Sendra
What works could Ilmoth achieve, if she could solve the riddles of the man’s magic tower?
Ilmoth hadn’t started pulling fingernails out of Nyrgoth Elder, though.
That would have been a brigand’s play, surely.
That was the sort of thing Kaille had been known for back in the day, with merchants grown close-mouthed about where they’d hidden the goods.
Ilmoth had made her demands and Nyrgoth had said “It does not answer me. I am dead to it,” and apparently that had been more than just a gambit.
Ilmoth had understood the truth of it, and declared, “Then I shall make it answer me,” and that was what she had been trying to do ever since.
Leaving the wizard to do … whatever it was wizards did.
“I wondered if she’d cut them off you,” he said, of the horns. That did get a response, a wary flick of the eyes in a face still mumming disinterest. “Wear them herself. Or me. Sendroth Sorcerer turns up at Daimlesse Regent’s court wearing the horns of her pet magician. It would be a message.”
Nyrgoth Elder made a sour noise unbecoming of a wizard.
“A message I’d not want to send,” Sendra admitted. And the brigand king shouldn’t scruple, but he’d never been the kind to torture old men. “Not a step like that, which couldn’t be taken back.”
The man looked at him, at last. “And the walls of Edmen, that had stood for three hundred years?”
“Can be rebuilt,” Sendra said firmly. “Can your horns be regrown?”
The man’s lips moved, once or twice. Withered old-man lips, except they were thinner than Sendra was used to.
Wrinkled in a different way, covering teeth too regular by far.
“Probably,” he said at last. “Forgive me if I don’t look forward to finding out.
What will it be, Sendroth Sorcerer? Use my tower to …
unseat the Regent and be Headman of Lannesite? ”
Sendra was about to reply that surely it wasn’t too great an ambition, now they had the tower.
Except, he realised, that wasn’t what the Elder meant.
Meant the opposite: that compared to all this—the tower, the star, the spirits—Lannesite was just a patch of dirt.
The revelation shook him. He felt his horizons being torn down to reveal … space going on forever.
“Ceryon,” he said flatly. “You know it? The Enclave at Ceryon.”
He saw the man about to deny it, the whole of Sendra’s past and grievance just vanishing into the century-heavy memory of the wizard. Then the faintest of frowns creasing the brow beneath the ridges of his horns.
“You’re of Ceryon? The … Forgive me, it wasn’t headman or porsir they had there. Their chief person.”
“The Guide,” Sendra told him. “Our teacher. Our Enclave.”
“A … monastic retreat. Isolationists. Usually, some manner of mystical creed of improvement. Self-sufficiency and a refusal to accept the dominion of others.” A weirdly schoolmasterly delivery.
The Guide of Ceryon had spoken just the same.
Not information recalled naturally from the Elder’s mind, perhaps, but whispered to him by the spirits of the tower, still doing his bidding in small things despite Ilmoth’s best efforts.
Then Nyrgoth blinked heavily. “You were caught between Lannesite and Aenterland, when it went bad.”
A surprise, to hear Lannesite’s own magician say bad, describing the start of that polity’s active domination of its neighbours.
First Aenterland, where the Regent’s sister had tried to start her bid to take the throne, then everywhere within reach of Lannesite’s borders.
Then everywhere within reach of that. A buffer zone that soon became a protectorate that needed its own buffer to protect it and then …
“I wasn’t the Guide,” Sendra said shortly.
“But I was happy, there. We all were. Then Lannesite decided we couldn’t be happy.
We couldn’t be, unless we were Lannesite’s.
As though we’d have raised an army and marched on their city.
” And they might have sheltered enemies of the crown, or played the spy game, or interfered in a dozen ways, but it wasn’t about that, Sendra was sure.
It was that the business with her sister had made the Regent mad.
A traitor’s knife so close, how could she trust anyone?
How could she tolerate any within her reach who didn’t bow their brows to the dust?
“This is revenge then,” the Elder noted. “You want the Regent dead, her city rubble, her people in chains, for the loss of your Enclave? That’s where this takes you?”
Sendra opened his mouth. No words came out.
The plan had been survive, and brigandage had been their path to that end.
Then had come Ilmoth and her ill-fated monsters, and the bandit’s survive and grow rich had become a grand crusade.
And he hadn’t just taken the stores and the treasures and burned everything.
He’d had those headmen and officials up before him.
He’d had them pay him tribute rather than just robbing them.
He’d made them rob themselves, consent to their own impoverishment, because that was how Lannesite did it. That was how regents did it.
He wanted Daimlesse to notice him. He wanted her to fear.
He wanted her, perhaps, to beg. He wanted her to feel what he had felt, when her soldiers had destroyed the Enclave on their way to rap the knuckles of her sister.
It was revenge, then. And what was it they said, about revenge as a meal?
Eat it, go hungry. Not a meal so much as kicking everyone else’s plate from the table for scorning to serve you.
If Ilmoth gives me the power of this place, what will I do? She’d said wild things about what the spirits could accomplish if she could master them. Remove Lannesite from the map, she’d said.
Nyrgoth was still staring at him from beneath beetling brows.
A wizard, waiting for the answer to his insoluble riddle.
Sendra almost asked the man’s advice, then.
That was a wizard’s function, surely? A way out of the vice he was in, goaded by pride and loss, trying to hang on to honour.
Not just a brigand. And perhaps that was how he’d let things twist themselves into this knot.
Because the moment he gave up the magic and Ilmoth’s lures, then he was just a brigand, to be hunted or ignored.
Ilmoth returned, then. She’d been kicking about the other chambers of the tower, and from her face had plainly not found what she was after. “Leave me with him,” she told Sendra. “My kinsman and I are going to catch up on old times.”