The Silver Mage (8 page)

“
YOU SHOULD LEAVE ME,
”Gerontos said.“Just leave me here and save yourselves.”

“Never!” Rhodorix laid a bloodstained hand on his brother’s shoulder, then glanced at the druid standing nearby. “Think your god will intervene and save us?”

Galerinos merely shook his head, too exhausted to speak, and leaned, as bent as an old man, on his heavy staff. Rhodorix considered his cousin’s wounds, slight if Galerinos had been a warrior but grave enough for a softer man. The young priest’s arms, bare in his linen tunic, bled from a hundred scratches, the work of the thorny bushes and low-growing trees of this stretch of countryside. Blood stained the hem of his tunic as well from the cuts and scratches on his bare thighs.

All that hot autumn day the three of them had been scrambling through the underbrush in the rocky hills, trying to find a hiding place, taking turns supporting Gerontos, whose broken leg could bear no weight.

“No use in you dying with me, Rhoddo,” Gerontos said. “Either of you.”

Rhodorix helped his brother sit down among the boulders. Gerontos’ leg, snapped below the knee by a savage ax, had turned purplish-black; blood oozed from under the bandages Rhodorix had improvised from strips of their tunics. He helped Gerontos settle himself, then got up and looked down the long slope of the hill to the valley below. Somewhere among the tall grass and the patches of forest waited their clan and safety, somewhere too far to see. Unfortunately, he could all too clearly see a small mob of their enemies, still some distance below them, but coming inexorably up the hill.

Just after dawn that morning, Rhodorix, eldest son of the Dragon clan, and his warband had been guarding Galerinos as he dowsed for water. Instead of a spring they’d discovered a trap set by the white savages. All fourteen of his men lay dead down in the valley; only he himself, his brother Gerontos, and the druid had survived the attack. Unhorsed, desperate, they had taken too many wrong paths during their attempt to escape.

I made too many bad decisions, not anyone else but me,
Rhodorix thought. “The shame’s mine,” he said aloud. “Better I just die with you here. Even if we got back, what am I going to tell the vergobretes?”

Neither Galerinos nor his brother could look him in the face. Neither said a word.

“But, Gallo, you can hide or suchlike,” Rhoddo went on. “Get away after they kill us.”

“If Great Bel wants me to die, then die I will,” Galerinos said. “There’s no use in running.”

“Well, how, by the hells, do you know what he wants? You keep praying, and we keep getting more and more lost.”

“That’s why I think he wants us to die. If he’d only led us to water right away—”

A cry drifted up on the hot and dusty air, a shriek of triumph, an answering howl from a band of men.

“They’ve spotted us,” Rhodorix said. “Naught else matters now.”

“Help me up!” Gerontos said. “Cursed if I’ll die sitting down.”

Between them Rhodorix and Galerinos hauled him up and helped him prop himself against a boulder. Gerro’s face had gone pale under the smears of dust. Sweat plastered his dark hair to his forehead. Had his leg been sound, Rhodorix knew, the two of them could have scored some kills before the superior numbers against them brought them down. As it was, they could no longer fight back to back.
Not long now,
he thought.
Soon we’ll all be drinking in the Otherlands.

Twelve men were making their way uphill through the rocks and the underbrush, twelve savages with manes of dark hair and milk-white skin, scored with the black lines and dots of tattoos. Ten of them carried spears; the others bore the heavy war axes that had so efficiently shattered the Devetians’ wooden shields that morning. Some hundred yards downhill they paused to argue among themselves, pushing each other in their eagerness to be the first to attack.

“Gallo, run!” Rhodorix snarled. “Get out of here now!”

“I won’t.” The young priest stepped forward and raised his staff to the sky. “I’ll beg Bel’s help and try to curse them.”

“A load of horseshit would do us more good than that.”

Galerinos ignored him and took another step forward. He stared straight at the enemies and began to chant, a low rumble of sound at first, then louder and louder. His words came punctuated with deep breaths, and every breath seemed to draw power from the very air around him. Each curse vibrated like a swarm of angry wasps as it streamed toward the enemy below. Rhodorix had never heard such a sound out of any man’s mouth. He felt himself turn cold as the chant rose and fell. More to the point, their enemies seemed as transfixed as he. They stood and listened, weapons slack in their hands as Galerinos cursed them, their women, their offspring, their clans, their future offspring, their crops, their herds, and anything else they might touch or cherish.

With one last bellow of sound, Galerinos cried out, “Begone!” and swung his staff down to point straight at them. All of the ill-luck of the curse sprang out at them—and a good deal more. With a hiss and crackle like lightning from a clear sky, blue fire leaped from the staff in a long sizzling bolt and struck among the enemies. They screamed, began to back away, screamed again as a further shower of blue flames burst out of the staff and struck. One man fell backward, writhing and foaming at the mouth. Two others grabbed him, but he continued to twitch and foam. All at once the enemy band broke. They ran this way and that for a brief moment, hysterical and leaderless, then turned and began to race downhill, howling as they ran. A last bolt of blue fire followed them.

Galerinos stood staring, his mouth half-open, his expression stunned.

“What did you do?” Rhodorix grabbed him by the shoulders. “How did you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What—you have to know!”

“The curse never worked like that before! Back in the homeland, I mean.” Galerinos paused to gasp for breath. “You heard me. I asked the god to send ill-luck down upon them, and from the look of things, I’d say he did.”

Laughter sounded behind them, an odd laugh, more like the plucking of a cithara’s strings than a sound made by a throat. Rhodorix spun around. The strangest man he’d ever seen stood leaning against a tree trunk and smiling at them. A slender fellow, he had yellow hair as bright as the paint on a Rhwmani standard, and his lips were a paint pot red as well, while his eyes gleamed sky blue. His ears, however, were the strangest feature of all, long and furled like lily buds.

“I doubt if your god had anything to do with those bolts of fire,” the fellow said. “You know sorcery, don’t you?”

“What?” Gallo gaped at him like a dolt. “But that’s unclean!”

“Sorcery such as my friend Caswallinos studies is not unclean.” He pried himself off the tree trunk and walked over. “My name, by the by, is Evandar.”

Rhodorix dropped to his knees. “Forgive my brother, Mighty One,” he said. “He can’t kneel before you. He’s badly hurt.”

“So I see,” Evandar said to him, then turned back to Galerinos. “Your master, in fact, that very same Caswallinos, asked if I might find you for him. Come walk with me.”

Galerinos obeyed, striding uphill to join the being that everyone in the migration of the Devetii assumed was a god. Together they moved a few paces off. As Rhodorix got up to keep a watch downhill, he felt the air turn cool around him. He glanced up and saw a mist forming in the sky, a strange opalescent cloud shot through with pale lavender gleams and glints. The hairs on the back of his neck rose.

“Ye gods!” Gerontos said abruptly. “They’re gone!”

Rhodorix spun around to look where his brother pointed. Sure enough, Evandar and Galerinos both had vanished. As he watched, the cloud of peculiar mist began to shrink into a swirl of gray and lavender. In a heartbeat, it had disappeared as well.Rhodorix tried to speak, then merely shook his head in bafflement.

“Do you think Gallo will bring us back some aid?” Gerontos said.

“I hope so,” Rhodorix said. “I’d think so.” Yet he felt that he lied. Why would the clan care about two shamed men such as themselves?
Especially me,
he thought,
I’m the one who led us right into the trap.

With a curse and a groan of pain, Gerontos let himself slide down against the boulder until he sat upon the ground. Rhodorix sat down next to him and prayed that the gods would allow his clan to take mercy on his brother.

T
o Galerinos, it seemed as if he and Evandar had walked but a few feet away. The god, or so he thought of the being next to him, paused and turned to face him.

“Your master worried when you lads didn’t come back,” Evandar said. “He and some of the other men found that battlefield, if you can call it that. A slaughter yard, more like.”

“So it was,” Galerinos said. “I’m surprised that any of us got away.”

“They assumed you’d been taken prisoner, so I said I’d fetch you back.”

“You have my humble thanks.” Galerinos glanced around and saw nothing but mist all around them. “Where are the other two?”

“Back where I left them. I told Casso that I’d bring you back. He said naught about your friends.”

“I can’t desert them!”

“You already have.” Evandar grinned with the wide-eyed innocence of a small child and pointed off in the distance.

Galerinos spun around to look downhill. The mist was lifting, revealing a clear view of the camp, only some five hundred yards away. Horses, wagons, people—they spread out in a dusty spiral on the plain, desolate except for grass, crisping in the autumn heat, and a few straggly trees. A faint umbrella of brown dust hung in the air above the conjoint tribes of the Devetii, refugees from the Rhwmani wars.

Out in the open grass stood Caswallinos, his hands on his hips, his staff caught between his side and the crook of his left elbow. For someone so blessed by divine power, he was an unprepossessing fellow, almost as skinny as his staff and bald except for a fuzz of gray stubble round the back of his skull. As they hurried down to join him, Galerinos was expecting his master to kneel before the god. Instead, the old man merely smiled and bobbed his head in Evandar’s direction.

“My humble thanks for returning this stray colt to me,” Caswallinos said. “I take it the other lads are all dead.”

“Two were still alive last I saw them,” Evandar said.

“Then where are they?”

“Still up on the mountain. They were wearing iron, and so I left them there.”

Caswallinos sighed and ran a hand over his face as if he were profoundly weary. “What have I told you about wyrd?” he said. “And how things undone redound upon you?”

“Do you think those two are part of my wyrd?” Evandar said.

“They are now, since you left them somewhere to die.”

“But they were wearing iron.” Evandar stamped his foot like an angry woman. “Iron swords, iron shirts. It aches me.”

“I know that,” Caswallinos said. “No one was asking you to touch them.”

The supposed god—Galerinos found his belief in Evandar’s divinity crumbling—stared at the druid for a long moment then turned away. He seemed to be watching the white clouds drifting in from the south.

“We need our two lads back,” Caswallinos said, “and we need water.”

“You’re not far from a big river.” Evandar kept his back to the druid. “Head to where the sun rises. It won’t take you long to reach it.”

“I wish you’d told me that this morning.”

Evandar merely shrugged.

“If you had,” Caswallinos went on, “those lads wouldn’t be dead, and the last two stranded on a mountainside.”

“Oh.” Evandar turned around to face him. “Mayhap their wyrd is mine, then.”

“It is.”

Evandar pouted down at the ground for a long moment. “I suppose you’re right,” he said at last. “But I shan’t bring them here.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll be leaving to find that river.”

“Will you bring them to me there?”

“I shan’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because the river’s too wide. Too much water!” He vanished, completely and suddenly gone without even a shred of the opalescent mist to cover his departure.

Caswallinos muttered a few words under his breath, something highly unpleasant from what Galerinos could hear of it.

“Master?” Galerinos said. “Is Evandar truly a god?”

“Of course not! I’m not sure what he is, mind, but he’s most assuredly not divine.”

“But he opened the sea road for our ships, and he comes and goes—”

“Just as the gods are supposed to come and go?” Caswallinos snorted profoundly. “In the old tales, fancies of the bards, lad, fancies of the bards. I’ll explain later. Come with me. We need to tell the vergobretes about this river.”

“True spoken. We’d best get there today. The horses have to have water.”

“Indeed. My heart aches for your two friends, but I’m afraid we’ll have to leave them to Evandar.” Caswallinos paused to look Galerinos over. “Ye gods, your arms, lad! It looks like you’ve been fighting a few savages yourself. By the by, did Evandar drive your attackers off?”