Legacy of Kings (35 page)

Which it well might be, she mused. It was much easier to create the illusion of such a place than to conjure that much mass. But its appearance was pleasing to her, and since she sensed that Colivar had created it just for this meeting, she decided to take it at face value and simply appreciate his work.

She walked up the white stone staircase and felt the shade of the building’s interior envelop her as she passed between its pillars. Inside, she could see that carved alabaster couches with white silk cushions had been arranged in a perfect square. Colivar’s presence on one of them, in his black attire, was visually dramatic.

But she was dressed in the same color now, and provided an equally arresting contrast.

“Kamala.” He stood as she approached. There was a subtle tension about him that she could taste, and instinctively she knew that whatever was bothering him had some kind of sexual undertone. She had serviced enough men in her youth to read those signs loud and clear. “Thank you for coming,” he said.

“Your note made it sound urgent.”

“Events move quickly these days.”

He nodded toward a glass decanter set on a small table between two of the couches; the red wine in it gleamed like fresh blood in the ruddy sunlight. She waved aside the offer and entered the seating area instead, choosing a couch opposite his own and settling herself on it. Jet black on pristine white. She could feel the room settle into perfect symmetry as he sat down directly opposite her, and she knew that the furniture had been positioned so that the light of the setting sun would set her red hair ablaze.

“I need your help,” he said.

She nodded. “I assumed as much.”

“I have a lead on where Siderea Aminestas might be. Or else a trail that may lead to her. I need to know which it is.”

She raised an eyebrow curiously. “So I’m your queen-tracker, now?”

He chuckled softly. “Do you know someone one better suited to the task?”

“No,” she said. A faint smile flickered across her own lips. “I do not.”

“There’s a city to the south called Tefilat. I need to know what’s out there.”

“You mean, you need to know if
she
is there.”

He nodded. “Can you do that?”

She remembered how hard it had been to enter the territory of the northern queen, even in a vision. If Siderea possessed that same power, then she could lose herself in the vastness of the desert, and no one would ever be able to find her; there weren’t enough clear landmarks in such terrain for Kamala to focus on. But in a more structured environment it was possible. Not likely, but possible. “Perhaps,” she said.. “Do you have a map for me? I don’t know this region.”

“Something better than a map.”

He reached out to hand her something; when she opened her hand beneath his to receive it, he poured a thin stream of reddish sand into her upturned palm. “This is from Tefilat.”

She closed her fingers over the sand, feeling its fine gritty texture. Then she extended her senses into it, where the hidden traces of its past history might be found. Its locational energy was strong and clear, and she knew she would have no trouble using it as an anchor to connect to its point of origin.

Briefly she thought of retiring to some private place to begin, but then she remembered how he had come to her while she’d been searching the Spinas. The memory brought a strange rush of warmth to her cheeks. He hadn’t hurt her then, when she had lain helpless before him. It would make no sense for him to do so now.

“One thing,” he warned her, as she sat back on the couch and prepared herself for the mental journey. “Sorcery may not work properly there.”

Again the faint smile appeared. “Have you ever asked me to go to a place where sorcery
did
work properly?”

She shut her eyes without waiting for his response. Apparently Tefilat was not far away; she required no more than a few seconds to establish a clear focus for her sorcery. Then it was a simple act to send her senses outward, as she had done in the Spinas, to explore the place. It was a safe enough procedure, providing one did not mind leaving one’s insensate body in the hands of another Magister.

A strange ruddy landscape took shape around her. In some places the earth was molded into sweeping shapes, patterned with stripes in orange and rust, as if a layer of cloth had been draped over the terrain. In other places there were wind-carved monuments that were both beautiful and strange, with shapes that played tricks upon the mind’s eye, seeming to shift from one form to another as her mind moved past them.

Guided by the traces in the sand, her sorcerous viewpoint shifted to a vast canyon with a dry riverbed coursing down its center. The walls on both sides were high, with shadowed alcoves large enough to contain a house. Some of them had actually had houses in them, which had been abandoned long ago. Their walls were crumbling as time and wind reclaimed them, and in some places it was hard to tell where a house ended and the natural debris of the canyon began.

Then she came around a turn and saw Tefilat itself.

It would have been a breathtaking sight for anyone. For Kamala, raised in the slums of Gansang, it was nigh on overwhelming. Here there were not simply dwellings tucked into the natural shelves and alcoves of the canyon walls, but tall and elegant buildings, in some cases several stories high. Across their intricate façades sandstone stripes rippled and eddied, as if the buildings had somehow grown there organically rather than having been carved by the hand of man.

It was beautiful in its grandeur. Eerie in its emptiness.

And it was tainted.

She could feel the warped power that resonated from the ancient stone, could see it shimmering darkly about the richly carved walls, could taste its
wrongness
in her very soul. Fragments of shattered spells clung to this place, along with memories of human fear and echoes of terrible bloodshed. No, she would not want to stand here in her real body, subject to these dark, fragmented energies. It was little wonder people now avoided this place.

But someone had been here recently; she could sense that clearly. She struggled to get some sense of identity. At first she could conjure only hazy images, echoes from the distant past. Armies gathering. Spells being cast. The shadows of vast wings coursing along the valley’s floor. Bodies left behind in the wake of those shadows, living flesh from which the human consciousness had been sucked dry.

Then she began to pick up clearer impressions, from more recent events. She saw desert tribesmen passing through the place, and her power provided the proper label:
Hom’ra.
Then others appeared. Witches. She narrowed her eyes instinctively as she struggled to make out details, even though her physical eyes were not required for this search.

Just then a wing-shadow passed overhead. She saw a few of the Hom’ra look nervously upward, but most of them seemed to be unaware of the Souleater’s presence. She could sense the creature’s power licking at their souls, sipping from the essence of their lives to feed upon as it passed overhead. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. The tribesmen continued their work of bringing supplies into the city as if nothing untoward had happened, until a woman approached them. She was dressed in a white sleeveless gown and shrouded in so many layers of protective sorcery that Kamala could not see through them to determine her identity. The Hom’ra bowed to the woman as she passed, not as one did to an earthly ruler, but with a sense of fearful reverence.

Focusing her concentration to the utmost, Kamala tried to break through the power that surrounded the woman, to get a clearer view of her. But she could not focus directly on her, no matter how hard she tried. The sensation was a familiar one, and it sent a shiver coursing through her soul. This had to be Siderea; there was no other explanation. Thank the gods the Witch-Queen herself was not present, and all Kamala had to contend with were conjured images, crafted from the residual energies of past events. Those had no consciousness of their own.

But something here did, she realized suddenly.
Something
was watching her. She could sense its scrutiny like a chill breath on the back of her neck, and she whipped about suddenly, using her sorcery to take in the entire panorama, all at once. Yet she could not identify any focus for the strange sensation. Was this some trick of local metaphysics, like Colivar had warned her about? The sensation grew more intense even as she searched for the source. It seemed to be coming from all directions, as though there were not one source point, but many. A circle of source points, gradually taking shape around her . . . .

As they slowly resolved themselves, she realized what they were.

There were dozens of figures surrounding her now. Ghostly images, human and half human, and a few that were something else entirely. They emerged one by one from the air, as if drawing their substance from the very landscape. And one by one they took up position around her, forming a perfect circle with her at the center. There were three ranks of them visible and more were forming behind those, circle after circle of impassive figures, their expressions unreadable, their bodies motionless—

She broke contact and fled the scene. Her mind slammed back into her body with such force that it left her breathless. For a moment it was all she could do to breathe steadily, and she struggled to maintain sufficient composure that Colivar would not realize what had happened.

Gods. Those were the same gods who had been watching her when she began her search for the northern queen. She hadn’t actually seen them back then, but she had sensed their presence. And these felt like the same entities.

But who were they? What did they want with her? She could not begin to fathom an answer.

It could just be the power of Tefilat playing with her mind, she told herself. Maybe the sorcerous effort of this search had triggered memories of the other one, and the city’s strange resonance had caused the two efforts to get all mixed up in her mind. But that still begged the question of why gods had been watching her the first time. Did they have a vested interest in this Souleater war? Or did they consider a female Magister an unnatural creature, perhaps, whose sorcery disturbed the natural order of things? Their stoic expressions had offered no clue.

When she thought she had enough control of herself to handle human conversation again, she opened her eyes.

Night had fallen during her search, and a series of torches had been lit. Colivar was watching her closely, tiny reflected flames dancing in his eyes.

“Well?” he demanded. “What did you see?”

Did he know that something had gone wrong? She would operate on the assumption that he did not until he indicated otherwise. “She’s not there now,” Kamala rasped. The startling vision had caused her throat to seize up She coughed lightly, trying to get the muscles to relax. “But she was there previously, along with the Hom’ra. Not very long ago. And her Souleater was there also.”

“One will not travel far without the other,” he said. Then: “Tell me everything.”

So she described her vision in as much detail she could, conjuring images when words failed her. Only when it came to the final vision, that of the gods themselves, did she keep her silence. The message of that part might be personal, and she had no reason to share it.

When she had finished her recitation, Colivar was silent for a moment, digesting all the information she had given him. “Clearly they’re using the city as a staging ground of sorts,” he said finally. “But for what? Tefilat is out in the middle of nowhere. It’s too far from any potential target to be of use in morati affairs, and distance has little meaning to a sorcerer, so there’d be no point in going out there.”

“There’s a point,” Kamala said.

Colivar raised an eyebrow.

“You said it yourself,” she told him. “Sorcery isn’t reliable there. Magisters don’t like to go to places where they can’t trust their power. Like with the Wrath. Remember? Nyuku took shelter right by it, because he knew no Magister was likely to come calling.” It seemed to her that Colivar stiffened slightly when she mentioned Nyuku’s name, but she couldn’t be sure. “And any spell that detected his presence would have been taken with a grain of salt, because sorcery couldn’t be relied upon there.”

It had been a brilliant plan, she thought. If Ethanus had not suggested she go there herself to escape the other Magisters, Rhys would likely have died in that secret prison, and the invasion of the Souleaters might never have been detected. Until it was too late.

Colivar walked over to the small table where the wine glasses sat and picked one up. “It’s not impossible,” he muttered. The crimson wine glowed like fresh blood in the torchlight.

“But Tefilat isn’t the Wrath,” she said. “I didn’t sense any disruption on that scale. There’s no reason a Magister couldn’t function there, if he was careful enough.”

“No,” he agreed. His expression was thoughtful. “I visited there when I first became Farah’s Magister Royal. It’s an eerie place, and sorcery doesn’t always work quite right, but it’s not a major threat to anyone.” He nodded. “But you’re right. Magisters generally avoid such locations. If I wanted to hide something from sorcerers, I would definitely seek a place like that to do it in.”

He took a deep drink from the glass. A slow drink. She could see the muscles in his throat ripple as he swallowed. Then he lowered the glass, gazing thoughtfully into its depths. “Whoever your Master was,” he said, “he taught you well.”

A flush rose to her cheeks. Did he really think that, or was he just trying to ferret out some clue about her origins? Knowing his great age and the breadth of his experience, even the second question was a compliment.

“Clearly we need to learn what’s out there,” he said, when she did not respond to him. Then he chuckled softly. “
We
. What a strange concept that is! I suppose now I must deliver this information to my
allies.
How the world has changed.” He sighed melodramatically, then sipped from the glass once more.