Changespell 01 Dunn Lady's Jess (30 page)

"She wasn't dumped," Carey clarified. "Lady was wearing her halter. They must have been at their destination, where she should have been hobbled."

"She could have broken free," Mark offered, even as Carey shook his head.

"Something scared her, or she wouldn't have run in like she did, and had half the household chasing after her. She's not a hard catch, normally."

Mark looked down at the bow and arrows before him, fingering the stiff leather of the quiver. "Jaime's all right," he said in a stiff and determined voice, the sturdy adaptability shaken. "She's all right. She's probably on her way back on foot, embarrassed as hell."

"Maybe," Carey acceded, still not believing it. "If only Lady could tell us . . . if only we could bring back Jess . . .
damn
, I miss her."
Not now, Carey—one crisis at a time
.

Mark looked up, a sudden alert glance, and Carey turned to see what had caught his attention. Morley—good.

"Morley—" he started, but the man raised his hands to forestall demands and explanations.

"I know, I know," he said. "Lady came back without her rider. I know where she went, and right now a very brave child is daring to interrupt Sherra at work. We'll find Jaime, Carey."

Eric, dead because Carey had dropped into his life. Arlen, waiting for a rescue that wasn't coming. Jess, buried in a place where no one could reach her. "She's not going to stop me this time," he said.

Sherra never tried. To her consternation and Carey's barely repressed wrath, Morley revealed that, faced with a shortage of riders, he'd sent Jaime to Theo's, an accomplished wizard well within the territory Jaime was used to covering. Accomplished enough to draw Calandre's unwanted attention—or focus it on the courier who might be carrying some version of the spell he was helping to control. By midafternoon, in a day turned cloudy and dim, Carey rode point, the only experienced horseman in a small group of uneasy riders on already well-worn horses.

Despite his heavy exposure to horse sense, Mark had clearly not spent many hours in the saddle, and Gacy, the advanced student Sherra had assigned to the investigation, held the reins like he thought they might attack him. The fourth member of the company was Katrie, the tall blonde woman Jaime had come to trust and Carey had therefore chosen as the warrior for the group. Normally he could depend on his own reflexes and training when it came to defense, but when Sherra had pointedly suggested an escort, Carey agreed immediately. It seemed it was time to regret his taxing strategy for keeping his mind off his troubles.

He checked back over his shoulder and decided his neophyte riders could take a little speed. "Going to canter!" he called back to them, and asked his sturdy little bay mare for the transition. Morley, he decided, had been acting out of mercy—or guilt—when he gave Carey the bay for this trip; the animal's gaits were as smooth as slow river water and took no effort to sit. He knew the others wouldn't have it so easy, but he squelched his sympathies and refused to look behind until he reached the turnoff to Theo's little homestead. He found pretty much what he expected: the others straggled out behind him, easy prey for any raiding party that might be hanging around. Mark and Gacy were too busy keeping themselves ahorse to care, but Katrie shot him a look of pure ire as she stopped beside him.

"Making my job pretty damn hard," she growled at him.

He knew; he just hadn't cared, and his shrug told her as much.

"Fine," she said coldly. "But now we're here and we'll do it my way. Hold my horse and keep your ass right here until I say otherwise. I'll be back after I've had a look around." She dismounted, an awkward maneuver that still managed to show the authority of movement Carey associated with skill among the warriors.

Carey caught the reins she tossed at him, and watched her stride up the lane. When she was out of sight, he leaned back in a weary stretch, while the bay shifted to a lazy, hip-shot stance beneath him. Mark and Gacy had dismounted and were making various disgruntled noises as they experimented with walking.

"If this is the accepted mode of transportation around here, maybe I'd better take a few lessons from Jay," Mark grumbled, a comment that maintained his dogged insistence that Jaime was perfectly all right but did nothing to convince Carey it might be the truth.

"There are other ways," he said. "As long as you know two wizards you trust with a fairly complicated spell, and don't mind the side effects."

"It's not that bad," Gacy protested mildly. He gave his backside a meaningful rub and added, "It's not the only thing with side effects."

"No kidding," Mark agreed.

Carey tuned them out, going to the blank, tired space he'd been cultivating so assiduously. And then he blinked, because Katrie was standing in front of him with a mixture of annoyance and concern on her face, saying his name for what was apparently not the first time.

"Carey! What Level have you lost yourself on?"

"What'd you find?" Carey asked shortly.

"No indication anyone's there, though there was a bunch of horses earlier. I haven't translated any of the signs, yet—came to get you first. So stick to the edge of the trees when we hit the clearing, and tie up. I don't want you messing up what little that hard dry ground has to tell me." She took her reins from Carey, looped them over her horse's head and swung into the saddle, and then led the way while Mark and Gacy still struggled to mount.

The lane was short, and Carey was soon slipping his halter over the bay's bridle to tie up at one of the clearing edge's trees.

"There's a bridle in front of the cabin," Katrie pointed. "And there's an area to the right and behind the cabin that I want you three to stay away from until I'm through looking it over."

"But no one's here?" Mark asked hopefully, as though he hadn't heard her earlier proclamation.

"No one you know," Katrie said grimly. "And no one alive."

Carey had his horse secured while the others still fumbled with halters and bridles, and he trotted to the forlorn jumble of leather and metal that lay abandoned in front of the cabin. It didn't take a second glance to recognize it as the bridle Lady had been using. Nearby was a series of earth-gouging hoofprints, the sign of a startled and explosive takeoff. He left the bridle where it was and skirted the area in deference to Katrie, heading for the cabin and its ajar front door.
No one alive
, she'd said. Since there was no one outside, that meant—

"Carey, no!" Gacy cried as Carey reached across the threshold to push the door open. He didn't even have time to wonder before the doorway erupted in a glaring offensive of light and sound and power, enclosing him in cacophony. Then the ground smacked him between the shoulder blades, hitting him as hard as the magic. As the discordant assault faded away, it was replaced by hard, running footsteps and panting breath and anger.

"Ninth Level damnation, you should
know
better than that, Carey!" Gacy said from somewhere above his head, as horse sweat-scented fingers caught his chin and probed along the side of his neck by his jaw. A groan wormed its way out from deep inside him, and those same fingers patted his cheek gently.

"Is he alive?" Katrie asked, carefully dispassionate, at the same time Mark blurted, "What the hell was that?"

"Pyrotechnics, I think," Gacy said. "He's a bit stunned, but all right, I think." His voice moved further away, paused, and then pronounced, "Looks to me like there's been another wizard here, and he or she left us a childish little gesture."

"You call
that
a childish little gesture?" Mark said, kneeling by Carey. Carey blinked, trying to see past the multi-colored whirls of light that still obscured his vision. He thought about sitting up, but his body made no response to the suggestion; in fact, it could barely feel the comforting hand Mark had rested on his arm as he asked, "What happened to those famous checkspells you guys always talk about? How can you let a dangerous spell like that go unchecked?"

Gacy was close again. "Because very similar spells are used in some of our mining operations. We do our best, Mark, but there are certainly spells on the loose that can cause havoc if put to other than their intended purpose."

"Well, there's not much I can figure here, except that there were several horses—three, maybe," Katrie said in disgust. "We could have guessed that much without any tracks at all—although now we know for certain from the bridle that Jaime
was
here. Is it safe to go inside now, Gacy?"

"It spells out clear," Gacy said absently. "Here, Carey, I'm no healer, but see if this doesn't help."

Relief. His vision cleared, the haziness inside his head faded away, and even if his body still showed no inclination to sit up, he at least had the feeling it
could
, if he insisted. And when he heard Gacy's low voice saying, "Poor Theo," he did, indeed, insist. From his back to his knees to his wobbly feet, with Mark steadying him, he dragged himself to the cabin.

Katrie hunkered by a man's body, staring with disgust at the slashing wounds that had killed him. "No reason for this kind of brutality," she muttered, glancing up at Carey's arrival. "If this was done by Calandre's people, she's giving them a pretty long rein."

"This isn't Theo's hand," Gacy said from the long worktable he was scrutinizing. Katrie left the body for the table, and Gacy gestured at the neatly sorted papers set aside from the rest of the jumble. "And I don't think it's all here, either."

"How can you tell?" Katrie questioned, her eyes roaming the rest of the cabin, too impatient to wait for Gacy's explanation before looking for her own clues.

"For one thing, Theo works—worked—in a state of perpetual clutter. His current projects were always spread out all over the table—and he was a scribbler, always putting down cryptic little bits and pieces of his spells on paper. Like this." He pulled out one of the papers from the middle of a stack; the sheet was nearly black with ink scrawlings, illegible notes that took up the entire surface area. Gacy spread the pile out on the table, stared at it a moment, and shook his head. "There's nothing here on the checkspell or the world-travel spell. And there should be."

"That's not too surprising," Katrie said dryly. "We already know there was a wizard here to set that spell at the door. It's not too hard to figure that same person sorted Theo's stuff. Calandre's trying to figure out what kind of progress Sherra's making."

"And maybe get her hands on Arlen's spell while she's at it," Carey said. "She must be getting frustrated by now."

"But—what about Jaime?" Mark said. "They must have taken her, but why bother? She can't tell them anything."

Katrie shook her head. "I don't know the answer to that one—but I think we'd better get back to Sherra with what we do have. We need to make sure the other wizards have protection. There's no telling what else Calandre is up to, if she's decided to go on the offensive within Siccawei."

And he hadn't even precipitated things by going after Arlen. The bitter thought made way for the next, a decision that was made before Carey gave it any conscious thought. There was nothing to stop him from using the recall spell now—especially if no one knew he was going to do it. He glanced at Mark and quickly amended the resolution—there
were
people who would support him in this, especially considering that given a few days for travel, it was possible he would find Jaime at Arlen's stronghold as well.

Katrie was looking sharply at him. "Are you going to be all right for the ride back?"

"I'll be all right," Carey said grimly. His mind had leaped ahead to its new goals, discarding the overwork that had served him so poorly on this day. It was time to renew his resources, to retreat and recover. And then it would be time to attack.

But when they returned to Sherra's cabin, riding through the steadily falling warm summer rain, some of that new intent must have shown in Carey's face. She waited only long enough to hear the group's report, and then she took his spellstones away and put him in a guest room under house arrest.

Dayna stood with her back to the late afternoon light of the workroom window and watched Chiara, wondering if her notions about the friends and enemies of this world had been correct. Carey was confined in a first-floor room—a comfortable enough place, but there was no mistaking that it was a jail, for the spell Gacy had set at the threshold let others wander in and out, but kept Carey within. Furthermore, Sherra had appropriated his spellstones. Both actions seemed insulting and not a little callous, and they set Dayna to thinking about how no one had gone after Arlen, how they were willing to sacrifice Jaime, how they hadn't really looked into the confusion that was Dun Lady's Jess.

So the day after Jaime's abduction, Mark was out pretending nothing was wrong, that as soon as the wizards who had managed to gather here had hashed out their plans, someone would go and fetch Jaime, just like that. And Carey was sleeping, had been almost the entire time, repairing the stresses of an overworked body. Dayna had knocked and poked her head in his room before she'd come upstairs, just to make sure he hadn't changed his mind—and half hoping he had—but hadn't tried to wake him. If he really meant to go through with his kamikaze plan, he'd need all the rest he could get. It was that plan that put her here, designated thief and spy instead of unwilling student.

"You're awfully quiet," Chiara said, looking up from the leather-bound notebook she was carefully inscribing. Dayna had been amazed at the way magic was insinuated into this society, making what at first had seemed a rude and unrefined existence into lives that were at least as comfortable and secure as her own. There were spells for keeping teeth clean, there were spells for cramps, there were spells to repel mice and vermin. Not everyone could afford them all, of course, but then, there were plenty of places in Ohio where people lived with mice—including Jaime's old farmhouse. "No complaints today?" She frowned at her neat writing as Dayna slid away from the window and along the wall to the cabinet behind Chiara's back. "Do you remember what that woman said she needed? Was it a weather forecast for one day or one week?" she asked suddenly.