Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (6 page)

This horse could not see.

It was not that the horse was simply blind.  Its face was
like that of many of the other curiously ugly wild horses he’d seen in his
travels except that, beneath the unusually long, thick forelock that stretched
down from its ears to its muzzle, the skin and even the skull itself were
closed completely over without so much as a thought to eye sockets.  It was as
if the very idea of having eyes was absurd.  He supposed that normally such a
creature would be consigned to working in mines or would have been killed at
birth and fed to the dogs. 

He looked back across the glade considering.  Was this the
nature of the bargain between the horse and the mage, then? Hallin allowed the
creature to use his sight for its own, and in exchange, the horse allowed him
to ride.

A vague sense of trepidation flowed over Dith, and he wasn’t
sure from whence it came.  Surely not the horse.  Surely not himself.

A blind horse?  Are you sure this is wise?

Against his better judgment, Dith eased himself up onto the
horse’s back and tied the dirty orange rucksack to the ties that already held a
dusty bedroll behind the saddle.  So far the horse was amenable and seemed not
even particularly interested in what he was doing.  It seemed this would not be
as difficult as he’d thought.  He felt no rebellion, no sense of testing any
boundaries.  This horse was well trained indeed.  But he remembered Gikka’s advice
which he’d never had opportunity to use before now, that it was important to
take command immediately, to let the horse know you are not to be trifled
with.  So he drew himself up and took the rope harness in hand. 

Then, in answer to the animal’s gentle probing, he
magnanimously granted the horse his full vision. 

The poor creature immediately flew into a panic, bucking and
whinnying in terror, nostrils flared, spittle flying, and Dith had to cling
with both arms and both legs or risk being thrown.  It was too much, to go so
suddenly from blindness to seeing the world fully as he did, with all its
strands of power and all the shadows of possibility overlaid.  He eased away apologetically
and instead let the horse take vision for itself as it would.  Almost at once,
the animal’s fear subsided, and he felt the warmth of the horse’s gratitude
flow through him.  The beast settled itself, biting up another crunchy plug of
grass for comfort.

The horse’s mind was completely unlike his own.  The
gratitude he’d felt was not a clear articulated message but a raw and rather
primitive emotion, mostly relief and an acknowledgment that his fear was eased
at Dith’s will.  But that was all. 

Oddly enough, he could not probe back into the creature’s
mind, no matter how it sought and probed for sight in his.  This did not alarm
him, however, since he began to doubt that the creature could understand very
complex thoughts in any case.  Maybe there was simply nothing there to probe.

Of course not.  It’s…a horse.

He found this rather disappointing, actually, since he’d
always admired and almost envied the relationship Gikka had with Zinion, as if
her horse understood her so well that he could act on her merest whim almost
before she herself knew what she willed.  The other Brannagh horses-at-arms
were likewise so clever and so well disciplined that they gave the appearance
of great intelligence, and this was one more reason he’d been driven to seek
Hallin’s horse in the first place.

By contrast, this horse did not seem to respond to anything
at all.  In fact, Dith despaired of even getting it to move.  A fine thing that
would be, for Hallin to lead the Montorians back into the glade many days hence
only to find Dith still sitting on the horse, tugging and nudging and kicking
at it, unable to make it move at all. 

He tried nudging it with his knees, talking to it, pulling
at the rope, but it calmly chewed some more frozen grass.  Even so, Dith knew
he didn’t feel any stubbornness or refusal there.  In fact, if anything, he
felt only patience, as if the horse knew he would figure the whole business out
soon enough and was content to wait until he did. 

After a while, Dith decided that trying to make the horse
move was pointless when he had yet to consider his path.  He knew he needed to
get to Pyran, but he would prefer to avoid Montor to do it, which meant he
needed to move more east than south and cross the river at the first
opportunity while it was still narrow enough to cross easily but without coming
across any impassable cliffs or chasms.  Perhaps there was a bridge along the
way that he hadn’t noticed. 

Suddenly the horse was moving.

This is a terrible idea…

The other horses made half hearted efforts to fall in behind
them, uncertain, wondering if they were meant to follow without their riders,
but between their discomfort at being so near a mage and their lack of
enthusiasm for another long trek through the snow and ice, they went back to
the river’s edge and the sure grazing along its bank.

The horse picked up speed slowly as it went, as if aware
that its rider had never ridden before, guiding itself as if Dith had told it
exactly where to go.  Even while he sensed that the horse was taking care not
to throw him, Dith clutched awkwardly at the horse’s thick mane, trying to keep
his balance. 

Before long, the ugly blue-gray horse was carrying him
smoothly and swiftly downward through the mountains, certainly much faster than
he could have gone on his own.  If the horse was at all perturbed by the fact
that this terrain bore no resemblance to what he’d seen with Hallin on the
climb up the mountain, he gave no sign of it.

Eventually Dith reduced his involvement to merely sitting
and keeping his balance against the steady rhythm of the horse’s gait, and he was
able to relax a bit.  Before he’d seen the Brannagh horses, he’d never had any
interest in riding.  Horses had always seemed to him more trouble than they
were worth, much like people.  People were worse, of course.  People would
betray you, people would lie to you.  People would sell you to atrocity and
sleep the night unburdened. 

Only after years of being around the knights and around
Gikka, one of the least trusted people on all of Syon, had he learned that some
people could be trusted. Maybe he could learn to trust a horse, as well.

As silly as it seemed, and perhaps born of his envy of the
knights’ relationships with their horses, the thought occurred to him that it
would probably be easier for him to trust this half tonne of careening flesh
with his life if he treated it more as a companion than as a convenience he’d
stolen.

“It seems you’ve become my horse, if you’ll have me,”
shouted Dith over the clatter of the horse’s hooves, as if the horse would
understand him better if he spoke aloud, “so…what am I to call you?”  He
fancied he felt surprise followed by a mental shrug from the animal as it moved
faster and faster over the rocks and fallen branches.  It had always simply
been horse/conveyance/beast-of-burden, never a being with a proper name, and
one day, as it had been told angrily on more than one occasion, it would be
food for dogs.

Stale feed in a bin, a whip across his flank, a tank of
dirty water to drink…from the images and feelings Dith gathered from the horse,
Hallin had treated this creature very harshly and with little more than
contempt, as if horses that would carry a mage could be found at every
crossroads.  Amazing.  Hallin had clearly had no idea of the treasure he had in
this animal.  Here was a horse who could one day be the equal of Zinion or even
Alandro with the proper care and training.  His own horse.  His––

“Glasada,” Dith said suddenly, his voice surging with each
galloping step.  He remembered the last time he had seen a
glasada
danced, almost exactly a year ago during the last Feast of Bilkar.  It was
beautiful, fast and complex, evocative of the steps of one walking gingerly
across an ice floe and testing each step.  Dith was no dancer and could not
hope to keep up with the dance, but Gikka––his beautiful Gikka––danced it
expertly, putting even the barefoot Bilkarian monks to shame.  The name was
perfect.  “What do you think?”

As if to show how well the name suited him, the horse moved
confidently down the steep descents and over the snow covered deadfall without a
misstep.

“Very well, Glasada it is.”

Eventually, Dith stopped panicking at every turn and let
himself trust this new companion––trust Glasada––to find his way, needing only
to tell him their destination was Pyran.  Oh, not merely the name of the city
since he could not expect the horse to know where Pyran was, but the vague
direction and route they would take.  What would have taken him the better part
of a month afoot should take them no more than a tenday together, if that.

“Brilliant, boy.  Absolutely brilliant.  A horse.  I’d
never have imagined…”

He could not ignore it any longer.  The voice in his mind
was louder now, clearer, and most definitely not his own––a separate presence
inside his mind.  Surely this could not be the horse speaking to him…

“Much better than how I should have gone about it
myself.”

Dith shook his head to clear the ringing from his ears and
felt the drip of blood welling in his nose, just as he had in the depths of the
Keep.

“It’s all well and good to go porting here and porting
there, but those in Pyran are a little touchy about such flagrant displays
since I…well, since the landbridge fell.  No sense of humor, Hadrians, none. 
So bravo, my boy, bravo.”

The landbridge?  So his suspicion was true, then.  The voice…

Less than a day had passed since he had left Galorin’s Keep,
less than a day since the great obsidian chamber had closed itself behind him
and sunken back into the depths of the mountain, but already the whole
experience was taking on a dreamlike and distant quality, as if it had happened
to someone else or perhaps was all nothing but his own fancy. 

He replayed the memory in his mind, refreshing it,
reinforcing it.  It was real.  He knew it was.  He would not forget.

He’d stepped down the obsidian stairs to find exactly what
he’d expected, shelves full of sheaves and scrolls which contained millennia of
logs of experimentation, historical accounts, and dissertations concerning
certain aspects of the Art, all written in different languages, different hands… 
He’d read a few of the most recent ones and fought down a sense of
disappointment.  Certainty trees with their thready branches into possibility
and near-possibility, strands of power, means of concealing those threads even
from other mages…it was all accurate enough, certainly, but very little of what
he’d skimmed told him anything he hadn’t already learned on his own.  He had
begun to lose hope of finding the one thing he’d hoped to find:  the secret to
controlling his strange power, and, of course, what this stupid needy rock in
his rucksack had to do with it all.

In one corner, tucked away in an unobtrusive crate under a
table and looking more like a scrap of rubbish than anything else, he found a
small crumpled bit of parchment.  It had not a word written upon it, and he
nearly ignored it.  But when he lifted it from the crate into the red glow of
the mountain’s heart emanating from the walls and floor around him, he saw a
vision mark very like the one he’d created for Gikka, only far more intricate
and far more intense.  His heart raced.  He doubted it would allow him to read
it since vision marks are usually keyed to one person, but he could not resist
trying.  As dangerous as reading a vision mark meant for another might be,
especially one of this intensity, he knew he had to try. 

By the time he’d finished, his head was in agony, and his
nose was running with blood.  It seemed the vision mark had been meant for him,
strangely enough, but in spite of that, the intensity was so great, so
overwhelming, that even his own strength could not completely protect him from
its power.  He’d never experienced anything like it in all his life, and in
spite of his pain, he was elated.

He watched the vision mark fade into nothingness.  This was
the real treasure of Galorin’s Keep, and for all that he had succeeded in
finding the keep itself and even in finding this chamber, he’d come terribly
close to failure, to walking right past the unassuming crate without a second
glance.  He might never have found this legacy but for a bit of luck. 

“Luck, nothing, it was your damned curiosity.  I was
counting on it.”

If someone, even another mage, had asked him what he’d found
in the vision mark, he could not have said entirely.  A life, perhaps, but that
was not quite correct.  The vision mark did not contain every moment of a man’s
life from the first time his nurse set him at her teat to his last breath, nor
did it record every sordid assignation or other human foible, but instead, like
a deeply detailed memoir, it held every nuance of brilliance, every observation
on the nature of the Art, every subtlety, experience, anecdote…literally every
moment of one man’s magic. 

In this case, of course, that one man was Galorin.

What Dith hadn’t counted on was that the unique combination
of his unusual strength and Galorin’s had caused him not only to absorb his
knowledge and his power but what seemed his very essence as stored in the
vision mark.  Not that he had actually absorbed the ancient mage’s spirit or
soul into his mind, not exactly.  At least he hoped such was not the case. 
Surely even for someone of his power, bearing the soul of an immensely powerful
mage would be too much and might push him to madness.  He dabbed worriedly at
the drop of blood at his nostril.

“Did you absorb my spirit?  An interesting question. 
Most likely the ‘me’ that speaks with you now is but a copy, and a damned good
one if I do say so myself.  The real Galorin is no doubt off chasing through
the stars on a cloak of night with one god or another.  Yes, that’s a much more
comforting thought, certainly.  At least to me.”