Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (5 page)

“Not our mess.  You recognize the power behind that turbulence.”

“Yes,” she sighed with a certain resignation, a dry
whistling sound that rose from the disused depths of her chest.  “How could I
not?  Ever he has been a noise along the strands, and ever we have ignored him
since he chose not to be among us.”

“Yes.”  He looked away again, uncertain how to continue, how
to make her understand.  “But this disruption is something altogether new.”

“So we watch for a time and see how it resolves.”

“Yes, but––” 

“The danger, if any, is not imminent, nor is it likely ever
to be so, coming from him.”  She handed the goblet back to him.  “I do not see
how this grand deduction required waking me.”

“It should not have,” he said quietly.  “Except that we
perceived the threat to be more immediate and more dangerous.”

An ugly grimace stretched the skin of her face so tight he
thought it might split.  “After all these centuries, with us in our citadel and
him off on that insipid island, suddenly he is an emergency again?”  She
laughed.

“In our estimation, yes.”

Her laughter faded.  “What did you do?”

“We tried to…eliminate the cause of the turbulence.”  He saw
his meaning register on her face.  “Our first attempts failed.  We had not
counted on the strength of his allies.  But this time, we received word that
our agents were successful.”

She only stared, but her silence seemed to shriek and rail
against him.

“This time, we ported them to Pyran.  It was not a simple
thing.  First, we had to port one there who actually survived and could port
the others to him.  He was not the first we sent.  Some were crushed by
falling, others were entombed in stone, and some…well, some we could not bring
back at all.”  He was babbling nervously, trying to fill the silence. “This was
no mean feat in itself since no one here has seen the city on that side in
nearly four thousand years, and then—”

“Spare me the tedium of your logistics,” she whispered.  “I
take it you sent mages.”

He nodded.  He had thought that to be self evident.  “Once
there, they fulfilled their mission readily.”  He looked into her eyes and
drove his point right into her heart.  “They sought him out and killed him.”

Her eyes did not blink. She did not breathe.  After a time,
she shook her head.  “No more than this?  To say ‘they sought him out and
killed him’ and leave it so?”  He watched her eyes brim with tears before she
looked away.  “You killed him,” she said quietly.  “One of our own.  That’s
never been done.  It’s simply not done!”

He raised his chin.  Was it defensiveness he felt or
defiance, the sure knowledge that killing her old lover had cut her to the
quick?  He fancied it was more the latter and secretly reveled in the
knowledge.  He nodded.  “Nevertheless, it
is
done.  Casualties were
high, predictably, but in the end, our agents prevailed.”

“Yet the disturbance remains.”

He sighed.  “The disturbance remains.”

She smiled.  “The answer is obvious—he yet lives.  The
ineptitude of your ‘agents,’ as you called them, could very well explain how
your turbulence is untouched.”  She raised one brow.  “Did they see him dead?”

He enjoyed watching hope fight with agony to emerge
victorious from her wizened features, so much so that his voice took on an
almost cheerful tone.  “They not only killed him, they dragged him out and
burned his corpse to dust.”  He laughed viciously.  “I wish you could have seen
it.”

Her wrinkled lip twitched.  “They lied, then.”

“No, I think not.  The vision mark was clear.  But killing
him seems to have made very little difference, as you see.  The turbulence did
seem to diminish for a time, but––”

“Diminish?  When you woke me, you told me it had grown
worse!”  She blew out her breath and closed her eyes again, following strands
forward and backward through dimensions, untangling the skeins as best she could
without actually touching them.  For one of her power to touch them would
disrupt them further still.

“Seemed, as I said.”  He insisted, discreetly following her
progress along the strands at a distance.  “Perhaps it diminished, or perhaps
we only wished to see that it did.  Regardless, it did not vanish altogether as
we had thought it would.  This is the point at which I believe we erred: 
Thinking that perhaps he was not the source of the problem after all, or at
least not its only source,” he paused to let that register, “I sent our agents
to confront and destroy the next most likely source.”

“The prince.  Damerien.”

He nodded.  He paced away from her, choosing his words
carefully.  “Along the way, our agents were sidetracked, and…”

Her eyes snapped open.  “Sidetracked?  How?  They did have
specific orders, did they not?”

He swallowed hard and prepared himself for another of her
harangues.  “As I am given to understand, they were recruited along the way to
help in another attack, one they judged to be beneficial to our goal.  They had
to make a decision immediately with no time to consult us first.”

“Ah, and they were destroyed, were they?”

“Not precisely.”

She waited.

“They were recruited into an assault on a castle called
Brannagh.  This, after they had destroyed the temple of B’rad––”

“I’m sorry,” she said, the usual growl in her voice suddenly
shaking. “I thought I heard you say ‘Brannagh.’”

“Yes, I…”

Her voice became nearly a whisper.  “Surely they did not
attack the ancient stronghold of Damerien’s sons…  That cannot be what you
said.”

“Ah…”

“Were they to succeed, you know right well that this would
fulfill part of the very prophecy we work to defeat…”

“They…attacked Brannagh and destroyed it, yes.”  He rubbed
his brow, feeling the sparks of her rage from across the chamber.  “All was
done without our knowledge or consent.  We had to grant them autonomy after a
point, you see, for practical reasons.  We could not be there to guide them at
every turn.  We informed them of the goal and trusted them to do what was
necessary to achieve it.  What we failed to do was to tell them what they must
avoid…”

She paced the floor frantically.  “And did they indeed go on
from their glorious success in fulfilling part of the prophecy to do as they
were tasked, to destroy Damerien, in hopes of defeating it?”

He watched her a moment, then shook his head.  “Damerien was
already gone, fled.  He was warned, apparently, by the…fall of Brannagh.”

She screamed with rage and frustration.

“They continue to seek him, but for now, it seems he has
vanished.  His household upholds a façade that he is still in residence, but
several horses were missing from the stable. We can only assume…”  He shook his
head.  “In any case, if our agents do not locate him soon, they are to return for
new orders.”

“Attacking Brannagh…”  She shook her head in disbelief. 
“Have you any idea what they’ve done?  What you’ve done?” 

He nodded miserably.  “We saw the turbulence on the great
strands, as foretold, and we took steps to avert the prophecy, but in so doing—”

“In so doing,” she roared, “you have helped it along as if
you had set it in motion yourselves!  You could have done nothing at all and
been victorious for eons to come!  All the forces on that horrid island
together could not have destroyed Castle Brannagh and pushed the prophecy
forward!  So what did you do?  In your zeal to do something, anything at all,
to stop this turbulence in the strands, you sent them the only force that
could!”

“Yes.”  He had had enough of her derision.  His voice
dropped to a deadly whisper.  “And thus you find yourself so inconveniently
awakened from your lovesick stupor over a now dead mage to help us set the
universe aright.”

She slapped him so hard he fell to the ground.  “But that I
will need your strength to undo the damage you and the others have done, I
should crush you here and now.  After all,” she said, bitterness dripping from
her voice, “Guardians can be killed, as it turns out.  So be thankful that I
find you indispensable because the day, the hour, the moment I do not…”  She glared
at him to make her meaning clear.  Then she shook the dust from her matted
white hair, and stormed out of her chamber.  “Where are the others?”

He stood, rubbing his jaw.  “They await your pleasure in the
library.”

“Very well,” she said, moving down the corridor.  As she
moved, her hair softened into gentle curls, and the strands seemed to refill
with their original dark blonde color.  Beneath the filmy seamless robes, her
body filled out again, and her skin took on its accustomed suppleness.  A scent
of jasmine filled the air around her.  “And for pity’s sake, Guardian, stop
your sulking.”

The Hodrache Range

Dith crouched in a patch of snow in the trees lining the
small clearing and looked over the horses grazing at the river’s edge.  Nothing
seemed to mark any of them as the one ridden by Hallin.  The only strands of
energy he saw around the horses seemed meant to conceal them, and he brushed
the feeble strands aside with a wave of his hand.  Nothing else seemed to bind
any of them to the other mage in any way, which was a mixed blessing at best. 
If there were such a binding, it would surely mark the mage’s horse for him,
but just as surely, nothing Dith could do in that case would let him take the
horse short of killing Hallin outright.  Not that he would have a particular
problem killing Hallin, but at the moment, he had no idea where Hallin was. 
The last he’d seen of them, the injured mage and his Hadrian companion had been
near Galorin’s Keep, high on the mountain, and that was…

He squinted up at the sun, looked around at the snow.  He
had no way of knowing how long ago that was, actually.  He’d lost all sense of
time inside Galorin’s Keep.  Judging by the cold and the freshness of the snow,
he supposed it was still sometime late in the Gathering or early in the Feast
of Bilkar.  The horses were still here, so he could not have lost more than a
few days at most in the Keep, but any more than that, he could not guess.  He’d
never studied the stars well enough to guide himself by them, so they would be
of no use to him, either. 

He supposed the date was of little concern.  He cared only
that the special horse was still here somewhere, just where Hallin and the
others had left it, just as he’d hoped it would be.  Since leaving Galorin’s
keep, he had thought of little else.

Seeing another mage, even one sent to destroy him, had been
exciting and oddly reassuring.  In his whole life, he’d seen only two others. 
One had tried to mentor him, always vexed at how he did not follow convention,
and the other had been his first lover.  In the end, they’d each betrayed him
to save their own skins.  In vain, as it turned out.

Truth be told, he felt some pangs of guilt at taking the
injured mage’s fastest means of getting aid.  To kill someone outright was one
thing.  It was quite another to leave him stranded and injured in the snow. 
Then again, Hallin and his Hadrian companion had had plenty of time to make
their ways back to the horses.  Most likely.  Well, he told himself, they’d had
longer than he had.  If nothing else, they’d had however long Dith was in
Galorin’s Keep as a head start, so they should have been and gone already.  If
they hadn’t claimed the horses by now, he reasoned, they most likely would
not. 

He had heard the scream, after all.  Hallin was too clever
to have waited around to die in a fire he could not see, so as excruciating as the
port would be, Dith was sure Hallin had ported both himself and his Hadrian
companion straight back to Montor.

Absolutely certain. 

Besides, the thought of gaining a horse’s speed to Pyran was
too good to let pass untried, especially if Hallin was likely to lead a mob
back into the Hodrache to find him.  He frowned.  That was something he hadn’t
considered.

You are out of time.

He stepped silently into the clearing, assuming as
unaggressive a posture as he could manage, but even so, three of the horses
nearest him bolted away.  Only one remained.  Perhaps a score of paces off, a
large horse with a thick blue-gray coat frosted white at the tips grazed quietly
with its back to him.  Its kinky black tail flicked out of habit or perhaps
boredom since the flies had long since frozen to death in the mountain air.  As
he’d hoped, Dith saw no especial ties, no unusual strands of power, nothing
binding the animal, yet it alone of the horses at the riverside withstood his
presence.  This was a good sign indeed.

What are you doing?  This is a waste of time.

“Easy,” he soothed, as much to ease his own nerves as those
of the horse.  After all, this horse could not be nearly as well trained as
Zinion, and had Gikka not been there to control him, Zinion, the legendary
Brannagh horse-at-arms who could hold discipline even with screaming demons
charging him in the darkness, might well have trampled Dith in a panic. 

He approached this animal as Gikka had taught him, steadily,
smoothly, well clear of its rear legs, making quiet sounds so as not to startle
the beast.  But while the horse turned an ear toward him––only one, as if it
could not be bothered to pay more attention than that––it did not deign to look
around at him, still calmly pulling up plugs of frozen grass to chew.  It
knocked an impatient hoof against the ground, and Dith wondered if it might
walk away.  But no, it held its ground.

Encouraged, he hitched the ugly orange rucksack higher on
his shoulder and reached out to touch the horse’s side.  There it was, that
shiver of revulsion that horses had for mages, and Dith started to pull his
hand back, ready to jump out of the way if the horse started bucking, but
unlike Zinion, this horse did not shy away from him, much less rear or kick.  If
anything, it leaned into the contact, encouraging it.  In that moment, in that
brief contact between himself and the horse, Dith felt a strange probing at his
mind, a gentle seeking, and he began to understand.  He moved around toward the
poor creature’s head, patting its shoulder, rubbing gently at its neck, feeling
at once the horse’s revulsion at his touch but also its strange determination
to maintain that touch.  Then he saw the horse’s face, and his suspicion was
answered.