The Sable City by M. Edward McNally
*
When the white light faded before Phin’s eyes, he found himself looking at Kanderamath’s book in his hands, which he had caught just above his nose. He dropped the book to one side and scrambled away from Centurion Deskata, but caught his breath when he looked at the man.
Deskata had tossed the leather satchel aside after shaking out the book over Phin‘s head, and the fact that he now stood absolutely still was nowhere near as disconcerting as the fact that the satchel was hanging motionless in the air a foot from his hand. Phin stared at the man and realized that absolutely still was an understatement. Deskata was frozen in mid motion, one foot raised to step forward, mouth hanging open to draw in breath, probably so that he could yell at Phin some more.
Phin scooted away and scrambled to his feet, panting so hard that it struck him that his breath was presently the only sound in the vast room, and seemingly in the world. There was a cold profundity to the silence all around, and the quality of the light was somehow off as well though Phin could not say just what was wrong with it. He turned where he stood, looking all around, and jerked when he saw the winged woman who had led John Deskata here, across the room and up on the second floor catwalk. She was perched on the balustrade, squatting on her haunches with a broad smile on her face. Motionless.
Some movement did appear in the corner of Phin’s eye and he turned to it almost desperately, but then drew in his breath. At the base of the circular dais of ascending stairs, the dark floor seemed to shimmer as it turned a milky white. A figure began to rise upward through the stone. It was robed all in white and seemed to be wearing some sort of crown, but a nimbus of light that made Phin shield his eyes made it impossible to perceive detail. It did seem to be facing toward him.
Phin did not know if running or playing frozen was a better idea, but in truth he did not know if he was up to a run. The cold feeling he associated with necromancy gripped his innards and he shivered to his core.
The figure stopped rising at the height of a man and the light flared more strongly, causing Phin to close his eyes. When he opened them, the man was staring back at him. He was an older fellow with a salt-and-pepper beard, deep frown lines across his forehead, and a long nose with a distinctive hook. Phin knew the face. The man’s crown was more of a circlet with a zigzag pattern on top, and his long, rumpled robes were an all-too-familiar shade of gray. In one hand he held an onyx wand twisting like the root of a tree, with a great golden gem the size of a goose egg atop it.
“Briandh, bodoan,” the man said, speaking the old language of Tull. Phin answered by rote in the same tongue.
“Greetings to you, brother.”
The man walked up the stairs towards Phin with the stride of an old campaigner, belying stooped shoulders and the network of lines at the corners of pale green eyes. He shook back a wide sleeve from his empty hand and stretched it out toward Phin, who brought his own hand up automatically. They shook, but as their hands touched Phin gasped and swayed on his feet for he felt like his brain had been kicked over on its side and everything was spilling out. He saw Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor, and tall Abverwar for the first time. Voices of his instructors. A young girl, pretty and blonde, laughing in the gray robes. And books. Lots of books. Lessons read, examinations taken. More reading, memorization that faded in days, other things that Phin never forgot. Souterm, Nesha-tari. Zeb and the Westerners, and the Duchess Claudja. Black boots with sharp, cruel heels. Then Deskata, frozen in mid motion.
Phin stumbled and nearly went backward down the stairs, but the man braced him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Your forgiveness, Phinneas Phoarty,” he said. “That is a lot faster than asking questions.”
“You, you, you…”
“Yes, you know me,” the man nodded, then turned his face and his hooked nose to profile. “Not too bad a likeness, I reckon.”
The man was referring to a portrait he had seen in Phin’s head, which Phin had seen every day for the ten years he was at Abverwar. It was one of several hanging above the Chancellor’s table in the mess hall. Second from the left, in fact.
“Kanderamath,” Phin said, and the man frowned.
“Well…almost. More like Kanderamath’s ghost, to be blunt about it.”
Phin only stared, for the second Witch King of Tull had been dead for around five centuries, ever since he had caused the First Opening of Vod‘Adia. Despite being dead, Kanderamath narrowed his eyes and stared off into space for several moments, his gray-flecked eyebrows rising as he did so. He looked at Phin.
“So you did not come here for me at all.” The old Witch King turned and looked at the book on the floor. “You only brought an item of mine here by chance.”
“Kanderamath,” Phin said again, for he had little idea of what else to say. Kanderamath looked at him sideways, and sighed.
“Do not take this the wrong way, Phinneas, but I had rather hoped for a wizard of a somewhat…greater competence. The Circle has done a number on your brain, boy. If they ever catch you, tell them I am sorely disappointed by what they have become.”
Phin stared at the crowned figure, then looked all around the chamber filled with light of a strange quality, as though everything were stuck in a frozen moment.
“Did, did you stop time?”
Kanderamath smiled faintly. “In effect, but not in reality. Time stops for no one. It is however possible to step out of the stream, for a few minutes. And a few minutes is all that we have. Hearken unto me, Phinneas.”
The Witch King took a firmer grip on Phin’s shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes.
“My entrance into Vod’Adia was a disaster, both for the friends who came in with me, and for the world at large. All that I have seen in your mind confirms this for me now. Opening the city unleashed the undead upon Noroth for thirty years of war, and now it has allowed devils and demons to enter this world without being summoned, to butcher the unwary to make claim on their souls. This is intolerable, and it must end.”
“You want me to end it?” Phin blanched, the thought finally jerking his brain loose from the deep wheel rut in which it had been stuck.
“It needn’t be that hard, Phin. May I call you Phin? Good. You see, when I came here I used spells of gyring to move Vod’Adia out of the state in which it had existed since the Ascension.”
“Since the what?” Phin asked, and Kanderamath frowned.
“Let’s just call it the Cataclysm, shall we? The event fourteen centuries ago that tore the city out of our material world, and slew every living thing herein. To enter the place a millennium later, I first had to set it moving. Turning, if you will. For one lunar month the place was to resume its connection to this world, our world, so that I and my companions could venture inside.”
“Why, why in the world would you do that?” Phin asked.
“Because, Phin, in my day that was the sort of thing we forerunners of your Circle of Wizardry did.” Kanderamath sighed. “We were not the customs agents and messengers of an Empire, but a union of the most powerful magi on two continents. Dedicated to the study of magic for its own sake, not just for the practical applications. We believed in magic not just as a tool, but as an art and a science.”
Phin opened his mouth for another question, but Kanderamath raised a hand.
“Let me speak, Phin, for there is space between the things you must know, and those you only want to know. I caused Vod’Adia to Open so that it could be explored, and perhaps reveal clues as to the nature of the…Cataclysm. But what we found here was the immortal remains of all those souls who had perished a thousand years before, reduced to unholy, undead monstrosities.”
“Like those that emerged at the Second Opening. Those that it took the thirty years of the Dead War to destroy.”
“Exactly like them, for that was the same bunch.” Kanderamath sighed and rubbed a finger on the side of his nose. “When we realized that the place was haunted, to put it mildly, my fellows and I still believed that we had the power
Kanderamath looked at the spot on the floor from which he had arisen, and Phin had no doubt it was the very spot on which the Witch King had fallen. His shade spoke quietly.
“In my hubris, I had bound my gyring spells to cease only upon my exit from Vod’Adia. When I knew my own death was near and that I would never leave this place, I cast certain spells to become as you see me now. I am not Kanderamath, I am only what is left of him.”
“So that when another wizard came looking for you…this would happen,” Phin said. The shade nodded once.
“Even without my leaving, the city Closed to our world after one month. But it continued to move. Ninety-nine years later when it Opened again, the undead poured out into the world where they had once lived, and you know the rest of that story. But what happened after that was in some ways worse, for while Vod’Adia is only Open to our world once in a century, during the long times between it is Open to other places. Infernal places. With the city emptied of the undead, other, even more dangerous things began to make their way in.”
“Like her,” Phin said, jerking a thumb toward the winged woman frozen on the catwalk balustrade. Kanderamath nodded and frowned across the room at her.
“Succubus, from the Abyss. A demon. I think that one is called Uella.”
“You know her?”
“Not really. I retained some dim awareness of things that have happened here over the last several centuries, at least in this chamber. That one has…done some things, here. Unpleasant things.”
Phin looked nervously at the frozen demoness, at her glassy red eyes and leering grin. He shuddered, but for a moment it seemed as though the whole chamber shuddered in his sight.
“Our time grows short, Phinneas. Take this.”
Phin turned and found Kanderamath was extending the twisting wand out to him, holding it around the jeweled top and offering the handle.
“My spells of gyring must be brought to an end Phinneas, so that no one may enter this place again to be tortured and slain by the demons and devils. Nor what would be worse, that the fiends may choose to exit the city into our world.”
Phin raised a hand uncertainly, but Kanderamath slapped the wand into his palm. The touch of it gave Phin a start, for it was warm. The black shaft of it was shaped like a stretched-out coil, something like a pig’s tail pulled out just short of tight. Though it was light, it had the texture of stone. The great golden gem at the end was unlike anything Phin had ever seen.
“What do I do with this?” Phin asked.
“Nothing,” Kanderamath said firmly. “Do not use it, nor try to use it, in conjunction with any spell. This is an object I have fashioned here, over the last many centuries. It contains a portion of my essence and when it is carried out of Vod’Adia, my spells will end with its leaving. All of them.”
Phin looked at the shade, which already seemed to be fading as Kanderamath had let go of his end of the wand.
“What about you?” Phin asked.
“I will get the final death I have long deserved. Conceal the wand, Phin, for it would not do to have anyone here see it. Particularly not the demons nor the devils.”
The light in the room was changing, and Phin thought he was starting to see the shape of one of the Node pillars right through Kanderamath’s shoulder. He jammed the Witch King’s wand up into the billowy right sleeve of his robes and went about knotting the end around his wrist while still speaking with rising desperation.
“Wait! I am still at least half-prisoner of the devils, and I think this guy with the short sword is about to kill me!”
“Don’t let him,” Kanderamath advised, plainly transparent now. “Get that wand out of Vod’Adia, Phin. Then see that it is destroyed.”
“Destroyed? How?” Phin doubted he could just snap the thing over a rock.
“A powerful wizard,” Kanderamath said, only visible now as an outline. “One whom you can trust not to use the wand for their own aggrandizement.”
“I don’t know anybody like that!” Phin shouted. “I don’t know that I am like that!”
“You are,” Kanderamath said, and then he was gone.
John Deskata stumbled forward, then jumped back from the spot on the dais where Phin had been lying only an instant before. The light in the towering chamber was as it had been, and Phin thought he could hear noises far off, like pounding feet.
Deskata looked around wildly until spotting Phin. He pointed his sword at him.
“How did you do that?” he demanded. It took Phin a moment to remember what it was the Centurion wanted from him.
“Deskata, back off,” Phin said, trying for his most commanding tone but not quite getting there. “I can not take you away from this place, but I am still a Wizard. Take another step toward me, and one of us will end up dead. That does not help either of us.”
Deskata glared, his sword level at the end of his arm.
“If you can not help me, then what do I care?”
There were definitely footsteps approaching, heavy boots echoing from beyond one of the numerous sets of double doors around the room.
“Go on, Johnny! Stick him!”
Both Phin and Deskata looked across the room at the grinning succubus on the balustrade, who now had a little spiked devil hovering just off her shoulder. She pantomimed stabbing a blade into her throat, and lolled out a long, forked tongue from the side of her ruby-red mouth.
Deskata frowned at her, then looked back at Phin. He lowered his sword to his side, and called across the room.
“I am not going to fight for your amusement, bitch.”
Uella grinned. “Want to bet?”
“Centurion Deskata,” Phin said softly, and Deskata turned to follow his gaze.
On the west side of the circular chamber two wide double doors were swinging open. Phin could see three or four hobgoblins running through a torch lit hall toward them, lightly armored and carrying spears. Behind them came a crowd of more heavily armored Magdetchoi in heavy splint mail and spiked helmets, bearing axes, morning stars, and bows. Their hobnailed boots rumbled in the hall.
Deskata sighed faintly. He reached up to his neck and jerked a leather cord out from under his Legion breastplate, snapping the string and dropping a ring Phin had seen before into his hand. Deskata slipped the ring onto a finger of his sword hand, and peered at the onrushing monsters through the same striking emerald eyes Phin had only seen on the Sarge’s face, back in Camp Town. He did not look at Phin again. Deskata took up his tower shield and tightened the straps that secured it to his left arm. Then with a savage cry that was from the Miilark Islands as much as the Imperial Legions, the Centurion pounded down from the dais, back up the stairs that faced it, and met the hobgoblins in the doorway.
Chapter Forty