Mercedes Lackey - Mage Winds 3 - Winds of Fury

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Winds of Fury [112-066-4.2]
By: Mercedes Lackey
Synopsis:
Exciting conclusion to the Mage-Winds trilogy. Elspeth & Darkwind return
to Valdemar for a final confrontation with Ancar of Hardorn, the evil
Adept Hulda, and a surprising ending for Falconsbane!
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NOVELS BY MERCEDES LACKEY available from DAW Books
THE MAGE WARS
THE BLACK GRYPHON*
THE BOOKS OF THE LAST HERALD-MAGE
MAGIC'S PAWN MAGIC'S PROMISE MAGIC'S PRICE
VOWS AND HONOR
THE OATHBOUND OATHBREAKERS
KEROWYN'S TALE
BY THE SWORD
THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR
ARROWS OF THE QUEEN ARROW'S FLIGHT ARROW'S FALL
THE MAGE WINDS
WINDS OF FATE WINDS OF CHANGE WINDS OF FURY
DARKOVER NOVELS (with Marion Zimmer Bradley)
REDISCOVERY RETURN TO DARKOVER*
*forthcoming from DAW Books in Hardcover
Winds of Fury Book Three of The Mage Winds
Copyright 0 1993 by Mercedes R. Lackey. All rights reserved. Jacket art
by jody Lee.
For color prints of Jody Lee's paintings, please contact: The Cerridwen
Enterprise P.O. Box I0I6I Kansas City, MO 64III Phone: 1-800-825-1281
Interior illustrations by Larry Dixon.
All the black & white interior illustrations in this book are available
as II ' x 14 ' prints; either in a signed, open edition singly, or in a
signed and numbered portfolio from:
FIREBIRD ARTS & MUSIC, INC. P.O. Box 14785 Portland, OR 97214-9998
Phone: 1-800-752-0494
Time Line by Pat Tobin. Maps by Victor Wren.
DAW Book Collectors No. 921.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin USA. Book designed by Lenny
Telesea.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance
to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
First Printing, August 1993 DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT OFF. AND
FOREIGN COUNTRIES -MARCA REGISTRATION. HECHO EN U.S.A.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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Dedicated to the teachers of the world.
chapter One.
Ancar, King of Hardorn, slumped in the cushioned embrace of his throne
and stared out into the empty Great Hall. Empty, because he no longer
bothered with holding audiences. He was not here to listen to the
complaints of the people of Hardorn. When he wished them to learn of his
will, there were better ways to inform them than to gather them together
like a mass of milling sheep and declaim it to them.
He did not serve them, as one petty bureaucrat of his father's reign had
whined that he must-just before he had ordered the man given to his
mages. They served him; his pleasures, his will, his whims. That was
what his mother had taught him before she died, and Hulda had simply
confirmed those lessons. Now, after all these years, they were finally
learning that. He was their ruler by right of arms and strength; he had
the power of life and death over them, and all that lay in between.
It had certainly taken them long enough to realize that.
The servants had lit the candles ensconced along the birch-paneled
walls, and the dancing flames reflected from the polished graygranite
floor and the varnished maple beams above. Wavering spot's of flame
twinkled at him from gilt trim and gold fittings, from crystal ornaments
and the metal threads of battle flags hanging from the beams. This had
been a court of weaklings, once. His few decent enemies had been subdued
or annihilated, and their families and lands with them. Now all that
remained of them were the flags of their conquered holdings, and a few
trophies Ancar kept to remind others of his grasp.
Echoes of his movements came back to him like a whisper. He found a
peculiar irony in this empty chamber; a poignancy, yes. He found all of
his pensive thoughts poignant. He had run out of challenges.
This hall was as empty as his own conquests.
Oh. of course, he had all of Hardorn trembling at his feet-but he could
not extend the borders of his Kingdom more than few shabby leagues in
any direction. Even he dared not look Eastward, of course; to the East
was the Empire, and the two-hundred-year-old Emperor Charliss. Only a
fool would challenge Charliss-or someone who was stronger than Charliss.
Ancar knew better than to think that he could boast of that.
To the North was Iftel, and he frowned to think of how his single
attempt to invade that land had ended: with his armies transported
bodily back to the capital and deposited there, and not a memory of
crossing the border among them-and with his mages vanished utterly,
without a trace. There was an invisible wall stretching along the
Iftel-Hardorn border, a wall that would allow no one to pass.
No, whatever guarded Iftel was as powerful as the Emperor, and there was
no point in making It angry.
To the South was Karse. Ruled by priests, at war with Valdemar for
hundreds of years-he would have said that Karse was a plum ripe for his
picking. Except that he had been unable to gain more than those few
leagues; after that, it seemed as if the very land itself rose up
against him. and the Sun-priests certainly called up demons against his
armies, for scores of men would vanish every night, never to be seen
again. And it had become worse since the Priesthood had been taken over
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by a woman; he had lost even those few leagues he had gained.
But he could have coped with the losses in Karse. It was all hill
country, rocky and infertile, of little use. He could have even coped
with the humiliation of Iftel. If it hadn't been for Valdemar.
If he lowered his eyes, he would see the map of Hardorn inlaic in the
granite of the floor just in front of the throne. The Empire in black
terrazzo, Iftel in green marble, Karse in yellow marble, and Valdemar in
its everlasting white. Valdemar would be at his left hand; the hand of
sorcery, or so the old-wives' tales had it.
Valdemar, the unconquered. Valdemar, that should have been first to
fall.
Valdemar, the ripe fruit that Hulda had promised him from the beginning.
He felt his lips lifting in a snarl and forced his face back into his
mask of calm. And if the truth were to be admitted, he could not have
told whether the snarl was meant for Valdemar and her Bitchqueen, or for
Hulda, the Bitch-Adept.
He shifted uncomfortably and the echo whispered back at him, a p e him
Valdemar from the time she began to teach him black sorcery, had
promised him the pretty little princess Elspeth, had vowed that he would
have both within moments of seizing the throne of Hardorn from his
senile old father. He liked tender little girls; at sixteen, Elspeth had
been a little riper than he preferred but was still young enough to
make a good plaything. At a single stroke, he would have doubled the
size of his kingdom, and created a platform from which to invade not
only Karse but Rethwellan as well. Then, with both those lands firmly in
his fist, he could have challenged the old Emperor or simply
consolidated his power, making himself Emperor of the West as Charliss
was of the East. Hulda had promised him that. She had sworn she was the
most powerful Adept in seven kingdoms!
She had pled d h she had certainly ac and in teaching him the secrets of
her body! He had had no reason to doubt her at the time-Except that it
had never happened. Somehow the damned Heralds sent to negotiate a
marriage with Elspeth got word to their Queen of his plans and the death
of his father. Somehow one of them even pliantom rustling of fabric.
Hulda had rnrne A ge im her help and her teaching; not been h would have
tolerated the former if she had not brought him the latter. But she had
the attitude without producing results, and if she weren't an Adept,
he'd have had her slow-roasted alive by now.
When he was younger, he had accepted the fact that she virtually ruled
him without a thought. But then, he had accepted many things back then
without a thought. He was older now.
escaped Ancar's prison cell, warned the Queen, and stopped him and his
hastily-gathered army.
But it got worse with his second attempt. Somehow the Queen managed to
raise a mercenary army that was capable of defeating his mages as well
as his troops. Somehow they had cobbled up an alliance with the fanatics
of Karse.
Somehow all of this had happened without Hulda, "the most powerful Adept
in seven kingdoms,'~ ever becoming aware of what was going on until
after the fact. Bitch-Queen Selenay was still firmly on her throne.
Another bitch, a mercenary Captain named Kerowyn, now held the border
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against him, and there didn't seem to be a single trick any of his
commanders or mages could work that she hadn't seen before-and countered
before. The Herald-Bitch Talia had been made a Sun-priest herself, and
vested with the authority of the Arm of Vkandis by yet another bitch,
the High Priest Solaris. And Bitch-Princess Elspeth had simply vanished,
on some other quest for help, and he had to assume, given the absence of
panic, that she was succeeding, even though not one of his agents could
locate her.
And Bitch-Adept Hulda sat and twiddled her thumbs.
He was beginning to grow very tired of women. He had already grown tired
of Hulda.
He was not aware of the fact that he had spoken her name until the
echoes sent it back to him. This time he did snarl.
Yes, he was growing very tired of Hulda. He was tired of her whims, her
eccentricities, her pretenses. What had been charming and exciting when
he was sixteen now bored him-when it didn't disgust him. She was too old
to play the coquette, too old for girlish mannerisms. And when she cast
them off, she acted as if she was the monarch here, and not he.
That galled him almost as much as her consistent failure, and he And
wiser.
She treated him exactly as she had when he had taken the throne.
She spoke, and expected him to listen attentively; she issued orders,
and expected him to fling himself into whatever she ordered him to
do.
I could have tolerated all of this if she had only done what she had
promised. Outthinking her was a challenge then...
She had pledged him before he took the throne that he would soon be an
Adept to rival her; she swore he would have power beyond his wildest
dreams, power enough to level mountains if he chose. She swore that she
would teach him everything she knew.
But the power never materialized, and the training she gave him never
went beyond the level of Master. She had never taught him how to use all
the powers he could Sense, and all the training she had given him until
that moment had made it impossible for him to touch them. Or at least he
had not been able to touch them during the time that she had been his
only teacher.
He had encountered this reluctance on Hulda's part to give him any more
real teaching two years ago, shortly after he had turned Master. He had
been certain at that moment that the powers of an Adept were almost in
his grasp, that it would only be a matter of a little more training.
That was when the excuses began. Hulda suspended his regular training
sessions, telling him that he was beyond such things. That had made him
elated, briefly-until he realized that there was no way other than
regular training to achieve his long-sought goal. And when he began to
seek her out, asking for more teaching, she was always busy... And at
first, her excuses had seemed plausible. After so many defeats from the
west, they were taking no chances. Hulda had mustered a cadre of mages
of relatively low power to watch the border for any weaknesses in the
force that protected Valdemar from magic. She needed to organize these
people, to make certain that the coercion spells upon them were powerful
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enough to keep them at their work no matter what temptations and
opportunities to defect were placed before them. But after weeks of such
excuses, they began to wear thin.
After a few months, he took matters into his own hands.
He had been collecting mages since his first, ill-fated attempt to take
the Valdemaran throne. Now he began doing more than collecting them and
placing them under his coercion spells; now he began finding out, in a
systematic sweep through his mage-corps, just what they knew.
He had been collecting and recruiting every kind and type of mage that
showed even the faintest traces of power-from hillshaman to mages of no
known School. By aggressively pursuing a course of forced-learning, he
had picked up every bit of knowledge, however seemingly inconsequential,
from any of his "recruits" that had teachings he had not gotten. He had
also been collecting every scrap of written information about magic that
he could lay his hands on; every grimoire, every mage's personal
notebook, every history Of ancient times, and anything concerning magic
to he had from within the Empire. Much of it had been useful. Some of
it, he was certain, Hulda herself did not share. But none of it brought
him the prize he was trying to reach-At least, not to his knowledge. As
he understood it, only an Adept could use the power of "nodes, " those
meeting places of the lines of power that he could use. Every attempt he
had made so far had resulted in failure. He was still not an Adept, and
he had no idea how far he was from that goal.
He had been trying to find an Adept to teach him, with no luck.
Of course, Adepts could be avoiding Hardorn; everything he had ever
heard or read indicated that the kind of Adept willing to teach him
would also be the kind unwilling to share power, and that was precisely
the problem he had with Hulda. Hulda might be warning them off, somehow.
It would not surprise him much to discover that she had been working
against him, preventing him from locating an Adept so that he would
always be her inferior.
But she had underestimated him, and his willingness to tolerate a
position as ruler in name only. There could be only one Ruler of
Hardorn, and it would not be Hulda.
A servant appeared at the door, waiting silently for him to notice her
existence. He admired the woman for a moment-not for her own looks, but
for the new livery he had ordered. Scarlet and gold:
the scarlet of blood, the gold of the wealth he intended to grasp.
The livery matched his new device, now blazoned above his throne,
replacing the insipid oak tree of his father. A winged serpent in gold,
upon a field of blood-red, poised to strike.
Hulda should have taken note of that new device, and thought about what
it meant.
Hulda thought that she had him under control, but she had not counted on
the more mundane methods of dealing with an enemy.
He had placed spies among her servants, loyal only to him, their loyalty
ensured not by spells, but by fear. He had chosen these people
carefully, finding those for whom death would be preferable to losing
someone-or something. For some, it was a family member or a lover that
they would die to protect. For others, it was a secret.
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And for a few, it was a possession that made life worth living. Such
passion meant control-and such control could not be revealed by magical
means.
These servants followed Hulda's every move, and let him know when she
was so deeply engrossed in some activity that he would be able to act
without her guessing what he was up to. She was not infallible-for
instance, she did not possess a spell that he had read about, one that
permitted the caster to see into the past. Whatever he did while she was
occupied, she would not know about. She also did not possess the
mind-magic that enabled one to read the thoughts of others. Well,
neither did he, but that was of little matter at the moment. What was
important was that she could not detect his control of her servants from
their thoughts. So as long as she did not torture their secrets from
them, he would always know where she was and what she was doing.
She might have servants of the same sort watching him; in fact, he had
planned on it. His propensity for taking young, barely postpubescent
girls was well known-as was their regrettable tendency to not survive
such encounters. He still enjoyed such pleasures, but as often as not,
the girl was incidental to something magical he wished to achieve. There
was great power in a painful death-something about a life being ended
prematurely released incredible Power. He did not think Hulda knew that
he knew this; after all, his Preferences had been well established long
before he learned of the power these acts released . So he would wait
until Hulda was occupied, then select one of the little lambs in his
private herd and repair to his own chambers for an enjoyable and
profitable candlemark or two.
His hand-picked servants watched Hulda, and guarded his secrets against
her.
The woman waiting for him to acknowledge her, for instance, was Hulda's
personal maid, and privy to her comings and goings.
She was common enough to attract no notice; middle-aged, neither plain
nor pretty, neither fat nor thin. And well-trained; she would not have
slipped away, she would have waited for Hulda to dismiss her-and yet, at
the same time, she would have arranged to be so attentive that Hulda
would not dismiss her unless the mage wanted privacy. What a shame she
wasn't younger.
He raised his eyes and nodded. The servant crossed the floor silently,
her eyes lowered, and prostrated herself at the foot of the throne.
"Speak, " he said quietly.
"Hulda has retired to her chamber in the company of the muleteer I told
you of, Majesty, " the servant replied, in a voice carefully pitched so
as not to carry beyond the immediate vicinity. He had not chosen this
chamber as a place to sit and brood without thought; it was impossible
to be spied upon effectively here, and impossible to be overheard, given
the acoustics of the place. It had been built to enable a semi-private
audience in the midst of a crowded court.
Such clever design gave him true privacy without making it obvious.
He raised his eyebrows in sardonic surprise; the muleteer must be a
remarkable man, for this would be the fourth time he had graced Hulda's
bed. Then again, Ancar had heard that the man had the strength and
stamina of one of his mules ... and perhaps shared more with them than
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Ancar had guessed.
The King had no fear that this muleteer might be an agent of Hulda's
own; he knew everything there was to know about the man.
Gossip in the kitchens had first alerted him to the muleteer's unusual
abilities, although none of his excellence was in the area Of
intelligence. Hulda's muleteer was as dense as a rock and possessed of
very little wit, only one short step above absolute simpleton. And Ancar
had, in fact, arranged for his erstwhile tutor to hear about the
muleteer's physical attributes. It had been no surprise to him when she
immediately found an excuse to go down to the secondary stables to see
the man for herself. As he had expected, once Hulda had ascertained that
there was no hook attached to this very attractive bait, she had taken
it.
Yes, well. the "hook" is the man himself, and his ability to keep a
woman occupied and heedless of anything else for several candlemarks at
a time. Not something Hulda would be looking for.
So, once again, Hulda and her new toy were amusing themselves.
He wondered how long this toy would last. She tended to be as hard on
her playthings as he was on his.
"Very good, " he said in reply. "You may go.
The servant got slowly to her feet and backed out, closing the door
behind her. Ancar did not immediately rise from his throne; he would
wait, and give Hulda the opportunity to become completely engrossed in
her lover before he moved.
No, there could be only one ruler in Hardorn. He was going to find a way
to rid himself of Hulda, sooner or later.
That was, in a way, something of a pity. She was the only woman above
the age of fifteen that he found desirable; perhaps that was because her
sexual experience was so vast, and so unique. She constantly found new
ways to amuse him. And it would be very pleasurable to somehow reduce
her to the level of one of the servants; to strip her of all ability to
challenge him, and yet leave her intelligence and her knowledge intact.
That would be a triumph greater than conquering Valdemar.
No, I don't think that will ever happen. No matter how powerful I
became, there would be no way I could strip her mind bare without
fearing she would find a way to release herself. She would never accept
any kind of role as an underling. It would be a waste of power I could
better spend elsewhere. Once I am an Adept, once I have defeated her,
that defeat must be followed by her death.
Finally, when he was certain he had given Hulda enough time to Put
everything except the prowess of her muleteer out of her mind, he rose
and took his slow, leisurely way to his own chambers.
And not to his official chambers either.
Keep watch, " he told one of the guards outside the chamber" another of
his hand-picked armsmen, but this one controlled directly, as all his
personal guards were, by spells controlling his mind.
He turned to the other. "Tell my chamberlain I am not to be disturbed
unless there is an emergency. " Then he turned just outside of the
double doors of the audience chamber and entered one of the corridors of
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the sort used by the servants.
The guard followed him walking about three paces behind.
This was not a heavily trafficked corridor, either; in fact, it was
likely that no one walked it except to keep it clean and keep the lights
burning along it. It led to a set of dark stairs, which led downward,
directly to one of the oldest parts of this castle; one of the round
towers that had once anchored this building against siege.
Seldom used now, but he found the round shape of the rooms very useful.
He held the only key to the door on this level; he unlocked it,y after
first making certain the spells and physical devices meant to insure his
privacy were still intact. The wooden door had a copper lock; very
useful in that copper retained the traces of any magic that might be
used on it. He let himself into the bottom room of the tower and
relocked the door behind him.
This room held his collection of peasant girls, gleaned from the
countryside by his troopers, all housed in neat little cells built about
the exterior wall of the room. They were carefully chosen by his
chamberlain and himself; he looked for deep emotional capacity, and his
chamberlain looked for a lack of awkward relatives who might miss them.
A spell of silence ensured that they could not speak to one another, nor
communicate in any other way. Every day he had food and water delivered
to them by a servant; each cell had all the facilities of one of the
finer guest rooms in the castle itself, even if the space was a bit
cramped. No vermin here, and no dirt either. He was quite fastidious
about his person, and what he permitted in close proximity to it. Every
girl here was under a nunor coercion spell, set by one of his tame
mages, that forced her to eat, drink, and keep herself neat and bathed.
The aura of terror in this room was quite astounding, and wonderfully
sustaining. The spell of silence only made waiting more frightening to
his captives.
Hulda assumed that this was the only purpose of the tower; she had never
looked beyond this chamber and the one immediately above. She had no
notion of what lay in the windowless third-story room, under the round,
peaked roof.
He would not be availing himself of the services of any of the girls
today. He had already charged himself with as much power as he could
handle yesterday, and the little that had leaked off in the interim was
insignificant.
He crossed the chamber to the spiral staircase that rose through the
middle, taking it up to the room above. He ignored this room as well; he
had no use for the couch, the rack, the chest of instruments.
Not today. He permitted the room to remain in darkness, lit only from
the chamber below, as he crossed to the staircase that curled up the
stone wall and rose to the third and final room.
It, too, lay in near total darkness. He lit a lantern at the head of the
stairs-without the use of magic. He would need all the power he had for
what lay before him; the manuscript he meant to follow today had made
that much quite clear.
Once the lantern gave him some light to see by, he made a circuit of the
room, lighting every burnished lantern within it, until it was as bright
as possible in a room with no windows.
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This wood-floored room was ringed with bookcases, exactly as the
ground-floor room was ringed with cells. And here lay the prisoners of
his intellectual searches, the captives of his quest for knowledge.
Hundreds of books, of book-rolls, of manuscripts; even mere fragments of
manuscripts. All of them were handwritten; the kind of knowledge
contained in these words was not the kind that anyone would ever commit
to a printer. He had been collecting these for more than the two years
of his disenchantment with his mentor, but it was only within the past
two years that he had begun studying them and trying the spells
described in them without supervision.
He fully intended to try another of them today.
He did not know what this spell was supposed to do, but he had some
hopes that it might be the long-sought way to tap safely into the power
of nodes, the spell that would finally make him an Adept.
It was in this very manuscript that he first found the word "node, " and
realized from the antique description that these knots of energy at the
junction of two or more ley-lines were the same energy nexus-points that
he had been, thus far, unable to tap himself.
This was one of the incomplete manuscripts, and it was the many pages
missing and paragraphs obliterated that had made him hesitate for so
long before trying anything contained in it. The real purpose of this
spell was in the pages that were missing, and the pages he possessed
were riddled by insects and blurred by time.
Still, this was the closest he had come in all the months of searching.
and for the past week or so, he had felt ready to attempt this "spell of
seeking. " For some reason, today felt right to try it.
He had managed a week ago to restore some of the manuscript at least; a
clear description of the level of Adept that could tap into the "nodes,
" though not the safeguards that would make such tapping less hazardous.
This was the first time he had seen such descriptions, or the directions
on how to use the node-power once he obtained it.
Hopefully, if he were strong enough, the safeguards would not be
necessary. He had never once seen Hulda using any such safeguards when
she accessed the power of "nodes. " Then again, his more cautious side
chided, she could have established those protections before you were in
a position to watch her. She could have been hiding them from you.
The spell described was not the same one that Hulda used, of that much
he was certain. This spell required the construction of some kind of
"portal"; he could only assume that it was a portal to the node-power.
That made sense; he already knew that he, at least, could not touch
these things directly.
He settled into a chair he often used for his meditations and suppressed
a shiver. He recalled only too well the first and last time he had
attempted to touch the nodes directly.
He had been able to see these power nexus-points, as well as the lines
leading to them, from the time he reached the level of Journeyman.
From the time he was first initiated by Hulda into the
world of magic, he had been able to see the power that all things
created, all the colors and intensities of it. But until Hulda drew
file:///F|/rah/Mercedes%20Lackey/Lackey,%20M...Mage%20Winds%203%20-%20Winds%20of%20Fury.txt (10 of 233) [6/4/03 10:31:00 PM]
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file:///F|/rah/Mercedes%20Lackey/Lackey,%20Mercedes%20-%20Mage%20Winds%23%20-%20Winds%20of%20Fury.txtWindsofFury[112-066-4.2]By:MercedesLackeySynopsis:ExcitingconclusiontotheMage-Windstrilogy.Elspeth&Darkwindreturn oValdemarforafinalconfrontationwithAncarofHardorn,theevilAdeptHulda,andasurprising...

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