The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage (45 page)

“Well, that’s what I feared, all right. It seems your mother’s dweomer has true power.”

Lilli sank shaking onto her wooden chest. Nevyn glanced around the chamber, saw the pitcher and cup, and poured her water. She clasped the cool pottery cup in both hands and sipped like a child.

“Will she ever let me be?” Lilli whispered.

“Not here, not in Dun Deverry. I doubt me if she can appear anywhere else. Her dweomer’s real, but she was no master of the dark craft. It takes a lifetime of practice and study to travel as a haunt. Sooner or later, she’ll have to face her reckoning, but I’ll wager she clings to life—if you can call it life—for as long as she can.” Nevyn considered, frowning, for a long moment. “We’ll have to find somewhere safe for you to go. As long as you’re here, she’ll try to prey upon you, sucking your life to feed her spirit.”

Lilli laid cold fingers on her throat.

“I’m sorry,” Nevyn said gently. “I know these things are hard to comprehend.”

“It’s not that. I felt—I was sure she was trying to kill me. Not just do what you said, but kill me.”

“Then we’ve got to get you out of here straightaway.” Nevyn hesitated, thinking. “Although it’s just possible she could somehow follow you like a barnacle riding a ship, and I can’t go with you. The prince needs me here. Blast her! I’m honestly not sure what she can or cannot do. I’ve never heard of a haunt appearing in the middle of the day before.”

The weariness that had overwhelmed her earlier returned. Lilli felt as if she were sinking into the wood chest like water. There’s no hope, she thought. She’ll win in the end.

“Lilli.” Nevyn’s voice was a soft whisper. “What are you thinking? Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“The dark wins in the end. The dark always sucks up the light.”

Nevyn smacked his hands together hard. Lilli came to herself with a little shake of her head.

“What?” she said. “What was that? What was I saying?”

“Naught that you need to remember. I won’t lie to you. The situation’s very grave.”

“If there was only somewhat I could do.”

“Oh, there is. If you’re willing, you can help me win this battle. I have to tell you honestly, though, that it could be very dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous already, isn’t it? But what could I possibly—oh, wait, I do see. I can be bait.”

“Just so. It’s a real risk, but I don’t know what else to do. She could wander around here for a long time. It’s a huge dun. I’d have a cursed hard time chasing her down.”

Lilli hesitated, feeling her heart pound, but she was remembering Bevyan, lying in a grave behind Lord Camlyn’s dun.

“I don’t care about the risk. I’ll do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am. For all I know she’ll try to kill someone else once she’s done with me.”

“She’s already done that. Practicing, I suppose. Well and good then. As much as I hate to risk you, I—wait. I can lay a double trap, now that I think of it.”

Lilli merely nodded. Her heart was pounding so loud, it seemed, that she could barely hear him. Her breath came ragged in her chest.

“I think,” Nevyn went on, “that we’ll move you to a room in another broch and put Branoic on guard at your door. I’ll be hiding somewhere nearby, and we’ll see if she falls into our trap.”

When Nevyn said he’d be hiding nearby, he meant of course nearby on the etheric plane. His actual body would lie some distance away. For the rest of the afternoon, he stayed with Lilli and kept her among other people where she’d be safe. Once night had fallen, and the astral tides were calm again after their change, he gave Branoic his orders.

“I’m going up to Lilli’s old chamber. Give me time to get there, and then take her to the new one. You stand guard outside, but remember, lad: if you hear her scream, get into the room fast.”

“You can trust me for that, my lord,” Branoic said. “Never fear.”

In Lilli’s chamber Nevyn lay down on her bed in the darkness. He crossed his arms over his chest, each hand on the opposite shoulder, then let his breathing slow into long, measured breaths while in his mind he built up the image of his body of light, a pale blue and nearly featureless simulacrum. With an effort of trained will, he transferred his consciousness into it. Even though it hovered above him, for a moment he felt as if he were falling; then he heard a rushy click, and he slipped over to find himself floating above his body. Blue light suffused through the chamber and gleamed on black stone walls gone dead, a prison around him. Turning a little he floated up to a join of wall and ceiling. Behind him the silver cord, pulsing with life, payed out, linking him to his untenanted body below.

Curious Wildfolk appeared to hover around him. Here on their proper plane they gleamed like crystals, all angles and geometry as they trembled and flew.

“Stay away, little brothers,” Nevyn sent his thoughts to them. “I’m laying a trap.”

They winked out and disappeared. Nevyn waited, but time is hard to measure on the etheric, and he began to fear that Merodda had gone directly after Lilli. Perhaps she could sense her daughter’s presence from some distance. Yet if he left too soon and she found his unguarded body, the consequences would be grim. If she snapped the silver cord, his body would die, leaving him adrift out on the astral long before his Wyrd demanded.

Nevyn dropped down to float just above his body, but before he could transfer over, he felt rather than saw another presence on the etheric nearby. Like a flushed grouse he flew up and got back into his corner just as the silvery-blue form of a naked woman glided through the black wall below.

Rather than an artificially crafted body of light, Merodda appeared in her etheric double, the matrix that had formed and interpenetrated her body during life. Faithfully it had recorded her death as well: her neck furrowed by the rope, her head flopped at an angle from its breaking. Already, however, the double was beginning to distort. Her legs seemed too long and thin; her torso, bloated and squat. Although she knew how to drain life-stuff from her victims, she seemed to lack the knowledge of how to distribute it within her etheric form.

In this grotesque simulacrum she drifted toward the bed, then stopped, staring at the unexpected sleeper. Nevyn called upon the Light and dropped like a striking hawk. In answer to his call, light came—a vast glowing sheet of it, shifting and twisting in rainbow colors like those northern lights the Dwarven folk tell of. Nevyn caught the edge with the hands of his body of light.

Merodda looked up, saw him, and shrieked—or rather, sent the thought of a wail out into the etheric where his mind heard it as a shriek. Like a fisherman throwing a net, Nevyn hurled the sheet of light at her and over her. She shrieked again, twisting back and forth as she clawed at it with both hands. He grabbed the edges and clutched them grimly, trapping her. She was beyond thinking in words; over and over she shrieked and tore and threw herself back and forth, but slowly her struggles exhausted her. She stopped moving; her shrieks turned to a thin wail of fear.

Above them both Nevyn visualized a pentagram, glowing with silver and blue, then drew round it a circle of gold. He rose, hauling Merodda with him, and flung them both through this gate into the astral plane. An indigo wind, dark as a bruise, caught them, swirled them, tumbled them around and around as they fell, rushing downward through a cloud of blown images—faces, beasts, stars, symbols, and letters in unknown scripts. The images beat against them, then flew on, borne by the indigo wind. In her net of light Merodda was screaming and twisting as she tore at the glowing strands.

“Courage!” Nevyn called out. “You go to your redemption!”

Straight ahead in the indigo a long slash of violet appeared, then swirled and thickened into a shimmering oval of pale lavender light. Nevyn called out a Name, and they fell through, tumbling at last to rest in a field of white flowers, nodding on a breeze that barely trembled their pale white leaves. Some distance away a river gleamed silver, or was it a mist? It shifted, tenuous as moonlight. When Nevyn tugged on the last tatters of his astral net, they fell away to reveal a tiny child, formed of pale golden light.

“Call upon the Light!” Nevyn said. “Call upon the Light and forswear the Darkness!”

The child wept, throwing tiny hands up in front of her face as if she feared a slap. Even though the astral wind blew so gently here, it caught her up and began to carry her toward the river. She drifted this way and that, bobbing on the breathless wind, but ever closer she came to the silver river.

“Go with the Light!” Nevyn called out. “Go in peace!”

Whether she answered, he never knew. The struggle to travel on this plane in the body of light was growing too much for him. He saw his gathering weakness as a shattering of the vision: pieces of landscape fell away, the flowers withered and vanished. Only the violet light still gleamed, and in it a rift of indigo. With a last effort he launched himself through and fell back into the wind.

Spiraling around and around, up and up it seemed, past the manic frenzy of torn images and broken snatches of strange music, he saw at last his pentacle gate of silver and blue. Soaring and struggling both at once, he reached it and slipped through, bobbing up into bluish light that glimmered on the dead black walls of the chamber. Below him he saw his body, lying twisted on its side but still joined safely to his consciousness by the silver cord. Nevyn floated to a position directly over it and hovered for a moment, gathering strength for his return.

Yet someone or something shared the chamber with him. All at once he felt a presence, a trembling of life within the stone space. The presence gathered strength, glittered like crystal in a corner, swelled and grew, turned into a vaguely female form, huge and menacing. When she raised cloaked arms like huge wings, he saw her long hair, streaming down black as stone over her shoulders and down her back. Her face, shadowed by a hood, he could not see at all.

“Where is she?” The thought came to him in a silky whisper.

“She’s gone to the Light, where she belongs.”

The presence considered him briefly, then vanished. Nevyn shuddered in what he could later admit was fear. He slid down the silver cord until he hovered just above his body, then let himself fall back. Another clicking sound, a long wheeze of breath, and he was back.

“It is over!” Nevyn slapped one hand hard on the mattress beside him. “May she find the Light!”

Not so much as a crack of the Light’s earthly counterpart gleamed around the hide over the window. It was late, then. He sat up, stretching his cramped muscles, wondering over the presence. A god form, perhaps? It inspired the same kind of cold awe as one of those created embodiments of raw power. And yet it seemed too personal, too individually concerned with Merodda to be a goddess. With a shrug he got up, but as he was hurrying across the ward to Lilli’s refuge, he was thinking about the presence in black. The only lore he could connect with her was what Aderyn had told him about the Guardians, those strange beings attached to the elven group-soul. But what would one of them be doing in Dun Deverry? He cast that explanation aside, which in the long wheel of events proved to be most unfortunate.

By the light of a candle lantern Branoic was standing guard, leaning against Lilli’s door. At the sight of Nevyn he straightened up, all tense expectation.

“Does Lilli fare well?” Nevyn said.

“As far as I know, my lord.” Branoic spun around and pulled open the door.

Lilli nearly fell into the corridor. She managed a laugh.

“I was leaning against it,” she said. “I wanted to stay right by it, you see, so Branoic would hear me if I screamed.”

“Very wise,” Nevyn said. “But it’s over. She’s well and truly dead this time.”

Lilli let out her breath in a long raspy sigh.

“Thank the Goddess,” she whispered. “And a thousand thanks to you, Nevyn.”

“Oddly enough, I did it for her sake as well as yours. But be that as it may, she’ll never trouble you or any other soul again.”

Yet he knew that even as he spoke the truth, he was lying, that while Merodda would never trouble anyone in this life, she would have other lives in which to work her enemies harm. No doubt she would remember them all, even in her new bodies and new lives. Now that she’d learned to welcome evil, evil would seek her out. He hoped and prayed that she would renounce it when it presented itself to her, but he had no way of knowing if she would or not. One thing only he could be sure of: sooner or later in the long skein of lives, her thread would tangle round Lilli’s once again.

  PART THREE