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‘No. I’ve tried to reach her several times now, but I can’t. I can feel her mind, but she seems utterly distracted. I hope things are going well there.’
‘Maybe the Gel da’ Thae simply don’t want to fight against their own kind. They have no love for Deverry men, certainly. What do they call them? Red Reivers?’
‘That’s right, Lijik Ganda in the Horsekin tongue.’
‘Wait – Rocca used a different word for red.’
‘The Gel da’ Thae have a great many words for all the different colours. Gral means red like rust. Ganda means red like fresh meat.’
‘Oh. That says a great deal about the name they chose for Deverry men.’
‘True. Now, Braemel allied itself with us and with the Roundears up in Cerr Cawnen out of fear of the Horsekin, those wild tribes of the north. This spring Grallezar hinted at some sort of trouble in her city, something to do with a coterie of Alshandra worshippers, but she never said what it was. I assumed it was none of my affair. The Gel da’ Thae can be as clannish as we are.’
‘Then we’ll know exactly what she chooses to tell us, and naught a thing more.’
‘That unfortunately is very true. I could definitely feel her fear, though, when we talked mind to mind.’
In his daily scrying sessions, Salamander had seen changes taking place at Zakh Gral. New troops had arrived, hordes of slaves were building new barracks, and always work on the stone walls went forward. He told Dallandra about these developments in detail. For some while more they talked back and forth, letting their minds reach across the hundreds of miles between them. Salamander could feel himself tiring. Far sooner than usual, he had to fight to maintain his concentration. Dallandra became aware of his difficulty the moment he felt it himself.
‘Ebañy, you’re exhausted,’ she said. ‘I know that we need to keep an eye on Zakh Gral, but be very careful that you don’t spend too much time scrying. You had to turn yourself into your bird form to escape the fortress. That was a huge strain. Then I got myself into trouble with that astral gate, and you had to come rescue me – another huge strain. I’m worried about you. Your old madness could reassert itself if you keep getting exhausted.’
‘Worry not, oh princess of powers perilous! I’m quite aware of that. From now on, I’ll scry only twice a day, morning and evening. I promise.’
They broke the link. When Salamander got up from his perch in the window, he felt so dizzy that he lay down on top of his blankets fully dressed. I’ll get up in a moment or two, he told himself. But when he woke, it was morning.
Technically, Neb and Branna were merely betrothed, not married, but with war looming, there was no time for formal ceremonies and no extra food for feasts. Since Branna’s father and uncle had approved their marrying, everyone who knew them assumed quite simply that they were. Upon their return to the dun, Neb had moved the few things he owned into Branna’s chamber from his own, and that was an end to it.
With Branna so busy with her cousin and the children, Neb saw little of her during the day. After breakfast he often lingered at table with Salamander, Gerran, and Mirryn, listening to their talk of the coming war. On this particular morning, after Branna and Galla had gone up to their hall, and Tieryn Cadryc had gone out to consult with the grooms, Maelaber, the Westfolk herald, came over to sit with them, though his escort stayed seated with the warband. Maelaber told them in some detail about the preparations the Westfolk were making for the fighting ahead. Gerran listened with the oddly bored expression on his face that meant he was absorbing every scrap of information. Mirryn merely glowered down at the table, so intensely that at last Maelaber fell silent.
‘And what’s so wrong with you, Mirro?’ Gerran said. ‘Did the porridge turn your stomach sour or suchlike?’
‘You know cursed well what’s wrong,’ Mirryn said.
‘Well, you can’t argue with Cadryc’s orders,’ Gerran said. ‘He’s the tieryn as well as your father.’
Mirryn answered with a string of epithets so foul that Neb, Salamander, and Maelaber all rose at the same moment and left the table. Neb could hear Gerran and Mirryn squabbling as they walked away.
‘Waiting for war’s always hard,’ Salamander muttered.
‘True spoken,’ Maelaber said. ‘When I left the Westfolk camp, everyone there had thorns up their arses, too.’
Maelaber returned to his escort and the warband, but Neb and Salamander went outside to the dun wall. They climbed up to the catwalks, where they could catch the fresh summer breeze and lean onto the dun wall. Between the crenellations they could see the green meadows and streams of the tieryn’s rhan. The sun fell warm on their backs, and Neb yawned.
‘Tired already, are you?’ Salamander said.
‘Being married cuts into a man’s sleep.’
‘Oh get along with you! Braggart!’
Neb grinned and decided to change the subject. ‘Have you heard from Dallandra?’
‘I have,’ Salamander said. ‘She shares our wondering about that pestilence, but she doesn’t think it came from one of the Horsekin cities. No more does she think that those priests who took you to her uncle’s have anything to do with it.’
‘Well and good, then.’ Neb turned around to lounge back against a crenel. ‘Oh by the gods!’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Look up!’ With a sweep of his arm, Neb pointed at the sky. ‘He’s back.’
Far above them, a bird with the black silhouette of a raven circled against the pale blue, far too large for any ordinary bird.
‘So he is,’ Salamander said. ‘Our mazrak, home again from wherever his peculiar tunnel led him.’
‘He waited to arrive till Arzosah left us, I see. Huh, the coward!’
‘I wouldn’t call him that. Would you argue with a dragon thirty times your size? Ah, I see by your expression that you wouldn’t.’
Neb slid his hands into his brigga pockets and found the weapons he carried, a leather sling and a round pebble. He brought them out as casually and slowly as he could. ‘I wonder if I can get a stone into the air before he notices.’
The raven floated in a lazy circle over the dun, then allowed himself to drift in closer. Neb could see him tilting his head from side to side as if he was examining everything below him. All at once he swung around and flapped off fast, heading north from the dun, a rapidly disappearing black speck against the clear sky.
‘He must have seen your sling,’ Salamander said.
‘He’s got good eyes then, blast him!’ Neb slapped the leather loop of the sling against a crenel in frustration. ‘You know, Salamander, it’s a cursed strange thing, but I keep feeling like I know that bird – or the person inside it, I mean. It’s as if I can see through his feathers or suchlike. Well, that sounds daft, now that I say it aloud.’
‘Not daft but dweomer,’ Salamander said. ‘Most likely, anyway. You may be mistaken, of course, but somehow I doubt it. I’d say he’s someone you knew in a past life.’
‘Truly? I certainly don’t have any fond feelings for him.’
‘Oh, when you recognize a person like this, it doesn’t necessarily mean they were a friend. An old enemy will call out to you, like, just as loudly.’
Neb paused, thinking, letting his mind dwell upon the image of the raven and the feelings it aroused. ‘An enemy, truly,’ he said at last, ‘but there’s somewhat more as well. It’s like a debt linking us, or more than one debt. I owe him somewhat, but he owes me far more.’
‘Odd, indeed!’ Salamander said. ‘Well, meditate upon it. The answer might be important.’
‘The chains of wyrd always are, aren’t they?’
‘True spoken. Very true spoken indeed.’
Salamander saw the raven mazrak again the very next morning. A little while past sunrise, his regular time to spy on Zakh Gral, he focused through a scatter of high clouds and scried for Rocca. He saw her immediately, standing before the altar in the Outer Shrine. For a moment he gloated over her image. Had she taken care of herself, she would have been beautiful, with her high cheekbones and thick dark hair, but her face looked sunburned and dirt-streaked, framed in messy tendrils of dirty hair. She was wearing a long, sleeveless dress of pale buckskin, painted with Alshandra’s holy symbol of the bow and arrow.
Behind her, on the rough stone surface of the altar, sat the relics of her goddess’s legendary worshipper, the holy witness Raena. Salamander had seen most of them before – the box with the wyvern dagger, the copper tray with the miniature bow and arrows, the bone whistle, and the obsidian pyramid. A new addition to the hoard startled him. They’d sewn the shirt he’d left behind onto a plain cloth banner and attached it to a long spear. It stood behind the altar and snapped in the wind.
Lakanza, the grey-haired high priestess, stood next to Rocca with a scroll in one hand. In front of them Sidro knelt with her head bowed, while the two Horsekin holy women stood off to one side, their faces grim, their hands clenched into fists. As Salamander watched, Lakanza unrolled a few inches of the scroll and studied it for a moment. Sidro raised her head and looked at Rocca with such venomous hatred in her blue eyes that Rocca took an involuntary step back, but when Lakanza lowered the scroll, Sidro ducked her head to stare at the ground.
Although Salamander could hear nothing, he could see Lakanza’s mouth moving in some sort of chant. She raised a hand and beckoned to one of the Horsekin priestesses. The woman stepped forward and took the wyvern dagger out of its box. She grabbed Sidro’s long raven-black hair with one hand and raised the dagger with the other. Salamander yelped aloud, thinking he was about to see Sidro’s throat slit. Instead, the woman pulled Sidro’s hair taut and used the dagger to hack it off, cropping it close to her skull. Sidro endured the ritual with her mouth tight-set and her eyes shut.
Disgraced, Salamander thought. Serves her right, too, nearly getting me killed like that! Yet what had she done, after all, but tell the truth and identify an enemy of her people? Salamander’s conscience bit him hard. No one would listen to her now, but she had guessed the truth – he was one of Vandar’s spawn, just as she’d said. His supposedly miraculous escape might well bring disaster upon the fortress and shrine both.
Once she’d cut off Sidro’s hair, the Horsekin woman turned and threw it into the wind, which took and scattered the long strands. A few more words from Lakanza, and Sidro rose, picking up the things lying at her feet – a sack and a blanket. Salamander watched as she left the fort and set off on the trail heading north to the forest lands. Had she been thrown out of the holy order? Not likely, since she still wore the painted dress that marked her as a priestess. More likely she’d merely been sent out to preach to the distant believers, much as Rocca had done. She might even be heading to Lord Honelg’s dun. If so, she’d walk right into Ridvar’s fortguard and end up a prisoner in Dun Cengarn.
When Salamander widened his Sight to look over the fortress, he saw the raven mazrak drifting on the air currents far above her. Impossible! he thought. Less than a full day before, the raven had flown over the Red Wolf dun, a distance of at least three hundred miles. Ye gods, don’t tell me there are two of them! Salamander broke the vision with a quick stab of fear at the very thought of there being more than one powerful mazrak ranged against them. Then he remembered the astral tunnel.
‘Don’t you think it’s likely,’ Salamander asked Dallandra later, ‘that he’s discovered how to get onto the mother roads?’
‘Yes, I certainly do,’ Dallandra said. ‘Much more likely, in fact, than there being two of these wretched mazrakir. So that’s what that tunnel was for! Huh, that’s interesting. It’s never occurred to me to try to gain the roads from the astral. It’s not part of Deverry dweomer, either. I wonder where he learned that?’
‘Bardek, I suppose. You thought at one point that he might be from there, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, and he could be. But however he learned it, that he can work that dweomer means he’s a man of great power, so be careful.’
‘I shall be, never fear. Let us most devoutly hope that he can’t lead armies through those tunnels.’
‘It’s highly unlikely, since they originate on the astral.’
‘An entire army of dweomermasters does strike me as a very distant prospect, now that you mention it. Here’s another odd thing. Neb told me that he feels some sort of link to our mazrak from an ill-defined past wyrd they seem to share. He couldn’t tell me much more than that. It’s not a pleasant link, however. That he does know.’
‘Oh by the Star Goddesses!’ Dallandra’s image looked abruptly weary. ‘I don’t know why I’m even surprised. Nevyn made a great many enemies during his long life.’
‘That’s certainly true. I remember a whole ugly clutch of them very clearly indeed, being as I was involved in hunting them down. Off in Bardek, that was, our little war with the dark dweomer –’ Salamander abruptly paused, his mind flooded by a surge of memories and omen-warnings both. ‘The black stone. The obsidian gem on Alshandra’s altar. It has something to do with all of this. I know it in my soul, but I can’t say why or what.’
‘Then meditate upon it.’ Dallandra’s thoughts rang with urgency. ‘Brood over it like a mare with a weak-legged foal.’
‘I shall. I’d wager high that this is a matter of wyrd, something ancient and deep. It involves me, too, though I’m not sure how.’
And indeed, Salamander was right enough about that. During his early childhood, when forming and keeping clear memories lay beyond him, the raven mazrak and the black pyramid had woven a net of wyrd around him. It had snared even a man as powerful as Nevyn, the Master of the Aethyr – which had been Neb’s name and dweomer title in the body he wore then, back in those far-off days.
PART I (#)
Dun Deverry and The Westlands Spring, 983 (#)
Every light casts a shadow. The dweomer light has cast a darkness of darkness. In that vile night creep those who once were men even as you, thinking that they craved secrets only to ease the suffering of the world. Somewhere along their way, the shadow crept over them unawares …
The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
Built as it was across seven hills, the city of Dun Deverry towered above the surrounding farmlands. Riding up from the south, Nevyn saw it from a long distance away as a cluster of grey and green shapes on the horizon. The road twisted, swinging at times a mile off the straight as it meandered around a lord’s dun or rambled along a stream till it finally reached a ford or bridge where a traveller could cross. As the road changed direction, the city seemed to dance on the horizon, now to the east, then to the west, showing him different views as he drew closer. A little while before sunset he finally rode up the last hill, and by then, the city loomed over him like a thunder cloud. The south gates had been repaired since the last time Nevyn had seen them, over a hundred years before, when they’d been only ragged heaps of stone and broken planks. Now they stood twelve feet high and over twenty broad, made of stout oak banded with iron. Each band sported an elaborate engraved design of interlaced wyverns, and on the portion of wall directly above the gates stood a wyvern rampant, carved in pale marble.
Since the stone wall holding them was a good fifteen feet thick, the gates opened into a sort of tunnel, which eventually led onto a cobbled square. Oak saplings, dusted green with their first leaves, stood round the edges. Out in the centre a good many townsfolk were standing around the stone pool of a fountain, gossiping no doubt, but none of them paid any attention to Nevyn, a shabby old herbman leading a laden pack mule and a scruffy riding horse, all three of them covered with dust from the road.
Nevyn, however, studied the townsfolk. As he followed the twisting street uphill past rows of prosperous-looking shops, he kept looking around him, appraising the faces of the people he passed. He’d come to Dun Deverry on two errands. For one, he was searching for a particular young woman who had been his apprentice many a long year before. Everywhere he’d been in the years since her death, he’d searched but never found her. He was hoping that since she’d died in Dun Deverry, she’d been reborn there. She would look very different, of course, but he knew that he’d recognize Lilli when he saw her again. The other errand was far more complicated. To accomplish it, he’d need the help of friends.
Olnadd, priest of Wmm, the god of scribes, lived in a shabby little house not far from the west gate. A brown wooden palisade enclosed the thatch-roofed house, a vegetable garden, and a pair of white geese. When Nevyn arrived at the gate, the geese stopped hunting snails to glare at him. He laid a hand on the latch. Hissing and honking, the pair rushed forward with a great flapping of white wings. His horse and pack mule both threw up their heads and began pulling on reins and halter-rope. As soon as Nevyn let go of the gate, the geese subsided.
‘Olnadd,’ Nevyn called out. ‘Olnadd! Anyone here?’
The front door opened, and the priest hurried out, a slender man with a slick, sparse cap of grey hair. In daily life Wmm’s priests dressed much as other Deverry men did, in plain wool brigga with a linen shirt belted over them. Olnadd’s shirt sported yokes embroidered with pelicans, the sacred bird of his god.
‘Whist, whist,’ he called out, ‘get back!’
The geese retreated, but not far.
‘My apologies,’ Olnadd said. ‘They’re better than watchdogs, truly.’
‘So I see. You don’t look surprised to see me, so I take it that my letter reached you.’
‘It did.’ Olnadd opened the gate and stepped out, shutting it quickly behind him. ‘Let’s take your horse and mule around to the mews. I’ve got a shed out there that will do for a stable.’
Once his animals were unloaded and at their hay, Nevyn followed Olnadd into the house. The priest’s wife, a tall, rangy woman who wore her grey hair in braids round her head, greeted him with a smile and ushered them both into her kitchen. They sat at the table near a sunny window. Affyna brought out a plate of cakes and cups of boiled milk sweetened with honey.
‘So, then.’ Olnadd helped himself to a raisin cake. ‘What brings you to us?’
‘A rather curious business,’ Nevyn said. ‘I want to see the king. I’ve made him a talisman, you see, a little gift for the blood royal.’
‘Little gift?’ Affyna said. ‘If you’ve made it, it must positively reek of dweomer. Well, I suppose reek isn’t quite the word I mean.’
‘It will do, truly.’ Nevyn grinned at her. ‘The question now is, how do I get an audience with our liege to give it to him?’
‘That will take a bit of doing,’ Olnadd said. ‘I don’t suppose we should pry, but I can’t say I’d mind having a look at the thing.’
‘I shouldn’t admit this, but I wouldn’t mind showing it off. It’s taken me a cursed lot of hard work.’ Nevyn reached into his shirt, pulled out the slender chain he wore around his neck, and unfastened a small leather pouch. He slid out its contents, wrapped in layers of silk.
‘Close those shutters, will you?’
Olnadd got up and did so. One ray of light came through the crack and fell across the table in a line of gold. Nevyn drew a circle deosil around the bundle with his hand, visualized four tiny pentagrams at its cardinal points, and cleared the space around the talisman of all influences – not that evil or impure forces would be lying about the priest’s breakfast table, but Nevyn didn’t care to have the stone pick up traces of local gossip. He unwrapped the five pieces of silk: the first, mottled with olive, citrine, russet and black; the second, purple; the third, Wmm’s own orange; the fourth an emerald green, and the last pale lavender.
In the centre of the silks lay an opal, as big as a walnut, but so perfectly round, so smoothly polished, that it seemed to breathe and glow with a life of its own. Affyna sighed sharply, and Olnadd muttered a few words of prayer under his breath.
‘It’s commemorated through Bran and the great Gwindyc, you see,’ Nevyn said. ‘I’ve linked it up through the Kings of the Wildlands to the golden root of dominion. Not a word of this to anyone, mind.’
‘And is there anyone else in Dun Deverry who’d know what I was talking about if I told them?’
‘Not half likely, is it?’ Nevyn glanced at Affyna.
She smiled again. ‘Any woman who marries a priest learns to hold her tongue.’
One piece at a time, smoothing out wrinkles, Nevyn wrapped the opal back up in its silken shrouds. He returned it to the pouch, then wiped the dweomer circle away from the table. Olnadd got up and opened the shutters to let in the spring air.
‘And what kind of man is our king?’ Nevyn said. ‘I knew his grandfather, you see, but I haven’t been at court in a cursed long time.’
Olnadd considered, rubbing his chin.
‘Hard to say. Now, he used to be the wild sort, Casyl, when he was the Marked Prince, but wedding the sovereignty changes a man. He’s held the kingship only a year now, but he seems to be steadying down.’
‘Seems to be?’
‘Well, he’s a splendid warrior. Very useful just now.’ Olnadd considered again, picking up his cup and twisting it between his long fingers. ‘But the emotional sort. Given to quick judgments and – well – gestures. Things fit for bard songs, a lot of talk about honour – you know the sort.’
‘How easy is it for a subject to see his highness? I’ve brought a good bit of coin to bribe servants.’
