The Black Road

TWO

Twisting and squirming, hands flailing through the bands of invisible force that held him captive, Raithen fought against Cholik's spell. Surprise and fear marked Raithen's face, and Cholik knew the man realized he wasn't facing the weak old priest he thought he'd been talking to with such disregard. The big pirate opened his mouth and struggled to speak. No words came out. At a gesture, Cholik caused Raithen to float out over the balcony's edge and the hundred-foot drop that lay beyond. Only broken rock and the tumbled remains of the buildings that had made up Tauruk's Port lay below.

The pirate captain ceased his struggles as fear dawned on his purpling face.

"Power has brought me to Tauruk's Port," Cholik grated, maintaining the magic grip, feeling the obscene pleasure that came from using such a spell, "and to Ransim buried beneath. Power such as you've never wielded. And none of that power will do you any good. You do not know how to wield it. The vessel for this power must be consecrated, and I mean to be that vessel. It's something that you'll never be able to be." The priest opened his hand.

Choking and gasping, Raithen floated back in and dropped to the stone-tiled floor of the balcony overlooking the river and the abandoned city. He lay back, gasping for air and holding his bruised throat with his left hand. His right hand sought the hilt of the heavy sword at his side.

"If you pull that sword," Cholik stated, "then I'll promote your ship's commander. Perhaps even your first mate. Or I could even reanimate your corpse, though Idoubt your crew would be happy about the matter. But, frankly, I wouldn't care what they thought."

Raithen's hand halted. He stared up at the priest. "You need me," he croaked.

"Yes," Cholik agreed. "That's why I've let you live so long while we have worked together. It wasn't pleasant or done out of a weak-willed sense of fair play." He stepped closer to the bigger man sitting with his back against the railing.

Purple bruising already showed in a wide swath around Raithen's neck.

"You're a tool, Captain Raithen," Cholik said. "Nothing more."

The big man glared up at him but said nothing. Swallowing was obviously a hard and painful effort.

"But you are an important tool in what I am doing." Cholik gestured again.

Seeing the priest's fluttering hand inscribing the mystic symbols, Raithen flinched. Then his eyes widened in surprise.

Cholik knew it was because the man hadn't expected to be relieved of his pain. The priest knew healing spells, but the ones that caused injury came more readily to him these days. "Please get up, Captain Raithen. If you have led someone here and the fog has obscured their presence, I want you to handle it."

Showing restraint and caution, Raithen climbed to his feet.

"Do we understand each other?" As Cholik gazed into the other man's eyes, he knew he'd made an enemy for life. It was a pity. He'd planned for the pirate captain to live longer than that.

Aribar Raithen was called Captain Scarlet Waters by most of the Westmarch Navy. Very few people had survived his capture of a ship, and most ended up at the bottom of the Great Sea or, especially of late, in the Gulf of Westmarch.

"Aye," Raithen growled, but the sound wasn't so menacing with all the hoarseness in it. "I'll get right on it."

"Good." Cholik stood and looked out to the broken and gutted buildings that remained of Tauruk's Port. He pretended not to notice as Raithen left, nor did he indicate that he heard the big pirate captain's slight foot drag that told him Raithen had considered stabbing him in the back.

Metal whispered coolly against leather. But this time, Cholik knew, the blade was being returned to the sheath.

Cholik remained at the balcony and locked his knees so he wouldn't tremble from the cold or from the exhaustion he suffered from spell use. If he'd had to expend any more energy, he thought he'd have passed out and been totally at Raithen's mercy.

By the Light, where has the time gone? Where has my strength gone? Gazing up at the stars burning bright against the sable night, Cholik felt old and weak. His hands were palsied now. Most of the time he maintained control of them, but on occasion he could not. When one of those uncontrollable periods arrived, he kept his hands out of sight in the folds of his robes and stayed away from others. The times always passed, but they were getting longer and longer.

In Westmarch, it wouldn't be many more years before one of the younger priests noted his growing infirmity and brought it to the senior priest's attention. When that happened, Cholik knew he'd be shipped out from the church and placed in a hospice to help with the old and the diseased, all of them dying deaths by inches and him helping only to ease them into the grave while easing into a bed of his own. Even the thought of ending his days like that was too much.

Tauruk's Port, with Ransim buried beneath, the information gleaned from the sacred texts-those things Cholik viewed as his personal salvation. The dark forces he'd allied himself with the past few years willing, it would be.

He turned his gaze from the stars to the fogbound river. The white, cottony masses roiled across the broken land forming the coastal area. Farther north, barbarian tribes would have been a problem to their discovery, but here inthe deadlands far north of Westmarch and Tristram, they were safe.

At least, Cholik mused, they were safe if Raithen's latest excursion to take a shipload of the king's gold fresh out of Westmarch had not brought someone back. He peered down at the layers of fog, but he could see only the tall masts of the pirate ships standing out against the highest wisps of silver-gray fog.

Lanterns aboard those ships created pale yellow and orange nimbi and looked like fireflies in the distance. Men's raucous voices, the voices of pirates and not the trained acolytes Cholik had handpicked over the years, called out to one another in casual disdain. They talked of women and spending the gold they'd fought for that day, unaware of the power that lay buried under the city.

Only Raithen was becoming more curious about what they sought. The other pirates were satisfied with the gold they continued to get.

Cholik cursed his palsied hands and the cold wind that swept over the Hawk's Beak Mountains to the east. If only he were young, if only he'd found the sacred Vizjerei text sooner…

"Master."

Startled from his musings but recovering in short order, Cholik turned. He tucked his shaking hands out of sight inside his robes. "What is it, Nullat?"

"Forgive me for interrupting your solitude, Master Cholik." Nullat bowed. He was in his early twenties, dark-haired and dark-eyed. Dirt and dust stained his robes, and scratches adorned his smooth face and one arm from an accident during the excavation only a few days ago that had claimed the lives of two other acolytes.

Cholik nodded. "You know better than to interrupt unless it was something important."

"Yes. Brother Altharin asked me to come get you."

Inside his withered chest, Cholik's heart beat faster. Still, he maintained the control he had over himself and his emotions. All of the acolytes he'd bent to his own endsfeared him, and feared his power, but they remained hungry for the gifts they believed he would bestow. He intended to keep it that way. He kept silent, refusing to ask the question that Nullat had left hanging in the air.

"Altharin believes we have reached the final gate," Nullat said.

"And has Altharin halted his work?" Cholik asked.

"Of course, master. Everything has gone as you have ordered. The seals were not broken." Nullat's face creased with worry.

"Is something wrong?"

Hesitation held Nullat mute for a moment. The pirates' voices and the clangor of ships' lines and rigging against yardarms and masts continued unabated from below.

"Altharin thinks he has heard voices on the other side of the gate," Nullat said. His eyes broke from Cholik's.

"Voices?" Cholik repeated, feeling more excited. The sudden rush of adrenaline caused his hands to shake more. "What kind of voices?"

"Evil voices."

Cholik stared at the young acolyte. "Did you expect any other kind?"

"I don't know, master."

"The Black Road is not a way found by those faint of heart." In fact, Cholik had inferred from the sacred Vizjerei texts that the tiles themselves had been shaped from the bones of men and women who had been raised in a village free of evil and strife. They'd never known need or want until the population had grown large enough to serve the demons' needs. "What do these voices say?"

Nullat shook his head. "I cannot say, master. I do not understand them."

"Does Altharin?"

"If he does, master, he did not tell me. He commanded only that I come get you."

"And what does the final gate look like?" Cholik asked.

"As you told us it would, master. Immense and fearful." Nullat's eyes widened. "I've never seen anything like it."

Nor has anyone else in hundreds of years, Cholik thought. "Get a fresh torch, Nullat. We'll go have a look at what Brother Altharin has discovered." And pray that the sacred texts were right. Otherwise, the evil that we release from behind that gate will kill us all.

Pressed into the side of the mist-covered cliff, holding himself on his boot toes and the fingers of one hand, Darrick Lang reached for the next handhold. He was conscious of the rope tied around his waist and loins. He'd tacked the rope to a ship's spike he'd driven into the cliffside five feet below, leaving a trail of them behind him for the others to use. If he slipped and everything worked right, the rope would keep him from plunging to his death or into the river sixty feet below. If it worked wrong, he might yank the two men anchoring him to the side of the cliff down after him. The fog was so thick below that he could no longer see the longboat.

I should have brought Caron along, Darrick thought as he curled his fingers around the rocky outcrop that looked safe enough to hold his weight. Caron was only a boy, though, and not one to bring into a hostile situation. Aboard Lonesome Star, Caron was ruling king of the rigging. Even when he wasn't assigned aloft, the boy was often found there. Caron had a natural penchant for high places.

Resting for just a moment, feeling the trembling muscles in his back and neck, Darrick breathed out and inhaled the wet, musty smell of rock and hard-packed earth. It smelled, he couldn't help thinking, like a newly opened grave. His clothing was wet from the immersion in the river, and he was cold, but his body still found enough heat to break out in perspiration. It surprised him.

"You aren't planning on camping out up there, are you?" Mat called up. He sounded good-natured about it, but someone who knew him well could have detected the small tension in his voice.

"It's the view, you know," Darrick called down. And it amused him that they acted as if they were there for a larkinstead of serious business. But it had always been that way between them.

They were twenty-three years old, Darrick being seven months the elder, and they'd spent most of those years as friends growing up in Hillsfar. They'd lived among the hill people, loaded freight in the river port, and learned to kill when barbarian tribes had come down from the north hoping to loot and pillage. When they'd turned fifteen, they'd journeyed to Westmarch and pledged loyalty in the king's navy. Darrick had gone to escape his father, but Mat had left behind a good family and prospects at the family mill. If Darrick had not left, Mat might not ever have left, and some days Darrick felt guilty about that. Dispatches from home always made Mat talk of the family he missed.

Focusing himself again, Darrick stared out across the broken land at the harbor less than two hundred yards away. Another pirate sentry was encamped on the cliff along the way. The man had built a small, yellow-tongued fire that couldn't be seen from the river.

Beyond, three tall-masted cogs, round-bodied ships built for river travel as well as coastal waters rather than the deep sea, lay at anchor in a dish-shaped natural harbor fronting the ruins of a city. Captain Tollifer's maps had listed the city as Tauruk's Port, but not much was known about it except that it had been deserted years ago.

Lanterns and torches moved along the ships, but a few also roved through the city, carried by pirates, Darrick felt certain. Though why they should be so industrious this early in the morning was beyond him. The swirling fog laced with condensation made seeing across the distance hard, but Darrick could make out that much.

The longboat held fifteen men, including Darrick. He figured that they were outnumbered at least eight to one by the pirates. Staying for a prolonged engagement was out of the question, but perhaps spiriting the king's nephew away and costing the pirates a few ships were possible. Darrick had volunteered for such work before, and he'd come through it alive.

So far, bucko, Darrick told himself with grim realization.

Although he was afraid, part of him was excited at the challenge. He clung to the wall, lifted a boot, and shoved himself upward again. The top of the cliff ledge was less than ten feet away. From there, it looked as if he could gain safe ground and walk toward the city ruins and the hidden port. His fingers and toes ached from the climb, but he put the discomfort out of his mind and kept moving.

When he reached the clifftop, he had to restrain a cry of triumph. He turned and looked back down at Mat, curling his hand into a fist.

Even at the distance, Darrick saw the look of horror that filled Mat's face. "Look out!"

Whipping his head back up, some inner sense warning him of the movement, Darrick caught a glimpse of moonlight-silvered steel sweeping toward him. He pulled his head down and released his hold on the cliff as he grabbed for another along the cliff's edge.

The sword chopped into the stone cliff, striking sparks from the high iron ore content just as Darrick's hands closed around the small ledge he'd pushed up from last. His body slammed hard against the mountainside.

"I told you I saw somebody out here," a man said as he drew his sword back again and stepped with care along the cliff's edge. His hobnailed boots scraped stone.

"Yeah," the second man agreed, joining the first in the pursuit of Darrick.

Scrambling, holding tight to the edge of the cliff, Darrick pressed his boots against the stone and tried in vain to find suitable purchase to allow him to push himself up. He gave thanks to the Light that the pirates were almost as challenged by the terrain as he was. His boot soles scraped and slid as he tried to pull himself up.

"Cut his fingers off, Lon," the man in back urged. He was a short, weasel-faced man with an ale belly pressing against his frayed shirt. Maniacal lights gleamed in his eyes. "Cut his fingers off, and watch him fall on the others down there. Before they can make it up, we can nip ondown to the bonfire and warn Captain Raithen they's coming."

Darrick filed the name away. During his years as part of the Westmarch Navy, he'd heard of Raithen. In fact, Captain Tollifer had said that the Captain's Table, the quarterly meeting of chosen ships' captains in Westmarch, had suggested Raithen as a possible candidate for the guilty party in the matter of the pirate raids. It was good to know, but staying alive to relate the news might prove difficult.

"Stand back, Orphik," Lon growled. "You keep abuzzing around me like a bee, and I'm gonna stick you myself."

"Shove off, Lon. I'll do for him." The little man's voice tittered with naked excitement.

"Damn you," Lon cursed. "Get out of the way."

Quick as a fox in a henhouse, Orphik ducked under his companion's outstretched free arm and dashed at Darrick with long-bladed knives that were almost short swords in their own right. He laughed. "I've got him, Lon. I've got him. Just sit you back and watch. I bet he screams the whole way down."

Keeping his weight distributed as evenly as possible, going with the renewed strength that flowed through his body from the adrenaline surge, Darrick swung from hand to hand, dodging the chopping blows Orphik delivered. Still, one of the pirate's attempts slashed across the knuckle of his left hand's little finger. Pain shot up Darrick's arm, but he was more afraid of how the blood flow would turn his grip slippery.

"Damn you!" Orphik swore, striking sparks from the stone again. "Just stay still, and this will be over with in a trice."

Lon reeled back away from the smaller man. "Look out, Orphik! Someone down there has a bow!" The bigger pirate held up a sleeve and displayed the arrow that had caught on its fletchings and still hung there.

Distracted by the presence of the arrow and aware that another could be joining it at any moment, Orphik steppedback a little. He drew up a boot and lashed out at his intended victim's head.

Darrick swung to one side and grabbed for the little man's leg with his bloody hand, not wanting to trade it for the certain grip of his right. He knotted his fingers in the pirate's breeches. Even though the breeches were tucked into the hobnailed boots, there was plenty of slack to seize. Balancing his weight from one hand on the cliff, Darrick yanked hard with the other.

"Damn him! Lon, give me your hand before this bilge rat yanks me off the cliff!" Orphik reached for the other man, who caught his hand in his own. Another arrow fired from below clattered against the cliff wall behind them and caused them both to duck.

Taking advantage of the confusion, knowing he'd never get a better chance, Darrick swung his weight to the side and up. He pushed his feet ahead of him, throwing his body behind, hoping to clear the cliff's edge or he would fall. Maybe the rope tied around his loins would hold him, or maybe Mat and the other men below had forgotten it in the mad rush of events.

Arching his body and rolling toward the ledge, Darrick hit hard. He started to fall, then threw an arm forward in desperation, praying it would be enough. For a gut-wrenching moment, he teetered on the edge, then the point of balance shifted, and he sprawled facedown on the ledge.