Changing Of The Guard (Book 6) (6 page)

It was a plan that put Hirl-enat in a difficult situation.

With Ettril gone, Hirl-enat was the ranking Koradictine, and as such it was almost mandatory that he perform the role that met with the Lectodinians. Yet, the mage who went home to Badwall would be seen as a leader there, too. Hirl-enat would not want Neuma to have that task, but they both knew Fil was not strong enough to cast the magic required to perform the transport.

So the gambit was forced upon Hirl-enat. Go to Vapor Peaks and let Neuma run the order in their homeland, or go to Badwall and let Neuma communicate with, and possibly conspire with, their bitter rivals.

She wondered which poison he would choose.

“The plan is good as far as it goes,” Hirl-enat finally said. “I suggest you return to Badwall while Fil and I work with the Lectodinians. But we will reconsider our path through the Mist Mountains. The directions you selected are inappropriate.”

Neuma smiled, knowing Hirl-enat had picked on this portion of the plan merely because it was something he could change. His tinkering would amount to a few ineffectual adjustments based on topography that was probably out of date anyway.

“I see what you mean,” she said, gazing at the map.

They worked together for another half hour, refining the plan, then went to their bedrolls. It was time to sleep. They needed to be prepared tomorrow.

And Neuma
was
tired. The battle with the Toreans had worn her out. But as they walked away, Neuma was uncertain if she would get much sleep at all. The essence of the plan was still
her
work. Fil would ensure the order heard the truth of that.

And tomorrow would be a good day, she thought as she pulled her roll over her shoulder.

Yes.

A very good day.

Book 3: Nestafar

Chapter 1

Garrick burst into Ellesadil’s chamber. A guard moved to stop him, but Garrick brushed past. He was angry, and the shove was harder than it should have been, but he didn’t pause to check on the guard or to apologize for his handling.

“Where is the boy?” Garrick said.

“Garrick?” The lord looked up from his paperwork with an expression of shock that swiftly settled to a relieved smile. He looked old and tired. It was early morning. A bowl of cold cereal and a half cup of the ginger tea he was so famously enamored with sat on one side of his desk. “Where have you been?”

“Am I to understand the boy is taken by the Koradictines?” Garrick growled, barely able to control himself.

“Yes. You understand correctly,” Ellesadil replied. He sat up straighter.

Garrick turned away, his mind on fire.

He turned back to Lord Ellesadil, and in three steps had him by the throat.

“How did you let this happen?” he said.

He lifted the lord from his chair and pinned him against the wall.

Ellesadil’s fear tasted cold and bitter against Garrick’s hunger. The lord struggled to breathe, but Garrick didn’t care. The boy was gone, and it had happened on Ellesadil’s watch. Ellesadil put his hands around Garrick’s forearm. His face turned pink.

“I—” the lord couldn’t choke out the rest.

“He was just a boy,” Garrick roared, pressing Ellesadil against the wall as heat rose within him. “How could you let this happen?”

Ellesadil’s face grew even more crimson. The lord’s leg kicked meekly before Garrick’s rage finally collected itself and he dropped Ellesadil harshly to the floor.

Garrick stood there, panting, towering over the lord with feet spread apart, his arms extended, fingers flexing. The guard came meekly in through the doorway.

“Leave us,” Garrick said. “You have my word that Lord Ellesadil will not be harmed.”

The guard hesitated, but Ellesadil sat up straighter against the wall, breathed deeply, and waved him away.

“Where did they go?” Garrick said.

“We don’t know,” Ellesadil replied, holding his hand to his throat and beginning to get his wits about him again. “Darien and Reynard have been patrolling since the boy was kidnapped.”

“How long have they been out?”

“Days. Where have you been?”

Garrick closed his eyes, ignoring the lord’s question.

His time in Existence had changed him. He felt it the moment he woke up in his chamber. His magic was bigger, more encompassing. He focused on his life force and felt the depths of the world around him with a connection he had never understood before. He smelled the aroma of bread from across town. He sensed a merchant's concern for his daughter who had woken to a fever. He felt how these two things depended on each other, how the fact of one was tied to the fact of the other in the invisible way all actions in all communities of people were tied. But in the same manner, he felt weary in ways he hadn’t. He was tired of the struggle, deadened to problems that seemed to never end and seemed, perhaps, to never have an end.

“The kidnapping is a message,” he said.

“A message?”

Ellesadil stood up.

“They want their revenge on me. This kidnapping says the Koradictines know of my tie to Will.”

Ellesadil contemplated Garrick’s thought as he edged back to his desk and sipped tea. His unease with Garrick’s presence was a thing in itself. “That would explain much.”

“The boy is a target because of me. I do not wish to imagine what they might be doing to him now.”

“If you are correct, they will hold the boy safe to entice you to come to them.”

“Perhaps,” Garrick said.

But he had learned much the past year. He had seen the orders close-up, and had felt the disruptions that occurred when their power went astray. Garrick felt that same thing in his bones how—he had been corrupted by that power himself, after all. He had returned to Adruin to fulfill his commitment to wrest control of the Freeborn from the clutches of his best friend.

Perhaps the change in him was brought on by exposure to the raw life force of Existence, or perhaps Braxidane—who was now his Mage Superior—had triggered his next progression. Whatever the cause, he was different now.

He felt things more deeply.

He understood the orders.

And now he used these two things, spreading himself over the plane, searching for the magic of Ettril Dor-Entfar, Lord Superior of the Koradictine order, and searching for Will.

He felt three guards as they walked their beat. One still smarted from having lost five crowns at a gaming table last evening. Another entertained his friends with stories of a woman. The third was dying of a blackness growing inside his liver, though Garrick was certain he didn’t know it, yet.

A young woman bent to a mopping job.

A fisherman cursed nets he had fouled the previous day.

Garrick clenched his hands. His skin crawled, and his stomach swam in a turgid sea. He felt them all, men and women walking in the rutted streets. He sensed Torean magic practiced in the manor yard by an apprentice who was fumbling with a lesser spell, and he felt an adept named Creseda casting layered magic over a wooden wheel—simple work, being done for a paying customer.

Then he felt what he sought.

A mass of Koradictine magic so thick it nearly clogged his throat.

Ettril Dor-Entfar. It had to be the Koradictine leader.

He sensed more in the area. Darien’s trail, the residue of battle lust, and the faint casting of Torean magic that went cold. The Koradictine’s magic, too, seemed to snap off as if the caster had just disappeared.

The Koradictine had clearly left the plane.

He went to the window again in a distracted fog. His senses, still stretching across the land, felt heavy and damp.

“Are you going to answer me?” Ellesadil said.

“They’ll not find Ettril,” Garrick replied.

His mind snapped back into focus.

Ellesadil was fully recovered now. He stood behind his desk and rearranged his disheveled clothing.

“I’m sorry, Lord. I shouldn’t have treated you harshly,” Garrick said, rubbing his temple. “What was that you said?”

“I asked where you’ve been.”

“I was pulled away by my superior,” Garrick said.

It was not a lie. Braxidane had sent him to Rastella to break Hezarin’s hold on that plane and to save Braxidane’s own unborn champion. His work had been successful, and as a reward (or was it a lesson?) he had spent untold hours (or was it days?) immersed in the flowing networks of Existence, the connective tissue between the planes that were home to planewalkers like Braxidane and Hezarin.

Will’s disappearance wasn’t Ellesadil’s fault at all, Garrick saw that clearly now. It wasn’t Darien’s fault, either. Or Reynard’s fault, or anyone else’s.

It was his fault. All of it. His fault.

Ettril was able to kidnap Will because Garrick, wasn’t here to protect him. And, the abrupt ending to Ettril’s path told him that the task of bringing Will back was all his, too. Neither Darien nor Reynard nor any other mage or warrior could follow the Koradictine’s path through the planes.

“Much has happened while you were gone,” Ellesadil said.

“We can discuss those things when I return,” Garrick replied, striding to the doorway. “But now I need to go find the boy.”

“Your order is falling apart,” the lord said. “You should stay here and mend it.”

Garrick gazed at Ellesadil, suddenly feeling more at ease than he could ever remember feeling. He could play the planewalker’s game as well as Braxidane could. Garrick had promised to take the Freeborn House from Darien, but there had been no timeline attached to that commitment.

“The world existed without a Torean order for a long time,” he said. “I think it will manage to get by without one for a few days more.”

Then Garrick left, his boots echoing in the hallway.

Chapter 2

Bare sycamore and birch trees stood as sentries over ground that had been recently trod upon. The wind had calmed to leave the area silent.

Garrick was no ranger, but it took no expertise to make out the marks of hooves and boot heels that marked the Koradictine campfire. The rut of wagon wheels, and the prints made by the steady gait of horses left clean signs leading northwest. Toward the Koradictine stronghold.

But that was not the trail that interested him.

The trail he searched for now was the bloody taint of sorcery that he felt decaying like residue washed up on a beach. And, along with that blood-taint, the path he sought also felt of Existence, a sensation that hummed with the essence of life force, the power that gave Existence its very presence.

The link told Garrick he was right, that Ettril had left the plane.

Could he follow?

The idea excited him. He felt the link as if it were a physical thing connected to his own sense of being, as if it were a vine or a tendril left behind that Garrick could latch onto with his own life force. Its whisper seduced him.

If, as Braxidane said, a planewalker who steps into the realm of a plane opens that door for other planewalkers, would the same policy exist in the opposite direction? Could Ettril’s passage leave him room to follow?

Garrick called on his link and drew sorcerous power from Talin’s reservoir of magic, channeling it through proper leverage points and letting it pool in his hands until his fingertips glowed golden hot. He molded life force into his magic, and he recreated the sensation of wearing the robe he had found on Rastella. A shell of energy wrapped about him, and when the moment felt complete, Garrick attached his spell to Ettril Dor-Entfar’s trail, then pulled.

Wind whined with the dry rasp of dead leaves spinning through the air. The honey-laced aroma of Braxidane’s magic grew around him, as intoxicating and sweet as candy. Ettril’s trail grew thick. Its essence whipped suddenly around his wrist, attaching to him like a sea serpent’s tentacle. It ripped him from the plane, drawing him up and off the land, into a haze that grew dense and damp around him.

This time he was ready, though.

As he stepped into the raging flow of Existence, he drew the hardened mantle of his life force around him. The flow rushed past with a siren’s call of raw pleasure.

Something hit his shoulder, and the link snapped with a loud crack. Garrick screamed as he crashed against a hard surface. Fire burst around him, and his hands burned as the link tore into the soft meat of his hands. He fell, then, slipping into a vortex of color, spinning out of control.