The Last Witchking Read online

  “Well?” he demanded. “Banish it now! We’ll dredge it up again in the chamber downstairs tomorrow.”

  Speer leaned back and closed his codex with a loud snap that caused a small cloud of dust to rise up from the well-weathered leather.

  “Of course, just as soon as I can locate a suitable bell. But I’m glad you’re here, Cajarc. I wanted to ask if you are still staunchly opposed to my plan to raise up an army from the wolves of the islands.”

  The sorcerer’s face no longer resembled an overripe raspberry, but he was clearly still irritated, judging by the dismissive tone of his voice.

  “Yes, Ar Dauragh, it was a dreadful idea yesterday, it remains a dreadful idea today, and it will be a dreadful idea tomorrow. There are lines even a Witchking dare not cross. Why do you think your father and his fellows did not resort to such abominations even when they found themselves at the mercy of the elves?”

  Speer nodded. “It is hard to argue with that. My apologies, Cajarc. I am well aware of all that you have done for me, and I treasure your counsel. As you so delicately did not say, my youth, at times, may render my judgment suspect.”

  What remained of his anger faded from the little Écarlatean’s eyes, and he reached out to touch Speer’s hand in an avuncular manner. “I fear you will find intelligence is seldom an adequate substitute for experience, my lord. And the wise man learns from the failure of others rather than his own. Now, if you will be so kind as to see our honored guest departs the premises, I have a rather urgent matter awaiting me in my chambers.”

  Speer laughed, knowing that a plump young widow from Raegedal had arrived with the town’s annual contribution to the castle’s upkeep in the afternoon. “Then far be it from me to disturb you. Good night, Cajarc.”

  “Good night, my lord,” Cajarc said, bowing slightly before turning and walking hastily out of the library.

  Speer snorted, amused, and returned to his codex. He read about the extraordinarily inventive way that one of the princes of Thauron, deprived of his inheritance by his younger brother, went about seeking his vengeance, which culminated in a feast that rather made his stomach turn.

  A baleful rumbling from the inchoate form of the demon on the other side of the library interrupted his reading.

  “Be patient. If nothing else, the man deserves one last simple pleasure.”

  “You don’t think I can offer him a more intriguing experience than a sow from the village?” The dark smoke abruptly coagulated in a vaguely obscene female shape.

  “Oh, very well.” Speer flicked his fingers and moved a small amount of salt to one side.

  The circle now broken, Scaum-Durna flowed out from it like a serpentine shadow.

  “Don’t kill the woman,” Speer said. “She may be of use.”

  “As you say, little brother.”

  He returned to the codex. It occurred to him that it could be said he was committing a betrayal every bit as terrible as those about which he now read. Then again, had Cajarc himself not taught him of the importance of learning from the mistakes of others? His father and the other Witchkings had refrained from abomination, that much was true. It did not escape Speer’s attention that they had also been defeated.

  After abandoning the savage Thauronians, Speer turned to a grimoire and attempted for the second time to make sense of a spell called The Ephandril of Glyceranus, neither the purpose nor the preparations for which appeared to be coherent in any meaningful way. He was still puzzling over the meaning of the term “pylocatabasis” when he heard someone entering the library.

  It was a blonde woman, large of hips and bust, with eyes that were far too aware and malevolent for her stolid, peasant face. She stood there in the doorway naked, with blood dripping from the corners of her mouth onto her fat, blue-veined breasts. Both her hands and arms were covered with blood up to the elbows. She looked very pleased with herself.

  “For fanden!” Speer swore. “Are you out of your infernal mind?”

  “You said I couldn’t kill the woman,” Scaum-Durna said with a crimson-stained smile. “You never said I couldn’t kill him.”

  The preparations for the great working took longer than Speer anticipated. Finding and trapping a wolf bitch took the tongueless men nearly two weeks. The wolves of the isles named after them had learned to be wary of men and their deadly bows. No one asked, either by word or by sign, what had happened to Cajarc, and if they trod warily around the strange peasant woman who stalked, naked, dirty, and more often than not, bloodstained, through Mordlis as if she owned it, Speer could hardly blame them.

  But they tolerated her readily enough, most likely because the demon went about satiating its craving for pleasures of the flesh with such abandon that Speer began to wonder if he would have to send out for younger reinforcements. Most of the guardsmen were in their forties and fifties, and only by virtue of their numbers were they able to collectively bear the burden imposed upon them by Scaum-Durna.

  Speer himself was far too busy with the complex minutiae required for his working to spare even a moment for his physical needs, let alone pleasures. He caught his reflection in a well-polished brass lantern one afternoon and winced: He was unshaven, hollow-eyed, and gaunt from weeks of missed and half-eaten meals.

  But at last he was ready, and in time for the Blood Moon, when Arbhadis alone could be seen in the night sky. He had the unholy relics: the skull of a burned witch, the dried umbilical cords of three babies ripped untimely from their mothers’ wombs, a feather from the wing of a fallen angel, a demon’s fang, the knucklebone of a thief, and the severed tongue of a fraud. He had written out all seven sheets of the spell in the blood of a male virgin on the skin of a coward who had died in battle, and in a language that was old when the demonic spirits were still walking the Earth in their own flesh. And the wolf bitch was being held in a cell in the dungeon.

  “Are you ready for this?” he asked Scaum-Durna as they stood outside the growling wolf’s cell. “Are you frightened at all?”

  The demon looked at him in puzzlement he could see through the woman's eyes. “Why would I be frightened?”

  “How many generations do you expect to retain your consciousness with your spirit divided into so many souls?”

  His question provoked a disturbing howl of laughter. “You think I’m going to serve as the demonic element, little brother?”

  “I’m certainly not. I can’t. The remnants are too weak in me to fuel an entire new line.”

  “I know.” Scaum-Durna took him by the hand and let him into the great summoning chamber, in which very nearly all of their materials for the working were waiting for them. “How fortunate that we have a pentagram strong enough to hold the spirit we’re going to use.”

  Speer’s eyes narrowed. He had always known Scaum-Durna had its own purposes in mind, but what they might be beyond the gift of the womanly flesh it already possessed was beyond his ability to even guess.

  “Your forefathers were good enough to aid me in removing one threat to me,” the demon told him. “Did you think I was speaking metaphorically when I first called you little brother? Adar-malik, who was once an angel, begot three sons on Ilae of the Shining Hair when he ruled over the great city of Gulan Cazhdal. The last, and least, was called Karak. The middle son was Durna. And his eldest son, and heir, was Vorbis.”

  “Scaum-Durna…Prince Durna?”

  “Even so. The spirits of the soulless cannot die, but they can be shattered. You are what remains of Scaum-Karak. And the weapon you seek shall be forged of Scaum-Vorbis. For twenty thousand years he has lorded it over me. He still styles himself the King of Gulan Cazhdal even though the city was long ago buried beneath earth and water. He is among the foulest of the foul spirits, and his power is great indeed. You could not ask for a better source for your army of vengeance. He will give you fierce warriors, killers full of hate and fury.”

  Speer nodded. “Very well. So long as he is not so powerful that the spell cannot shatter him and bind him to
the seed.”

  “Which you must contribute,” the demon said, stepping close to him and running one dirty, rust-encrusted fingernail across his chin, before it bent down and picked up an empty bowl from amidst the various accoutrements and ingredients gathered for the spell. Despite its fetid breath and the feral madness in its eyes, he could feel himself responding to the warmth of its voluptuous female presence. “I can help. Unless, of course, you prefer to mount the wolf-bitch directly.”

  Speer cupped one of the demon’s large breasts in his hand and brushed his thumb across it. For all its heft, it was still firm, and it had been weeks since he had last had a woman.

  “I think we can spare the poor beast the indignity.”

  >

  It didn’t take long before their preparations were complete. Speer did the summoning, which with the true name of Scaum-Vorbis was considerably easier than many he’d previously performed.

  When he completed it, which took him through only the first half of the second page of the long spell, the entire chamber went completely black for a moment, as every candle in the candleholders at each point of the pentagram went out. Then there was a silent flash, like lightning without thunder, and the center of the pentagram was filled with the shadowy form of a huge, angry demon with a bull’s head, black-feathered wings, and three pairs of arms.

  “You!” the demon roared at the naked form of the woman standing at his side. “What in the name of our Fallen Father have you done? How dare you!”

  “Hello, elder brother,” Scaum-Durna said with a self-satisfied smile on its face. “I cannot tell you what a joy it is to see you again after all these years. Particularly in circumstances such as these.”

  “What has he told you, magician?” the trapped demon demanded of Speer. “Release me, and I shall give you more than you can imagine! I ask nothing more than for you to release me and allow me to punish my brother for his insolence!”

  “Magician? Are you truly so blind you do not recognize your own family? Are you so stupid you do not realize what we are going to do to you?”

  Scaum-Vorbis fell silent for a moment and stared at Speer, its huge bovine eyes blank with incomprehension. Then awareness dawned and it screamed in sheer terror.

  “No, no, no!” it cried. “Brothers, you cannot do this thing! In the name of Adar-malik, in the name of Ilae of the Shining Hair, I beg you, do not do this to me!”

  Even so, they did. And the King of long-dead Gulan Cazhdal finally went the way of his ancient city.

  It was exactly sixty-four days later when the wolf bitch whelped her pups. There were seven in all. One was a strange, twisted thing that was a horror to behold. It breathed with great difficulty and died before nightfall. Five promised to be the warriors of his martial vision. The last was a disappointment, a mundane animal.

  Two male pups and three females had the heads of beasts, but underneath the fur that covered their bodies, he could see their bodies were more or less in the shape of the human form, although with limbs that ended in claws rather than hands and feet. They were intelligent—he could see it in their eyes, which as soon as they opened burned with an inexplicable rage, fueled by the fury of the demonic spirit trapped inside each of them. The five unnatural creatures were grey like their dam, but the sixth one, a male pup, was nothing more than a simple wolf, although its fur was black as midnight.

  That boundless rage would serve the fuel for a fire that would one day devour the elven race and its four kingdoms. It would destroy them just as they had destroyed his race, Speer vowed. For these would be the only children he would ever have, these small, mewling abominations would have to serve as the foundation of his father’s vengeance. The hate was the demon’s gift, but Speer would give them a target for it.

  “What about the black one?” he asked Scaum-Durna, who, much to Speer’s relief, had moved into the body of a giant grey wolf. “It’s just a wolf. Shall we drown it or simply leave it with the mother?”

  “Neither,” said the demon in a voice that was uncharacteristically full of awe. “That one is the special one. That one is our masterwork!”

  “I don’t understand. It looks like any other wolf pup.”

  “You will.”

  Speer shrugged and reached out to the little pup. Then he jerked upright, pulled his hand away, and very nearly shrieked. Without warning, the pup had transformed itself into a perfect facsimile of a healthy human baby, smiling and staring up into Speer’s face. And when Speer, astonished and not quite able to believe what he’d seen, stepped back from the pups, it just as rapidly transformed a second time, and, with the exception of its darker coloring, became indistinguishable from its brothers and sisters.

  “Did you see that!”

  “I did indeed.” The demon licked the little pup affectionately. “I salute you, Ar Dauragh. I believe the sword of your vengeance has been forged!”

  The pups grew rapidly. They were quick to anger and just as quick to forget. They mercilessly plagued the cats of Mordlis stalking them and chasing them until the hissing cats finally climbed to the rafters to escape. And what few rats the cats happened to miss, the pups were sure to slay. The castle was soon more free of vermin than it had ever been. They had language of a sort, although Speer could not understand more than a few guttural words that revolved around their primary interest: food. The black one soon showed himself to be the leader. He was the biggest, the strongest, and the most fearless, shamelessly using his ability to change between what Speer thought of as their natural shape and his other two forms as the situation required.

  Speer had thought to raise them in the castle, but six months after their birth, the sounds of a commotion below woke him, and he rushed down the stairs from his tower, only to learn that the pups were gone. The two tongueless men who had been on guard duty outside were dead, their throats cleanly slashed, and the small door from the kitchen was unlocked. For a moment, Speer wondered if someone had broken in and stolen his progeny, until a thought occurred to him, and he descended down the spiral staircase into the dungeon.

  It was as he feared. The door to the cage in which the pups’ mother had been kept was hanging open. The key was inside the lock, the key which he had carelessly left on a hook on the wall underneath the nearest rushlight holder. The hook would have been well within the reach of any of the pups, even the smallest female, as standing upright, their heads already reached his chest.

  “You needn’t worry,” he heard Scaum-Durna say. “It was bound to happen.”

  He whirled around and glared at the giant wolf, angry at the demon’s calm response to the disaster.

  “Did you help them?”

  “Me? No, I knew nothing of it until I heard you stomping around and shouting.” The demon shook its shaggy grey head and laughed. “Little brother, did you think to control a spirit as fell and fiery as the one that burns inside them? Even though each of them carries inside but a part of that which was once our brother Vorbis, they cannot bear to be under the control of another. They are not a weapon to be wielded in your hand like a sword. They are more akin to an earthquake or a vast conflagration. You created them, now you must trust in your creatures to find their own way to accomplish your will. You are their father and their creator, but you will never be their master.”

  “But it is dangerous out there,” Speer protested. “There are wolves and bears. The Dalarn will fear them and hunt them down when they learn of their existence.”

  “They are still young, and already your veteran guardsmen are no match for them. Don’t fear for your wolflings, Ar Dauragh. If you would fear for someone, fear for those wolves and bears and men upon whom they will sharpen their teeth. Before your wolves can war upon the elves, they must grow strong, and to grow strong, they must learn to fight for their lives. You must leave them to it, lest you weaken them with your succor.”

  Speer sighed. “You’re right, of course. If they are too weak to survive on their own, they will be too weak to defeat the elves. Bu
t it is hard, Scaum-Durna. It is hard to see them go.”

  “I know. But be patient. Soon the mountains will ring with the terror of their howls.”

  Despite the demon’s reassurances, Speer fretted. For three years, his studies languished and dust gathered on the codices in the library as he spent hours every day wandering through the hills and woods around Mordlis, looking for signs that his wolflings still survived. Three times, he thought he had discovered signs of their dens, but one was empty and in the other two cases the dens were inhabited by ordinary wolves.

  He suspected Scaum-Durna knew where they were, for the demon had uncharacteristically retained its lupine form and often disappeared into the darkness when night fell, sometimes failing to return for days at a time. But the demon resolutely refused to tell him anything about its nocturnal wanderings, not even when it returned to Mordlis with an open gash on its shoulder that looked as if it had been inflicted by a beast with a very large jaw.

  Then one day, after it had been gone for nearly a week, Speer was surprised to see a man riding along the grassy track from Stammløse on a black horse. He was even more surprised when he went out to meet the man and saw from his eyes that Scaum-Durna lurked within him.

  “I see you’ve abandoned the wolf.”

  “Go to the stables and find yourself a horse. I think you’ll want to see this.”

  His interest piqued, Speer did as he was told and soon was galloping after the demon over the hills to the east of Mordlis. They rode for nearly two hours, through copses of ash and beech, and through meadows of tall grass that rose nearly to his horse's belly. Only when they reached the top of a large hill with a gentle incline did Scaum-Durna stop and bid him to dismount.

  The demon dismounted as well and pointed toward a forest to the southeast.

  “We can’t get any closer or they’ll notice.”

  His heart pounding with anticipation, Speer reached out and drew from a dancing sky ley and sharpened his vision until he had the eyes of an eagle. What he saw filled him with relief and a fierce, exultant joy.