Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (40 page)

Aidan breathed a sigh of relief.  “What you say makes sense.” 
But a new worry made the hair on the back of his neck rise.  “But if somehow
Moncliffe got word that Wirthing was planning an attack on Brannagh…”

“He may no longer be neutral.”  Tero templed his fingers. 
“He has his own agenda we know nothing about.  We should not guess at it.  We
do know Wirthing’s agenda, and we know the marquess has brought a regiment to
him.”  He looked around at the assembled men.  “Gentlemen.  Now we know our
enemy and his numbers.”

Lacework

Daerwin slowed beside Nestor and waved the rest of the
riders ahead of him.  Indeed, just as Chul had said, the entry into the Lacework
looked as if it had been cleaned of all magic. Nestor had not even bothered
reining in his horse as they came near but merely waved the knights onward,
having seen at a glance that they would be safe.

“They were indeed at pains to hide their passage here,” he’d
mused as the riders passed them.  He pointed across the entire span of the Lacework. 
“Cleared all across, it is, and for good measure up around the far hills
besides.  Made rather a panicky mess of it, seems to me.  No helping that such
a hurried clean even cleared this odd grass away.  Lucky for them, up it comes
again already,” he’d gestured around them to the new grass shoots sprouting up
and shook his head.  “An impressive bit of magic, that, to withstand such a
cleaning.”

Daerwin nodded thoughtfully and guided the last of the
riders into the Lacework, casting a quick glance behind him before he rode in
after them.  Before long, the riders were deep in the labyrinth of the Lacework.
High above them towered mighty spires and cliffs of coral jutting upwards for
hundreds of feet through the fissures in the stone, joining here and splitting
there, running in great ribbons in places, but mostly just standing like great
trees in a forest, obscuring the sunlight in all but a few patches along their
way.  The way was narrow enough in places that they’d had to ride single file
and a few times, they’d had to deviate from the obvious direct path to find an
opening wide enough to accommodate the girth of the horses.  But when the path
opened up, they rode as many astride as they could.

Heaps of sharp, broken coral lined the edges of a few open
fissures in the stone of the Lacework.  These were all that was left of the
heavy monoliths that had crumbled and fallen away, sometimes leaving open
crevasses in the grassy floor and sometimes leaving unstable beds of broken
coral that were slowly being overtaken by grasses.  Occasionally, the Lacework
rumbled and shuddered as others of the coral towers collapsed in the distance. 
The reefs were drying out and becoming brittle, and in the freeze and thaw of
the late days of the Feast of Bilkar, without the sea water to help support
their weight, they were slowly crumbling away.  Occasionally a dusting of
crumbled coral would fall over the riders as they passed uneasily between them.

The sheriff searched the narrow blaze of sky above them as
they rode, watching for Colaris.  The bird had been ordered to make his return
below the Lacework, but the sheriff reasoned that once he reached the camp and
saw that they’d moved on, he knew how to search for them just as he had in the
war.  It would be simpler than during the war, he told himself:  they had not
bothered to hide their tracks.  Colaris would find them, if he yet lived.

He
would
find them.

Daerwin was not ready to accept yet another loss, not now. 
He simply could not.  He refused to let his thoughts wander back to Brannagh,
back to all those lost there.  He felt a lump of emotion rise in his throat,
and he angrily battled it down.  Since when had he become so soft, that he
could not hold discipline in his mind to stay on the mission at hand?  He
caressed Revien’s neck and rode on, only occasionally allowing himself a glance
upward.

“Hold by the gods!” cried Peringale.  His horse skittered to
a halt and danced nervously for a moment before regaining composure.

A flock of seagulls fluttered and screeched angrily, upset
to have been disturbed in their meal.  The gulls were tearing meat from dead
bodies in tatters of seamless robes––mages, which quite unnerved all the
horses, especially the spare Brannford horses that followed behind Jath.  It
was all the boy could do to sooth them enough to lead them past the carnage and
out of sight and feel of it.

The gruesome spectacle was no worse than anything the
knights had seen in the war, but after several miles without seeing anyone but
themselves, to stumble upon such a thing was enough to shake their nerves,
especially considering that those mages could as easily have been alive.

Once everyone was well clear, Damerien suggested calling a
brief rest to help calm both horses and riders.  Daerwin would much rather have
waited to call a halt until they were well clear of the Lacework and any
likelihood of being ambushed in this inhospitable terrain, but he thought it
wiser to have the horses and knights alert and calm than to press them.

Only Laniel had stayed back among the bodies, and Daerwin
assumed he was seeing to them as was his place as the only priest in their
midst.  Then again, he was Bilkarian, not Verilionite, so his reasons were likely
far more pragmatic.  When he returned, he told them that he had spied a gull
tugging at a medallion round the neck of one as they passed, and he thought to
see if any of the rest carried anything similar that might lend them some
insight as to why all these mages had come to Syon after four thousand years.

At the very least, he said, he had hoped to recover
artifacts from those who’d died at Brannagh, and he had.  Laniel had brought
back two medallions and a gold ring, as well as a torn bit of parchment with a
strange design on it.  A vision mark.  Damerien immediately took the parchment
from Laniel and looked at it closely.  The knights watched him and waited
patiently.  They could as easily have looked upon it themselves, but as curious
as they might be, they had little trust for such things, and it were better the
duke should be the one to look at it if anyone should.

At length, Damerien rubbed his eyes.  “It was not an
official dispatch,” he murmured, tucking the still visible vision mark into his
glove.  “It was but a journal: a soldier’s diary, kept for him that loved her
and their children.”  He looked up at the assembled knights and smiled sadly. 
“She speaks of the boredom and the ceaseless marches, and the mindlessness of
those giving the orders.  She laments being ever subject to the dangers but
never in position for the glory, which always seems to fall to others.  Above
all she marks the loneliness of being so far from those she loved.”

The knights looked down at their mounts, not wanting to meet
their duke’s eye.  Yes, it was the song of soldiers in every war, in every age,
and it made them uneasy to see this dead enemy now as being so much like
themselves.

“Yes, she is like you,” Daerwin said to them, his voice
strong and firm.  “She felt as you feel, she loved as you love, she lived as
you live, but do not believe for a moment that she would not have killed you on
sight for being her enemy.  She and those with her entered Syon and committed
acts of war against us.  They destroyed everything that we hold dear!”  His
voice broke.  “Do not lose sight of that fact or your weakness will keep you
from surviving to return to your own loved ones.”

His words had the desired effect.  The knights nodded to
each other.

The smaller medallion Laniel had brought back was from a
priest of B’radik––silver, an acolyte’s medal––and the other was, as Daerwin
feared, one of the Brannagh Knights’ medallions, taken, no doubt from the body
of one of the slain. 

Daerwin scowled bitterly, picturing the plague-weakened
priests and knights being slaughtered like children in their beds. 
Intellectually, he supposed he had known the castle would not fall without
deaths, but these pieces taken from the bodies of those who had destroyed his
home, which they in turn had taken from the bodies of those at Brannagh, made
it inescapable to him now.  Without a word, he accepted the ring from Laniel
and put it on his daughter’s finger.  The ring, a simple band of gold with a
modest emerald and two rubies, had been one of Glynnis’s favorites.  Had she
been wearing it when…?  What else had they done?  He forcibly wrenched his
thoughts away from his grief.

Renda squeezed his hand but did not meet his gaze.  If she
had, they both might have released all the grief they’d stored for the last
month, and they could not afford to do so, not with an enemy perhaps around the
next turn in the coral, not with their few remaining knights watching them and
looking to them for strength.  Daerwin gave the call to mount, surprised at how
strong his voice sounded in spite of the tightness in his throat, and
mercifully, they resumed their journey.

The riders settled into the journey again, the images of the
destroyed mages and the gulls tearing at their flesh forgotten, or at least
relegated to fodder for nightmares.  Daerwin had expected as much from them.  Like
the disciplined soldiers they were, they had put the very personal story of the
dead mage behind them.  They had taken his words to heart, that she was an
enemy, just as Kadak’s demons had once been the enemy, and the Anatayans and
later the Hadrians who allied with Kadak, however briefly, had been the enemy. 
He hoped it gave them peace.  For his part, he felt nothing for her.  For all
he knew, she might have been the one who killed his Glynnis.  The ring Laniel
brought back may have come from her finger.

The duke had sent Gikka and Chul even further ahead to scout
their way and plot their most direct course through the Lacework, but even so,
the journey was tense and silent.  The sound of the horses’ hooves clattering
over the stone, even damped as it was by the knee high grasses they trampled,
echoed unnervingly, hemmed in as they were on all sides.  Above them,
occasionally, they could hear a strange crackling noise in the pillars, a sound
that none would admit to hearing, since to do so would be to admit that the
thick cliffs of coral around them were crumbling from within and that they were
in grave danger of being crushed.  It was enough to speed their pace even as it
silenced their talk.  He was grateful that so far, at least, there had been no
ambush and no great tumble of coral down upon their heads.

Worse yet, a ride that should have had them off the Lacework
and out of this peril in no more than half a day was stretching on well past
midday, and the riders even more than the horses were fatigued with their
constant vigilance.

“Laniel,” Renda murmured softly, aware that her voice would
carry in the stillness, “while my father is at a loss for words, I would not
have you think him ungrateful for your pains,” she smiled sadly, touching her
mother’s ring thoughtfully.  “We would rather not have known the certainty of
those at Brannagh, but better we should have these than that they become
trophies in Byrandia for our enemies.”

The priest looked up at the knight, a bit startled after so
much silence to hear her voice.  He nodded without speaking.

After a time, she looked at him.  “Laniel, how now?  You
seem…contemplative.”

“I am a priest, my Lady.  It is my place to be
contemplative.”

“Indeed it is.”  She glanced over at Kerrick riding beside
her.  “What I mean to say is that you seem more contemplative than usual.  Is
something troubling you?”

Laniel frowned, and from the tension in his body, Renda knew
that the answer was assuredly yes.  Something was bothering him.  But whether
he would speak of it was the question. She was certain he would not, but
finally he spoke. 

“My Lady,” the priest all but whispered, “I am missing a
medicine vial from my saddlebag.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I see you do not understand.”  Laniel looked around him
before he went on.  He looked between Renda and Kerrick.  “I wondered how the
prisoner might have gotten one of my vials with which to cut himself because,
in my pouch, I still had all those I had gathered to treat him.  I had chosen
them carefully.”

Renda nodded.  “Well, perhaps you miscounted and took one
more than you thought.  Is it possible?”

“Indeed,” offered Kerrick.  “The camp was in something of a
mad dash to accommodate him when Gikka rode in.  With all the chaos, I could
certainly see such a benign error going unmarked.”

Laniel shook his head.  “I chose three, one for pain, one to
fight infection, and one to sedate.  If the missing vial had been the sedative
I used to treat him, perhaps I could believe I’d taken two.  But the missing
vial was the ano for the sedative.”  He turned to Kerrick.  “I was slow to
realize this.  It should have been obvious.  My Lord, you should have been unconscious
or dead if he had stabbed you with glass tainted with the sedative.  Instead,
you were lightheaded and, begging your pardon, my Lord, your manner was
uncharacteristic.”

Kerrick laughed softly.  “Was it, indeed?  Well, I admit, I
felt rather giddy.”  He smiled.  “Better lightheaded and giddy than dead, I
suppose.  I should count my blessings.  I only hope I did not embarrass
myself.”

Renda considered.  “And you are full certain this vial of
ano was not already in your pouch, perhaps hiding in the bottom ere you filled
it, or perhaps in passing you decided to bring it as precaution and forgot that
you had ?”

Laniel nodded.  “I am certain.  The sedative I use is
derived from
Verva copita
.  ”

She waited for him to continue, but apparently he thought
that explanation enough.  She shook her head.  “Forgive me,
Verva copita
?”

“
Copita
is gentle on the body but powerful and not
prone to cause ill reactions.  It is the same that I used with your father at
the abbey.  As gentle as it is, I had no expectation of complication that I
should need the ano, so I did not carry it.”