again, wafting over the top of a high stone wall. He recognized the clear, musical voice. It was Mika.
'What is she doing here at the keep, my friends?' he murmured to himself. Grinning, Wort flung himself against the wall and began pulling himself up its rough surface with powerful arms. If he fell, the hard cobbles below would almost certainly snap his neck. He did not care. Breathing hard, he heaved himself to the top of the wall.
On the opposite side lay the keep's garden. There were no flowers this late in the year, and the trees and hedges were dark and leafless, yet there was a stark beauty about it all the same. Then he saw her-as pale and radiant as the angel in the shacf- owed tapestry. She wore a gown he had never seen before, a flowing concoction of lavender silk that was in utter contrast to the plain dresses she usually favored. She had never looked so beautiful. Wort raised a hand to signal her and opened his mouth to call. Before he could do anything, however, a second figure stepped from behind a statue. Baron Caidin. He held his arms out, and Mika laughed again as she flung herself into his embrace.
Desperately Wort tried to look away. He could not. With dread he watched as Mika's fine-boned hands ran sensually across Caidin's broad back. The baron's green eyes glittered hungrily as he bent down, pressing his lips against hers. She did not resist him. Just the opposite. The golden-haired doctor leaned into Caidin's body-his strong, whole, handsome body-as the two kissed passionately again, and yet again.
At last Wort managed to turn his head. Going limp, he half slid, half fell down the face of the wall, crashing painfully to the paving stones. A hot wave of nausea surged through him. 'I should have known,' he croaked, his mouth filled with bile. 'You've always had everything I can only dream of, my brother. Everything. While I have nothing.'
That was not completely true. There was one thing Wort had that Caidin did not. The bell. Lurching to his feet, Wort hobbled across the empty courtyard, toward the looming spire of the bell tower.
When he burst into his high chamber, his cry of rage sent pigeons flapping in›all directions. Wort did not care. He batted the birds viciously out of his path. They were hateful creatures anyway. They cared naught for him-they desired only the bread crumbs he fed them. When he spied the tapestry hanging on the wall, fury ignited in his brain. He grabbed fistfuls of the rotting material. With a terrible rending sound and a cloud of dust, the tapestry tore apart. Turning in disgust, Wort flung open the trunk and snatched up the box of tokens. He clambered up the ladder to the belfry. The cursed bell gleamed in the fading daylight, radiating an aura of gloating.
We knew you would come back, bellringer…
'You were right,' Wort snarled. 'Her love means nothing. There is only one way I will ever be whole, and that is to have my revenge.' He grasped the bell's rope in strong, twisted hands. 'And I will have it-now!' The air shook with the thunder of the bell.
Mika knocked again on the stout oaken door at the base of the bell tower, but still there was no answer.
'Perhaps he has gone out somewhere,' she murmured. Suddenly from high above came the clarion sounds of a bell. Mika smiled. That was why Wort hadn't heard her knock. He was up in the belfry, with his bells and his pigeons.
'I suppose I shall just have to be rude and let myself in,' she decided aloud.
Opening the door, Mika began making her way up the dim shaft of the tower's spiral staircase. She lifted the hem of her dress to keep from stumbling. She had traded the lavender gown Caidin had given her for her usual dress of dark wool. It had been difficult to wrest herself away from the baron. These last days it had felt as if she were caught in a sweet, burning dream. All she could think of were Caidin's brilliant eyes, and the fiery touch of his body. It was wrong-it had to be. Yet she could not help herself. Each time she decided to turn him away, it seemed as if he knew just where to find the wounds of her loneliness, rubbing words of passion into them like salt, until she almost cried out at her need to be held, and touched, and… desired. It was manipulative, and cruel, and so very delicious.
This afternoon, however, she had vowed to slip away from Caidin. She had not seen Wort in several days, and wanted to make certain he was well and to talk more about the operation she planned that would hopefully heal his back. Telling Caidin there was a sick person she needed to see-and indeed this was not entirely untrue-she had managed to convince him to let her go, at least for an hour. She knew that the baron thought his half brother mad and violence-prone, and that Caidin did not want her to visit him. Yet the baron did not seem to know Wort as the gentle-spirited person she did.
'Perhaps one day I can help Caidin see that his brother is truly a good man,' Mika whispered. 'Perhaps I could even help them become friends.' The thought made her smile.
'Hello?' she called as she stepped into the dreary room where Wort made his home. Only the soft warbling of pigeons answered her. Again the ancient stones of the tower thrummed with the deep tolling of a bell. Something about the tone of the bell suddenly made her shiver. Shaking off the premonition, she moved toward the ladder that led to the belfry.
Mika paused. Something she had never seen before caught her eye. A tattered shape hung on one of the chamber's rough stone walls. Curious, she approached the wall. Reaching out, she stroked soft, frayed fabric.
'Why, it's a tapestry,' she murmured. The fabric was rotten, and the weaving badly torn, almost shredded. Carefully, she lifted the tatters of cloth, holding them together to see what tableaux they might once have depicted.
A gasp escaped her lips. A serene face gazed back at her with deep violet eyes, the perfect reflection of her own. It was like staring into a dark, dusty mirror. A jagged rip ran right through the visage of the woman, like a livid wound. Mika let the ragged tatters fall. She backed away, clasping both hands to her mouth. She tried to blink away the disturbing image of the pale face-her face-brutally torn in two.
Again a thunder of bells sounded from above. Mika jumped, her heart rattling in her throat. This time the tolling was distinctly ominous. Filled with inexplicable dread, she craned her neck upward and gazed at the trapdoor in the ceiling. Almost without thinking, she moved to the rickety ladder. She ascended slowly, as if reeled in by some unseen force. She pushed the trapdoor open and peered through the crack. What she saw froze her blood.
Wort was pulling one last time on the rope hanging from a bronze bell, a maniacal grin on his twisted face. A patch of air before him began to roil like a miniature storm cloud. Smoky tendrils swirled together, coalescing into three amorphous blobs. Gradually the black blobs took on shape and form. The coils of mist vanished. Three dimly translucent figures hovered before Wort, bobbing slowly up and down like corpses floating on a midnight sea. Mika bit her tongue to keep from screaming.
'Here, take them!' Wort snarled. He thrust a small wooden box out toward the three dusky apparitions. 'Take them all, and do your work!'
The three spirits bowed as one. 'It will be done, bellringer.' Their voices blended into chilling harmony. As the apparitions dissolved into the air, the box in Wort's hands did the same. With a look of hateful satisfaction, he nodded and began to shamble across the floor, heading for the trapdoor.
Fear flooded Mika's brain. Dizzy at what she had ' seen, she let the trapdoor snap shut and backed down the ladder. In her fright she missed her footing. Slipping from the ladder, she tumbled to the rotted straw that covered the hard stone floor. The wind rushed out of her painfully, and she lay paralyzed by pain and terror. Only one thought thrummed through her mind, as deafening as the noise of a bell.
What had Wort done?
As Wort turned away from the bell rope, he heard something in his chamber below-a thump! followed by a soft cry of pain. Rage flared in his chest. Someone had invaded his personal domain. Pulling up the trapdoor by its iron ring, he clambered swiftly as an ape down the ladder. He leapt to the floor and crouched, staring with blazing eyes.
'I see you have come back, Doctor.' His voice was low, hoarse, dangerous.
Hastily, Mika scrambled to her feet. 'Of course, I have, Wort,' she said breathlessly. She made a visiЫе effort to compose herself. 'I know it has been some days since I last came, but you know… you know how busy I am sometimes in the village. I came as soon as I could.'
Weird laughter bubbled in his chest. 'Oh, yes, doctor. I know very well about the things that occupy your time.'
A frown cast a shadow across her forehead. 'I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.'
