arms. Otto set her down.
”I've got to get a sword. Wait here,” he hissed at her. ”Stay out of sight.”
She staggered against the wall, looking worse in daylight than by flame. Her eyes were wide and wildly blank.
Otto hurried to the corpse. A Lys man and not yet dead.
”Erkel, friend, I need your blade.”
”Sir,” mouthed Erkel, eyes glazed, and Ottaviano took the blade from his blood-slick hand, his rage at perfidious Goiias boiling up again.
”Goiias!” came the shout again, and the girl cried out in Sorcerer and a Qentkman 381.
answer and ran, truly ran, down the corridor past Otto as he stood.
”Hey! Stop!”
”GOLIAS!” reverberated through the very stones of the building.
Prince Prospero had arrived, realized Otto, starting after the girl.
Prince Gaston glanced at the body on the mosaic-tiled floor, which lay in a smear of fresh blood on the worn stones. Still moving, knees curling to chest to meet the end as the beginning. He took a step away, then stopped again and looked a second time. A couple of blood-marked footprints led away in the direction in which he'd been going himself.
The light from the tall, narrow windows was wan and grey, the fading sun too weak to pierce the cloud cover which was rolling over the sky. He bent, a dagger ready in his right hand in case it was a ruse, and turned the near-corpse over slowly.
More blood, welling from fresh sc.r.a.pes on the face, crimson on white-indigo-black-violeted skin, and red blood on the broken mouth. She looked at him with purpled, puffed eyes.
”Finish it . . .” she whispered, slurred but distinct.
Too dark for Neyphile, too ragged, too grimed, the Fire-duke thought. This must be the hostage. Someone had sought to silence her: Goiias? But she was his bargaining-piece. Ottaviano had run past Gaston, bloodspattered and pale, an instant before Gaston had rounded the corner, and Gaston frowned to himself at the coincidence. But he would get the truth of it from her later, if she lived.
”Nay,” he said, and used his dagger to tear a piece of cloth from his scarlet cloak, ripping a wider gash in her grimy s.h.i.+rt and pressing it hard against a freely-bleeding wound in her chest. A blooded knife lay under her.
Her eyes closed. Her breath slipped out slowly: she fainted, close to death. Prince Gaston pushed aside her hair, matted with blood, and saw no obvious head injuries.
382.
'Etizabeth ”Sir?” called one of his men, Gallitan, and then ran forward up the hall, leading a squad of a dozen others.
”Captain Gallitan. Bring Gernan the surgeon. This woman's to be kept alive. Guard and tend her till Gernan's here. Keep a guard of two on her lest they try again.”
”Yes, sir.”
He left Gallitan there and went on with six of the men. Scuffling sounds came from both sides when he pa.s.sed the doors between this corridor and the main hali; there was fighting in the main hall around which the corridor ran, and Gaston disregarded it, confident that Captain Jolly would have it under control. The Fireduke had better prey than mercenaries in mind: Golias would be hereabouts.
A light exploded with a dull boom into the hall from a dark s.p.a.ce to the left, and it raced up the stairs which were thereby illuminated, a tall midnight-blue-cloaked figure running behind it. Gaston hissed with recognition and sprinted, following. The other was ahead, ahead by a length of stone, by a few turns. The soldiers fell behind, taken by surprise and unable to keep up. The Marshal raced up the stairs, afraid he had seen clearly what he saw by the fireball's light.
With a banging, smas.h.i.+ng sound, a draft of cold air flooded the stairway, fresh air from outside tainted with smoke. Prince Gaston took half a flight at a step in his rush to the last landing.
A door was no longer there. Burning splinters of wood were sprinkled around the guardroom which occupied the top of this ponderous square tower of the antique castle-There was another door open on the other side of the room, which led outside to the walk around the top. The wind wailed and mourned wordlessly through the opening.
He went out slowly, sword in hand. The wind had its shoulder to the tower and was pus.h.i.+ng him too, but Prince Gaston paid it no heed; he put his head beside the wall and frowned, listening. Straightening, he stalked to the corner, listened again, and then sprang around it, sword ready. Nothing there, not even the wind; this side was screened by the stone tower. He repeated the stalk and spring. Noth- Sorcerer and a (jentteman 383.
ing-no, a cry, from around the next corner, and blood on the stone here. The Fireduke took one breath and this time went slowly around the corner.
The wind which had ignored him on the one side and shoved him on the two others slammed into him here on the fourth, pressing him against the wall with its force. Gaston found breathing difficult in its powerful sucking drag and turned his head slightly, keeping an eye on the other two men on the tower.
They were fighting, not speaking, and Golias's face was to Gaston.
”Look behind you!” he cried to his opponent mockingly. ”Death himself has come for you, Your Royal Highness!”
The man in the blue-black cloak gestured with his free hand, the one which did not hold the long slender pretty dark-red blade, and moved it as if to throw, and the wind gathered and punched Golias. He staggered.
Prospero, thought Gaston, and did but watch, crouching slightly.
Prospero growled something, forcing Golias into the corner with the aid of that blow from the wind, and Golias sneered.
”Where is she?” shouted Prospero.
”Dead,” Golias said, and laughed, and he kicked out at Prospero, feinted, and threw a dagger with his left hand at Prospero's right eye. Prospero parried with the grace and economy Gaston had always loved to watch.
The dagger clattered into the wall and fell.
Golias used Prospero's evasion to evade Prospero and twisted and stepped-as quickly as the knife flew-to one side, along the crenelated wall, and he was no longer trapped.
But now Prospero's wind buffeted him to and fro as Prospero fought with him, making him slip and sending his blows awry, and Gaston watched, holding his breath, as Prospero started what Gaston could feel was a leadup to a killing strike.
Golias could feel it too, and he jumped back suddenly and threw his blade like a spear at Prospero, who beat it 384.
'Etizað aside as he lunged forward. It spun out, over the wall, seized by the wind to tumble end-over-end away and down, brightly flas.h.i.+ng in the thin sunlight.
Again Golias's quick heels saved him.
Gaston leapt forward to follow them around the corner in time to see the door dragged shut behind Golias and to see Prospero lose his grip on its edge and slam his fist into the door. Incipient death can give a man great strength against all the Elements, else Golias could never have closed it in Prospero's very face.
”Prospero!” cried Gaston, starting forward.
Prospero swung and glared once, a brilliant wild look, at Gaston and then stepped back. He swept his hand down, then up, clenching it, and a great blast of wind flattened the Fireduke against the wall as the door blew inward. Prospero ran in. Gaston was nearly suffocated in the screaming, howling wind that pinned him, and he tore himself free of it step by step, dragging himself along the stone, sc.r.a.ping his cheek b.l.o.o.d.y.
The room he entered, minutes after Prospero, was empty and quiet. As Gaston came to the door, the wind ceased as unnaturally as it had started. The splintered bar for the door lay in two pieces on the floor.
He looked slowly around, turning on his heel, and saw it: the remains of a table, blasted, fires flickering around it now and going out. Someone had left through a Way.
”Prospero,” said Gaston, and sheathed his sword.
He went down the stairs then, briskly, back to the business of subduing the more mundane forces left behind and of securing the object of the battle, now a piece of its jetsam.
33.THE DUKE OF WINDS SAT FEEDING sticks to a feeble fire in a sheltered desert canyon. Wind tossed the stunted, contorted trees on the canyon's rim, but never reached him; the resinous little smoke-trail of the fire rose without smarting his Sorcerer and a (jentieman 385.
eyes. On the other side of the flames, Hurricane filled out his supper of oats with mouthfuls of gra.s.s, methodically reaped and chewed.