The Spirit Stone (58 page)

‘No, you don’t.’ She managed a smile. ‘Not in the least.’

He smiled in return, then lowered his gaze and contemplated the white crystal again. It glowed from within, as if celebrating its twin’s release from the dark shrine.

‘What I do want to understand,’ Laz said, ‘is this crystal. I wonder if I can make it show me other views. I want to know how it manages to convey images from one place to the next. And here’s an answer very much worth knowing. If someone looks into its twin, can they see us?’

Sidro reflexively laid her hand on her throat.

‘Not a nice thought, is it?’ Laz said. ‘Especially if that minstrel can see you. You’d best not look into it again, Sisi.’

‘I won’t, then. Maybe you shouldn’t either.’

‘I’ll certainly put it aside for now. I don’t want to cause Grallezar any more pain by forcing her to see my disgusting visage. But later, I’ll come back to it. It intrigues me.’ He picked it up in one hand and stroked it with the forefinger of the other. ‘It has other secrets to show me. I’m sure of that.’

Sidro felt a ripple of cold run down her spine.
A wizard warning,
she thought, but she knew Laz too well to hope he’d stop pursuing a thing he wanted because of a mere omen.

Salamander’s grief had finally forced him to see the obvious, that he’d been in love with Rocca. The bitterness of the realization haunted him, that he’d not seen how much he’d loved her until his treachery had killed her. He knew that he’d had no choice, that he’d had to protect his people from the Horsekin warriors no matter what the cost to himself or to her.
She was an enemy,
he would remind himself.
She wanted the Westfolk dead.
But always in his mind a traitor voice would answer,
I could have changed her, I could have shown her the truth.

That night, when sleep refused to come to him, he slipped out of the tent without waking Gerran and Clae, then walked for hours at the edge of the sleeping camp. Now and then he would look up at the stars, so cold and far above him, and weep for her. At last, so weary that he could barely stand, he stumbled back to his blankets and fell into welcome darkness, only to have Gerran shake him awake at dawn.

‘You’ve got to get up,’ Gerran said. ‘The army’s pulling back this morning.’

Salamander mumbled a few unpleasant words under his breath and rolled out of his blankets. He pulled on his boots—he’d slept in the rest of his clothes—and staggered out of the tent to search for food. The servants had been busily packing up all the supplies, but he managed to talk one of the freed village girls into giving him some cold soda bread and half a greasy sausage, which he ate on his way to the horse herd to fetch his roan gelding.

While the rest of the army formed up into a rough marching order, Salamander sat on horseback and looked at the ruins of what had once been Zakh Gral. A breeze lifted wisps of ash and dust and sent them drifting before they scattered and fell. Somewhere in the cinders and shattered stones lay Rocca’s ashes. The wind would scatter them, too. The rain would wash them into the river and down to the sea.

‘Ebañy!’ He heard Dallandra’s voice so clearly that it took him a moment to realize he was hearing it only in his mind. ‘Ebañy, get back here!’

‘I’m on my way!’

Salamander turned his horse and jogged back in the direction of the army to find it already moving out. On her grey gelding, Dallandra was waiting for him. He pulled up next to her mount and turned in the saddle to face her.

‘You had to do what you did,’ Dallandra said. ‘If Rocca had left with the other women, she’d still be alive. She chose to die, Ebañy. You didn’t kill her.’

‘I forced her into a position where she had that choice to make.’

Her silver eyes considered him in the same cool way that they would assess a man with a battle wound. ‘You did?’ she said at last. ‘Ye gods, how vain are you? The will of the princes, your people, the Deverry lords, and the Deverry high king himself, to say naught of the rakzanir who decided to build that wretched fortress in the first place—none of them had a thing to do with it, did they? It was all you?’

Salamander had never felt so murderous in his life. Dallandra sat calmly in her saddle, though her horse tossed up its head as if it suddenly feared him.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Am I right?’

Salamander choked back a barrage of curses, then released his anger with a sigh that let him speak normally. ‘Of course you are. I wouldn’t be furious if you were wrong.’

‘Ah, so you can see it. Good!’

‘You’re becoming as cold-hearted as Nevyn was, I hope you realize.’

‘Maybe it’s old age.’ She smiled at him. ‘Let’s go catch up with the army. We can talk later.’

That day the army marched back to the west-running road leading to Braemel, a position about half-way between Zakh Gral and the ford. Dallandra and Salamander left the noise and confusion behind and rode a short distance west. Beyond the forested hills they could see the dark rise of the distant mountains.
Someday the People will have to go back there,
Salamander thought,
Horsekin or no Horsekin.

‘Do you feel a little better?’ Dallandra said. ‘About Rocca, I mean.’

‘The guilt has not yet ceased to chew upon my heart, if that’s what you mean,’ Salamander said. ‘But its teeth are shorter and duller. I still wish—’ His voice clouded, and he stopped speaking.

‘Grief takes its own time to heal,’ Dallandra said. ‘I’m so sorry you lost her.’

‘So am I. Very sorry.’

When they’d gone about a quarter of a mile, they halted and dismounted beside a rivulet, trickling down to join the Galan Targ. They slacked their horses’ bits and let them drink while they sat among the rubble from the clear-cut forest. Dallandra set the black pyramid down between them on Salamander’s old shirt. With the spirit unbound, Salamander was expecting it to glitter in the usual way of gems, but a peculiar quality still marred its reflected light.

‘It’s staining the light that touches it,’ Salamander said. ‘Or withering it? No, that’s not it, either. I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t, either, not completely,’ Dallandra said, ‘but this pyramid isn’t physically here in the way that an ordinary piece of stone is here in this world. It’s the shadow of a thing that exists on a higher plane.’

‘A what? I’ve never heard of that before.’

‘Evandar explained it to me years and years ago. He gave Rhodry a knife that shared the same qualities. These things have their true being on another plane of existence—the lower astral in this case, I’d say—but they cast a shadow onto the physical plane. The shadow’s made of matter.’

‘It’s like the Wildfolk, then.’

‘Not precisely, no. When the Wildfolk manifest in our world, they’re no longer in their own. They’ve travelled here, you might say. But with one of these—’ Dallandra held up the obsidian pyramid, ‘—only the shadow is here. The real object’s still in its proper world.’

‘Yet it feels so solid.’

‘It is solid, even though it’s only the shadow. It can be held and used and carried around, but doing so has effects in its own world, ones we can’t be aware of.’

‘That must be why it could bind such a powerful spirit.’

‘Exactly.’ She paused, her eyes stricken. ‘Loddlaen sold it to the man who trapped the spirit.’

‘I see.’ Salamander tried to think of some comfort to voice but found none. ‘Who was he?’

‘The spirit had no way of telling me that. It did show me an image of him, a very typical Cerrmor man, I’d say. The spirit used the words “he dripped evil”.’

‘Dark dweomer, then—’ Salamander paused, thinking. ‘There was a Cerrmor man who’d learned the dark dweomer in Bardek. He tried to steal the Great Stone of the West—Alastyr, that was his name. Nevyn drove him into a trap, and then the scum’s own apprentice killed him. Nevyn told me that this Alastyr had some sort of link with Loddlaen.’

‘And a great interest in dweomer gems, it sounds like. Well, it probably was him, then.’

Her face betrayed nothing, nor did her voice, but Salamander knew that hearing her son had trafficked with the dark dweomer must have stabbed her to the heart.

‘Should we go back to camp?’ he said.

‘Not yet.’ Dallandra turned calm eyes his way. ‘The others can tend the wounded. I want to sit where it’s quiet for a while.’

‘Shall I look into the stone?’

‘Why not? I hope it’ll finish giving you Evandar’s message. You know, there was a time when I couldn’t bear to say his name, just because I missed him so much, but now things are better, partly thanks to Cal, of course, but partly just because it’s been so long. That’s one of the gifts the People have, the time to let old loves slip away. The Deverry folk and the Gel da’ Thae aren’t so lucky.’

‘And that’s your message to me?’

She merely smiled for an answer.

Salamander picked the black pyramid up in both hands and stared into it through the clipped square of its tip, only to see what appeared to be a section of a wooden plank. When he leaned closer, the view widened just enough to for him to realize that he was seeing part of a rough-made table and the edge of a red pottery plate. Before he could tell Dallandra, the vision inside the crystal changed. With it memory came flooding back.

He saw the island once again, remembered seeing it before, remembered, even, sitting in Nevyn’s lap and his bewilderment at the pictures that seemed to come out of nowhere. Now, as a man, he could focus his trained mind and understand what he was seeing.

‘There’s an island with a long wooden dock,’ he said aloud. ‘At the dock, a boat with a dragon head for a prow is bobbing at anchor. The island itself isn’t all that large, and half of it’s wooded. In the midst of the trees there’s a tall square stone tower. I think there’s a house of some sort in front of the tower. Someone’s standing on the pier. Ye gods, it’s Evandar, all right, yellow hair and turquoise eyes and all.’

Dallandra leaned closer. ‘Is he holding something?’ She kept her voice low. ‘Val told me that he was carrying something when you saw him.’

‘It’s a book, bound in white leather. On the cover’s a black figure of a dragon—it must be Arzosah! He’s opening the book now, and I can see writing in it. It’s the instructions for some sort of dweomer working. Blast and curses! The vision’s fading. I can’t read it.’ He looked up from the crystal.

Dallandra was gazing into some far distance. ‘Haen Marn,’ she said.

‘Um, what?’

‘Not what. Where. That island and its lake are named Haen Marn. Rhodry told me about it, years and years ago. A woman he loved lived there at the beginning of the Cengarn wars. Her son, Enj, was the man who helped him find Arzosah, but when they returned to the place where the island had been, it was gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yes, disappeared, and its lake with it. It can move itself, apparently, in times of danger.’ Dallandra turned back to look at him. ‘And it certainly was in danger, with a Horsekin army heading for it. No one has the slightest idea of where it might be.’

‘Which means no one knows where that book is, either.’

‘Unfortunately, you’re right. I wonder what that working was. Something important enough for Evandar to enchant this crystal with a message.’

‘Why by all the hells couldn’t he just say outright what he meant? Dalla, you’ve told me many a time that he loved riddles and jests and all sorts of tangled prophecies, but by the silver shit of the Star Gods, if I may quote your esteemed beloved banadar, why couldn’t he just come straight out with his wretched predictions?’

‘Because he was so afraid of being wrong.’ Dallandra smiled, just faintly. ‘He couldn’t truly see the future, not whole, anyway. It took me years to understand that. He saw hints of the future—images, voices, bits of visions, nothing clear and nothing fixed. So he passed them along as riddles.’

‘Riddles that he knew might have three or four possible answers.’

‘Exactly. But that way he couldn’t be wrong and mislead those he told them to.’

‘And in a way, they
were
riddles, merely riddles to him as well as to the rest of us.’ Salamander sighed and shook his head. ‘When you consider it—’ He stopped in mid-sentence.

In the obsidian pyramid an image was forming. When he returned his gaze to it, he thought at first that he was seeing his own reflection, because a pair of eyes looked straight back at him, but then he realized that the eyes were brown. Slowly the smoky image clarified until he saw the face in which the eyes were set, a sharp, slender man’s face half-covered in blue tattoos. Salamander yelped in surprise and heard, very distantly, an answering squawk, very much like a raven’s croak. The face disappeared. Salamander set the pyramid down.

‘I think I’ve just seen the raven mazrak,’ Salamander said, ‘and he’s as much human as he is Gel da’ Thae.’

Dallandra grabbed the crystal and stared into it, then shook her head in frustration. She muttered an invocation under her breath, then revoked it and tried another, staring all the while into the black stone. Finally she set it down again with an oath so foul that she must have learned it from Calonderiel.

‘Lost him,’ she said, ‘or more likely, he’s covered his showstone with a bit of cloth. I’m assuming he’s got some sort of stone. It might be a mirror, of course, or some other object he can use for scrying.’

‘I think that’s a safe assumption,’ Salamander said. ‘He must be looking for me, or wait! He may be looking for this stone, if we’re right and Sidro’s with him. She knows what used to sit on the altar in the shrine.’

‘So she does. Now, didn’t you tell me that Valandario wanted the pyramid destroyed?’

‘Eventually, yes, but she also told me not to do so until I’d learned everything I could from it.’

‘That’s sensible.’ Dallandra weighed the crystal in her palm like a housewife judging a baker’s loaf. ‘If it really is a link to the raven mazrak, then it’s going to be useful. Here’s an idea! We’ll study it until we meet up with Val. Then we’ll hand it over to her and let her have the joy of smashing it to bits.’

‘Now that sounds like a splendid plan, oh princess of powers perilous! I’ve no doubt that joy is exactly what she’ll feel when she contemplates its shards.’