PART 3: Curse of the Dying
Some people say that life is a journey; it’s not about where you’re going to, but how you get there. Others that life is a stage and every person an actor therein. I’ve even heard it said that life is a kaleidoscope. Simply adjust your perspective a little and suddenly everything falls into a different shape.
Whatever it is, when you enter a new phase of life, or death, it is like opening a door. All you can hope for is that whatever is on the other side doesn’t wish to devour you before you can escape.
With this thought in mind, I opened the door and stepped inside. There was a faint light in here, from the coals of a fire which had burnt out in a grate. This light cast the corners in a deeper shadow, so that I had difficulty in piercing them. Sitting near the grate’s glow was a large, four-poster bed with heavy scarlet drapes. They were pulled back a little on the near side as if carelessly shut by the one within. I could just make out the vague, pale oval of a man’s face on the pillow inside.
Near the bed, on my side of it, was a small wooden table with a pitcher of water, a unlit candle and a drinking glass sitting on it. The glass had some water in it as well. I’m not at liberty to say if it was half full, or half empty, but it was exactly what I had been looking for. An easy way to make sure that my poison only took the master of the house. If nothing of the sort had been there, I would have had to resort to something of the dart or injection methods, both of which could have become messy in a hurry.
A thick carpet on the floor deadened my footfalls as I crept across the room. At the side of the table I paused, glancing at the figure on the bed. His eyes were hidden by the pillow and a mass of dark hair. A pale hand lay beside the pillow, with a heavy seal ring still glinting on it. The feeling of magic in the room was intense, as if a fairy had been by and sprinkled her wish-granting dust on the floor. It blunted my senses, so that I could not tell if the man was asleep or shamming. He was certainly breathing steadily, laying relaxed as if deep in slumber.
I drew a tiny packet from a cloak pocket and looked at it in the dim, faintly orange light. White powder was inside, fine as icing sugar. It would leave no color in the water, no taste and hardly any odor. But it was deadly. A poison concocted in another dimension, by people who know what they are doing with mushrooms, herbs and man-made chemicals.
I opened the packet and moved a hand to tip it into the cup, intending to reserve two-thirds for the pitcher. My hand was just over the shining glass vessel when there was the sound of a breath being drawn beside me. I startled, sprinkling poison over glass and table. The Duke had awoken.
I turned my head towards him, seeing the whites of eyes bright in the gloom as they stared at me in horror. At the same moment, something else moved in the room. From the shadows beside the bed a wizened hand shot out, grasping my wrist so tight the packet of poison fell from my hand to the floor. A high-pitched, grating voice cried,
“See master, I told you evil was abroad tonight! My power warned me. Someone is poisoning you in your own house!”
The Duke sat upright, throwing aside the curtain. I jerked back, dragging a figure from the shadows with me and almost upsetting the table in the meantime. It was the figure of a bent, shriveled woman with long, gray hair and a terrible glint in her eyes. The feel of magic was so strong around her it was like an oppressive perfume, going to my head. I made another jerk at my wrist, getting it free this time as we both stumbled out into the center of the room. The witch was dressed in black and red velvet, a rich gown for one so unappetizing in appearance.
Out of the corner of my eyes I saw the Duke fumbling with his bed clothes, drawing something out from under the covers which appeared to be a handgun. But at the same time the witch took a hobbling step towards me, holding up one of her wrinkled hands. I felt a beam of dark light strike at my mind, a direct mental attack that was designed to incapacitate me rather than craze or kill.
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As I hinted, I am not unskilled in such contests of the mind. I pulled myself together, blocking the dark thrust with mental armor like a scaled dragon’s hide. The witch was strong; I felt her power start to peel back the scales as a fisher’s knife would. I prepared another block, but did not lose sight of the physical world. The Duke was shouting, “Agatha, get back!” While the witch came at me with her claw as if to ram home the mental spike with her bare hand. Blocking the next magical thrust with my mind, I drew my sword in the physical realm. Even a strong mental magician has a difficult time keeping track of both the physical world and what is going on in their minds during a mental duel. The witch almost fell onto the blade as I made a thrust at her heart. It went home, sliding through red-and-black fabric as well as what lay beneath.
The witch gasped, staggering forward further onto the blade. The mental attack broke off, leaving me trying to draw back in the physical realm and the mental one at once. Once again, that witch’s shriveled hand clawed at me, grasping my wrist. She seemed to pull herself up the blade, rather than make an attempt to escape. I felt a deep cold up my arm, a frigid icicle thrust through the wrist.
“May your death be long, until you pay full score for your evil ways!” The witch gasped as she fell dead on my blade.
This curse was not mental magic as I knew it. Her touch made my sword arm go numb and I felt the curse seep into my bones like a poison. I think it sat uneasily with the elixir of youth I had taken so long ago. The vestiges of that potion still ran in my blood, keeping the ravages of time at bay. The curse came up against them and they did not find each other to be comfortable company. Or at least, that’s what I guess, because under the cold I had a growing feeling as if my blood were going to boil. And the witch’s curse did not, as you shall see, have quite the effect she was hoping for.
I shoved her corpse away with my left hand, trying the get a grip on myself and control my numbed arm. The Duke shouted something, calling for guards and giving me pet names of his own invention, I believe. Bullets started to fly as he fired on me, now that his witch was out of the way. The room had cleared of the sense of magic, and that was one relief. It seems the Duke himself had none, but had kept the sorceress as a sort of safeguard, which had created the rumor of his supposed powers.
A bullet ricocheted off my sword’s blade, ringing loudly in the room. I snatched up a chair which was standing nearby and threw it at the Duke, awkwardly, with my left hand. This put his aim off and I jumped forward, switching hands on my blade. A last shot grazed my on the shoulder and he was out of bullets. A sweep of my blade lopped off his hand with the gun in it, a thrust finished him off. I had completed my mission, but everything was a mess, including the room.
Blood was trickling down my arm from the shoulder wound, but I hardly felt it. The fight between the curse and the elixir was making me feel something less than well. Waves of red and yellow poison seemed to be building up somewhere in the back of my head.
Thumping footsteps on the stairs announced the guards, finally on their way. I stumbled across the room, dropping a bar across the door that had been resting to one side of it. That would hold the guards for a time, but now I was trapped in the room. A hasty glance took in the small, arched window which was on the right-hand wall. It was just big enough for a person to fit out of, with a squeeze. The table aided me in reaching it, but I was four stories up above a small strip of land at the edge of the ravine. It looked like a long, dark, jagged way down.
I heard fists beating on the door, then the report of a rifle being fired at it. Leaning down, I snatched the drape of the bed and crammed it out of the window. It was like a puppy wagging its tail in a well and hoping to touch the water. The drape hung out a few feet, still making it a drop of more than three stories to the ground. Desperate, I remembered the length of rope Chuck had given me, which I had around my waist. Uncoiled, it was perhaps twenty feet long and not very thick. But it was better than nothing. I tied it to the end of the drape, shoved the whole thing back out of the window and scrambled through. Even through my gloves, the rope burned my hand as I slid down it. At the bottom of the rope I dropped, landing with a roll and a flop which took my breath away.
For a long moment I lay on the ground, dazed. The sky above was still overcast, a few darker clouds moving swiftly across it in a high-altitude wind. I couldn’t feel one arm, the other shoulder burned with a bullet wound and the colored waves in the back of my mind were roiling disconcertingly. It was, indeed, a night to be remembered.
The guards would start searching the grounds once they realized I had gone out the window. And with the drapes stuffed out the window and the rope on the end, it wasn’t going to take long to guess. With an effort, I pulled myself up and staggered off into the brush. Somehow, I found my way back to the horse. He was in the process of chewing through his picket rope and gave me an angry snarl when I came up. It soon turned to a sneer as he realized what sort of condition I was in. But, being in no mood for argument, I persuaded him to return me to Chuck’s shack without delay.