Magic's Poison, page 1
part #1 of Magic's Poison.epub Series
Magic’s Poison
-1-
The attack came in the evening, when Marin was making camp.
She’d been late leaving Stonyvale that morning. The horde of last minute details that always cropped up before a long journey seemed even more numerous than usual, and she’d been flustered and anxious about her errand to begin with. By the time she finally rode out the gate of the fortified village, it was nearly noon. She didn’t hurry, though. She had a long way to ride, and didn’t want to tire the horses.
Afterward she realised she’d made it ridiculously easy, but at the time it never occurred to her to conceal her departure. Andar Red-eyes, her enemy, had always seemed to regard her as more nuisance than threat. She’d been confident, too, that he expected her to wait for responses to the letters she’d written. She knew that those letters had been intercepted, but she hadn’t realised that he knew she knew. She certainly didn’t expect to be physically attacked. After all, she was a Guardian, even if a junior and unimportant one. All the licensing and policing of magic in the district was in her charge: people would notice if something happened to her, and anyone who harmed her would have to face both the civil and the magical authorities. Only the most desperate criminal, she’d thought, would risk killing a Guardian, and Andar was a well-connected nobleman. She was braced for ridicule and slander, but she didn’t expect violence.
She let her mount amble easily along the rutted track which was the main road from Stonyvale. The path followed the stony north bank of the White River, through thick pine forest and under sheer cliffs, and it was almost entirely empty of traffic: she met only two carts in five hours, both travelling in the opposite direction. The White River District was a backwater: a thousand square miles of mountainous wilderness, and not one town worthy of the name. The king had claimed it because of the silver and copper ore in the mountains, but it didn’t belong to any of the provinces of the kingdom of Aldoris, and only a few people made their homes in it. There were no villages along this road before the next county, and Marin had no hope of staying under a roof that night. It didn’t bother her: she was well-accustomed to camping, it was summer, and the weather had been dry.
She ended up stopping only sixteen miles from Stonyvale; she might have ridden on, but there was a good place to camp close to the road. It was level and dry, sheltered by tall pines and watered by a little stream which tumbled past to join the river; the open margin of the river stood deep with lush grass. She turned the horses loose to graze and began collecting wood to make a fire.
She was sitting by the fire, whittling an extra tent peg, when the attacker rode up out of the gathering dusk. The gurgle of the stream, and the roar of the White River in its rocky bed, concealed the sound of his approach, but her horse, Willow, neighed to greet the newcomer’s horse. Marin looked up and saw a strange horseman halting between the trees that screened her camp from the road—a tall, bulky figure, black against the light of the river beyond. She jumped to her feet, alarmed but telling herself not to be: surely this was only another traveller who wanted to share her fire?
The man dismounted and looped his mount’s reins over a branch, and she saw that he was a powerful man, heavily bearded, dressed in worn leathers and carrying a sword. As he came forward, Marin abruptly realised that she knew him. His name was Jako or Jokon, and he worked for Andar Red-eyes--whom she was on her way to report for using illegal magic.
Marin caught her breath and took a step back. Andar’s man grinned to see it. He stepped forward, drawing the straight sword from its sheath at his side.
‘Don’t fight,’ he said, leering. ‘If you don’t fight, you won’t get hurt.’
Marin yelped and spun about. The man lunged after her, moving the sword aside and reaching out a large hand to grab; she dodged away-- and crashed straight into a tree. Jako-or-Jokon caught her as she recoiled. He seized her shoulder in a massive hand and hauled her round to face him, then slammed her back against the tree. He put the sword down and fumbled at his coat. ‘Hold still!’ he ordered.
Marin screamed and struggled wildly. She found that she still had the whittling knife in her hand, so she thrust it at Jako, just as he lunged forward to pin her. Jako gave a howl of pain and surprise and grabbed at her hand. She tried to stab him again, but, to her shocked surprise, the knife was stuck in his side. She kneed him clumsily in the general area of the groin and struggled to wrench the knife out. He yelled and fell back. Terrified, expecting another rush, she lunged after him and stabbed him again. He screamed horribly and folded over, tearing the knife out of her hand.
Marin screamed too, in fear and horror: now she’d hurt him, he’d kill her! She saw the sword, lying where he’d dropped it, and dove for it. She came up clasping the hilt with both hands, waving the heavy blade unsteadily in front of her.
Jako, however, was still on the ground, curled up on one side, his legs kicking helplessly. His shrieks subsided into horrible moans.
Marin lowered the sword, staring. Jako’s moans ended in a short gasp of breath, then another. Then there was silence.
Marin stepped closer, suspecting a trick. Jako didn’t move. She knelt down beside him, and saw that his side was soaked with blood, which was black in the dusk under the trees. His eyes were screwed shut, his teeth bared in a grimace of agony.
The horn handle of her whittling knife stuck out like some strange ornament for his coat.
Marin transferred the sword to her right hand and reached nervously with the left to check for a pulse in his throat. She still expected him to grab her wrist and sit up—but he didn’t. She could not find a pulse.
She sat back on her heels, trembling. He was dead. Oh, God, she’d killed him! She dropped the sword and pressed her hands against her mouth, then snatched them away as she realised they were bloody. Sickened,she stumbled away from the body and plunged her hands in the little stream. The cold water pressed against her fingers and tugged at her coat sleeves. She splashed water over her face, then, noticing that there was blood on her leather riding jacket as well, tore the coat off and pushed it under the swift current. She hauled it out, rinsed and dripping, and abandoned it on the bank.
She was cold in her shirt: the day had been warm, but it was growing dark, and the mountain nights were chill. She started for her pack to fetch a blanket, then stopped, shivering, her mind numb with shock. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, realising as she did that she was crying.
Jako’s horse, frightened by the screaming, had torn free of its tether. It was standing now in the meadow beside the river, along with her Willow and the pack-horse Socks. All the horses were nervous, standing with their heads up and their ears pricked, watching her. Marin was confident, however, that they would not bolt: her own horses regarded her as their herd leader, and Jako’s horse would naturally stay close to other horses in a crisis. She went over to reassure the animals. Willow at once trotted up and butted her shoulder with his nose. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her face into his coarse warm coat. She was shaking violently. She’d never killed anyone, never. She hadn’t even hit anyone since she was a child.
She comforted herself with the horses until she felt a bit calmer and more coherent. She unsaddled Jako’s mount and relieved the animal of its bridle, then left it to graze with the others while she went back to look at Jako.
He had not moved, of course: he was still curled up on the pine needles beside her fire with her knife sticking out of his side. She stared at his body with shame and horror. She’d never meant to kill him. She’d only wanted to stop him, to make him go away. Her blind stab must have cut a major blood vessel. He must have intended to kill her, though: he couldn’t have attacked her like that and then left her alive to report him.
Even as she thought this, she was unsure of it. ‘If you don’t fight,’ he’d said, ‘you won’t get hurt.’ That was an odd thing to say if he’d been sent to kill her. Besides, if he’d wanted to kill her, why hadn’t he done it? He could have cut her down with that sword before her little whittling knife was anywhere near him. She’d killed him, and he’d only meant to... what?
Maybe he’d wanted to rape her. She’d certainly feared rape when he came at her. If he had raped her, though, surely he would’ve been bound to kill her afterward? He couldn’t have been so stupid as to expect to get away with it!
She’d been certain, when she saw him, that Andar had sent him. No, she was still certain of it! She was on her way to report Andar for illegal magic and treason, and Andar had good reason to fear her report. Andar’s servant had ridden straight up to her and attacked without more ado. To suggest that the servant had some private motive was absurd.
Gloomily, she reviewed her dealings with Andar of Corbywood, nicknamed Red-eyes. She’d first heard of him two years before, when she was appointed Guardian of the White River district. Benit of Coldhaven, her predecessor in the office, had named Andar as ‘one of the more intractable problems of the district’.
‘He’s a sorceror,’ Benit had said bluntly.
Marin had blinked in surprise. ‘If he’s a sorceror, why hasn’t he been arrested?’
Benit had snorted in disgust. He was an old man, and had been Guardian of the White River for thirty years; he was looking forward to his retirement. ‘I don’t have the evidence, do I?’ he’d asked bitterly. ‘I’m sure I’d find it—abundantly!--if I could search his castle, but I can’t. He makes sure that I can’t. He’s got three or four robbers as his servants, and they have orders to break my legs if I ever set foot across his threshhold. They’d do it, too.’
Marin goggled. When she was training to be a Guardian, nobody had mentioned such hazards. ‘Won’t the king’s deputy help?’ she’d asked. A Guardian was entitled to ask the civil authority of a district to enforce the laws on the use of magic.
‘No,’ Benit had told her flatly. ‘The king’s deputy in this benighted district is presently one Lord Nial of Marbrook—a minor noble from Tenefen county. Andar, as it happens, is also a minor noble from Tenefen county. Lord Marbrook doesn’t want to disgrace somebody from a family he knows. Besides, he doesn’t see any harm in sorcery when it’s sitting quietly in the White River; he thinks it’s only a problem if it moves downhill. He says he’ll act if I show him some evidence—but I can’t get any evidence unless he acts. Andar, damn him, is quite safe, and he knows it.’
When Benit was gone, though, Marin began to wonder whether Andar was really a sorceror. He was a trained magician, yes—a Magian, in fact, like Marin, one of the magical elite—and, yes, there were rumours about him--but he’d never been charged with anything. It could be that Benit simply disliked him. On her first tour of her new district, she’d made a point at stopping at Andar’s castle—a disused border keep which had been standing empty when the supposed sorceror moved in—and introducing herself.
The visit had not been a success. Andar proved to be a paunchy middle-aged man in a soiled but expensive coat. He had regarded her with the blood-shot eyes which had given him his nickname, then told her that his men would horsewhip her if she ever presumed to trespass again. Jako and one of the other men had seized her and frogmarched her back to her horse. She’d been glad to get away unharmed.
She’d appealed to the royal deputy, Lord Marbrook, but he’d been no more helpful to her than he’d been to Benit. She’d written to her superiors, the Magian Council, asking for help and advice: they’d told her to ask the civil authorities. Her plaintive reply that she’d already done so received no response.
As helpless to act as her predecessor, Marin had kept an anxious eye on Andar. For a time everything had been quiet—but that had changed, the previous autumn. Some shepherds from the region had arrived in Stonyvale and accused Andar of bespelling some of their friends to make them his servants. Lord Marbrook reluctantly agreed to investigate, but, since the snows had started and the mountain roads would soon be impassable, he put the investigation off until spring. In the spring, however, things got worse: Andar himself came to visit Lord Marbrook, and the royal deputy went from tolerance of the sorceror to active support for him. The accusation against Andar was dismissed, and the sorceror began to act like a lord of the land. By summer, a rumour had started that Andar was going be appointed Baronet or even Count of the White River. He openly began to collect tithes from one of the royal silver mines and he spent money freely, hiring servants and turning his delapidated castle into a grand manor. Nobody, however, seemed to have seen any royal charter or letter granting him the right, and Marin suspected that he was relying on some kind of glamour or compulsion spell. What that spell might be, she didn’t know. She would even have said that such a comprehensively effective spell was impossible—except that she didn’t know enough about compulsion spells to rule it out entirely. It puzzled her, though: whatever the spell was, it would have to be extraordinarily powerful, and she’d never heard that Andar was an unusually powerful magician. Most of those who knew him, in fact, seemed to think his Gift was thoroughly mediocre. It was clear enough, however, that if Andar was using magic to compel or deceive, he was committing a crime, and it was her duty as a Guardian to bring him to justice.
She had written more letters, increasingly urgent ones. Still there was no response. At last she’d placed a subtle magical tag on one of her complaints. In this way she learned that the letter was intercepted by Lord Marbrook and sent directly to Andar. That was when she had decided that she must leave the district and appeal for help.
Andar, she now acknowledged leadenly, must have noticed her tag, and sent Jako to stop her.
She abruptly thought to wonder whether Andar had sent only one man to stop her, and gazed about wildly, heart thumping ... but no, Jako seemed to have been alone. It made sense that he should have been. Whatever Andar had done to fool Lord Marbrook and the rest, it couldn’t possibly make them agree to the murder of a Guardian. For something so blatantly criminal he would have to rely on his original four men, and they were doubtless also useful at home. Andar had probably believed that Jako could easily deal with an earnest, gawky twenty-seven-year old peasant, whose selection for training as a Guardian had come after years working with livestock in rural Tenefen.
Jako obviously hadn’t thought Marin dangerous, either. He hadn’t expected her to fight. He’d never even noticed that she was holding a knife, until she stabbed him. She winced at the memory of his scream.
She wished that she could have frozen Jako with some magical spell, or cast an enchanted sleep on him, the way people did in stories. Magic, however, didn’t work like that. It required too much time and too much concentration to be any use in a fight. About the only thing Marin could do without building a labourious symbolic spell-construct was to touch the minds of animals—and that was considerably more than most magicians could manage.
She was shivering again. She picked up her coat: it was sodden. She hung it over a branch to drip, took a blanket out of her pack, wrapped herself, and crouched by the fire, feeling sick, weepy and exhausted. The evening was closing in: the last of the sunset gleamed red on the river. She looked across the fire at Jako’s body, and realised that she had to move camp. She couldn’t possibly sleep here tonight, with that... thing... lying there.
On the heels of that realisation came another: she ought to search the body before she left. Jako might be carrying letters from Andar. She would need them as evidence if she wanted to bring charges.
Trailing blanket, she forced herself to go over to the body. It seemed to grow more horrible and more pitiful every time she looked at it. It took all her resolution to crouch down beside it and search.
Jako’s purse held only a few silvers and a button. There was nothing in his left coat pocket; he was lying on the right one, and it took Marin several minutes to work up the courage to roll him over. No letters in the right pocket, either—but there was a small leather bag, which she took back to examine in the firelight.
The bag held a small glass flask—a double flask, she saw as she inspected it. The outer cylinder was sealed with a cork, and inside it was a tiny phial, about the length of her little finger, full of some golden liquid. The phial ended in a sharp needle, which was stuck into the cork of the outer flask. Its other end, she saw, was equipped with a cork plunger.
Part of her training as a Guardian had concerned healing magic, and she knew that she was holding a hypodermic syringe, such as a skilled physician would use to administer medicines. She suddenly remembered how Jako had fumbled at his coat after telling her to ‘Hold still’. He’d been reaching for this; he’d intended to give it to her.
So what was it? A drug, to render her docile, so that he could take her prisoner? Or a poison, to make her death look natural?
She uncorked the outer flask; the syringe, attached by the needle, came out with the cork. Gingerly, she pulled it loose. The scent of the liquid inside wafted up to her: a potent aroma that mingled citrus and musk with a pungence like candied angelica. It was somehow familiar, but Marin couldn’t place it. She drew in a deep breath. The fragrance seemed to slide up behind her eyes and begin to glow. The firelit clearing became all at once unnaturally distinct, and the dimness no longer hindered her. She was aware of the shape of the forest around her, of the horses grazing in the dusk. She could feel her senses reaching out to them, as though she were working magic. She drew another deep breath, and sensed the bats flitting out from a crevice in the cliff behind her, and the mice skittering through the long grass. She felt as though she could summon them with a thought.
She caught her breath with a gasp and dropped the phial back inside its flask, then sealed the flask with the cork. This stuff was magical. Whatever it was--it was magical, and it was potent.
