The Red Wyvern: Book One of the Dragon Mage (50 page)

“I do believe every word you say. To hold faith in Havoc be another thing entirely. Here, if this Lord Harmony be his brother, and truly, you tell me that such is the case, well, then Harmony must be a god, too, and no lackwit or jealous spirit.”

Raena flushed scarlet, then leaned forward, her hands grabbing the ends of the chair arms.

“I tell you,” she growled, “Lord Havoc is a god. I do feel his power upon me when I work magicks.”

“Harmony never denied that there be great power with him and his brother both.”

Raena sprang to her feet and trembled.

“I will not listen!” she snarled. “If you think me a liar, then I will leave your house.”

“Rae!” Verrarc rose, feeling panic clutch his heart. “Nah nah nah, I never meant—”

“How may I stand here and listen to this blasphemy?” She tossed her head. “Better I freeze out in the winter snows!”

In two quick strides Verrarc crossed to her and flung his arms around her.

“Don’t leave me! I beg you!”

“Then speak no more blasphemies and listen to none, either, from this Harmony creature.”

“Done, then. You have my word.”

At that she smiled and allowed him to kiss her. One kiss led to another, and he was about to suggest they while away the cold day in their bed, when he heard someone cough twice behind him. He let Raena go and spun round to see Korla glaring at him.

“Be you ready for the dinner, master?” she said. “Or shall it wait at the cook’s hearth?”

“We’ll eat now. You may serve it at table.”

With a snort Korla shuffled off, banging the door behind her.

“I do hate that woman,” Raena hissed. “You should turn her out and that ghastly mooncalf of her granddaughter, too.”

“And where would they go? Korla did serve my mother well, and she’ll have a place here as long as she lives.”

Raena seemed about to argue, then merely shrugged and turned away.

“Let’s go dine,” Verrarc said.

She hesitated, staring into the fire.

“Please, my love?” Verrarc went on. “Let’s not have the food chill with waiting.”

“Oh very well! Whatever pleases you.”

When he touched her arm, she shook him off and marched out of the room without another word. He followed, planning out apologies.

Evandar returned to his country to find winter creeping back. Although the sunlight remained warm, the trees had lost their leaves again. Great drifts of red and gold lay on the ground or scattered across the grass with each breath of cold wind. Swearing like a silver dagger, he called down the astral Light yet once again and poured its energy into the Lands. He clothed the trees with green and filled the river with fresh water; he brought birds to life and scattered flowers over the green meadows. Everywhere he walked, spring returned—but for how long? he asked himself. Would he have to stay here now to fight against the winter, like a sieged lord trapped in his dun?

He could, he supposed, go consult with Dallandra about this change in the Lands, but the thought of iron and its torments stopped him. All at once he remembered a man who must have been another dweomer-master, someone he’d met by chance during the summer’s wars, when he’d been hunting Alshandra. Off at the far edge of his domain, it was, in a place that he had never created.

Under an aged oak tree that grew beside the silver river, Evandar stripped off his semblance of Deverry clothes and left them in a heap on the grass. He ran naked along the riverside, stretched out his arms, and sprang into the air. As his leap carried him up, he changed into a enormous red hawk. With a screech the hawk flew high and circled to get his bearings. The Lands spread out far below in a long sweep of green meadow, divided in one direction by the boundary forest and in the other, crosswise, direction by the silver river. The landscape stretched into mist and a horizon, where, or so he suspected, other lands had sprung up following the pattern of his own, wild lands with no lord to rule them. In one of them he’d found a mysterious old man, but at the time he’d been too intent upon Alshandra to wonder who he might be.

Evandar set off, flying fast, for the edge of the mist that ran into the green meadow like feather-edged waves upon a shore. Although it hid the land below, he tucked his wings and dove, swooping down to level just under its cover. He was flying over a grey landscape stretching sullen in a grey light. Big boulders pushed up through thin soil, and a constant scour of wind blew dust in little eddies over the flat. At a distance, among patches of green lichen and thin grass, he saw a dead tree, stripped of branches, and swooped down to land nearby.

The old man with the brown skin and ready smile still sat on the rocks where Evandar had left him. He was still cutting the apple with a blunt knife, and each time he sliced off a piece, another grew back to replace it. Yet something had changed. All around him, for a distance of some fifty feet, the barren land had turned green with the beginnings of grass. Near the dead trunk a sapling had sprouted. With a shiver of feathers Evandar changed back into elven form, then created himself a green tunic to wear as well. He sat down on the rock opposite the old man.

“An apple tree?” Evandar said. “That’s new.”

“It is.” The old man looked up and greeted him with a smile. “You’ve returned.”

“I have, at that. I’ve come to ask you a question or two.”

“Ah, have you? Well, I may not answer unless you answer me some of my own.”

“A fair bargain, good sir. I’ve told you why I’m here. Why are you here?”

“To act as a canal.”

Evandar gaped.

“Haven’t you ever been to Bardek?” the old man said, grinning. “The irrigation canals bring water from where it is to where it’s not.”

“And are you bringing water, then? The land’s a bit greener than when last I saw it.”

“Water of a sort. But now it’s my turn for the question. You came to ask questions, but why do you think I have answers?”

“Because of that apple. In my own country there’s a tree that marks a borderland. One half of it is always green and in full leaf, while the other half is dead and blazes with fire. I don’t know why, but the apple seems to me to be the same sort of thing.”

“Very good. You’re quite right.”

“I think me that I’m a canal myself, when it comes to maintaining my lands.”

“It could well be.”

“Can you tell me how these canals work?”

“Power comes from the astral plane, meets a pattern, and fills it, like water will run down a canal and fill up a pond. Do you know what I mean by the astral plane?”

“I’ve heard the word before, truly. So the power runs through me to my lands?”

“I’d suppose so.” The old man suddenly laughed. “I’ve never seen you at work.”

“Ah. Well, I’m the master of the green lands over there.” Evandar waved in their direction. “I created them for my people by pulling down energy and braiding it into forms. This was all a long time ago, of course. We wandered among the stars, but we grew weary.”

“Ah, so you don’t come from the world of matter.”

That word again, matter! Evandar considered it one of the three greatest riddles, along with Death and Time.

“I don’t, good sir,” Evandar said. “Could you be so kind as to answer me this? When I’m in residence in my lands, I can create anything I wish, just by picturing it, but the thing refuses to stay. If I don’t keep bringing water down the canal, as it were, then the pond dries up. How can I stop this?”

“You can’t. That’s the very nature of the etheric plane at work. Nothing persists there unless you keep building it anew.”

Evandar swore with a few oaths he’d learned from Rhodry. The old man made a wry face.

“You may ask me a question now, sir,” Evandar said. “It’s your turn.”

“Oh, I don’t have any more. I’ll save them in case I need to ask you somewhat later.”

“Fair enough. Then I’ll give you another question to hold in store. When I go to the world of men and elves, nothing I imagine gets itself born. Why?”

“That’s the nature of the world of matter. It’s extremely difficult to create there, but what you create takes great effort to destroy. In the etheric world, what you create with great ease fades away easily.”

Evandar sighed and considered this, while the old man kept peeling the apple and eating what he sliced away.

“I think I begin to understand,” Evandar said at last. “Do you mean to tell me that unless I’ve been born, unless I’ve subjected myself to flesh and stench and death, that nothing I do will remain?”

“Oh, it’s not quite as bad as all that. Close, but not quite. Well-loved images remain as images, though imperfect ones. In some worlds bards already sing about your country, though they have all sorts of wrong names for it.”

“So if I should lose it, it won’t be completely gone?”

“Not as long as the bard songs get themselves sung and men and elves are willing to hear them. But in the end, every song falls silent.”

“Then I’m doomed to lose it for once and all.”

“Not truly. If you lose it, you’ll find it again. If you hoard it, you’ll lose it.”

This made no sense whatsoever, but Evandar had no time to puzzle it out. He rose and bowed.

“My thanks, good sir. If ever I can be of aid to you, I will.”

“You’ve got the answers you need, then?”

“I do, though I like them not.”

Evandar flung his arms into the air and leapt back in to the red hawk form. He screeched once in farewell, then flew off, fast and steadily, for his own country and the mothers of all roads.

Far, far to the south of Bardek, so far that in those days very few human beings knew they existed, lie a handful of islands, scattered across the sea by the Goddess of Fire, some say, in aeons past. Be that as it may, they’d offered a refuge to elven folk who’d fled the destruction of the Seven Cities by ship, back at the time when Deverry men first rode in Annwn. The name of the largest of them is Linalantava, the Island of Regret.

In elven form, wearing his green tunic and buckskin leggings, Evandar travelled to Linalantava. With a pair of heavy leatherbound books under his arms, he walked along a misty trail that seemed to lead nowhere. All at once he stepped off, glided down, and found himself standing among twisted, stunted pines.

A cool wind played over a barren landscape. It seemed that the very sunlight changed, turning pale while he picked his way through huge grey boulders along the crest of a hill. Below him a cliff dropped down to a long parched valley gashed by a dry riverbed; far across rose high mountains, black and forbidding, peaked with snow. A wind blew steadily, whining through the coarse grass. The stunted slant of the few trees made it clear that the wind rarely stopped.

When he turned round, he saw directly behind him more of the deformed trees, scattered round a spread of low wooden buildings, long oblongs roofed with split shingles. They were covered with carvings, every inch of the walls, every window frame and door lintel, of animals, birds, flowers, words in the elvish syllabary, all stained in subtle colors, mostly blues and reds, to pick out the designs. From round behind the complex he could hear a faint whinny of horses, and a snatch of song drifted with the swirling dust.

Evandar made his way among the huddled longhouses, some hardly better than huts, that sheltered what was left of one of the finest university systems the world has ever known, then or now. The dry air of these parched mountains protected the books that the People had brought with them into exile, the last pitiful remains of the grand libraries of Rinbaladelan and the copies that generations of scribes had made since. It was the curator of these books that he’d come to see, and he found him in the scriptorium, a long narrow building with windows all round.

Meranaldar jumped up to greet him with a low bow. Although his name meant “demon slayer,” Meranaldar was a thin man, stooped and hollow-eyed from his long years spent tending the sacred books. His hair was as pale as Evandar’s own, but his eyes were a more normal purple color.

“My humble greetings!” Meranaldar said. “A visit from one of the Guardians is an honor worth treasuring.”

“My thanks to you, then.” Evandar held out the books. “I’ve brought these back to you.”

Meranaldar took them and laid them down on the wooden table. His long fingers, gnarled from years of holding a pen, trembled as he turned a few pages.

“Does Jill have no further need of these, then?”

It took Evandar a few moments to realize what he meant.

“I’m sorry,” Evandar said. “But yes, she’s dead.”

Meranaldar’s eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away on the sleeve of his tunic.

“Well, she had the shaking fever very badly when she left us,” Meranaldar said. “May her gods treat her well in their Otherlands, as she called them.”

Evandar considered telling him how Jill had truly died, then decided against it. Grief was grief no matter what caused the mourning, and he had no desire to tell long complex stories about dweomer and the Guardians.

“I knew she’d want you to have them back,” Evandar said instead. “My friend, I’ve come with a favor to ask you. You’ve got a map of the city of Rinbaladelan, if I remember rightly. I should like a copy of it.”

Meranaldar stared at him for a long moment.

“Er, you do have the map, don’t you?” Evandar said.

“Of course! I’m just surprised. It seems such an odd thing to ask for.”

“Ah, well, I suppose it does. I have this scheme in mind, you see, but it’s not yet ripe enough for the talking about.”

“Very well. Far be it for me to argue with a Guardian.” Meranaldar paused, drumming his fingertips on the table while he thought. “The best copy isn’t here. It’s down in the city. I’ll have to find someone to take my place, then journey there.”

There had been a time when Evandar would have accepted all this effort as merely the tribute due to a Guardian, but recently he’d learned what effort meant to those who lived in the world of Time and Death.

“How may I repay you?” Evandar said.

“Oh, my dear Evandar! No payment needed.”

“But I want to bring you something in return. Jill told you about the Westlands, I know, and your people left behind there. Would more news of them please you?”