Mortal Consequences

Chapter 10

"Praise Jannath the Golden Goddess! It works! It works!"

Carried away, Candlemas whirled and grabbed the first person at hand, a wispy lesser mage named Jacinta. Two other mages laughed to see the chubby mage dance with the young woman, then laughed harder when he grabbed their hands and swung all three in a circle. Farm hands, gathered to witness the miracle, clapped their hands and hooted and stamped their feet.

The scene was a remote valley amidst steep hills covered with ash and elm trees, bottomed by a trio of jewel-like lakes. At the head of the valley was a small square keep of black stone and a few peasant cottages. The floor of the valley, split by a glistening stream, was not farmed in typically ancient meandering lots, but quartered with geometric precision and planted with every type of grain crop: wheat, barley, rye, spelt, oats, bran, timothy… It was near a small bridge over the stream, at the sharp edge of the wheat field, that magicians capered like children.

"Whew!" Candlemas huffed to a halt. Two hundred and fifteen years old, he was still in his prime, but long hours and good food had slowed him down. Dressed in a plain brown smock and rope sandals, pudgy and bald with a bushy black beard, an observer would never know Candlemas was a leading mentalist of his time. In fact, hardly anyone in the Netherese Empire, archwizard or lowest peasant, knew where Candlemas was, or what he'd been attempting. And after three long years "I've done it! We've done it, for you've all helped, my friends! And you shall reap the rewards, and the ages shall sing praises to your names! But come, let us watch!"

With brown, work-worn hands, Candlemas parted wheat stalks and ran amidst them. Lifting his head high, he could see how, ahead in a wandering line, wheat was stained a bright red like rust. But when he brushed the stalks with his hands, the red dust was knocked free to shimmer down like fiery snow and disappear amidst the yellow stalks. Candlemas laughed at the sight.

"Oh, they will sing praises to my name, just as Sunbright prophesied!"

"Milord?" asked Jacinta, who was thin and colorless as wheat. "What prophecy is that?"

"Eh? Oh, it was-it's a long story," he said. "Never mind. Look ahead! The spell has jumped the line! It's working on the barley!" He let out another fierce howl that almost cracked his throat, then stopped running, and stood puffing and grinning.

"You see," Candlemas told the three gathered mages, "I knew, I mean, a shaman friend of mine… This rust, this crop blight, began-what was it-four years back? From the start I knew it was trouble. Lady Polaris brought it to my attention in Castle Delia, and ordered me to fix it-as if that were simple. The rust ate the heart of the wheat, hollowed the kernels into empty shells, then it spread to other grains, even jumped to apple trees and peaches, which made no sense. A disease stays with its host, usually. It doesn't attack everything living. I thought we'd never figure it out, but a friend of mine, a barbarian shaman if you can believe it, prophesied I would find a cure, and we have!"

The mage's voice trailed off as he remembered his enforced adventuring to the future. How frustrated he'd been as steward to the estates of Lady Polaris, when suddenly he was ripped up and transported to the future, where he witnessed the destruction of the empire.

And he remembered how, returned to his own time, he'd found a new goal in life, and succeeded. This morning, as the sun rose, he'd brought out a potion, one of thousands he'd experimented with. It contained brimstone and antimony, quicksilver and iron filings, fennel and cuckoo's pintel, and lungwort and foxglove. He'd chanted to Mystryl, Mother of Magic; and Jannath, Grain Goddess, She Who Shapes All. He'd invoked spells by the dozen: Prug's plant control, Anglin's wall, Fahren's glitterdust, Shan's web. Then, kneeling, almost weeping with exhaustion, he'd dumped the potion at the roots of the rust-ridden wheat that gleamed like blood in the dawn light.

And performed a miracle. For the earth bubbled and seethed where the potion spilled, and a soft green glow enwrapped the leaning stalks of wheat. Like a green fire, the spell whisked through the field. And where it touched, rust fell away like dust, leaving the young kernels green and healthy and growing, fit food for man and beast. Nor did the spell quit, but took strength from the land itself, and spread out in rippling waves, cleansing all the crops of the blight and moving on to purify more growth.

For the first time in decades, Candlemas looked out over his work and felt pride. The last successful spell he'd completed had been-when? When he'd jerked himself and Sunbright and Knucklebones back from the future. Yet that glow of pride, his second-greatest accomplishment after today's, still haunted him, for in that moment he'd lost the only woman he ever loved. She'd chosen to remain with her beloved city, and had died with it. Since then, Candlemas had been alone.

"I wish," he murmured aloud, "I wish Aquesita could see my triumph. That would make it perfect…"

"Perfection isn't for mortals," scratched a voice behind him. "It's for gods, and the dead. Such as am I."

Startled, Candlemas and his attendant mages whirled to confront-a monster.

The creature loomed over them like some scarecrow burned to cinders. Its mineral-glistening body was naked, without ears or eyelids, like nothing they'd ever seen. Yet, as Candlemas stared into the monster's bulging blue eyes, he found something familiar.

"You!" Candlemas shrieked. "Jergal get thee gone! I know you… by all the gods!"

"Yes!" From the slash of a mouth came a dry chuckle, "You know me. You helped give me this hideous form!"

Despite himself, Candlemas backed from the monster, but tripped in a tangle of wheat and fell on his fat rump. The lesser mages scattered through the grain. The farm folk were long gone.

Enjoying Candlemas's terror and surprise, the black monster casually raised claws to either side. With a whispered incantation, "Worm food!", twin bolts of dull brown lightning exploded from its palms.

Candlemas watched in horror as the bolts overtook his assistants, enfolded all three in brown carapaces like insects. Then the brown hulls split in a hundred places like old parchment. For an eyeblink, the mage saw all three standing frozen, as if unharmed. Then they fell apart.

First to drop off where their fingers, ears, noses. Their flesh split into thousands of long, wriggling tubes, like maggots or earthworms. The skin of their faces followed, leaving their skulls bare. Their brains boiled into writhing pink nests of worms, as did their organs. Within a minute, the humans were reduced to heaps of insect-like obscenities wriggling and boring through fresh white bones.

Candlemas was too stunned to look away, to fall down, to be sick. He just stared, until the monster rasped again, "Like that spell? I learned it in the deeps, dear Candlemas. I learned much in my own personal hell. Amusing, isn't it, when you think I created the place? That I couldn't know it?"

"What?" The pudgy mage craned up to the monster's staring blue eyes. "Your own… oh, by the Pitiless One."

"No pity," cooed the monster. "Only pain. I'd fashioned a pocket of hell to punish my enemies. You, among others, for you betrayed me. But Polaris, she who'll die most exquisitely, turned the tables on me. She stripped me of skin, remember that? Peeled me like a chicken so I'd feel the punishments with every nerve end. Then she hurled me into my own private hell for a year, that I might suffer for my disobedience. And how long ago was that, dear 'Mas?"

"Wh-What?" the mage stuttered. He couldn't look away, hypnotized like a bird before a serpent. "Uh, it was a-a year-"

"It wasn't!" the monster shrieked. The banshee wail stabbed into Candlemas's brain. "A year passed! And another! And a third! Years longer than my sentence, when every day, every minute was a seething torment of agony! Polaris forgot me!"

"But, but how-"

"I escaped! I grew this hide you see. I formed a whole skin from the rock walls that were my prison. I clad myself in stone, unpierceable, unstoppable. I became this hideous creature to escape the world of fiends, to enter the world of men, to get my revenge!"

"But you were-"

"Beautiful?" the flint monster thundered. "Ravishing! Gorgeous! Lusted after by men, envied by women! And look at me now!"

Candlemas remembered.

While he had been steward, responsible for the outbuildings and lands around Castle Delia, inside was another official, the castle chamberlain, responsible for the kitchens, dining halls, wine cellars, guest rooms, and great hall. A vibrant, brilliant, dashing mage with a cascade of beautiful red hair and glowing skin, a woman in love with herself, and the image in her mirror. A woman grown bored with her duties, who'd picked fights with Candlemas, plagued him at his work, and finally trapped him into ever-more dangerous and foolish bets, with the barbarian Sunbright as their pawn.

And all the while, the chamberlain had plotted to steal the seat of Lady Polaris, until the white-haired archwizard's iron hand clamped down, peeled the living skin from her chamberlain's flesh, and she cast her servant into hell-to be forgotten.

And driven insane…

"Sysquemalyn, I…" Candlemas moaned. He didn't know whether to plead, or offer pity, or run for his life. "Sys, you must understand. I didn't know Polaris kept you locked there. I've been away from Castle Delia. I left years ago, and never looked back. I assumed Polaris-"

"You assumed wrong!" The hellspawn reared against the summer sky and hooked hands like eagle talons over him as she screamed, "You didn't care! And for that, you die!"

The pudgy mage just barely threw up Valdick's forcecage before sizzling chain lightning, some variant of Volhm's chaining, exploded around him. Electric bolts scorched the air, charging it with ozone. They struck Candlemas's shield so hard he was rocked to his knees, felt the charred earth blistering hot under him, felt the temperature rise within the cage by hundreds of degrees. He'd cook unless he dispelled the forcecage, but Sysquemalyn-she might as well be Shar, the Lady of Loss and Anger-loomed and waited. And prepared another spell, for she shrieked from a gash of a mouth like a cleft in broken rock.

"Like that, dear 'Mas? Wait until I set your bones afire to burn within you! Wait until I boil your eyes in their sockets, till I curdle your brain! You'll live three years of my pain in the longest seconds of your short life!"

Candlemas scrambled to his feet, and banged his head on an invisible section of forcecage. It was so hot it seared his bald pate and made him yelp. Yet he realized part of the cage was missing. She'd actually unconjured his spell!

Wondering at her awesome power, he stumbled backward over scorched earth, found wheat burning everywhere from the lightning. Smoke roiled to the sky at all hands. Vaguely he hoped his rust-cure spell, his precious work of three long years, escaped the havoc.

Then he prayed he'd escape alive. Sysquemalyn pouted and blew out cheeks like split rocks.

A stinking cloud of yellow-green gas enveloped Candlemas. Instantly he retched on the poison. His head wanted to explode for sneezing, his eyes watered, he gasped and gagged and choked for air. He flapped his arms, shambled left and right, but the cloud followed him like a harpy. Then he was breathing it, and vomiting at the same time, and choking on his vomit. He burned, for the cloud contained acid. His scalp and hands and nose and ears prickled, grew stippled with blood. To open his eyes would blind him. Already he felt pinpoints of acid in his eyes like the claws of tiny imps.

In his darkness came a grating laugh, "Like the smell? I lived with it for months at a time, when the air in hell was too foul to breath or burn! Taste it! Enjoy it!"

The mage's blundering feet left soil, squished in mud, and with tearful gratitude he splashed into the stream that cut the valley. Bathing his aching face and bleary eyeballs, he tried desperately to think of a spell-any spell-to drive Sysquemalyn away, or else cover his escape. A levitation spell might float him out of range, or a shadow door let him wriggle away. Even Undine's door, with no idea of his destination, would be enough. Perhaps he had a chance. He didn't hear her insane laughter.

Heat belched all around him. Brimstone bubbled just under his nose. He was afire. His smock ignited, as did the skin on his elbows and knees. He screamed at the sudden pain, and forced his eyes open to see this new attack, to get away.

The water was gone. Instead, the creek bed roiled with black, sticky tar. Huge gas pockets burped sulfur. Things charred and long dead floated on the surface. The tar was near boiling, and Candlemas was elbow- and hock-deep in it. It stuck to his face and neck, and burned where it touched. He wailed with fright and agony as he plucked himself free and grabbed for the shore.

The monster Sysquemalyn was there to meet him. He grabbed gummy grass near her craggy, twisted feet. "Hot, dear 'Mas?" the monster cooed. "Let me cool you."

A hand like a knot of thorns closed on his arm. He tried to yank free, but could not. The flint hand was powerful as a chain yoked to oxen, and it dragged him on tarry elbows and knees across burnt grass and ashes. At first Candlemas felt nothing, though the hand smoked on his upper arm. Then he saw it was not smoke, but ice mist. Frost dusted his bicep, then ice. The chill spread down his arm until it was numb. Steam rose where ice met hot tar, with Candlemas's flesh trapped between. He struggled to get his feet under him, to rise, but the monster dragged him like an anchor. When she let go, he collapsed onto the dirt path between smoldering crops. The whole sky was black now, or so it seemed to his seared eyeballs under tar-heavy brows.

"Sys, please…"

"No pleases, please," mocked the monster. She loomed against the sky like a lightning-killed pine. "Nothing can save you. You know you'll die, don't you? But not soon, not fast. A little at a time." She lifted her splayed foot and stamped down hard.

Candlemas couldn't move his numbed arm, and the foot crashed down like a boulder off a mountain. He heard fingers break and twist, felt the stamping vibration through the ground more than through his shoulder, which burned as if afire. Writhing, kicking gluey feet to roll away, he glanced at his arm and shuddered, almost sick. The flesh was not just chilled, it was frozen solid, dead forever. Broken in a dozen places, held together by skin.

"I bit your arm off once, remember?" From the scratchy throat issued-almost-the soft cooing wheedle the beautiful Sysquemalyn had employed years before, "Had it torn off by a yellow fiend, actually. That jolt will seem the gentlest caress after a day or two."

"Please," Candlemas wept with pain, "please, Sys. What do you want?"

"Want?" A mad shriek again. The claws flew high over the bald shining head. "Death, in all its forms, to all my foes!"

With a wildcat wail she stabbed down, fingertips sparkling. Candlemas was hoicked into the air, pulled in five directions as if by wild horses, and spun wildly. The world became a blur with dozens of flint monsters craning over him keening a death chant. He felt blood surge in his head, saw his vision cloud, saw blood squirt from his sundered arm. When Sysquemalyn suddenly shrieked a halt, the mage stopped so quickly his legs broke. Waves of pain and nausea rolled over, and suffocated him.

More frightening, Sysquemalyn vacillated between sane and insane, shrieking one minute, cooing the next as if playing her own games. She might torture him for days, heal him as needed, then continue. For years, even, her thirst for revenge unquenched.

A coo, "That's three limbs. What do to with the fourth? Smite the skin with exploding boils, perhaps?"

Hanging in mid-air, three limbs distorted, Candlemas knew he couldn't escape. He could only live and take it. To fight was useless.

At least in this form.

Biting his tongue, Candlemas reached for the only escape he could imagine outside death. Yet it was a form of death, for what he planned would leave him as something else. If he survived.

But pain tore at his mind, and soon he'd lose his reason. Become a babbling horror like Sysquemalyn, hung between the world and sanity.

Reaching deep inside, Candlemas conjured words to a spell he'd never attempted, wasn't even sure he remembered. It was long ago he'd read of it, but now it came back, like opening a cobwebbed drawer to find a diamond sparkling within. Or a scalpel.

Grinding his teeth against pain, he grunted the weird, twisted sounds of Quantoul's selfmorph.

The change was instant. An observer wouldn't have known if Candlemas truly changed, or merely swapped himself with some other-worldly horror. For the thing that suddenly hung in air was a purple granite cone taller than Sysquemalyn. Its bottom was hollow and ringed with savage teeth. Tentacles dangled and flapped. Two blind eyes like milky pearls started from its side.

And hating everything on this plane, the windghost attacked.

The flint monster never recoiled, or even ducked the hideous apparition. Its hate burned just as hot. Flint claws met granite cone, and for a few moments the air was filled with screams, scratching, and scrabbling. Then, quick as thought, the monster Sysquemalyn drove two hands like spears through the windghost's hide. Stone-hard organs and a many-chambered heart were rent like rocks in a crusher. Torn from its body, the tiny brain died.

Candlemas didn't die with it, for the mage's consciousness was gone, obliterated by the polymorph spell. For everything, including that keen brain, had changed with the spell.

Sysquemalyn was left with a stinking heap of purple rubble in a scorched field marred with tar and sulfur and blood. Yet even death could not satisfy her rage, and the gore-spattered monster slashed and stamped and tore at the ruined carcass, screaming, "I want to kill him again! I want him dead again! Again, again!"

All that remained to mark Candlemas's life and work was the blight-curing spell, quietly percolating at the edges of the valley, quietly dispelling the poisonous rust, then passing over the hill and jumping to other fields. And on and on, to the horizon and beyond.

"We halt this fight!" Thornwing crowed. Beside her, Blinddrum nodded. "And all others! There is no more need for battle!"

"What?"

"Are you mad?"

"Who made you chief?"

"Get out of the ring!"

Voices rose all around, a cacophony.

"Sunbright challenged every fighter! He-"

"He did, and he fought, and he defeated us!" the swordswoman shouted them down. "And by beating us, he has defeated the whole tribe!" More noise, objections, calls for quiet and dignity, questions of custom, but Thornwing plowed on. "Blinddrum and I are the best fighters in the tribe. None would dispute that. Yet Sunbright Steelshanks, son of Sevenhaunt and Monkberry of the Raven Clan, defeated us both. And by that act, he defeated all of us! So he need fight no more."

Grumbling, growling, cursing, yet many agreed with the logic while others pondered it, weighed it against tradition. Even old Iceborn admitted he'd never thought of a challenge in that light, but it made sense. To beat the best was to beat them all.

Magichunger kept one wary eye on Knucklebones as he bawled, "What of his sentence of death? Pronounced by Owldark?"

"Owldark is dead," rumbled Blinddrum, "and with him his sentence. I don't remember the reason for the sentence anyway."

"A vision!" crowed an elder woman. "Owldark saw Sunbright standing over us, a bloody sword in his hand and all of us dead. Smoke and fire filled the horizon, and even the reindeer were slaughtered, and the son of Sevenhaunt the cause of it all!"

Superstitious, Blinddrum deferred to the quicker-thinking Thornwing. She tossed back her horsetail, lifted her thin arm so sweat glistened in the firelight, and called, "Owldark had many visions, and he had brain madness! Yes, listen to me! We all know he blacked out, fell in the cookfires many times. In the end, he led us here, to misery. Then he wandered the wasteland, and was eaten by wild dogs. Owldark was a good man, but not all his visions rang true! And so I dismiss his vision of Sunbright."

"And we need a shaman, and have none," Blinddrum added. "The sacred fire is out, and we cannot council until our shaman reignites it."

"Sunbright himself stamped it out!" objected Magichunger.

The big swordmaster had no answer. Thornwing merely waved her hand in dismissal. Despite her attempt at severity, Knucklebones sniggered at Magichunger's indignant glare. She turned one good eye on Sunbright. The pale shaman swayed on his feet, but stood. Her heart swelled in her breast for such a man, who'd risk his own life and dignity to save these people, fickle and ungrateful though many were. Yet she wouldn't have wagered money on how this argument would end.

"If we can't council," objected Rattlewater, "then what are we doing now?"

"Talking! So shut up!" old Tulipgrace snapped. That drew a laugh.

"No!" countered Leafrebel. "If we only talk, not council, then nothing we decide matters! It's just wind off the sea."

There was more argument, much more, going on so long Magichunger let the borrowed sword point to the ground. Exhausted in body, Sunbright sat at his mother's feet like a child. Yet his spirit sang as his people debated, invoking custom after custom. Sniffing at Magichunger, Knucklebones sat primly by Sunbright and took his cold hand. Others built up the fire, and some fetched pipes with carefully hoarded sumac and willow bark to smoke, as if this were a proper council.

Forestvictory made a speech. She talked at length about similar earth-shaking arguments from the past. Other tribesfolk who'd been driven out decades or centuries ago. Some who'd returned and brought disaster, others who came empty-handed and furthered salvation. She talked a long time, lulling her audience with sonorous words. When she finished, there was long quiet. Children had nodded off, heads pillowed on parents' laps. Even Knucklebones yawned, and covered her mouth, inadvertently clicking her brass knuckledusters against her white teeth.

In the long silence, Thornwing stood up, steel sword in hand. She was framed by a yellowing sky, for the tribe had talked through the night, and when she flung it high, it flashed in dawn light. The swordwoman's raspy voice carried to everyone, mesmerizing them. "I say this! If Sunbright is driven out again, I shall follow him! He's disrupted our lives by returning, and that is good, for we were useless as seals on ice pack. Chosen by blood and by the gods, Sunbright has recalled what we live for, who we have been, and who we should be. If he goes, I go, as does Blinddrum. A tribe of three living the old ways is better than a herd marching off a cliff because they're too blind to see. I say this with blood!" And she slashed the sword across her palm and held up the dripping hand.

Without a word, Blinddrum took the sword, slashed his palm, and clasped Thornwing's. Forestvictory rose, laid flesh to sword, and clasped. Her lover, Starrabbit, followed. Then Archloft and Mightylaugh, and Goodbell, who carried her sleepy children forward, slit their fingers, and clutched them to her bosom. So many people joined they clasped in a mob. Rightdove joined. Old Iceborn was helped up and joined, though he had to slash his withered hands three times to draw blood. Then Tulipgrace. Rattlewater, Leafrebel, and many others, but not all.

Magichunger and three dozen tribesfolk remained outside the ring. Finally Thornwing called, "You'll not join us?"

"No. Not yet," Magichunger hedged. "But we'll abide by the majority."

Thornwing nodded in acceptance, lowered her gory hand, as did the rest. "Then it's decided" she said. "Sunbright is returned to the tribe, alive and under no sentence. And shaman, for we need one and he has the gift. Sunbright, welcome back. What need we do?"

Painfully, with help from his lover and his mother, Sunbright Steelshanks rose and faced them all, squinting in the now bright daylight. "Friends, I thank you," he said. "As you see, the gods send us a new day for a new beginning, but it is not my place, as shaman, to tell you what to do, but simply to read the signs and advise. To talk, we must council. So I shall gather the proper materials, say the chants, and light the sacred fire. Then, together, we'll decide our future."