Eresken fumed; once he and his kind held sway here, this would all stop. True magic was meant to rule. No Elietimm enchanter would be at the beck and call of every self-important buffoon puffed up over a few bare leagues of mountainside. Hunger nagged at him so he skirted the rekin. He clicked his tongue with annoyance at the miserable crowd in the kitchen yard. Pushing his way past importuning hands, he tapped one of the Sheltya briskly on the shoulder. “Where is Aritane? I must speak with her.”
Krelia looked around, her face drawn with the anguish she took into herself with every healing touch laid on some needy body. “Did she go inside, for something to eat perhaps?”
The fool woman was going to lose herself completely soon, Eresken realized with a faint chill, seeing the vagueness in her eyes. He must watch Krelia more closely; if she was going to dissolve into madness, she wasn’t going to hamper his plans when she did so. He’d smother her in her sleep first.
“You’re looking for Aritane?” Remet halted, all manner of questions in his raised brows. “Bryn came; they went inside to talk in private.” Remet’s eyes were alert in the soft lines of his face, a newfound maturity in their focus. “He had news of Jeirran.”
Eresken nodded and hid curses in the deepest hollow of his mind. Bryn’s long friendship with Aritane made it so much harder to displace whatever doubts his news might fix in her head. What had Bryn heard from Jeirran? Did he know something Eresken didn’t?
“Thank you.” Eresken managed a friendly smile, man to man, overlaying it with a faint promise of confidences to come, of admission to an inner circle of knowledge. As he turned, he felt the youth’s eyes on the back of his neck. Yet another thing to remember and to step wary around. This onslaught of incessant and varied demands had tested Remet’s training in a way he’d never have faced in ten years of trailing up track and down vale after some ineffectual soothsayer. The boy was starting to think for himself and Bryn only needed someone to share his faltering loyalty to go running to his Elders, ruining everything.
Eresken’s pace quickened. The side door was ajar, a few huddled figures cowering on the wooden steps. Eresken spared no glance to encourage some worthless request. He took the stairs two at a time and hurried to the door at the far end of the corridor.
He halted on the threshold, honeyed words dying on his lips. “What are you doing here? Where is Aritane?”
Ceris sprang to her feet, looking for guidance from the men flanking her. “She went with Bryn?” Her pathetic smile beseeched him not to be cross with her.
“Who is this?” Eresken scowled at the older man, whose gnarled hand clasped the girl’s drooping shoulder. “You should work healing outside, not where we gather to meditate!” He took a seat behind the long table, forcing the others to rise from their chairs, stamping his authority on the situation.
The newcomer matched the Elietimm glare for glare. “I’m her father and this is her brother. We’ve come to see how she does, now that Jeirran tells us Sheltya need not be cut off from their blood no more.”
Yet another cursed complication to deal with. Eresken heard hurrying steps in the corridor. “Then please take your reunion elsewhere.” The Elietimm rose, expecting to see Bryn or, better yet, Aritane. Instead two unknown men charged into the room, faces alight with a hostility that hit him like a kick in the stomach. A woman followed, face obscured by some ghastly mask of paints but green eyes clear and bright with hatred.
It was the wizard’s slut from the Forest. Pain searing along his jaw told Eresken the bitch was using her cursed darts again. He stumbled with the cold shock of the drug in his blood. Scrambling around the table, he swept maps, parchments, goblets to all sides, throwing the jug bodily at the burlier attacker.
Closest to the door, Ceris drew breath on a panicked scream but the woman silenced her with a slap. The frail blond crashed back into the stone wall to slump whimpering to the floorboards. Eresken goaded Ceris’ startled father to attack, seizing on his impulse to protect his child. With an inarticulate roar, the man swung at the whore’s back. The elder of the traitors with her stepped in to block the vengeful fist, equal violence bolstered by the energy of youth. Eresken took a moment’s thought to weave the attacker’s face into an image of Jeirran’s foulest lust, with Ceris the weeping victim beneath the heaving body. He rammed this into her father’s mind, burning it into his consciousness, heedless of the damage he did.
“See what they—” He had no time to reinforce the vision with words. The second man, the skinny one with savage eyes, was a scant pace away, knife in his grasp. Eresken seized Ceris’ brother with hands and wits, throwing him bodily onto the gleaming blade. In the instant of agony distracting the boy, Eresken grabbed hold of his mind. He tied the lad’s wits tight in a web of chaos, isolating him mercilessly from all conscious thought and memory. Working faster than ever before, Eresken denied him any perception of pain from the myriad blows and cuts the frustrated attacker inflicted. Ruthlessly ripping out any instinct for defense and protection, he set alight every unconscious fury and hatred the boy harbored, turning each involuntary movement into aggression, tying the whole into a storm of mindless violence.
Eresken snatched himself from the maelstrom of the boy’s ruined mind just in time to see the shorter attacker go down under that insane rage. The father was laying into the other one with a chair leg, wood splintering as the agile man dodged and feinted and blows crashed into the wall behind him.
What of the whore? Eresken saw her biting her lip with vicious intent, halfway across the room with an upraised dagger. Eresken overturned the table, the stout oak board a futile defense, but it gave him long enough to drag Ceris’ body to its feet. With a frantic reach of his mind, he crushed the girl’s feeble volition with one explosive curse, leaving the girl’s eyes vacant pools of darkness. Barely an instant before the Forest bitch reached him, Eresken flung Ceris onto the whore’s back, uncoordinated limbs flailing, dead weight clinging, gray cloth hampering, dragging the murderous slut down.
Echoes of agony reverberated around Eresken’s mind as the brother died. Illusion of invulnerability was no defense against being bodily broken into a bloody mess, joints shattered, sinews cut, throat cut with a savagery that all but severed the head. The traitor was already moving forward, teeth white in a rictus of savagery against a mask of gore, reddened knife thirsty for Eresken’s blood. Kill or be killed, the simplicity of this one’s mind rang louder than any other thought in the room. A simple mind and one with no defenses worth the name.
The Elietimm felt the hardness of stone at his back, floorboards slick beneath his feet, the reek of blood, ordure and hatred thick in the air. The drug was tainting his senses, colors distorting, sounds both deafening and distant in the same moment. Eresken gritted his teeth, forced the turmoil from him with a shouted incantation and plunged his razor-sharp intellect, honed over so many years, into the naked reason of his assailant.
That much was easy. The Elietimm exulted in the sudden success before a sense of wrongness undermined him. Where was the shock? What of the recoil from sudden invasion that Eresken had learned so painfully to resist and then to redouble, turning panic back against the assaulted mind? All sensation and sound faded from Eresken’s consciousness as his world shrank to the confines of the mind he sought to capture. Why was he the one ripped from reality, when he had the chains of his iron will to bind this madman? Where was the flaw or weakness offering up the consciousness within? The Elietimm redoubled his efforts, but in a baffling reversal this domain, where he knew himself the master, turned itself inside out. Now Eresken found himself frantically seeking escape from a mental maze. How could this be? The man had no discipline, no training in the manipulation of mind and memory.