“There!” the hedge witch said, pointing. Below and off to one side a square stone tower stood rough and grey above the trees of the forest. About its base clustered outbuildings enclosed by a stockade of peeled logs.
“Heart’s Ease,” said Moira. “Our journey’s end.” She shifted her pack as Wiz struggled to his feet and they headed off down the path.
“Will we be safe here?” Wiz asked as the trail flattened out in the valley and he found he had breath for more than walking.
“In daylight nothing dare come close,” Moira told him. “Anything magic here would be immediately known to the Watchers. There are non-magic agents, of course, human and such, but . . .” she shrugged. “We are safe here as anywhere.”
“Thank God!” Wiz said fervently.
Moira frowned. “Do not be so free with names of power.”
“I’m sorry,” Wiz said contritely.
The forest enclosed them until they were almost on top of the castle. The trees were as huge and hoary as anywhere in the Wild Wood, but they didn’t seem as threatening here.
“It feels friendly,” Wiz said wonderingly, aware for the first time how oppressive the Wild Wood had been at its most benign.
“It is friendlier,” Moira agreed. “The forest folk hereabouts are kindly disposed toward the inhabitants of Heart’s Ease. They watch over the place and those who live there.” She shifted her pack with a swell and jiggle in her blouse that made Wiz’s heart catch. “Besides, this is a quiet zone. There is almost no magic here, for good or ill.”
Atros returned to his sleeping chamber fuming. It had been a long, frustrating evening. Damn those elves and their impudence! They had spirited his quarry out from his very grasp, humiliated him in front of the entire League and ruined his plans. His impromptu army disintegrated once they knew the elf duke guested the two they sought.
So they had been making for the elf hill after all,
the wizard thought as he stripped off his bearskin cloak by the light of a single lamp glowing magically in one corner. He did not understand it and he was too tired to really think upon it. Perhaps the one who had been Summoned was some strange kind of elf and not a man at all? True, Toth-Set-Ra’s scrying demon had called the Summoned a man, but demons could be wrong.
Too many possibilities,
he thought as he pulled his silken tunic over his head. For now sleep and in the morning . . . He moved toward the great canopied bed and then stopped. There was something, or someone, making an untidy lump under the sheets. He stepped back cautiously and possessed himself of his staff. He muttered a protective spell and then moved to the bed again. Reaching out with his staff, he flipped back the fine woolen coverlet and recoiled at what lay beneath.
There on the gore-clotted sheets was a thing which had once been a man. His back was broken, his ribs were smashed, his arms and legs dislocated and cruelly contorted, and his head lay at an impossible angle. But worse, he had no skin. He had been so expertly flayed that even his nose remained in place. His pallid eyeballs stared up at the ceiling and his ivory white teeth seemed to smile out of the mass of bloody tissue that had been a face.
Even in its present state, Atros had no difficulty identifying the body as Kar-Sher, Keeper of the Sea of Scrying.
“Do you like my little present, Atros?” hissed a familiar, hateful voice. The dark-haired giant started and looked around. In the shadows behind the feebly glowing lamp a face took shape. The face of Toth-Set-Ra.
“I told one I know what he was called,” the wizard’s voice went on, soft and full of menace. “Not his true name, Atros, just what he was called. And you see the result.”
The old wizard cackled. “Oh, I did take his skin afterwards. I needed it, you see. It is amazing what you can do with the skin of a wizard, even a wizard who set himself so much above his station. A wizard who was such an inexpert plotter as this one.”