She shrugged. “If so, I can deal with it.” The owner could not fail to offer her hospitality, with her sorcery wrapped around his heart, any more than the sun could fail to rise in the morning. But she was not about to tell him that.
“My name is Talesin,” he offered.
She mused upon that for a moment, wondering just how much she wished to reveal to him, then said, “I am called Kovan.”
“A boy’s name.”
She took her cap back from him and put it back on, tucking her wild red hair back into it. “Well, I am a boy, yes?”
His blue eyes sparkled in the sunlight. “And what would you call yourself if you masqueraded as a girl, Kovan?”
She hesitated. The open warmth of his manner was hard to resist, but not so intoxicating that she forgot the position she was in. Magisters were hunting her, probably the nobles of Gansang were as well, and then there were her dreams to consider. Might this pleasant young man, so far out of his accustomed noble element, perhaps connected to one of those forces? It was a chilling thought.
“I cannot decide,” she said, masking her unease with a flirtatious tone. “Choose something for me, Talesin.”
“Well, then.” He made a show of considering the question. While he did so, she reached out with a tendril of sorcery to take the measure of his soul. If he had secrets she would know them soon enough.
But the moment she touched him she knew that something was wrong. It was not just that there was sorcery wrapped around him like a cocoon, though there was. Men of rank often had Magisters’ spells cast upon them for one purpose or another, and the fact that this man had one only confirmed her suspicions about his true social station. But beneath that . . . beneath that was a soul like nothing she had ever known before. Touching it with her power was like grasping hot embers. The moment she made contact with him a searing magical heat shot up her arm and into her flesh, and she could no more analyze it in that moment than she could have kept her hand in a blazing fire to count the embers.
It took every ounce of strength in her soul to keep her surprise from showing on her face, and to fight the instinct to step back from him. Was his soulfire so much stronger than that of other men? Or was it simply so unfettered that it roared like wildfire along any magical conduit she gave it? In all her years with Ethanus he had never even hinted at such a phenomenon. She did not know what to make of it.
“Lianna,” he said, bringing her back to the present moment. “In the land of my ancestors is it the name of a goddess of great beauty, with a spirit like fire. Her touch shatters the ice on the great rivers, so that spring can come again. Will you bear that name, when you pretend to be a woman?”
She managed to smile calmly, though her heart was pounding fiercely. “A fine name. I will try to do it justice.” Gently she drew her hand from his grasp; his warm fingers were like velvet to her touch.
“So where are you from, most lovely pretender?” His tone was casual, but she sensed with instinctive certainty the question was anything but that. “If you do not wish to share your origins, then perhaps . . . tales of recent travels?” The answer mattered to him, she realized. It mattered very much.
He is connected to my nightmares somehow. He must be. The thought chilled her, especially as she was afraid to try to read him again with sorcery. Instead she reached out with a tendril of power—carefully, this time, oh so carefully—and wound the strands of a new spell about him. Not trying to break through the spells that were already there, simply adding one more to the cocoon. If you are searching for someone, I am not her. If you seek the answer to a mystery, I will not provide it. It was a simple safeguard, but it would suffice. Unless he was a Magister himself he would not be able to think past it . . . and she knew from the touch of his soul that he was not that. Magisters were chill in their soul’s essence, more like a corpse than the fire of a living man. Stolen life might fuel a Magister’s power, but it could not warm the ice which was at his core.
Once that precaution was taken, she found she could breathe again.
What are you? she wondered. Born to wealth but lacking more than a handful of coins, born to power but traveling like a mendicant, born to a bloodline of great renown yet unwilling to use your own name for fear it would be recognized . . . or am I misreading all those signs? Are you something else entirely, that sorcery has obscured?
She wished she dared use her power to investigate the matter. But she feared establishing any sorcerous contact that would make her vulnerable to his heat again. Not because she thought it would hurt her. It was clearly not a malign power. But because even the memory of it now stirred a strange longing in her, almost a hunger, and that frightened her. This was surely what a moth must feel like, she thought, just before it cast itself into a flame. Fluttering about the dancing light, feeling that blissful warmth upon its wings, an ecstasy of heat . . . and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, consumed.
“My past travels are of little interest,” she told him.
“And the future ones?”
I could lie to you. I could weave a spell that would convince you you’d heard my answer and found it of no interest. I could drive you away from me with a thought, and make you forget we had ever met.
Perhaps the last option would be wisest. Ethanus would certainly counsel her in that direction. But then she would never have a chance to learn what this stranger’s true purpose was, or why the touch of his soul was like fire to her. And besides, if he was truly connected to the presence that haunted her nightmares, might he not be more dangerous to her lost in the shadows, where she could not watch over him, than in plain sight nearby?
“I have taken up with a caravan,” she said. “Tomorrow we head south and east, toward the Free Lands. And yourself?”
His blue eyes fixed on hers. What depths they guarded, what mysteries! With enough time she could surely unravel them.
Careful, Kamala. This mystery can burn you.
“I have not yet chosen my next road,” he answered her.
“Indeed?” Kamala’s own eyes sparkled. “I hear the shores of the Inner Sea are quite temperate this season.”
“Are they?” He reached out toward her—she drew back, startled—but it was only to tuck a loose strand of hair up into her cap. His hand was warm against her skin, and lingered for a moment before withdrawing. “Do you suppose such a caravan might have need of an additional escort?”
Ethanus would say she was being foolish. Ethanus would advise that no mystery was worth this kind of risk, especially when unknown powers were involved.
And that, my master, is why I could not learn about the world by your side.
“Come on the morrow, at daybreak,” she said. “I will see what I can do about getting you hired.”
She left him then, in body at least. But it was a long, long time before the memory of his soul’s heat faded from her flesh . . . or from her spirit.
That night, for the first time in many days, Prince Andovan’s sleep was peaceful.
Kamala dreamed of moths.
Chapter 33
THE MILITARY settlement overlooking King’s Pass was high in the mountains, cold and chill. Yet even colder was the sight that awaited visitors, of which Colivar’s conjured images had been but a feeble warning.
The three Magisters stood in a veritable forest of death, overlooked by the staring, vacant eye sockets of twisted skeletons. In the time it had taken Antuas to find his way south the scavengers of the area had finished their work; the impaled bodies were stripped bare of flesh now, and some of them lacked limbs that had been carried off by one predator or another. Fragments of bone lay scattered around the site, where scavengers had cracked them open for marrow. The worst of the smell of death had faded, but one could still taste the memory of foulness on the wind when it blew across the field of stakes. One could only imagine how terrible that smell must have been when Antuas had been here.
Colivar stared at it all with an expression that made Sulah tremble. Not in all the
ir time together had he ever seen his former teacher look thus, or sensed in him such coiled energy that, if it were released, it would surely destroy anything and everything in sight. He knew that Colivar had seen the worst that mortal men could do to each other in wartime, and numerous sorcerous atrocities as well; so if there was something here that was terrible enough to awaken this darkness in him, it must be fearsome indeed.
The three of them had split up briefly: Colivar to inspect the field of stakes, Fadir to hunt down whatever signs of the supply party remained, and Sulah to seek out confirmation of the most disturbing part of the witch’s vision, the rising of the great winged beast. Now, as the young Magister returned to his teacher’s side, it seemed to him that the Colivar he knew was gone, and in his place was an ashen-faced stranger whose eyes were fixed not upon the field of slaughter surrounding them, but on some distant vision a hundred times more terrible.
“I found marks of one great creature,” Sulah reported. “Where the vision showed it rising. So that much at least was true.” Colivar turned to him slowly as he spoke, his black eyes hollow, haunted. “No sign of any others.”
“There will be no others,” Colivar said quietly.
Fadir rejoined them, then. His own expression was grim. “I found the supply party. Most were killed alongside their mounts. A few tried to flee into the woods, it appears, but they did not get far.”
“What killed them?” Sulah asked.
“Nothing human. They were torn to pieces while still alive.” He shrugged stiffly. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“So the witch’s memories were fairly accurate.”
“So it would seem.” Fadir’s jaw clenched tightly as he looked over the field of corpses. “I had hoped he was at least partly delusional.” He looked at Colivar. “You think it was a real Souleater he saw? One of these . . . what did you call them . . . ikati?”
“What other purpose can there be for all this?” Colivar waved at the field of stakes, and toward the place beyond it where the supply party had been murdered. “What other motive makes sense?”
“How about a gesture intended to strike fear into the enemies of the High King? This is Danton Aurelius we are talking about. His distaste for Corialanus is no secret. Nor is his penchant for brutality. This kind of display is hardly beyond him. A warning to would-be rebels: disobey me and you will suffer the same fate.”
Colivar shook his head. “This slaughter was too far from well-traveled roads to serve such a purpose. It was unlikely to be discovered while the bodies were still fresh, which was when the scene was most effective. Danton has better timing than that.”
“Not to mention,” Sulah offered, “that those who might have served as witnesses were apparently hunted down and killed. That is not what you do when you are trying to send a message to someone.”
Colivar walked to the nearest stake, gazed up at its occupant, and then put his hand upon the length of wood. It was an oddly intimate contact, almost a dark caress. “An entire unit of men were made helpless here, condemned to die over the course of a few days, their life force bleeding out along with their blood, from all of them at once, together . . . a Souleater would regard that as nothing short of a feast.”
“These stakes were not erected by beasts,” Fadir pointed out.
“No,” Colivar agreed, “they were not.”
“Perhaps these ikati are more than that. Perhaps the legends are right.”
Colivar said nothing.
“Some men say they were demons, but I myself have never credited that.”
“They are not demons,” Colivar said quietly.
“You sound very sure, given as how the last one was dead and gone long before the first Magister was born.” Fadir’s tone was a challenge. “What makes your version of the legend more accurate than any other?”
Colivar gazed out into the distance as if there were some terrible thing to be seen there, so far away he could not quite manage to focus on it, but felt driven to try. “Let us say I remember a time when the legends were young, and a few real facts were still remembered. There were even ikati skeletons to be found back then, kept as trophies of the Great War. I seem to recall a throne being made out of one of them, somewhere in the Northlands, and it was rumored that armor had been made from ikati skin as well.” He shrugged. “Truth and fantasy mingle over time, until they can no longer be distinguished from one another. Besides, it is more respectable to claim that humanity was nearly destroyed by demons, than to place the blame upon the shoulders of simple beasts. No matter how fearsome those beasts might have been.”
“They ate human souls,” Sulah said.
Colivar looked sharply at him. “They fed upon the life essence of their prey. As did many other species, at the time. Now we Magisters are the only ones left who do that.” A faint, dry smile flickered about the corners of his lips. “There is irony in that, yes?”
“I wonder if they would see us as rival predators,” Fadir mused.
“More to the point—I wonder who it is they see as an ally.” Colivar’s hand tightened about the stake. “This slaughter was a sacrifice, nothing less. Like the kings of the Dark Ages who left maidens chained on mountaintops, hoping that if the hunger of the Souleaters was sated thus the rest of their people would be spared, the one who did this knew exactly what was here, and what manner of food it hungered for.”
“Danton, you think?”
“These lances were made by his people,” Colivar said. Stroking the wood of the nearest stake again, letting his sorcerous senses seep down deep into its grain, to read the history of the thing. “The men who placed them here were following his orders. That much is clear.”
“But why kill so many?” Fadir demanded. “Surely this is more ‘food’ than one beast would require.”
Colivar shut his eyes. A muscle along the line of his jaw tensed for a moment. Again Sulah caught the sense of coiled energy within him, some black and terrible instinct that he was struggling to control. “Assuming an ikati was here,” he said at last, “and that someone made arrangements to feed it this many lives, all at once . . .” he looked at Sulah. “What would you expect to find, if you searched for it properly? And where would you look for it?”
For a moment the younger Magister stared at him, not comprehending. Then his face went even paler—if such a thing were possible—as he realized what Colivar was suggesting.
“A nest,” he whispered.
He looked out over the landscape, though the field of stakes, across the top of the gorge that was the King’s Pass, and to the granite-faced cliffs on the other side. After a moment he located a broad shelf strewn with rubble, set in a place that no man could reach without risking his neck climbing up to it. A winged creature, on the other hand, would find it a comfortable and convenient perch. Even a very large winged creature. “There,” he said.
Colivar nodded. “Go. Confirm it.”
It was rare that one Magister gave orders to another, and for a moment Sulah hesitated. But the look in Fadir’s eyes made it clear that Colivar’s knowledge of these matters had won him a kind of implied authority in this instance, so he nodded at last, and exchanged his human flesh for a winged shape that might fly the distance.
The wind slowly grew colder as the sun began to slip down behind the mountains. It was hard to find what he was looking for, but Colivar had trained him well, and Sulah uncovered the nest just before sunset’s shadows claimed that part of the ledge.
For a moment he just stared at the broken fragments and tried to gather his thoughts. Colivar seemed to take all this in stride, somehow, but he could not. The Souleaters were creatures out of legend, and when they last flew above the earth, it was said, mankind had been reduced to utter barbarism. All the proud monuments and civilizations of the First Age of Kings were gone now, lost to that terrible assault. Beasts the Souleaters might be—even natural beasts, perhaps—but their legendary status was well-deserved. And the thought that they might now be returnin
g was terrifying.
The Magisters will manage to survive, he thought, but what is the value of one man’s survival when the very world he belongs to is destroyed?
Finally he pulled himself together, picked up a fragment of a shell to bring back with him, and returned to where the other two Magisters were waiting. The object that was grasped in his talons appeared in his palm as he reclaimed his human form, and he held it out silently, grimly, for inspection. It was the size of a man’s fist, dull white on the outside, with an inner surface that gleamed a darker hue, blue-black, like the heavens at twilight.
A muscle along the line of Colivar’s jaw tightened for a moment. “How many?”
“One nest on the ledge. Many eggs, all broken. There . . .” he hesitated. “There could still be others. Elsewhere. Yes?”
“What is this?” Fadir asked.
“Why so many had to die.” Colivar took the shell from Sulah, looked it over, then handed it to the red-haired Magister. “This place was used as a breeding ground for ikati. These were—” he indicated the forest of impaled bodies “—food for their young.”
Fadir’s thick brow furrowed. “So whoever killed all these people was doing it to feed a Souleater? To help it breed?” He breathed in sharply. “Do you realize what you are suggesting?”
Colivar nodded grimly.
“Who would be mad enough to do that? Knowing that the last time these creatures roamed free, human civilization was nearly obliterated?”
“I have heard the High King is mad,” Sulah offered. “That the death of his son unhinged him, awakening a hunger for bloodshed that no amount of violence can slake.”
“He was always mad,” Colivar said, “but for a while he had a man of reason to guide him. Now that man is gone.”
“Ramirus?” Fadir asked. Colivar nodded.