Sword Play by Clayton Emery Read Free Book Online Page A

purple and yellow flowers, and no less than nine human stoop-backed gardeners bustled about them. Their supervisor tended her own patch at the back of the conservatory. Here in the hot greenhouse, she wore nothing but a short chemise and a frilly apron that looked ludicrous. Especially since, as a collector of grotesques, Sysquemalyn had many weird and sinister plants concealed back where Lady Polaris wouldn’t see them on her infrequent visits. The flowers resembled fleshy organs, bilious teardrops, lizards’ tongues, finger bones, and more. The female wizard hummed as she snipped liver-colored blossoms and dropped them into a pail.
    “Your damned barbarian is still alive!” Candlemas growled without preamble. “You owe me an arm!”
    She pretended bemusement. “An arm, dear ‘Mas? Why do you need three? A third to comb your beard? Certainly not to comb your head.” She laughed gaily at her wit.
    Exasperated, exhausted by his long walk—regenerating strained a body—Candlemas nevertheless ran his good hand over his bald pate, evoking another merry trill. “Don’t change the subject! And don’t mock me! Your barbarian—you started this stupid contest—is still alive! He’s been healing in the forest south of the Barren Mountains! He didn’t die when attacked by the remorhaz, damn it, and you owe me an arm!”
    Sysquemalyn set down her snippers and pouted prettily, as if sympathetic. “Dear, dear Candlemas. You’re all tuckered out by your little rebuilding project there. Barbarian? I don’t… Oh, the yellow-haired fellow, skinny as a plucked chicken! I remember him!”
    “I remember too!” In the greenhouse, the wizard was sweating heavily. Salty drops running down his healing arm stung like wasps. “You cheated, sicced a fiend on me too soon—aargh!” Pained, he lurched backward against a table, knocking a dozen potted flowers to the slate floor with a crash.
    Sysquemalyn tsked, but clearly Candlemas wasn’t about to go away. With a theatrical sigh, she perched her rump on a tall stool. “Very well. I may have been in error when I conjured the fiend. It could have happened to anyone. You should feel sorry for me, I’m so embarrassed.”
    “Sorry?” gasped the man. “Em-embarrassed?” He swooned, clawing sweat from his face.
    Smirking, Sysquemalyn replied, “You know, this is great fun. I’m so glad we formed this little wager. It was dead boring around here.”
    Eyes bugging from his head at her audacity, Candlemas couldn’t answer. Almost absently, Sysquemalyn picked up a lacquered bladder and gave an experimental squeeze. A thin green stream arced across the space between them and struck Candlemas’s red-meat arm.
    With a scream, the wizard leaped fully three feet in the air, crashed against a rack of potted flowers, and sent them smashing as he shrieked and clawed and ripped at his new arm as if to tear it off.
    “By Tipald, am I careless!” Sysquemalyn tipped a crockery pot to sprinkle cool water over the writhing wizard. “That’s liquid fertilizer. My, I’ll bet that stings!”
    As Candlemas ground his teeth and fought to regain his feet, Sysquemalyn jabbered on. “I’ll tell you what, since you feel so put-upon. Let’s continue the contest, and up the stakes even further. Let’s see … If your barbarian is healthy, we’ll dump some more tests on him, hard ones this time. If he survives, you win, as before. If he dies, I win. And the loser this time gets flayed alive!”
    “Flayed …” croaked Candlemas. He felt flayed now.
    “And just to be fair, you decide the test! I’ll stay out of it.”
    Despite dire warnings and his own pain, Candlemas was intrigued. But one thought intruded that had bothered him for weeks. “No, wait, wait. There’s a flaw in the argument, and I should have seen it when we made this bet. To win, you need the barbarian to die. And if we keep piling on tribulations, he will die. Then you’ll have won. But for me to win, he must survive, which he