Emeric leaned back on the cushions of his traveling throne. "And so. How goes the siege in my absence? How is the situation in general?"
Dragorvich had not survived as Emeric's siegemaster without developing a fine understanding of his master's moods. The king was in a suppressed good humor. Plainly he had got what he was looking for. Dragorvich knew he'd been heading for the Carpathians—a long journey with only one possible destination: the Countess Elizabeth Bartholdy. The most beautiful—and some said the most influential—woman in Hungary. Emeric had brought more cavalry, and more men with him. But Dragorvich knew his master well enough to suspect that was not all he'd brought back.
He also knew Emeric well enough to know the king wanted triumph for himself.
"Not as well as when Your Majesty was here. However, pursuant to your instructions, we have now started three more tunnels. My engineers calculate that all four are now beneath the walls of the Citadel."
He cleared his throat. "Pursuant to your instructions, we've halted repairing the moles. But a few weeks should see them repaired. We simply await Your Majesty's orders on that. As for the rest, we've kept up cannon fire on the western outer curtain wall. It shows some signs of damage, but it is still far from being ready to fall. Night-firing from the ships has been kept up, more for the nuisance value than anything else. The Venetian gunners have range and elevation on the ship's cannon, so we cannot really use them for pounding the walls. Also, with the fortress on Vidos covering that flank, we cannot bring guns to bear on the northern side."
"That fortress must go."
The Count nodded. "It would assist us to have it taken."
"I'll think about it. Now tell me, Aldanto, have you caught Hakkonsen and his saboteurs yet?"
"We caught and killed two of them," said the blond man, flatly. "The hunt will continue."
"It had better."
He turned to the Byzantine admiral. "And the blockade?"
The Byzantine snapped his fingers. A lieutenant hurried forward with a pouch. "These letters were taken from a vessel we intercepted some days after Your Majesty took the fleet back to the Narenta. They indicate that Doge Dorma has no idea that the island has been invaded. He is, however, taking steps for the reinforcement of it." The admiral smiled. "Or he was going to. One of the steps he commands is recalling Captain-General Tomaselli and promoting the commander of the garrison, Leopoldo, into his place. No surprise there, of course. If Tomaselli hadn't been well connected with the previous Doge, he'd have been recalled long since."
Emeric gave a little crow of laughter. "I want those letters. We shall have to see to a way of getting them into the captain-general's hands. He may wish to change sides." He rubbed his hands gleefully. "Any news out of Constantinople?"
"The Golden Horn enclave still holds out. Vessels are not expected back from Trebizond yet, Your Majesty. The Greek emperor is nonetheless pleased with some of the prizes he has taken from the ships sailing from Acre."
The king muttered something about Emperor Alexius. It could have been "Useless ass." Then he turned to the Croats and Magyar. "And the peasants? Are they getting back to the land? I want yields as well as loot."
The Croat nodded. "I had to hang a few men to get the message home. But there are more of them working their fields."
The Magyar captain cleared his throat. "There are some of the Corfiote nobility we've caught—what the Venetians call the 'Libri d'Oro.' Most of them are inside the Citadel, but some were still loose in the countryside. They're not worth ransom, but I thought we might make them into collaborators, Your Majesty. They can find and drive the peasants for us."
The king nodded. "An excellent idea. See to it."
"Your Majesty . . . there are several towns, too. Fortified ones in the north. We have them under watch but they're not besieged yet. When the Citadel falls, of course, they will be easy to take. But in the meanwhile . . ."
"Offer them terms. Once we're inside the walls, we can change our minds, can't we?"
All the officers standing about laughed heartily. They knew Emeric well enough to know the king admired his own sense of humor—and frowned on those who didn't.
Emeric had chosen a bare hilltop overlooking the Citadel from the southeast for the ritual he had to enact in strict accordance to the instruction from Countess Elizabeth. Initially, he had been pleased at extracting help from her; now, in retrospect, he was no longer as pleased as he had been.
Elizabeth Bartholdy had a way of bringing the kings of Hungary under her control. Emeric had watched the effect on his own father, over the years. By the time his father died, he had been no more than a shadow of the man Emeric remembered as a boy.
He wondered just how many strings were attached to this particular "gift." Elizabeth never did anything that was not to her advantage. And, yes, he made use of the darker powers himself, but not to the extent that she did. Nor did he meddle with the powers that she dared to.
But . . .
He had the damned thing, after all, so he might as well make use of it.
He went out to his picked site in a grim state of mind. He ensured that his men would cooperate by stationing guards around a perimeter that was far enough away that no one would be able to see what he was doing except for his special assistants. Those assistants had been provided for him by Elizabeth, also. The ritual that needed to be enacted here could not be done by one person alone.
The weather had decided to cooperate, at least. Storm clouds gathered and built around Pantocrator. The wind whipped angry flurries of dust from where the assistants had been assiduously clearing every scrap of living matter, even lichen and tiny rock plants, until there was nothing but sterile, barren rock. Another was sharpening the bronze knife.
The patterns and sigils Emeric would do himself; he trusted such things to no assistant, even ones trained by Bartholdy. The fact that he kept such iron control over important matters, delegating them to no one else, was one of the things he thought his great-great-aunt respected about him. The brushes and pens for that work he kept in a special case—an ancient thing she'd given him many years before. It was made of hide and bone. The hide was curiously dark and iridescent, the bone . . . jet black. Neither part came from any earthly creature, and neither did the fangs, which served as a sort of semi-living lock and guardian. They opened only on certain words, treacherously closing on the hand if a mere intonation were wrong.
Of course, the king needed a suitable supply of ink. That was what the knife was being sharpened for. These rituals were designed to constrain the nonhuman and to protect him from it. They had to affect the homunculus he was about to release. Elizabeth had supplied the nonhuman blood from her captive stock. And Emeric and his assistants would have to give of their own to protect themselves.
So, when the knife had been honed to an edge that would wound the wind, each of them carefully slashed his forearm in turn, beginning with Emeric. Each of them funneled the scarlet blood that ran from the slash into the bottle that Elizabeth had prepared, while Emeric recited the guttural phrases Elizabeth had provided him. The sky darkened and the wind whirled around the hilltop, shrilling in their ears. There were two bottles now, one of red "ink," and one of black. Taking the first brush, Emeric began to paint the body and face of his first assistant with an intricate interweaving of sigils and symbols. The first went to build a fire in the center of the cleared place—only the fuel was bone, human and unhuman. When he was done with the last of them, and only then, did his most trusted assistant take the brush and complete the job on his master, Emeric. Then Emeric took up the knife and cut the first of thirteen protective circles into the bare earth.
At length, when the summer storm had formed into a huge dark tumbling mass, with Pantocrator shrouded in rain and distant thunder growling and cracking closer, they were ready. Stripped to the waist and painted—only their eyes showing in the masks of lines of alternating black and red—the nine began their chanting. The bone-fire was lit, the fungus that Emeric had piled atop it burning with a greenish flame.
Lightning lashed the earth, as if it was trying to strike them, but inside their protective circles it could not touch them. The assistants were made of stern stuff; though the very earth outside their hilltop smoked with the strikes, and the thunder threatened to shatter their eardrums, they did not even falter for a moment in their chanting.
Then, when the winds began to roar and the flames were near horizontal and the first heavy drops were splashing down onto the sun-dried earth, Emeric picked up the glass jar and threw the container into the flames. By the time the jar left his hands, the creature inside was fully aroused. The King of Hungary could sense the malevolent rage emanating from it.
The jar shattered. The liquid ran out of the fire in little coruscating, hissing rivulets.
The earth shook, angrily. If Emeric and his assistants had not been warned of the effect and braced for it, they would have been knocked to the ground.
And then the screaming began.
The scream seemed to go on and on; it pierced the very brain. It was full of rage, and pain. And for one, terrible moment, even Emeric wondered if he had let something loose that should never have seen the light of day.
The mighty cloud above them was lit with sheet lightnings. And the rain, advancing moments before, slacked off. The scream thinned and faded, receding into the distance, leaving a strange taste in the back of the mouth, and somehow, in the mind.
Well. Whatever had been turned loose was no longer his problem.
Emeric stood triumphant, smiling toothily in the flickering firelight. The truth be told, high magics were something he followed by rote. He enjoyed the powers conferred on him, the use of which required no effort on his part, but he was always nervous about these tasks.
Suddenly the earth itself trembled. He was flung from his feet. The rock beneath the fire burst explosively, scattering flames and ash over them. The ground shook beneath them, again and again.
The ground shook like a dog, flea-bitten. "What was that?" Svanhild clung to Erik. First the storm and now this! She wished for Cahokia.
Erik patted her comfortingly. "Its just an Earth-tremor, dear. We have had them up at Bakkaflói, especially when the volcano at Surtsey has been active. In my grandfather's time, one knocked down half of Reykjavik. Either it is not a very big one or we are far from its center."
"Are we safe?"
"We should probably get out of this cave."
"But it is raining out there."
"It seems to be stopping now."
Manfred picked himself up from the battlements. "Who in the hell needs cannons? Another one like that and the walls will just fall down. Does this part of the world often get earthquakes?"
The captain-general nodded, staying sitting down. "They have been heard of before, yes." Manfred had been trying for tact, especially when listening to the captain-general's version of the destruction of the moles. He'd been struggling with a volcano of laughter. Instead he got an earthquake.
"Well, it is a lot less welcome than that storm will be, if it comes here off the mountain. I thought I was going to boil in my armor today."
Eneko Lopez and his companions came breathlessly up the stairs.
"Did you hear it?" demanded Eneko. "Or see anything unusual?"
"No. But I felt it," said Von Gherens. "Knocked me off my feet."
"Not the earth tremor. Just before that. The scream. The agony and the rage and hatred."
Manfred shook his head. "It wasn't from out here. We were watching the coming storm and then we had the 'quake. The storm seems to be breaking up."
Eneko took a deep breath. "Something very magical, and very, very evil has come to this island. Something that should not ever have been created. I fear for this place."
Count Dragorvich cursed. Then he swore. Then he kicked a rock. His adjutant kept well back. He had run to call the siegemaster, only to find the man striding to the mines already.
"All four, Tiepostich?"
The adjutant nodded. "Yes. We got two men out of the northern one. In the others we lost all of the sappers and we lost most of the bucket chain."
"Damn! Labor is scarce enough without this. And the king is not going to be pleased that we have to dig the tunnels again. We need to wait a few days before we restart too. There are always aftershocks."
Tiepostich knew that when the king was not pleased, one of Dragorvich's men was usually going to be heading for a slow death. He wondered if, this time, it would be him.
In the cave beneath the Citadel the rock moved, though not so much as a stalactite fell. But the priestess watched in horror as the sacred pool cracked across, and the water drained away into the rock.
She looked at the small altar with the half almond. Without a bride he would not help. The Goddess would defend, but this . . . this called for him. For the actual wielding of power.
But who would pay such a price?