Tenoctris had described power lingering at sites of previous wizardry—and at sites of death and slaughter—just as Metron said. The difference was that Tenoctris had warned it was a danger which could cause a wizard to act in unintended fashions with disastrous results; Metron was concerned only with increasing the power of his spells.
Garric smiled faintly, his hand on the ball pommel of his sword. That didn’t change anything; he hadn’t trusted Metron’s judgment from the first.
“You’ve got somebody else to break into the Spike so we don’t have to ourself?” Hakken said. There was hope in his voice, though he was obviously worried by Metron’s preparations.
Without lifting his athame from the soft wood the wizard had drawn a seven-pointed star, then bounded it with a circle. He worked freehand and with a skill that made Garric’s lips purse.
“My art will aid you,” Metron said. “But not that way.”
He sounded condescending to Garric, but Hakken probably found reassurance in the wizard’s delivery. “The allies I spoke of will join us after Lord Thalemos is free. They’ll help us to establish Lord Thalemos on the throne of Laut.”
Garric thought that something else had almost slipped off the wizard’s tongue. He was hiding something, though he might simply want to avoid frightening the unsophisticated bandits. Metron must be very tired from the wizardry he’d performed; and he must be a very powerful wizard indeed.
“Go on,” Garric said. There was no point in pressing Metron on questions where there was no way of telling what, or which, lies he was telling. “Show us what we’re to do.”
Metron looked up, meeting Garric’s eyes over the figures he’d drawn. The wizard smiled, but his expression only made Garric think about Tint’s warning: He like you for food, maybe.
Metron took the sapphire ring out of his pouch and set it in the middle of the symbol. The stone was a sparkle too small to have shape.
Without writing words of power around the circle as Garric expected, the wizard said, “Ammo ammonio hermitaris….” His athame dipped toward the ring at each syllable, making the ivory blade a suppliant to the jewel’s majesty. “Apa apalla apallasso….”
Fog lifted from the marshy ground beneath the dock. It grew darker, more solid. It tightened into a column as sinuous as a snake’s body, then coalesced in the form of a building in the air above Metron’s circle.
Metron’s voice sank as he murmured a few words more. His athame continued to beat a fixed rhythm in the air, but his mouth smiled triumphantly as he looked up at the arc of spectators.
“The Spike,” he said. “Built in the center of Durassa by the first Intercessor as her palace and workroom…and as a prison.”
Fog continued to condense into the image. The building, a cylindrical structure in a walled garden, took on texture and the streaky gray/pink color of banded schist. The sheer-sided tower had no doors or windows, but a covered passage ran from the gate in the enclosure wall to the base of the tower.
“The outer wall should be no difficulty for active men like yourselves,” Metron said with a greasy laugh. “Even less so for your companion, Master Gar.”
Coarse bushes, vines, and—along the low-lying side opposite the entrance passage—bamboo appeared on the image, clothing the outer circuit of the wall. Only the twenty feet or so to either side of the gateway was clear.
Metron’s left index finger indicated places where shrubbery completely concealed the stonework; his right hand continued to beat time with the athame. The wizard controlled his breathing carefully, but Garric could see strain in his face and the sweat beading at his hairline.
“They don’t keep it up,” Vascay said, nodding in recollection. “Occasionally Echeon sends out a squad of Protectors to cut back the worst of it, but he can’t hire groundskeepers in the usual way.”
“I don’t bloody blame them!” Hakken muttered.
“Inside the garden…” Metron continued, “are dangers that you could not pass without my art to help you.”
Vascay raised an eyebrow. Garric felt his own spirit quiver at the implied challenge.
He grinned at himself. What Metron said was probably true. The wizard might have been foolish to word the matter in quite that fashion in the midst of armed men whose lives had made them hard even if they didn’t start out that way; but Garric would be a much greater fool if he let himself react to empty words.
Metron gestured, filling the space between the outer wall and the tower with carefully manicured vegetation. Trees stood in rounds of bright-colored flowers; hedges snaked and branched like water running across flat ground, sometimes encircling more flowers; and one star-shaped bed was of translucent, bell-shaped plants that looked more like jellyfish than anything Garric had seen before on dry land.
Tint wandered back, cleaning her teeth with a fingernail and holding an opened cattail for Garric in case he was hungry. It was probably an exceptionally fine cattail….
Tint rubbed against his leg; he scratched the coarse fur between her shoulder blades in response. The more contact Garric had with the beastgirl the less human she seemed, but he’d have found his wizard-imposed exile much harder to bear without Tint’s presence.
“Is that really what the gardens look like over the wall?” Toster said. The big man knuckled his beard with a look of deep puzzlement.
“It is,” Metron said. “What I show you here is the thing itself, not an image of the thing.”
“Then who keeps them up?” Toster said bluntly. “That’s expert work, that is. My old dad would’ve been proud as could be to have Lord Kelshak’s maze come out so neat and no bare holly twigs.”
“The garden cares for itself,” Metron said. His smile looked strained under its superiority, but the wizard was too proud to suggest an end to idle questions. “No human enters it, nor could a human survive without the help of one such as myself.”
Garric didn’t speak, but it was one of the times he regretted no longer having Carus in his mind to share a silent comment. A man really confident in his power wouldn’t have gone to the lengths Metron did to pose before a gang of bandits.
The wizard cleared his throat, and resumed, “When I’ve brought you through the gardens—”
“You haven’t said just how you are going to bring us through the gardens,” Hakken said. “Are we supposed to haul you over the wall with us?”
“In a manner of speaking you’re correct,” Metron said. “I’ll provide you—”
His eyes met Garric’s.
“I’ll provide Master Gar…” he went on. He brought a crystal disk on a silvery neck chain out from under his robe. “With this. I will be within it, working my art as required.”
Everyone looked at Garric. He shrugged. “Go on,” he said.
He closed Gar’s callused right hand into a fist, wishing he didn’t feel so completely alone and adrift. He wondered how long it would be before he was back with his friends, in his proper world.
How long it would be, and whether it would ever be again.
“When we’ve reached the tower,” Metron said, letting the disk fall against his chest, “we will climb it.”
“It’d be easier to go through the wall, it seems to me,” Vascay said. “Not easy. But easier.”
“Easy, yes, but useless,” the wizard said. “The lower floor is a guardhouse. The floor above it holds the kitchen and is guarded as well. The two floors above that are the Intercessor’s private apartments and workroom…and Lord Thalemos is held in the prison levels still higher in the building. Shall we not start where we want to go, my good man?”
“You figure we can throw a line to the top and climb up it?” Hakken said. He squinted in consideration. “We might could at that, but it’d have to be a light grappling hook and a bloody thin line.”
“No matter how sharp the hook was, it would find no purchase on top of the tower,” Metron said. “There is no parapet, and the stone, as you will see, is smooth as glass.”