Now he knew the ambience itself, like a whole additional occult world superimposed on the mundane. He could see it without seeing it—or smell it, taste it, feel it, hear it, and none of those words fit exactly what he knew. It was another plane, to which he could move without leaving where he was. Hub was a great city to his eyes, but in that other set of dimensions it was a universe of shadows inhabited by glowing beacons of sorcery.
Beacons, or standing rolls of thunder, or monstrous shapes, as he chose. Between them were the little whirls and flashes of minor magics: a woman using glamour to ensnare a lover, an occultly gifted cook producing a masterpiece of pastry for a lord’s table, a merchant sweetly swindling an unsuspecting opponent. He could see them as they were, if he wished, or he could view their extensions in the ambience, their projections of power. Purple and shrill, pungent or angular and angry—words and concepts had become totally inadequate to convey even the thoughts, and to describe them to a mundane would be impossible if he tried until the sun went out. Small wonder that sorcerers were not like other people.
Did all sorcerers perceive these things so clearly, or was such insight a function of strength? And how strong was he? He felt giddy with power, omnipotent. Was that a dangerous self-delusion? Could he truly be as mighty as he sensed?
On the far side of the field, Kalkor stood in the other tent, too excited to sit. He was steadying his ax upright with one hand and sharpening it with a stone held in the other, and he had already stripped down to the fur wrap, ready for blood. Then he felt Rap’s attention and looked up, blue eyes shining with madness.
Rap glanced into the ambience and there he saw Kalkor as a transparent, naked image of himself. In that dimensionless space he might have been standing an arm’s length away, or far off in Nordland. But there was more than just a wraith there; Rap also sensed red, twisted hatred like a coiling fire. Death and rape and atrocity sparkled in it and there was nothing human.
“You die soon, halfman!” Kalkor said, and his flames flailed hotter, gloating.
“Why?” Rap asked. He kept his arms on his knees and sent out his message without speech. The old man beside him did not look up. “What do you hope to gain by this madness?”
Kalkor laughed, and his laughter was blood spilled steaming on snow and women writhing in savage thrusts of pain. “If you do not know, you are unworthy to know. “
“You seek to win a kingdom with sorcery. The wardens will not allow it. Already you have transgressed against the Protocol!”
“The wardens?” The jotunn sneered. “I do not fear the Four! Olybino has three wars on his hands already and dares not rouse the jotnar, also. Bright Water applauds me. She sought me out on my ship one night, clothed only in occult beauty, seeking my strength and relishing my overpowering will.”
Rap could not tell if this was truth or madness. The twisted web of fire became a thing of claws and scales and poison fangs, clamoring in discordant dirge. “So I have two on my side, and the regent also will shun further war! I will carry the vote, and the wardens will not intervene!” Physically Kalkor stood in his tent on the far side of the campus, a long bowshot away, but with that contemptuous outburst he seemed to snap his fingers right under Rap’s nose.
Rap wrestled down his own dread fury, resisting the urge to hurl a bolt of power at the monster. The worst thing was, what the thane said might even be true. If the magic casement had foreseen that Kalkor’s succession would best serve the future of Inisso’s house, then Rap was the one who had been tricked! The other claimants, Inos and Angilki, had been sidetracked and Rap was doomed to die here.
Oh, poor Krasnegar!
Horrified, he peered deeper into the nightmare pit of Kalkor’s mind. He found no fear. He could hardly even find much interest in the outcome of the Reckoning, for the raider had long since lost any sense of human life being valuable, even his own. His insanity in forcing the match made a sort of weird sense, therefore. To a man who sought his thrills from danger, every new escape became a challenge to risk more the next time. Death and rape and loot must pall at last, and yet there was nothing else to gain if that was what a man lived for. So he had sought out occult power also, and that had made the problem worse. If he survived today’s spectacle then he must just seek a grander way to die, for now only death itself remained as the ultimate, inescapable, goal. And perhaps fame, as the thane who had sailed his ship to Hub and gambled a kingdom on a Reckoning in the capital of the Impire.
Appropriately, thunder clamored in the murky sky, and thousands of hands went over ears in the crowd. The downpour seemed to gather strength.
“And what after me?” Rap asked. “Do you slaughter the regent? Or that husk of an imperor? The boy, perhaps? What is the last verse of the war song?”
An explosion of unholy mirth turned the monster into a glittering, jagged monolith on a baleful starlit moor. “You will never know! But I shall have immortality!”
The duel would begin soon. The Imperial party was arriving. Azak was there, his skin glowing red with Rasha’s curse. Incompetent slut she had been! That spell was a shoddy piece of work. Inos, also, looking distraught and yet desirable enough to drive a man madder than Kalkor. Poor Inos, knowing not a single word of power!
“You can’t win, you know,” said the thane’s mocking whisper in the steely calm of the ambience. “I am a raider! I bow to no man. I recognize no law but death.”
“Nor I!” Rap said angrily. And the thane struck.
In the mundane world, nothing happened at all. The two old jotnar supporters sat by their principals, quite unaware of the occult confrontation in progress, but in the ambience Kalkor’s misty image slashed Rap across the face with a cat-o’nine-tails like the one he had brandished before him on Blood Wave.
It was not intended as a mortal blow, nor even to disable; the result should have been merely a vicious jolt of pain. The whip did not exist, nor did the wooden staff with which Rap deflected the sorcery, for those were only mental pictures of the invisible, images of the unimaginable . . . yet Rap barely restrained a counterstroke with his imaginary club that would have crushed the ogre’s skull.
Kalkor looked mildly surprised, and also amused. “Not bad!” he murmured.
“Let’s try that again, “ Rap said, reaching out in the spectral plane as if to offer a sailor’s crushing handshake or a bout of arm wrestling.
Kalkor struck back at once, a monstrous sword thrust at his opponent’s arm.
Rap preferred the handclasp. It didn’t matter how he thought of it, or how Kalkor did, either. What mattered was pure occult power.
Now they matched strengths, and in Rap’s vision the opposing fingers were soft as a child’s. He squeezed, meeting so little resistance that he hardly noticed it; rejoicing as he sensed that he was inflicting hurt, as he saw the jotunn’s eyes brim with swift-rising panic. Satisfied, he withdrew quickly, before he maimed the man. With his ax, Kalkor could doubtless cut Rap to ribbons, but in sorcery he was a pushover.
The thane recoiled with a cry, so that his aged companion looked up in surprise. The ambience filled with bubbling slime and a fetor of decay. Gifted with strength and wits, with courage and beauty and high birth, Kalkor had abused them all until, after a lifetime of conquest, he had come to believe that no man could ever best him at anything.
And now he knew better.
Low, dismal dissonance, a frothing pit exuding noisome stenches of terror . . .
Rap peered in disgust at the filth. He saw fear at last, but not enough fear to please him. “No, Thane! I will destroy you as you destroyed Gathmor. But first I will make your bowels run, like a craven’s. You will flee from me, and I will chase you all around the field. Finally, you will grovel on your knees before the crowd. You will beg the regent to have mercy and stop the match, and he will refuse. The imps will have great sport today, and for years the poets will sing comic songs about the Nordland raider who came to Hub to strut, and ended running from a faun.”
Kalkor bared his teeth, and visibly braced himself. “No one will believe! They will know that you are using sorcery!”