Darkspell

  “Ye gods, isn’t there anything between your two ears? I was the one who spoke through the fire, telling you to call upon the Light. You did, and here I am.”

  He smiled. Sarcyn wondered at it for a long time, that he would smile.

  “Tell me,” Nevyn went on. “Are you willing to make restitution?”

  “All I want is to die.”

  “Oh, you’ll get that wish, I’m afraid.” Nevyn turned sad. “But then you’ll be given the chance to get free of the Darkness forever.”

  “What? Where? In the wretched Otherlands?”

  “Oh, come now, lad! Do you truly believe that when a man dies, there’s an end to him? What sloppy training you’ve been given!”

  Sarcyn stared bewildered, yet he suddenly began to remember hints and clues—traveling in the etheric in a consciousness free of flesh, Alastyr’s boasts about living forever in the Land of Husks and Rinds—his hatred roared inside him as he realized just what Alastyr had cheated him of.

  “The great secret! Not in the Otherlands, but in my next life!”

  “Just that. It’ll be a challenge, lad. It’ll be a struggle.

  Nothing so great as what I’m offering you is given for free. Will you forswear the Darkness and turn to the Light?”

  Sarcyn hesitated for one bare heartbeat.

  “I will, O Master of the Aethyr. I will.”

  And then he wept, curling up like a child upon the floor and sobbing, beyond all words and thought alike.

  Although Nevyn had insisted that he was capable of riding off and bringing back a dangerous prisoner on his own, neither Jill nor Rhodry had been willing to let him. Now, however, they understood why the dweomerman had refused to let any of Blaen’s men accompany them. In silent awe they sat on a long stone bench near the wall of the enormous cavern and watched the dwarven market-fair. At least a hundred yards in diameter and easily twice that high, the cavern was lit by shafts of sunlight streaming in from far above. Directly across from them, water trickled down the rock and collected in artificial basins. Every now and then a dwarf would fill a bucket at a pool and take it away again for some domestic purpose. Out in the center of the cavern, some hundred or so of the mountain people haggled and traded. Most of the stuff for sale was food spread out on rough clothes: mushrooms, bats, root crops furtively tended up on the surface, game hunted equally slyly.

  “It’s a hard life these people have,” Jill remarked.

  “Huh. They deserve it.”

  “Oh, here, my love. Try to take it with good grace.”

  Rhodry merely scowled. When they’d ridden up to the dwarfhold door, one of the guards had held a small dagger up in front of them. It had blazed with light as soon as it had come near Rhodry and inspired a vast flood of cursing and shouting. Only Nevyn’s intervention kept the dwarves from making Rhodry wait outside. Although every now and then someone would stroll over and say a few pleasant words to her, Rhodry they ignored, as if he were a wolf or some other dangerous pet she kept.

  Wearing a rough brown dress that came to her ankles, a tiny woman, no more than three feet high, came over. In a sling at her hip she carried a baby. Since Jill had no idea of how long these people lived or how fast they grew, she couldn’t tell the child’s age, but it sat up straight and looked around as alertly as a human child of about a year old.

  “Ah,” the woman said. “You must be the lass who came with the Master of the Aethyr.”

  “I am, at that. Is your babe a lad or a lass?”

  “A lass.”

  “She’s a precious lambkin, truly.”

  At the praise the baby dimpled and cooed. Although she had a low forehead under a mop of curly black hair and her nose was thick and broad, she was so tiny, yet so vital, that Jill longed to hold her.

  “Can I ask you somewhat?” Jill went on. “Why do so many of your folk speak Deverrian?”

  “Oh, we trade with the farmers in the foothills. They’re a peaceable lot, and they keep our secrets in return for a bit of our silver. There’s naught like precious metals for making friends—or bitter enemies.”

  With the last she gave Rhodry a pointed look.

  “Please,” Jill said, “what’s so wrong with my man?”

  “He made the talisman of warding glow, didn’t he?”

  “He did, truly, but what does that mean?”

  “Well, you know.” The woman considered for a moment. “Actually, I don’t know. No one much does, I wager. But we have a rhyme, an old rhyme.” Here she rattled off something fast in her own language. “It means, when the Warding Blade glows, an enemy is nigh.”

  “Ah. I see. I guess.”

  The woman nodded, then wandered on, clucking to her baby.

  “I wish to every god that Nevyn would get himself back here,” Rhodry snarled.

  His wish was granted in a few minutes when the dweomer-master emerged from a tunnel on the far side of the cavern. With him came the dwarf named Larn; behind them strode two warriors with axes and Sarcyn, who walked all bent and stiff like a very old man. Jill and Rhodry rose and hurried over to meet them. Slack-mouthed, Sarcyn looked at her, and in his eyes she saw a weariness so profound that she stepped back. He smiled, a bare twitch of his mouth.

  “I’ll cause you no trouble.”

  Sarcyn was as good as his word. He never spoke again, either, during the long ride back to Dun Hiraedd.

  Floating above the fire, the image of Salamander’s face grinned. Nevyn heartily wished that just once in his benighted life the gerthddyn would take something seriously.

  “So,” Salamander thought to him. “Camdel’s evidence means that I was right about the opium.”

  “Just so. I want you to go to a certain Lord Gwaldyn straight away. He’s associated with the king’s provost, and he knows me well. Have Gwaldyn take this Anghariad under arrest as soon as he can, and tell him to guard her carefully. I’ll wager there will be a lot of the noble-born at court who are going to want her poisoned to stop her tongue from wagging.”

  “I’ll go to him first thing on the morrow. How long should I stay in Dun Deverry?”

  “Until I arrive. Liddyn the apothecary—you’ve met him, I think—is on his way here from Dun Cantrae. I’ll be giving Camdel into his care, then setting out to return the Great Stone to the king. Do you mind waiting there?”

  “Not in the least. In fact, your asking me to stay is somewhat of a boon, because my beloved and esteemed father wants me to come home.”

  “Well, now, if he needs you, I can send someone else to the capital.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself, O Master of the Aethyr.” Salamander turned melancholy in a most dramatic way. “I can guess exactly what this is about: he wants to berate me for my wandering ways. I said I’d return in the fall. That’ll be soon enough to hear yet another carefully composed and precisely pointed lecture on my faults, all delivered in full bardic voice.”

  When they finished their conversation, Nevyn put out the fire, for the summer night was warm. On the hearthstone nearby sat Alastyr’s three books, which the dwarves had handed over to him. One was simply a copy of the Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid; the others, in the Bardek tongue, were called The Way of Power and The Warrior’s Sword, half pretentious garbage, half exceedingly dangerous procedures and rituals. Idly Nevyn opened The Warrior’s Sword.

  “Yea, for all things shall be dominated by the Will of the true Warrior, down even unto the secret places of the Darkness, for it is most admirable and recondite a truth that they who fight under the Sigil of the …”

  With a snort Nevyn slammed the book shut and tossed it aside.

  “I wonder why those people can never write decently,” he remarked to the yellow gnome. “Recondite, indeed!”

  The gnome scratched its stomach, then grabbed a handful of charcoal from the hearth and scattered it all over the carpet. Before Nevyn could grab it, it was gone. He was picking up the last of the bits when there was a knock at the door.

  “It’s Jill.”
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  “Come in, child, come in.”

  She stepped in, shutting the door, then leaning back against it as if she were weary.

  “I’ve come to say farewell. Rhodry and I are leaving on the morrow.”

  “Ye gods! So soon?”

  “So soon. It’s the way Blaen treats Rhodry. All the generous things he does only make Rhoddo feel more shamed. Sometimes I don’t understand the honor-bound at all.”

  “They have a rocky field to plow. But I’d hoped you’d linger here until I finished up my affairs, at least.”

  “So did I. I’ll miss you.”

  “Will you, now?” He felt his throat tighten. “I’ll miss you too, but you can always reach me through the fire.”

  “So I can.” She was silent for so long that he came closer to look at her. “I’ve been thinking. At times I wish I’d just gone with you when you wanted me to study herbcraft, but now it’s too late.”

  “Because of our Rhodry?”

  She nodded agreement, thinking something through.

  “But, well,” she said at last, “one of these days he’s bound to get me with child, and I won’t be able to ride with him. If I went back to Dun Gwerbyn to be with Da, he couldn’t even visit because of his exile. But cursed if I’ll end up a tavern wench like Mam. So I was wondering, you see, if maybe—”

  “Of course, child!” Nevyn felt like jigging in sheer glee. “There’s no reason that you and I and the babe couldn’t settle down somewhere where the folk need an herbman and his apprentice.”

  She smiled in such sunny relief that she looked more a child than a woman.

  “If it weren’t for Rhodry’s stubborn honor,” he went on, “we could do it straightaway, but I can’t see him being willing to grub among the herbs like a farmer.”

  “He might—on the night when the moon turns purple and falls from the sky.”

  “Just so. But well and good, then. We’ll keep it in mind. Up in the northern provinces there are a number of towns that need an herbman enough to ignore the fact that a silver dagger is wintering with him.”

  After Jill left, Nevyn stood by the window for a long time and smiled to himself. At last! he thought. Soon his Wyrd would begin to unknot; soon he could begin to lead her to the dweomer. Soon. Yet even in his joy he felt a cold warning, that nothing in his dweomer-wound life would ever be simple again.

  EPILOGUE 1063

  The wild wind of a man’s Wyrd twists his life.

  Untamed it is, unknown its turning.

  Dread the dolt who declares he sees his, sun

  sparkling. In mirror-murk, Wyrd watches him.

  —Gnomic Stanzas of Gweran, Bardd Blaedd

  “Why didn’t you have Valandario order Ebañy home?” Calonderiel said. “It’s been months since the Master of the Aethyr had any need of him.”

  “Because in my heart I was hoping that he’d do something just because I asked him,” Devaberiel said. “Just once.”

  Calonderiel considered this gravely. They were sitting in Devaberiel’s tent, and a fire burned under the smoke hole in the center of the roof. Every now and then a drop of rain slipped past the baffles and hissed in the flames.

  “You know,” the warleader said at last, “you rant and rave at the lad too much. I swear it, bard, when you’re in full voice and yelling at a man, it makes his head ache.”

  “And did I ask your advice?”

  “No, but you’ve got it anyway.”

  “Coming from you, of all men—”

  “Ah, I know us both very well. Isn’t that why you’re angry at me now?”

  Devaberiel stifled a furious retort.

  “Well, yes,” the bard said at last. “I suppose it is.”

  Calonderiel smiled and passed the mead skin.

  By then autumn was drawing to a close. The weary sun hauled itself up late and stayed for only a scant six hours before setting among the rain clouds. Although most of the People had ridden south to the winter camps, Devaberiel and a few friends waited on the Eldidd border, driving their horses from meadow to meadow in search of fresh grass, hunting the gray deer and the feral cattle left from the days when Eldidd men had tried to claim the borderlands. For all his bluster, Devaberiel was worried about his son. What if Ebañy had been taken ill in the filthy cities of men or been killed by thugs or bandits?

  Finally, just two days before the darkest day, when rain poured down and wind howled round the tents, Ebañy rode in, dripping wet and shivering with cold, so miserable that Devaberiel didn’t have the heart to berate him straightaway. He helped his son tether his horses with the others, then brought him into the warm tent and had him change clothes. Ebañy huddled by the fire and took a skin of mead gratefully.

  “And have you run enough errands for one summer?” the bard said.

  “Oh, yes, and a strange business it was.” Ebañy wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and passed the skin to his father. “There. I am braced, O esteemed parent. You may lecture, scold, berate, and excoriate me to your heart’s content. I realize that I’ve arrived in the autumn only in the most limited, restricted, and weaseling sense of that word.”

  “I was just worried about you, that’s all.”

  Ebañy looked up in surprise and reached for the skin with a flourish.

  “Well,” Devaberiel went on, as mildly as he could, “Deverry’s a dangerous place.”

  “That’s true. I’m sorry. I found this lass up in Pyrdon, you see, on my way home, who found my humble self very amusing indeed.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s a reasonable excuse.”

  Again Ebañy stared at him in wide-eyed shock. Devaberiel smiled, enjoying the effect he was making.

  “Don’t you want to know why I called you home?”

  “Well, I assumed you wanted to take me to task for being a wastrel, scoundrel, lazy sot, or perchance total fool.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I’ve got important news. This spring I discovered that you have a half brother I didn’t even know existed. His mother is a Deverry woman like yours, and he’s ended up a silver dagger.”

  “Rhodry.”

  “That’s his name, sure enough. How do you know?”

  “Ah, by the Dark Sun herself, I met him, and just this spring. I kept staring at him and wondering why I thought I knew him. Here, Da, he looks a cursed lot like you.”

  “So I’ve been told. Do you remember that silver ring, the one with the roses on it? It’s for him. Now, look, I can’t go riding around the kingdom, so when spring comes, will you take it to him?”

  “Of course. After all, since I’ve met him, I can scry him out easily enough.” Suddenly he shuddered.

  “It looks to me as if you’ve taken a chill. I’ll put more wood on the fire.”

  “It’s not that. The dweomer-cold took me.”

  Devaberiel felt like shuddering himself. Realizing that his son was one of those persons that the elves call “spirit friends” always creeped his flesh. He busied himself with finding the leather pouch and tossing it to Ebañy, who shook the ring out into his palm.

  “It’s a strange trinket, this.” Ebañy slipped into Deverrian when he spoke. “I remember when you showed it to me, all those years ago. I wanted it so badly for some reason, and yet I knew it wasn’t mine.”

  “Do you still covet it?”

  “I don’t.” He closed his fingers over the ring and stared into the fire. “I see Rhodry. He’s up in the north somewhere, because he’s riding through snowdrifts. The ring quivers in my hand when I watch, so it’s his, true enough. Oh, it longs for him, it does, but I think me that in the end it might bring his death.”

  “What? By the barbarian gods, maybe I should just chuck the thing into a river.”

  “It’d only find a man to fish it out again.” Ebañy’s voice was soft, half-drunken. “And he’ll not die, our Rhodry, till his Wyrd comes upon him, and what man can turn that aside? Not even his own father, and you know it well.”

  Yet Devaberiel felt heartsick, that
his son saw some grave thing come toward them from the future.

  It was a long time before the Old One fully pieced together the story of the summer’s debacle in Deverry. When the appointed time for Alastyr and the Hawks to return came and went, he knew that something had gone seriously wrong and sent spies off to the kingdom. Before they could return, however, he received alarming news from more or dinary sources. Over in Deverry the king’s wardens and the gwerbret of Cerrmor’s men swept in and arrested several of their most important agents in the opium trade. Fortunately, Anghariad had been poisoned before she could babble secrets under torture, and Gwenca knew little of dark dweomer besides superstitious rambling that the gwerbret disbelieved. Still, the arrests were a severe blow to the opium trade, which provided the Dark Brotherhood with a significant part of its income.

  Yet the worst news of all arrived with the shaken spies. As the Old One had long believed, Alastyr and his apprentices were dead, and the books of power in Nevyn’s hands. The Old One longed to know what Sarcyn had told the old man before his public hanging; he simply couldn’t believe that Nevyn would waste a chance to torture every possible scrap of information out of the apprentice. The thing, however, that made him rage and swear for long hours was that Nevyn had pulled a final trick on them. When in his gratitude at having the Great Stone returned, the king had offered the dweomerman a boon, Nevyn had asked for a court appointment for his “nephew” Madoc, the Master of Fire and a man of considerable power. With him there on guard, the dark dweomer would never be able to meddle directly at court again.

  For several days the Old One shut himself up in his study and poured over the astrological data and the written records of his meditations. Somewhere in them had to be subtle indications of trouble that, it seemed, he’d missed before. Yet he found nothing to indicate the role Rhodry had played in disrupting Alastyr’s planes. Jill was even worse, a complete cipher to him, because he had neither her birth time nor that of her parents, whose low status made it likely that the precious times were unrecorded and thus forever lost. Finally he decided that he had made no mistake, that something was at work to disrupt all his carefully laid workings, something beyond his control.