Storm Warning (58 page)

“I love you.” He said it softly, simply, and with all the conviction in his body, mind, and soul, and not entirely sure that even this would satisfy him.

But the truth is often enough in itself. So it was, now.

 

They made an odd little group; Altra beside Florian, An‘desha in his Tayledras finery beside Karal in his sober black, holding the reins of Trenor. An’desha would have to ride Florian as soon as they got through the Gate; he wouldn’t be fit to sit on an ordinary horse afterward. They would need to ride for about two days to get from the place An’desha knew—where he and all the others had crossed into Valdemar from Hardom. fleeing the destruction of the capital—to the place where all three borders met. All three groups would have to travel about two days to get to their ultimate destinations, once they Gated as far as they could. And for the first day, whichever mage had created the Gate would be altogether useless for much of anything.

Firesong and Elspeth had gone first, then Darkwind and the gryphons. Now it was An’desha’s turn.

He turned to Karal, as if to say something, then turned back to the stone archway in the weapons-training salle they would all use as their Gate-terminus.

Karal had heard of Gates, but he had never seen one. And after a few moments of watching An’desha build his, he never wanted to see one again.

It wasn’t that the Gate itself was so terrible to look at; it was actually rather pretty, except for the yawning Void in the archway where the view of Kerowyn’s office should have been. No, it was because Karal sensed that the Gate had been spun out of An‘desha’s own spirit; An’desha was a pale shadow of himself, as this Gate fed upon him, a lovely parasite draining his very essence. It was quite horrible, and Karal wondered how
anyone
could bear to create something like this.

Suddenly, the gaping darkness beneath the arch became the view of a forest—a place where the forest had taken over the ruins of a farm.

“Go!” An’desha said, in a strangled voice. Altra bolted through. Karal set Trenor toward the Gate; Trenor fought the bit. The gelding did
not
want to go in there!

Karal started to dismount, then looked back at An’desha and saw the terrible strain holding this Gate was costing him. With a silent apology, he wrenched Trenor’s head around and dug his heels into the gelding’s sides.

Although he wasn’t wearing spurs, the startled horse acted as if he was; Trenor neighed frantically and bolted through the Gate.

It felt as if the ground dropped out from underneath them. For no longer than it took to blink, Karal’s body swore to him that he was falling; for that long, his senses swore to him that the entire universe had vanished and he was blind, deaf, and frozen.

Then they were through, and Karal spun Trenor around on his heels as soon as they had cleared the immediate area. He saw that this side of the Gate was the remains of a ruined stone barn, with only the frame of the door and part of a wall still standing and a view of the salle where only weeds and tumbled stones should have been. A moment later, Florian and An’desha came barreling through, and the scene of the salle vanished behind them.

An’desha swayed in the saddle; someone had thoughtfully strapped him in so that he wouldn’t fall. He clutched the pommel with both hands, leaving the reins slack on Florian’s neck; his face was alabaster-white, and his eyes were closed. He opened them slowly as Karal rode Trenor up beside him.

“I never want to Gate anywhere ever again,” Karal said, putting such intensity into every word that An’desha sat up straight in surprise. “I never want to put you through something like that again!”

“It won’t be so bad, next time,” An’desha replied weakly. “I promise you. Next time, we will make the journey in several smaller portions, over several days.”

“There won’t
be
a next time, if we don’t,” Karal replied acidly. He looked down. “Florian, is he fit to ride?”

: Even if he weren’t, I am fit to carry him. That is why he is bound to the saddle,:
came the reply.
:We have no choice. Time is speeding.:

“So we had better speed ourselves.” He reined Trenor back and gestured. Florian knew the way without a map; he was the best guide they could have had. “If you would lead?”

He steadied Trenor, and Altra leapt up to the padded platform where a pillion-saddle would have been. Rris had sworn that his “famous cousin Warrl” often used such a contraption to ride behind the Shin’a’in warrior Tarma shena Tale’sedrin, and in the interest of making the best speed possible, Altra had agreed to try it. Trenor didn’t seem to mind too much, although he’d tried to buck a little the first time Altra had jumped up there.

Florian swung off into the deeper woods, and if he was following a trail, it wasn’t a trail that Karal could read.

There must have been a trail there, though, since Florian pushed through the brush and rank weeds with no real problem. He was making good time, too; not quite a canter, but certainly a fast walk.

But there was no choice; every mark that passed was a mark that brought the next wave nearer—and Natoli had confided to him that there were several small villages lying where interference-points would fall. The ones in Valdemar had been evacuated, of course—but there could be no such guarantees of the villages elsewhere.

They
had
to stop this wave. They
had
to be in place in time.

prayer to the rest.
That was one of Master Ulrich’s favorite proverbs. Well, they had done all they could; Karal shut his eyes, trusted to Trenor to follow Florian, and sent up fervent prayers.

Whenever Karal sensed that Trenor was tiring, they stopped for a brief rest, water, and food; other than those stops, they rode right on through the night and on into the next day. This country was all former farmland, now gone to weeds and desolation; Karal didn’t really want to ask why it had been left like this. He had an idea that the answer would involve the war with Hardorn, and the little he had learned about Ancar from An’desha did not make him eager to hear more.

The countryside was desolate in other ways, too; there didn’t seem to be a lot of wildlife. Birds were few, and mostly oddly silent. Although it was late fall and frost soon crusted every dried, dead leaf and twig, there
should
have been night sounds; owls, the bark of a fox, or the bay of a wolf. The only sounds were the noises they themselves made, and that very silence was more than enough to put up the hair on Karal’s neck. An’desha slept in the saddle, as he had since they left the area of the Gate; Altra was not disposed to conversation, and Florian had his mind on finding their way. That left him with nothing to do but half-doze, worry, and try another prayer or two.

When dawn came, it brought a thin gray light to the gray landscape, and matters did not improve much. Trenor was tiring sooner, now, and it hurt Karal to force him on, but he knew there was no choice. They only had until two marks after dawn tomorrow to get into place.

But not long after the sun rose, An’desha actually shook himself awake, and looked around.

“I remember this,” he said quietly. “This was land that Ancar held briefly, and he drained it while he held it. It has made a remarkable recovery.”

“This?” Karal replied incredulously. “Recovered?”

“You did not see it before,” the Adept told him grimly, turning in the saddle to face him. “Nothing would grow;
nothing.
By next year this may be back to the kind of land it once was.” His eyes were shadowed by other memories than of this place, and finally he voiced one of them. “Ma’ar made places as desolate as this. The truly terrible thing is that he
thought
he was doing right in creating them.”

“Because in creating them he served some kind of purpose?” Karal hazarded.

An‘desha nodded. “He served his own people very well; he made them into a great and powerful nation. The only problem is that in doing so, he turned other nations into stretches of desolation that are still scarred by his wars today. For him, nothing mattered except himself and his own people—who were extensions of himself. He did horrible things in the name of patriotism, and thought that he was in the right. I do not
like
Ma’ar, but I understand him. Perhaps I understand him too well.”

Karal heard the self-doubt creep into An‘desha’s voice again, and answered it. “Understanding is the essence of not making the same mistakes, An’desha,” he replied. “I rather doubt that Ma’ar ever understood himself, for instance.”

An’desha actually laughed. “Well, now that is true enough,” he said cheerfully. “So, once again you unseat my problems before they can dig spurs into me. How far to the key-point?”

:Most of the day, if we are not delayed,:
Florian replied—

—just as they topped a hill to find themselves staring down at a gorge many hundreds of hands below. The gorge held a river—a river so full of whitewater rapids that it would be insane to try and cross it.

:This should not be here!:
Florian exclaimed.

They all stared down at the river below, all but Trenor, who took the occasion to snatch a few mouthfuls of dried weeds.

:And here, right on schedule, is our delay,:
Altra said finally.

“Not necessarily,” Karal pointed out quickly. “There may be a bridge. Do we go upstream or down to try and find it?”

“Upstream, I think,” An’desha said, after a moment of consideration. “It takes us nearer the Iftel side that way.”

In the end, they did find a bridge—a narrow, shaky affair of old logs and rough planks. Karal had to blindfold Trenor to get him across, after Altra tried the footing by carefully padding over first. But that put them several marks behind schedule, and it was nearly dawn before they finally reached their goal.

Karal had wondered just how they would know what side of the border was the Iftel side, and what was the Valdemar side. As the sun rose, he had the answer to that question.

“What is that?” he asked in awe, staring at the wall of rippling light that lay along the top of the ridge, just above them. He couldn’t see the top of it, whatever it was; it wasn’t air, unless there was a way to solidify air and make it into a curtain of refraction. It wasn’t water, although it moved and rippled like water with a breeze playing over it, and Karal was just able to make out large masses of green and gray-brown on the other side of it that
could
be trees and bushes.

:That is the border,:
Florian replied warily.
:It wasn’t always like that. Before the war with Ancar, it looked just like the border between Valdemar and Rethwellan, but once Ancar tried to bring an army across it, that was what sprang up. Anyone who tried to cross it was forced back. Anyone who tried to drive their way in with magic—died. I’ve heard that there are some very select traders who are allowed to come and go between here and there, but they are a close-mouthed lot, and they won’t talk about anything that they’ve seen over there.:

“I thought they had an envoy at the Valdemar Court,” An’desha observed.

Karal swallowed as he contemplated that shimmering wall of—of—

What was more, he was supposed to walk across it
right now.
There couldn’t be more than a mark to go until the next wave was upon them!

“Come on,” he urged, as his hands shook. “We have to get moving
now
We haven’t got any time at all to spare!”

To set an example, he urged poor, tired Trenor into a clumsy trot, sending him down the valley, through the knee-high grass, and up the ridge. The wall just loomed larger and larger; it didn’t change at all except for the continuous rippling of the surface as he drew nearer to it. He sensed An’desha and Florian at his back, but the sheer power of the wall drove them mostly out of his thoughts.

There wasn’t time for finesse, for study, for anything other than what he was already doing—running headlong into the thing, and hoping that it didn’t decide to kill him, too.

Fear held him rigid and made a metallic taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes and shouted at Trenor to drive him the last few spans remaining—

—opened his eyes again, just as they actually reached it, and passed into it—

Something seized and held him.

He could not move, not even to breathe. He was surrounded by light, yet could not see. He could only wait, while whatever it was that held him examined him, inside and out.

Was he a Priest? An’desha had named him “priest,” but it had been in jest. Or had it? Solaris had named him “priest,” but he thought it had merely been expedience. What had he done to earn the name?

Suddenly, it let him go. He found himself still in Trenor’s saddle, looking at An’desha and Florian through a curtain of rippling light that seemed thinner here than elsewhere.

:It is thinner. That is so we can reach them,:
Altra said, urgently.
:It is coming, Karal, take your position. Don’t just stand there thinking,
move!: