Shadowkings (16 page)

"Why?" she demanded as he strode over to wash his hands at the table.

He shook water from his long pale hands, dried them and said; "Because our time here is at an end."

Almost at once she heard voices from outside, among them that of Suviel. Keren tossed the last of the bandages on the table and dashed past the impassive Raal.

Two mercenaries with drawn swords held a dazed, half-awake Suviel between them while another four approached the sick tent. With them was the General and an uncomfortable-looking Domas. Keren glared at him as the General halted a few feet away.

"Give up your weapons and you will come to no harm," he said.

She ignored the command and grinned wolfishly, hand resting on the hilt of her sword. "Release my companion and you will likewise be unharmed."

The General responded with a smile of his own. "Surely you can see the futility of pitting yourself against us, woman. The terms of my compact require only that I deliver the herbwoman. If we have to kill you, it is no matter."

"Keren," said Suviel. "Don't fight. There are other ways - "

Keren's gaze never left the General's face. "Who have you sold us to, mercenary?" She put venom into the word. "Those priests, yes? Then come, for I will not surrender to them or you."

Her sword sang a metallic hiss as she drew it forth. The General shook his head.

"Impetuous, yet spirited. You could have been a valuable asset to my company, Keren Asherol. That can still be so, if you exercise a little prudence. Give me your sword and you will be safe, I swear it."

Keren spat on the ground. "Come and take it, lackey."

The General's composure dissolved into anger. "Take them," he told his men.

Before they could move, a voice spoke from behind Keren.

"Halt! There will be no fighting."

Raal Haidar was standing to her right, hands linked across his chest and concealed by the sleeves of his dark green robe.

"Unless you have a weapon, stay out of this," Keren muttered.

The tall man ignored her and said to the General, "You have made a grave mistake, for I fear you will have to return your fee."

The General unsheathed his own blade, a plain broadsword with a battered basket hilt. "And why would that be?"

"Because you will have no-one to deliver, foolish warrior." Haidar's hands parted and he raised one of them, forefinger pointing up, thumbtip pressed against the others. He paused for an instant, staring straight at the General who seemed to shrink slightly under the impact of that regard. "Be fortunate in your journey."

Then he spoke a long, single word and the world changed.

The word reverberated through her. Her skin crawled and her bones rang and the air in her lungs buzzed like a thing alive. One arm she wrapped across her chest, while the other quivered to the brazen sound of her sword, tightly grasped yet still somehow slowly slipping out of her fist. She could feel her hair writhing on her scalp and her eyes vibrating in their sockets. Then, with a fading undertone, the word ended and Keren straightened to look about her.

The General, Domas and their men were still visible, but only as horror-struck, tenuous wraiths searching in and around the tent. Night's darkness was gone, replaced by an all-pervasive white radiance that leached the colour from their surroundings, the tent, the trees, the grass, the flickering flames of the campfire. To Keren's eyes everything was in shades of crystalline white and grey, except for her companions.

Suviel stumbled across to Raal Haidar. "What have you done?" she said in amazement. "Where are we?"

Haidar, hand still upraised, looked around him as if in scrutiny for a brief moment before answering. "This place is known to the arcana of my masters as Kekrahan. It is one of several spectral domains which closely overlap our own plane of existence."

"We call them the Realms," said Suviel.

Haidar shrugged. "I do not know if we are speaking of the same thing. As I understand it, the Realms are seperate planes of existence in their own right. This - " He gestured about him, " - is but a ghosty half-world."

"And how long can you keep us here?" Keren said impatiently.

"Not indefinitely, so it would be wise if we set out to find your other fellow-traveller who, I believe, is keeping watch over your remaining horses up on the topmost level."

"How did you know that?"

"When we were tending the sick, your mind continually returned to this man, Gilly. My people are sensitive to fleeting thought-emanations and with you it was akin to hearing someone muttering under their breath."

"Shall we go?" said Suviel. "I have no desire to find myself back in our erstwhile captors' hands."

Together they made their way through the trees to the pathway that led up the mountainside. It was like walking through a community of apparitions; although it was the middle of the night, there were still many refugees awake, huddled round fires or stealing among the tents and lean-tos on obscure errands. As they came to the earthslide and masonry barrier, where Barew and his fellows tossed dice by torchlight, a scrawny dog leaped to its feet and began barking madly at their passing. One of the guards hurled stones at it and the poor animal ran off yelping.

The same thing happened twice more, once with a bony cat which abandoned its meal of dead rat and scurried away, and again with a tethered goat which ran in a panicky circle till they had passed by.

Gilly and Keren had pitched their tent under a jutting rock. The trader was sitting on a boulder when they arrived, feeding a fire with scraps of tinder. Keren smiled at the moody look on his face and turned to the sorcerer.

"You can bring us back now."

"Not here," Suviel said. "We might be seen."

Keren pointed to a gap between the overhanging rock and the side of the tent and right behind Gilly. "There?"

The mage gave her a reproachful look. "Trying to exact some petty revenge, Keren?"

"He deserves it," Keren said.

Raal Haidar drew himself straighter. "This is quite tiresome." He uttered two quick, harsh syllables, and Keren felt an icy wave pass through her, leaving her shivering cold in its wake with shadowy night once more shrouding all she saw.

Before them, Gilly had jumped to his feet and had half-drawn his blade when recognition stayed his hand. Suviel hurried over to rub her hands in the heat of the fire and was quickly joined by Keren. The trader quickly assumed an air of relaxed ease and sat back down.

"It would appear that I've missed all the excitement," he said.

"There is no time for explanations, Gilly," said Suviel. "We had best break camp immediately before anyone comes looking for us. And we've only two horses between the three of us so the sooner we leave the safer I'll feel."

"There will be four of us."

Keren turned with Suviel to regard Raal Haidar. The tall man met the mage's cool gaze for a moment before a ghost of a smile crossed his face.

"Fate decrees that we be fellow travellers,
Shin
Hantika," he said. "Like you, my destination lies to the north, in Prekine." He bowed his head very slightly, as if acknowledging her authority. "I am sure that I can be of service to you."

Suviel was silent and Keren felt a haze of unease at the suspicion, the certainty that the only way Raal Haidar could know of their travel plans would be if he had picked it from among Suviel's own thoughts.

Then the mage nodded. "Very well. We would be glad to have you journey with us."

"And will we be travelling from here to there in the blinking of an eye?" said Gilly as he stood. "Or can I look forward to days spent traversing mountains and fording rushing streams?"

"I fear we shall be confined to this plane of existence," said Haidar.

Gilly frowned. "I can scarcely contain my joy."

Whilst a half-truth and a half-lie,
Are perilous horrors to the unwary eye,
The unvarnished truth,
Is more terrible still.

—Contemplations
, 27.

Incomplete, the spell hovered a foot above Bardow's table, a glittering, twisting knot of broken colours. A couple of thin-wicked candles in niches by the door gave off yellow halos of light, but the spell's luminescence was quite different. It sent weak rainbow flickers over the table's dusty clutter of books, withered plant stalks, grotesque figurines, pincers, files, quills and empty inkpots, and a couple of plates bearing the quarter-eaten, dried-out remnants of food. The mage sat in a tall chair, elbow resting on the chair arm, chin cupped in hand, his face looking tired and lined in the spell's radiance.

Bardow felt tired. If he had been shaping an ordinary scrying spell, it would have taken him a matter of minutes and demanded only a modicum of concentration and alertness. This scrying spell, however, was different. In effect, he was trying to recreate the farseeing aspect of the Crystal Eye by pitting several Lesser Power thought-cantos against each other. Already his head was ringing with the effort of maintaining the cantos of Behold and Veil, and Impel and Lure, balancing their open forces, keeping them focussed on the same point.

At that point darkness enfolded light, red birthed black, white became silver became leaf green became jewelled blue became perfect circular ripples of oily shimmer. Bardow whispered the syllable which joined the beginning and the end of his fifth thought-canto, that of Binding. Opaque strands looped and looped around the composite spell, caging it.

He sighed with relief and sagged in his chair. As the thought-cantos slipped from his mind, a fading carnival of sounds and textures and emotions, he wiped his face with a trembling hand, and rubbed the smarting ache from his eyes. Once, back before the Mogaun invasion, he had attended a conclave where this very task was performed by Archmage Agartil; it had taken him but a few moments and fatigued him not at all. But Argatil had died with the Emperor at Arengia and the Rootpower was shattered and gone, leaving only the inelegant methods of the Lesser Power with which to achieve the impossible.

Sticks and mud to withstand the storm
, he thought.
And even with the Crystal Eye, it may not be enough
.

Above his table the spell was now a small pale orb, its face disturbed by tiny swirls of darkness that came and went. For now it was stable, but the antagonistic forces he had bound together would after a while begin to oscillate: then, it was a matter of bringing those forces into resonance with each other. Thus would he achieve his goal.

Bardow gripped the arms of his chair and stood. But his legs felt frail and he staggered slightly to the side. Laughing weakly, he steadied himself for a brief moment then retrieved a tinderwheel from beneath a sheaf of parchments, lit a tallow lamp then walked gingerly over to the window. A heavy grey blanket attached to a pole and crosspiece hung like a banner across the shutters, and when he moved it to one side a tall, dazzling shaft of sunlight abruptly dispelled the gloom. Plumes of dust from the blanket sparkled in the brightness. Bardow tugged open the shutters, pushed wide the outer ones and leaned on the windowsill, resting his palms flat on the heated stone.

Krusivel was bathed in the bright gold of a noon sun, an unexpected glory in this grey autumn. From the tower he could see people taking advantage of the uninterrupted warmth - washing was being hung out, roofs were being repaired, an extension to the barracks was under construction, and the horses were out in the upper fields, being run and raced by the ostlers and several of the knights. He breathed in deep and smelled grass and a hint of woodsmoke and suddenly found himself remembering...

...leaning out of a high window very like this, with sunlight in his face and the cold sharpness of mountain air in his lungs. And gazing down at a narrow, sloping street that wound its way through the town, past college halls, lodging houses and inns, with alleys leading off to taverns and stalls selling herbs or odd curios, tailors, flowersellers, scryers booths, a bakery whose delicacies were shipped to all the great cities, and an odd little shop which specialised in climbing paraphernalia. And looking up at the greenwings that dashed around the sky in great flocks, more often than not in flight from a predatory wolfhawk...

Bardow closed his eyes, trying to hold the memory in place. Fifty years on and he could still recall his first days as a student in Trevada. His last visit had been a year before the invasion, since when he had heard only rumour and fourth-hand accounts of the awful havoc and slaughter visited upon the mage-town by the Acolytes after the dissolution of the Rootpower. If Suviel survived and returned with the Eye, he would finally know what if anything remained of the dear places of his youth.

The sounds of children's singing voices reached him. Peering down, he spied a group of six or seven boys and girls sitting beside a clump of catear blooms. One lad was half-singing, half-giggling the old nonsense verse about the pig and the pigeon. When he finished, two girls with long, braided fair hair stood up, clasped their hands before them and began to sing:

As they sang, they acted out the words with their hands and finished with their arms raised above their heads and happy smiles on their faces. Bardow listened and watched with tears in his eyes. Although a simple child's verse, it contained, in a greatly abbreviated form, all the main elements of the Great Rite of the Fathertree which used to be conducted twice a year - at the height of summer and in the depths of winter.

We are all in winter now
, he thought sombrely.
Yet our children still have the faith that we lost. Their innocence shields them from truth
.

Behind him there was a knock at the door.

"I'm busy," he said over his shoulder.

"No, you're not," said a woman's voice.

He turned to stare. "I'm hard at work on a matter of great importance."