Read Online The Doomfarers of Coramonde by Brian Daley - Free Book Online Page B

sinew about him, as the Prince now knew to his
discomfort, and moved with the ease of fitness.
    As the unusual
trio—unusual foursome, he amended, for surely he was as oddly met as they—moved
to their tasks, Andre took the lavaliere from his neck and took his sword from
its scabbard. Unscrewing the pommel knob, he dropped the chain and Calundronius
into the hollow there, then replaced the cap.
    “Within this
container Calundronius is itself nullified for a time,” he explained, laying
the sword in a corner.
    He took his
place again and he, Gabrielle and Van Duyn began a unified chanting in some
monotonous language, unlike that of the codex and somehow much more
disquieting.
    The windows
were curtained, but some daylight had penetrated prior to the incantation. Now,
though, it was as if all light was forced from the room save the glow in the
braziers and a single candle in the center of the pentacle. They were in
darkest night and a bone chill had taken over. Springbuck couldn’t suppress the
conviction that they had somehow left the room and arrived elsewhere, in a
place where it was beyond his ability to orient himself or apprehend reality.
    Gabrielle threw
her hands over her head and her entire body began to glow with a blue light
that pulsed and flickered.
    An amorphous
shadow rose amid the runes, expanding from the floor in a manner which struck
the Prince as unwilling. He had the distinct impression that it was listening
to the chanting, that it scrutinized him briefly and then ignored him, and that
it received instructions with a hateful resentment.
    Gabrielle and
the scholar were silent now, though the woman still radiated the eerie aura and
gave the appearance of being in a trance. Andre changed his tone from a chant
to a steady, placid mode of speech. Springbuck thought that he assumed the
attitude of a schoolmaster assigning a complex task to a defiant and
not-terribly-bright student.
    Without warning
the darkness rolling within the pentacle was throwing itself from one side of
its invisible confinement to the other, straining to break free and destroy the
mortals in the room. Andre spoke a syllable of duress in a voice fearsome and
completely unlike anything Springbuck had heard from him before. The thing
within the pentacle was instantly quiet.
    Andre issued a
last instruction and, with an almost vocal snarl, the being was gone. Light and
warmth returned to the chamber.
    Andre stepped
from his spot to recover Calundronius and Springbuck noticed that he was bathed
in sweat and that his pudgy hands trembled badly.
    “Well,” asked
the Prince as Gabrielle began to reorder the room, “where is our defender?
Where is this fabulous metal war machine?”
    Van Duyn,
extinguishing a brazier, replied, “Our… unwilling benefactor has gone to
arrange for its transportation here. It wouldn’t do to have the contraption
materialize in this room, so Andre specified that it be brought to the meadow
outside the castle. If it’s moving when it arrives here, it could do damage
within the confines of a room or the bailey.”
    The scholar and
the wizard hurried off together to watch for the fruit of their handiwork,
chattering importantly in the way of experimenters everywhere. Springbuck
shifted his attention to Gabrielle as she bound up her hair with rawhide
throngs.
    She came to him
where he stood nursing his wrist and there was much, much in the glances they
exchanged.
    “I—I knew that
you and Edward would come to conflict, knew it in my heart when I first saw
you,” she told him, her eyes still holding his. She took his injured wrist
between cool, elegant hands.
    “Not hurt
seriously,” she decided after exploring it gently with her fingertips. “The
pain will leave it soon.”
    They stood quite
motionless so, for a moment.
    His gaze was
first to fall away.
    “I suppose we
should be on the ramparts with the others,” he murmured.
    Her hands left
his and he was immediately sorry he had spoken. He would have