"It's not?" Bram exclaimed innocently, looking over his shoulder to where he had come from. "I guess I got all turned around and confused by your rules."
"There's nothing confusing about any of this," snapped the centaur. "You're just simple-minded." The centaur extended its left arm and pointed behind Bram. "Now turn around and go right."
Bram quickly spun about and retraced his steps. "Turn right here?" he asked, standing at the intersection again. Straight ahead was the path he had already traveled, and to the right was the path he had wanted to take from the start.
"Yes, yes, yes!" exclaimed the centaur. "My, you humans are thick. I'm certain I explained all this to you clearly. You may turn right, just not left. Now do it and leave me in peace, before I have to get nasty." To emphasize its point, the creature reached behind its back and placed a hand on the hilt of the sword slung there.
"Try not to be so thick in the future!" the centaur called after him.
Bram bowed his head in mock deference, then proceeded. He was scarcely ten steps down the left fork when he felt his vision shift and blur in a vaguely familiar way. He blinked once, twice, thrice; the magical path beneath his feet disappeared and he stood before wondrous gates of gold and silver.
Chapter Nine
Lyim looked out across the awakening hillsides that sloped gently toward Thonvil, and he sighed with satisfaction. He had teleported to the eastern dirt road to give himself this view of the sleepy little burg. Despite its current run-down state, Thonvil's half-timbered buildings with thatched roofs looked warm and inviting against a backdrop of greening grasses and cornflower-blue sky.
It must have been a wonderful setting in which to grow up, Lyim thought, and not for the first time. Any place would have been better than the ugly and unyielding village of mud huts in which he'd lived on the Plains of Dust. The unfairness of the dichotomy was another entry on the ever-growing list of reasons to hate Guerrand DiThon.
The first time he'd had such envious thoughts was when, as an apprentice to Belize, Lyim had traveled to Thonvil on behalf of his friend Guerrand. That had ended in the disaster that was Lyim's hand. He'd come to Thonvil then to save Guerrand's family. Now he was here to destroy it. It seemed somehow fitting to Lyim, a closing of the circle.
Every hideous and pain-racked death occurring this spring in Thonvil was on Guerrand's head. Lyim had no doubt about that and felt no guilt. Death knells rang here two and three times a day because of Guerrand's unwillingness to bend the rules to help the friend who'd given his hand saving Guerrand's life.
Lyim adjusted the fingerless leather glove over his right hand and tucked it inside the overlong cuff on his coarse brown robe. It would not do, particularly considering the prevailing air of suspicion and fear, to advertise his profession by wearing his usual red mage's robe or allowing anyone to see his snake hand.
Lyim followed the road into the village. The mage kept his eyes averted and drew into himself so as not to attract notice as a stranger, a habit he had developed since the accident that had changed his hand. He could scarcely remember the days when he had sought the spotlight by both deed and dress. The man in the drab, dun robe had once worn the brightest, most flamboyant colors in the newest styles. He had once made it a goal to get to know the people in any small village he visited for more than a few days. Especially the ladies. Those days were far in Lyim's past.
Women still admired him, he had noticed with some small measure of pride. Lyim's handsome looks had changed little in nearly a decade, with no care paid to them. His hair was long, dark, and wavy, though he no longer took the time to fashion his signature top braid. The rigors of his life had kept his muscles toned and defined as only a strict regimen of exercise had before. Yes, women still looked at him with eager eyes, until they inevitably saw the snake that was his hand.
Lyim felt the creature shift annoyingly inside the thick leather glove. He gave an angry shake of his head and turned his stride toward the village green encircled by Thonvil's timbered buildings. Standing in the shadow of a tree, Lyim watched as two men dug a grave in the newly softened soil. He counted eleven fresh mounds of dirt in the square that until recent weeks had but two or three new additions each year. The plague was turning out to be as deadly as he'd hoped.
Lyim could scarcely believe the luck of overhearing the whispered conversation of a sailor who had recently returned to Palanthas from the Minotaur Islands. The sailor spoke with horror of fleeing Mithas when a new and vile pestilence had sprung up among the smattering of humans there. "The medusa plague," they were calling it, a disease whose arrival and spread they were blaming on the unclean living habits of the bovinelike minotaurs who inhabited the isles.
Lyim had been struck by the plague's similarity to his own situation, however different some of the symptoms. He had never shed skin, and he'd lived with the affliction for many years. But the snakes… it was too coincidental to ignore, and so he decided to travel to the islands northeast of the Blood Sea to see this disease for himself.
En route, he had briefly entertained the hope that unlocking the secret of the minotaur plague might provide some clue to curing his own affliction, but that died when he saw the first victim. The man's limbs had changed to three-headed snakes, not the single head that was his hand. What was more, the victims all turned to stone within three days and died, so Lyim realized there was no link to his own condition to be found here.
But he was a mage with a bitter grudge to settle, and the random pestilence in Mithas gave him another idea. A more delicious idea, in that it would allow him to cure his hand and get the revenge that he had longed for in the handful of months since Guerrand had refused to grant him entrance to Bastion.
Lyim spent two months among the brutish minotaurs, living in the most squalid conditions he'd endured since leaving the Plains of Dust. Most of the buildings on Mithas were of either mud or rough planking, with nothing better than a dirt path between them, even in the capital city of Lacynos. Despite horrid living conditions, the minotaurs were among the most honor-bound creatures Lyim had met in all his travels. They thought he was examining the stone bodies to find a magical cure. If they had known he was actually collecting the pestilence from the dead bodies and storing it in a specially prepared magical gem, they might have killed him, or worse.
Lyim saw spreading the plague in Thonvil as the perfect, triple-edged sword to use against Guerrand DiThon. As if inflicting an epidemic upon Guerrand's people weren't revenge enough, Lyim had added a curse to the pestilence so that Guerrand himself would appear responsible for the magical sickness. But the most useful of all the repercussions of the plague was that the news of its spread in Thonvil might very likely draw Guerrand from Bastion. Lyim would then have the opportunity to breach the stronghold more easily, gam entrance, and seek to reverse the process that had mutated his hand.
It had been a simple matter, under cover of a dark night less than a fortnight ago, to add the collected pestilence in the magical gem to the water in the village well. While monitoring the plague's progress was enjoyable. Lyim had returned this day primarily to discover whether news of the sickness had reached Guerrand.
The mage left the gravediggers in the square and sought the one person who was the likeliest to know: Guerrand's younger sister, Kirah. If anyone here still communicated with Guerrand, it would be she.
Lyim hiked the quarter league through unplanted fields toward the black and imposing stone castle perched on the Strait of Ergoth. Not usually of a mind to notice that spring had truly arrived, even Lyim could see that all patches of snow had disappeared into the earth, and the pale beige of winter was slowly turning to olive-green. The progress of the plague had put Lyim in an uncommonly good mood, and he launched into the uplifting last refrain from 'The Lark, the Rave, and the Owl," singing in an aggressive and undisciplined base: