Death of a Darklord

"How many people have died of this plague?"

"Over half the village," Thordin said.

Jonathan shook his head. "Why did he not send for help before?"

"He heard a bard singing of your defeat of the beast of Mandriel. When the bard told him you were living and not some legend, the town decided to send for you."

"If half of them are taken, it is a serious problem, indeed, but I have had a missive from Calum. He has given us a new assignment. I can't put that off."

"I will go back to Pegin's village," Blaine said.

"Alone?" Thordin asked.

A stubborn frown made Elaine's face seem very young, like a child told he could not do something. "He died to save his village. We can't let him have died for nothing."

Jonathan sighed. There were times when duty to the brotherhood and larger goals chaffed in the face of more immediate needs. This was one of them.

"What does Calum say in the letter?"

Jonathan handed it over.

Blaine stared at the floor, anger begi

Thordin looked up, an odd expression on his blunt face.

"What is it?" Jonathan asked.

"Cortton is the village Pegin Tallyrand came from."

Blaine looked up. "You mean the brotherhood is sending us to help Pegin's village?"

Thordin handed the letter to him. "It would seem so."

"Well, now we know what is wrong in Cortton," Jonathan said.

"A plague of the dead," Thordin said in his deep, ruined voice.

"When do we leave?" Blaine asked. Eagerness showed on his face. He sat straighter in the chair; even his wounds seemed to hurt less. They were going to save Pegin's village, repay the debt that Blaine felt, assuage his guilt at the other man's death.

Jonathan understood all that. He could watch most of it dance across the younger man's face. Blaine's face was always like a mirror. Strangely, it was Elaine who was harder to read, more private.

"A few days to gather supplies and pack, to let you heal. To try and determine what caused the great tree to come to life. If there is some evil magic coming so close to our home, we must know of it. I don't want to leave the others behind in danger."

"If we ca

Jonathan had to smile at his enthusiasm. "Then we leave for Cortton in three days' time, with or without that particular mystery solved. If we huddled at home before we had deciphered every evil that befell us, we would never leave these walls."

Elaine gri

Jonathan looked at the younger man's eager face. Had he ever been that young? No, he decided, he had not. There was an answering gleam* in Thordin's eyes. Looking forward to the next battle. Perhaps Thordin had been that young; perhaps he still was.

Jonathan stared at the two warriors. Perhaps those who lived by steel, like those who lived by magic, suffered the same delusion, that their abilities could solve every problem. Come to think of it, once upon a time, there had been a certain mage-finder that thought his abilities were proof against all evil. That had not been so long ago. Before Calum's illness-a few months.

He wanted to touch Thordin and Elaine, to shake them until the eager light died from their eyes. Didn't they realize that steel was not always enough? Magic was not enough. Intelligence was not always enough. There were some horrors for which nothing was enough.

They had fought the walking dead before and conquered. But a plague of the dead? Half a village brought to unholy life? Would they finally meet something they could not overcome? For the first time, a tiny worm of doubt began to gnaw at Jonathan Ambrose, mage-finder. Doubt. . and fear.

SIX

The man's body lay on its back, hands at its side. He had been average: medium height, brown hair, an unremarkable face, neither handsome nor ugly. Perhaps, alive, there had been some humor that animated that face, a divine spark that brought beauty to ordinariness. Elaine had seen enough dead to know that was often the case. It was hard to recognize a friend, a loved one, in the face of the dead, even the newly dead.

The shed was a mere lean-to, one wall missing, open to the winter night. Snow skittered across the body, sounding dry as sand as it gathered in the wrinkles of the deadman's clothes. The back of the shed was filled to the ceiling with wood. The snow dusted the cut wood.

Tereza stood over the body. The lantern at her feet cast a golden swath on the dead face. The icy wind gusted inside the lantern with a whoosh that sent flickering shadows trembling in the shed. The amber light seemed almost as uncertain as the shadows themselves, like colored darkness.

Elaine huddled inside her hooded cloak. There had been much yelling about her braving the cold so soon after nearly dying, but in the end, they had listened to Gersalius. He said she would be fine. It was magic, and on that, like it or not, Gersalius was the expert.

The wizard moved up beside them, kneeling by the body. His thick cloak spread like a dark pool on the hard ground. One pale hand appeared from his cloak to trace the man's cold face. His fingers were very long, graceful; musician's hands, poet's hands. They traced the bones of the cheek, the chin, the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the fleshy lips. Without looking up, he said, "What do you see, Elaine?"

"I see a deadman," she said.

"Look with more than your eyes."

Elaine shivered, drawing her cloak tighter. "I don't know what you mean."

He looked up. His eyes were thrown into shadow, like blind holes. His face was strange, somber, no longer friendly or even approachable. Kneeling there in the fire-kissed dark, fingers touching the corpse's up-turned face, he was suddenly a sorcerer, with all that one word implied.

"Come, Elaine, we have had this discussion before. You are a budding wizard, a witch, if you prefer. Tell me what you see."

His voice filled the shed, beating against the darkness. It was not a shout, and yet it was, as if his voice shouted on other ears besides her 'normal' ones.

"We haven't got all night, wizard," Tereza said. She stamped her feet against the cold. "Question her later, in the warmth."

Gersalius did not even look at her; his black-hole eyes never wavered from Elaine's face. "She must learn."

"I asked if you could discover why the great tree had come to life. You asked to see the corpse. I brought you. Now you go all mysterious on me. Why is it that wizards can never do anything like normal people?"

He turned to her at last, a slow move of his head. As his eyes moved out of shadow, they gleamed with a greenish light, the color of nothing in the shed.

His eyes weren't really glowing, were they? Elaine did not want to know if they were.

"You wanted me to discover something about the spell that killed this man. I am trying to do just that," the mage explained patiently.

"I asked you about the spell that animated the tree. We know what killed the man," insisted Tereza.

"Do you? Do you really?"

"The tree tore him in half, old man."

"That is how he died, yes, but not what killed him."

"It is too cold for riddles."

"And too cold for interruptions, gypsy."

Elaine's eyes flicked to Tereza. No one used that tone with her, not and lived a long and happy life.

Tereza drew a long breath that steamed in the air. Her eyes looked away from the kneeling wizard. "You are right. My apologies."

Elaine couldn't have been more astonished if Tereza had sprouted a second head. The woman never apologized, not for anything.

"Is that a spell?" She blurted it out before she had time to think. If it were a spell, saying so was not a good idea. Or perhaps it was. Gersalius shouldn't be bewitching them with his eyes. Surely Jonathan would disapprove of that.