Ash and Silver (19 page)

The steel-capped warlord squatted beside a few saddle packs and a small fire built on a stretch of sand. Though I glimpsed no way forward beyond the cavern's back wall, there had to be one. The party's fourth, the squire, was nowhere to be seen.

The warlord stood as we approached, a small leather case in hand. His hawkish face and solid bulk might have been hewn from the granite of his home mountains. An icy glance slashed me as he hurried back toward the prince on his rock throne.

A torch mounted in a rusty bracket marked one of the shadowed alcoves. At closer distance, it came clear that this overhang, scarce a handspan higher than my head, housed a deeper cove than the rest, and an opening at its back.

Voushanti waved me through the alcove into a wide passage. The wavering light of the cavern quickly faded behind us, and the bodyguard carried no lamp. Perhaps the red light in his eyes sufficed for his vision, but I cast a pale magelight. We had to climb over a few rockfalls and duck under low-hanging rock, but in the main, the way was easy enough until my senses detected a tangled shimmer in the air akin to a wall of spiderwebs.

No matter how forcefully I stepped through the enchanted barrier, I got nowhere. Even when I spied a palm-sized rock and with utmost concentration stepped past it, the motion left me where I started. The rock remained in front of me. To one who could not sense the magic, the passage would seem endless.

I doubted the enchantment was the prince's doing. It reminded me of naught so much as the Ciceron commons house and its strange portal. The logic, the colors, the nuances might have been worked by my own hand. A close examination suggested this one was not so impenetrable as that one. But should I break it? Giving aid to Osriel must give any man pause.

I turned to Voushanti, making sure my eyes did not shy from his monstrous face. A further show of weakness would do me no favors. “Has the prince moved beyond this enchantment?”

“The proper question is: Can
you
move beyond it?” His words crackled like flame.

Of course they were testing me. But answers lay ahead. The squire, too, I'd guess.

My blood heated as I examined the spellwork more thoroughly,
appreciating Evanide's never-ending practice in locks and barriers. The spell's release was buried deep, but not difficult. I infused a bit of magic. The barrier vanished like smoke.

The passage opened into a small chamber, where expectations were quickly unsettled. No squire waited. Indeed, no one had visited this place for a very long time.

Dust lay thick on the stone floor, unmarred by footsteps. A pile of rubble collapsed from the ceiling filled half the chamber. Ancient artists had painted horses, deer, and ox-like beasts in red and blue over the walls, punctuated here and there with unfamiliar god-signs. Yet it was not dead men's art that set my heart racing, but the round arch of hammered bronze set into the far wall.

No weaving of threaded light filled the bronze frame. Only rock, scarred, cracked, and pocked as any cave wall, half grown over with hardened seeps. It had narrowly escaped being blocked by the rockfall.

Shadows flitted across the wall and the arch, graying the light. I whipped my head around. The hooded prince stood in the tunnel doorway, Voushanti at his side. “So our journey is not wasted, after all.”

“He opened the way without blinking,” said Voushanti.

“I suspected he could. I deem him a man of many useful talents.”

The portal in the hirudo had been hidden behind a simple illusion of plaster and barred with a blood seal, but this one . . . I touched the stone inside the arch. Prepared this time, I did not flinch when fire shot up my arm, as it had when I touched the tapestry of light. Yet, even knowing what to look for, I could detect no magical seal, only the fire. Perhaps the portal was dead.

The prince joined me beside the arch. I did not step away, which was as difficult as anything I'd done on this journey.

“What kind of portal is filled with stone?” he said. “There should be light. Motion. A spell to unravel to open the way.” One of his misshapen fingers traced the line of a curling bronze stem, making my own hair curl with a frisson of enchantment. Or terror. Osriel knew exactly what he was looking for. Where had he learned it?

“A
portal
, you say, lord?” I tried to sound surprised. “A blocked doorway, it seems, or unfinished.”

He touched the stone, but just like Bastien in the hirudo, he did not recoil. Why did I experience the fiery rejection, when neither Osriel or Bastien did?

“I wish you to use all your skills to tell me what you find here.” His will was as palpable a presence as his bodyguard. How would I know if he was forcing me when the command was exactly what I wanted to do?

“This is real stone,” I said, rapping my knuckle on it, “solid, no illusion to hide a portal.”

That was true. Perhaps in my old life I could have drawn the right person's portrait to reveal the mysteries of this portal, as I'd done for the Cicerons in Palinur. But even if I remembered how to invoke my bent, I wouldn't do it for Osriel.

“What did you hope to find beyond this wall, lord prince?”

“You said it. Magic.”

The word was shaped with the craving of a twistmind for his nivat. It whispered of torments like those I'd seen in his bodyguard's eyes—of pain, despair, and hopeless ruin, of a man who well might seek unholy spoils on a battlefield. If the place called Sanctuary was a part of what the Danae called the true lands, and these true lands were somehow bound to the health of the world as Morgan's father believed, what would it mean if a skilled sorcerer without scruple could walk free there?

I could not hold back my shudder. Did that please the one whose gaze burned through his green hood?

Osriel wandered away toward the wall paintings and the rune-like god-signs. “And you, masked one?” he said over his shoulder. “What do you seek here?”

“A story,” I said, in all honesty. “What more could a historian desire?”

Damon had not chosen my missions and the Archivist's revelations at random. What great purpose linked an ancient massacre and a recent one with the warring sons of a great king, and a man with two bents? With Xancheira and Cicerons and Danae? I'd never seen any hint that Damon knew aught of my dealings with Danae—or anything called the true lands or the Everlasting or the boundaries between them. Surely the tale was bigger than Damon.

Gods, what I would give to know. Damon's purpose—that piece of the mystery—had torn my life apart. But my head felt like an anvil. Somewhere deep between my brows the pain of Osriel's ravaging yet lingered. Please gods, let that be all he'd left there.

My fingers strayed to the bronze frame. The flowers and beasts wrought in its gleaming surface were exquisite, so real I could smell the sweetness of the blooming lavender and hear the mawk of the crow and the rustle of the vines. Veins and sinews heated as I touched a pair of dancers twined in an eternal arabesque.

Without consideration, I reached deep, letting magic flow through my fingers . . .

. . . and I near drowned in light and sound and sensation.
Men in velvet gowns, women in embroidered caps or long scarves, and children decked out in ribbons of every hue danced through cobbled streets to rippling lutes and sawing vielles. Solstice fires blazed in healthy fields. Boisterous gaiety erupted in answer to sprays of brilliant fireworks against the night sky . . . shifting into whispered reverence. As the fireworks ceased and bonfires burned low, ears heeded fainter music, while lights of blue and sapphire flickered through veils of mist. . . .

I strained to see.
No, wait!

The image vanished as if whipped by a sea gale, and still the deluge came.
A quiet invasion from the distant east, impoverished Wanderers from the ancient homeland, their small magics used for thieving crops and horses, cattle and sheep, careless burning and rapine. Annoyances became years of violence. Vengeance that scarred the land. Riders in black tabards charged across the plains, whooping as they chased down the ragtag Wanderers. Lances of fire and ropes of light ensnared the wild ones—fierce men and women with curved blades and dangling earrings—and they were marched back to the city where pennons blazoned with the white tree flew. Shouts rang out: City of glory! All Hail, City of the Everlasting!

In a blink, all vanished. But when I closed my eyes again, images and sounds and words raced across my mind's canvas, blurred before I could grasp their story. Reason insisted I could control the chaos, but it could not tell me how. Yet only one thing could be its source—the furnace between my eyes pouring molten streams of magic down neck, shoulders, arms, and through my fingers. The magic of my blood. My bent.

Exultant, I watched the sun blaze and listened to storms of years roll across mountains and plains. Only sensible to consider the mysteries that dogged me. Xancheira, Cicerons, Danae . . .

A wintry gale howled through a ring of standing stones . . . curved blade and fire lance lay crossed on the center stone in the eternal sign of truce . . . blessings of peace rung in by cascades of joyous bells. Boughs of fir and yew on every lintel as the crowd gathered. Hosannas faded to awe as tall figures, male and female, skin scribed in sapphire light, laid their own solstice wreath atop the weapons. Meanings fluttered on
the wind like prayer flags in mountain temples, like the return of birds in spring, like the first green of field and forest: a pledge . . . a promise of hope . . . a profound holiness shaped of generosity and mutual sacrifice. For the truest danger came from the south . . . from purebloods . . . from the Registry . . .

Too soon that image faded, leaving eyes pricking and heart full, though I could explain none of it. Only time and peace might fit the pieces together. Meanwhile the flow continued.
Towers rose above the town, markets bustled, and everywhere grew flowers of red and yellow . . . which too quickly yielded to hisses of anxiety and the roaring, blistering heat of a furnace, the acrid odor of molten bronze and a splash of bright enchantment.

“Must have these ready tonight,” said a fading voice, as its owner tapped on a bronze frame just like the one my hand touched. “The archon will open the ways only a short time . . . the Wanderers must pass . . . until the time is right and they return with our salvation . . .”

Before I could grasp the meaning of these things, my stomach lurched, and the world dropped out from under me. And when I opened my eyes, I was in a wholly different place.

“S
easons have I waited to meet thee again, Lucian. I feared thee lost or broken, our hope failed.”

The Dané sat on a narrow hilltop of emerald grass, pocked with white stones and buttercups. Her bare feet scarce bent a blade as she rose. The weighty gray-blue evening sky promised storm. Yet did it portend whirlwinds of epic magnitude, it could not rattle heart and bone like the sharp-edged silver of her gards.

With all the grace I could muster after Voushanti's beating, I bowed. “
Envisia seru
, Sentinel. Mortal danger stalks me every moment I am here, so before all I must ask: Where are they, those humans who traversed the portal two winters past? Are they safe?”

A sea breeze teased my neck, ruffled the Dané's drapery of spidersilk, and tangled her red-brown hair. Her green eyes, very like Morgan's, glinted with silver lights as she examined me.

“Protected, else what is Sanctuary?” But she did not smile. “Thy deed was worthy, knowing thine own passage was not yet possible. Indeed, the travelers have testified to thy quality.”

“They took all the risk,” I said. “Such courage to step through. I doubt I helped with that.”

“Thou didst send thy heart with them. Braver than sending thine own self.” Her fingers brushed my brow, shooting sparks into every part of me. “But if thou'rt in mortal danger, I deem it best not to tell where the travelers bide or aught that might betray us.”

That, of course, made damnably good sense, though I'd no idea what she meant about my heart.

“What is it you want of me?”

“To set us free, of course. All of us—your kind and my own. Thou'rt the only one can do it. Come back when 'tis safe, and I'll tell thee all.”

“This place,” I said, pulling away so as to see our surroundings. “It's real. . . .”

For certain I no longer occupied a Navron cave with Osriel the Bastard. To the north the hillside descended into a folded landscape of grassy knolls, white-boned knees, and soft hollows that cupped ponds or lakes. At its foot, five white-ridged spits of land protruded into the heaving sea. Exactly as Bastien had described the landscape of my transports. The white hand.

The view to the south revealed this hill to be isolate in a crescent bay. A short bar of land—the wrist of the hand—connected the hill and its spits to a rolling coast forested with new-leafed birches. The wrist was of a width that perhaps two horses could traverse it abreast. No horses were in sight anywhere, nor were towns or villages or any sign of human habitation.

I'd no time to question. Every moment vanished from the chamber risked Osriel's interest.

“A great deal has happened since last we last spoke. I can't remember how to go back or how I might visit you again. My magic doesn't always bring me.”

“It is my choice as sentinel whether to give thee entry, even when thy magic opens the boundaries. 'Tis often too great a risk, for the danger here grows mighty and terrible. Thou needs must find the surer way to come—the Path of the White Hand. Till then, I cannot let thee tread this land too long nor expend thy magic here nor draw upon the land to replenish it. Trapped wouldst thou be, unable to return to thine own lands until the Everlasting births another human of thy power and . . . quality.”

“Trapped! Unable—”

“I'll send thee back.” Her fingers swept my eyelids closed.

“Wait!” I said. “Before I go, lady . . . tell me your name and what you are.”

“My name is Safia. I am summer evening light upon sweet grass. Sun and shadow.” Her sadness touched my heart, though I had no reason.

Then her hand brushed my brow.

•   •   •

T
he dusty closeness of the cave cut off the sea wind. My eyes refused to open, for surely they'd see the bastard prince awaiting explanation. Bastien said I vanished for mere moments at a time. No one with Osriel's skills could have missed the power of my bent, but had he noted my absence?

“Now, historian, tell me your story.” The hooded man rested his back against the painted wall, faced in my direction, though
direction
and
seeing
seemed to have no connection where Osriel's observation was concerned. “Complete this time.”

“I should have warned you,” I said, as lies and half-truths, spells and diversions battled for primacy. What could I possibly say to blunt the malevolence filling the chamber like black smoke? Would the choke leash come next?

“Warned?”
Neither Osriel's quiet intensity nor his manic shadows eased my jiddering gut. “Need I prove to you how sorely I take offense at deception?”

“You need prove nothing, lord. Your deeds have witnessed both to your puissance and your strict requirements. My breath comes short already, even before I feel the noose.”

I scrambled for ideas and words to express them. All I wanted was to get away from this devilish prince and consider every word and image of the last hour. That wasn't going to happen easily, with Osriel ten steps away. Voushanti blocked the only way out, and if my vision had not failed me, the steel-capped warlord waited just behind him. And what use a blast of fire or even my last resort—the
impenetrable wall
enchantment—in this rat-trap of a chamber?

“These years of exile have taught me much of my weaknesses, poor discipline, and self-indulgence. Did I babble obscenities, lord? Or curse at you, or gods' save me, did I threaten you with violence or unseemly . . . intimacies?”

“No.”

Curse it, villain! Tell me what you saw.
“Terrible aberrations that should have been trained out of me when I was a child seem to expose themselves when I probe deep-layered history. Please take this as no insult, Your Grace, but do you know how a historian's bent presents?”

“Sensory manifestations, so I understand, a rushing river of impressions derived from the object of study. And the historian's skills must bind and constrain that river and its tributaries into—as you said—a story.
Tell
me the story.”

I held up my hands as if they might diffuse his dangerous impatience. “There, you see, you've hit upon the
other
thing I failed to warn you of—my skills. You see, my superiors prisoned me for a matter of months. I was very close to madness. And whether from that or other circumstances, I lost my skills of interpretation. Imagine me standing in that river, as you so perfectly described it, and feeling it flow over, around, and through me without
the ability to constrain it. Over these years of my exile—easy to understand the shame I brought upon my family—I've not improved them. Perhaps if we were to speak of what I experienced just now, a wise and knowledgeable prince might make sense of it. I've seen the city of Xancheira, I believe, and battles and peacemaking and even—I hesitate to say, lest you think I'm mad again—two Danae standing—”

“Faugh!” bellowed the monstrous bodyguard. “Have you not heard enough of this babble, lord? He tells you only what you want to hear. Let me twist his neck twice around and perhaps he can find a word of explanation that is not a lie!”

The prince stretched a grotesque finger Voushanti's way, and with a single burst of scouring enchantment, dropped the big man to his knees. “I did not ask your advice, dead man. And do not speak of my desires again, lest I starve you.”

When the finger swung round to me, I kept my palms spread and open. Did I touch my silver bracelets at that moment, I'd not have given a dried pea for my chances of taking another breath.

“You saw two of the long-lived beyond this portal?”

“Not beyond the doorway, lord, for as I said, it is blocked. I glimpsed them in an image drawn by my bent.” This was not the time for embellishment. Nor to ask him how he knew the term
long-lived
. I'd never heard it, save from Morgan and her kin. What would I dare risk to hear what he knew of the Danae and their true lands?

The prince's arms wrapped round his chest, squeezing as if to crush his human heart. His silence grated on my spirit worse than his threats. Nor did I know whether the pressure squeezing my own chest was his wrath or simple terror. But I dared not speak before he did.

“Get him out of here.” Osriel waved that dreadful hand at the kneeling bodyguard. His voice, so smooth and cool, had taken on a heated roughness. “Ensure he takes no notion to leave us, for I would talk of vanished cities and mythical beings with this smooth-tongued historian. But my own dread master demands an accounting just now.”

The stone beneath my boots trembled, and the dead cold chamber took on a furnace heat and a morbid shimmer that raised every hair on my body. I'd scarce choked back the invocation of my last resort, when Voushanti gripped my arm tighter than ever. The hawk-faced warlord stepped aside to let us pass, revealing the missing squire hiding his face in his hands. Had any
adder brought to a market faire ever inspired such a careful dance as Osriel of Evanore?

The iron-fisted Voushanti and I had not gotten so far as the thready remnants of the web enchantment when the prince called after us. “And then,
historian
, we shall strip you of your mask and your lies, and hear how it was you vanished as you stood in your river of magic.”

It was well the prince called the warning. My greedy soul had already been contriving how I might learn what he knew before taking flight. But out on the seaward wall, Inek had warned me how it was hubris to taunt Serena Fortuna when she provided us a way out of an impossible situation. My life had value. I had answers the Order needed. And being in the grip of a devil, with an Evanori warlord and an angry Osriel the Bastard close behind, was as near impossible as I wished to visit.

For a handful of moments when we emerged from the passage and the shadowed alcove, Voushanti and I were alone. As I knew he would, the furious bodyguard shoved me to the pitted floor. Controlling the fall, I rolled to my belly. With a touch of a bracelet and a short burst of magic, a hand of flame shoved the bodyguard toward the rear wall. Another touch, another burst, and a whirlwind picked up dust and gravel and released it in the direction my finger told it—straight into the passage we'd just left.

I leapt to my feet and ran, grinning as Voushanti roared. I'd shaped the fire spell to feed on a victim's anger. The more furious Voushanti got, the hotter he would get and the more ferocious the pressure backing him to the wall. But an agonized scream from deep in the portal chamber quickly erased all childish pleasure. What unseen
master
tormented Osriel the Bastard?

I bolted for the cavern mouth, eyes over my shoulder, cursing when my feet got tangled in a leather pannier left near the fire. My stumble knocked over a stack of fist-sized caskets of tarnished silver, tumbling their contents in the sand.

Everlasting mercy!

Eyes. The silver caskets had spilled out eyes cut from a human body, washed clean and wrapped in dread enchantment. Eyes that had once given light to a man's knowing. That had looked on his lover or his children or the sun.

Sky Lord's wrath, what could make a man who had felt the pulse of divine magic in his veins resort to such profane cruelty? Many people believed the soul resided in the eyes. I hardly knew what I believed of gods
and souls, but even with half a mind I knew the world's glory shone through our eyes, as did its pain and despair, and every aspect that made us different from beasts.

A rain-soaked evening waited beyond the cave mouth. I'd hoped for darkness, but charcoal sky and steady rain would serve for decent cover. I swung quickly round the masking wall onto the lakeside path. The horses were gone.

My curses could have scythed a hay meadow. Without a mount to speed my escape, the path was now as dangerous a trap as the portal chamber. The two soldiers had been ordered to return to the lower end of the lake by sundown or forfeit their heads. I'd no reason to doubt they were there. Voushanti and the warlord could arrive at any moment. Osriel, too, if his
accounting
left anything of him. I needed to get off the path. Up or down; cliff or water.

The cliff was not so high, but every moment climbing I'd be exposed. Any man who'd trained at Evanide could survive in the water, as long as he had magic to aid him when the body's reserves ran out. But I'd no idea how much power I had left. Only experience enabled a sorcerer to judge his reserves, and I owned no memory of using my bent. For certain, once the signs of depletion set in, it would already be too late. Submerged in the middle of this lake, with the cold sapping my strength like a tyro downs ale, would be no time to discover the price of my historical venture.

So it had to be up. And fast. And quiet.

Again I blessed Inek and the hateful hours he had forced us up the cliffs on the coast south of the lighthouse, no matter fog, rain, or sleet. Though dauntingly vertical, this scarp was not a tenth the height, and was seamed and cracked like an old sailor's face. I scrambled up.

But beyond the blocks and cracks, easy hand – and toeholds vanished. Rain slicked the rock, erasing every bulge where my boots might hold the face for a push upward. Water sluiced over my head and spattered into my eyes. Twice I had to retreat and seek an alternate route, when encroaching night and rain left me blind to a next hold. But fear of the exposed and vulnerable position drove me upward as fast as I could haul my battered carcass. At least the pummeling rain should cover my noise.

Perhaps halfway up the wall, a tenuous handhold gave way in a splatter of grit and pebbles. My heart rattled like a sculptor's hammer when a toehold did the same. Only a meager protrusion and my left hand jammed in a
crack held me on the wall. My wrist bone near snapped before I could find more reliable support.

Too fast, idiot. Too fast.
I clung to the wall like a spider. A cold, terrified, miserable spider, unable to see top or bottom, unable to see anything but myself in a bone-shattered heap on the lakeside path, with Osriel of Evanore and his red-eyed monster standing over me, flensing knives in hand ready to expose my bones—and harvest my eyes. Yet immobility wasn't going to keep me unbroken either, for the longer I held still, the less feeling I had in fingers and toes.