The Shadow Isle (47 page)

The dazzle from the golden scales got into his eyes, and through them, he felt, into his brain. He wanted to touch it, to stroke the dress itself, not the woman underneath, to feel those golden scales under his fingertips. With a shake of his head, he shut his eyes. He heard her chuckle to herself.

“They say that the lust for the sun’s blood runs strong in the blood of the Mountain Folk,” she said, “and I think they speak the truth.”

Kov crossed his arms over his chest and kept his eyes shut. He could hear the dress jingle as she walked up to him, then felt her fingers touch his hair. She separated out a lock; then he felt the sawing of a small knife. The lock of hair came away in her hand, and she stepped back again.

She spoke first in her own language, then in Deverrian. “Look at me, Kov, because what I am about to do with this hair concerns you greatly.”

The urgency in her voice opened his eyes. A man in a green tabard was handing her a small glass vial filled with some sort of liquid. When she held it up to the sun, he could see that it was oil. Solemnly she stuffed the lock of his hair into the vial, then stoppered it. The man in green took it from her with a bow.

“Should you try to escape from our river,” Lady said solemnly. “I shall burn this hair, and your soul shall burn within you. Better you should stay among us!”

A man in a yellowish tabard stepped forward, bowed, and knelt down. With a small key he unlocked the shackle from Kov’s ankle.

“Let the dance begin!” Lady called out.

The villagers answered her call in their own language. Someone out of sight began to pound on a drum; a flute player joined in. All those in the circle began a solemn dance, moving a few steps in one direction, bobbing their heads, then moving back in the other, yet they always moved more steps deosil than widdershins, so that the circle did make progress around the pillar. As they danced, Lady chanted in her own language, swaying back and forth, first calling out, then murmuring softly, moving her hands in the air as if she were weaving some sort of ensorcelment.

It should have been impressive, but Kov was remembering Dallandra, with her beautiful face and cold-steel eyes, picking up his staff and talking about the dweomer upon it as casually as she would have told him that coltsfoot herb would ease dropsy. With as little fuss she could call forth rain out of a clear sky. She would have no need of stamping feet and silly chants to bind a man to her.
There’s no true dweomer here!
he thought,
not that I’d better let them know I know it.
At last the music ended, the dancers stopped, and Lady stood smiling at him, her face flushed, her eyes wide under their fan-shaped brows.

“You may have the freedom of our river,” she said.

“My humble thanks, my lady,” Kov said. “I shall serve you always.”

Her grin widened into triumph. Apparently she couldn’t tell a lie when she heard one, either. Kov silently worked a small spell of his own, not that real dweomer lay behind it.
Earth is stubborn, earth is slow,
he told himself,
rocks will stop the river’s flow.
He now knew, deep in his heart, that the threat to his soul would come not from her and her people, but from the gold itself, all that gold, piled up, glittering, waiting for him like a pouty lover.

“Since I belong to the river now,” Kov said, lying solemnly, “I crave a boon. I wish to learn to swim.”

“You don’t know?” Her smile vanished into a wonder almost comical. “Well, then, by all means, you shall learn! The very best of our young men shall teach you.”

“Well and good, then.” Kov bowed as low and as humbly as he could. “My heartfelt thanks!”

Learning to swim would take him away from the underground chamber for at least some part of the day. Kov intended to be a slow learner, positively clumsy, in fact, to have access to the sky and air for as long as possible while he schemed out a way to escape, far from the golden treasure’s spell.

Laz, of course, had no need of the Dwrgi Folk’s bridge. In his hunt for Faharn and his men, he flew over the Dwrvawr a good many miles to the north of the village, where the river ran through a high plateau of tumbled boulders in dry gullies, expanses of patchy brush and dry grass, bordered by hills so sharply ridged that it seemed they’d been cut with knives. An incessant wind blew down from the north, bringing a chill with it at night.

The wind caused him a great deal of trouble. After some days of flying, Laz had gained control of his blunted wings under normal circumstances. As long as he flew with steady strokes straight ahead, or glided on a rising thermal, he could control his motion as well as he always had. Landing, however, or making tight turns presented difficulties. Those maneuvers required a perfect camber that, with damaged wing tips, he couldn’t always achieve. He would just manage to get the right angle to land or turn when a gust of wind would tumble him, squawking, from the sky. When he attempted to land, a wind gust would fling him backward. At times he even dropped his sack of belongings, which generally came untied during its fall. He would have to land as best he could, transform back to man-shape, and laboriously pick everything up and repack it with his damaged hands.

After some days of this aggravation he decided to risk the tunnel working. Half spell, half ritual, Laz had pieced it together on his own from hints that he’d found in the ill-fated Hazdrubal’s teachings and the
Pseudo-Iamblichos Scroll
. At first he’d had no particular goal in mind, other than his usual curiosity about what would happen if he tried such-and-such a bit of dweomer. In human form, he’d gotten no results worth speaking of. In raven form, when he existed on the etheric as much as on the physical plane, he’d opened a long tunnel to and through the astral to—somewhere. At first he’d not recognized the strange roads he’d opened, misty tracks that led him through landscapes that seemed real but that changed at whim. In the library of the temple of Bel in Trev Hael he’d found a copy of the
Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
and at last understood the treasure he’d unearthed by accident.

The mother roads, the fabled mother roads that could take a man or a raven anywhere he wanted to go—they were a prize worth running risks for, Laz had decided. He’d used them to travel to the ruins of Rinbaladelan, then back to the temple of Bel up north of Cengarn. The summer just past, the working had nearly killed him. He’d opened a tunnel above the temple and used it to rejoin his men in the forest. Just as he’d come free, the tunnel had closed behind him with a snap like the jaws of some great beast.

Thinking about his narrow escape still made him shudder. He had no idea why the tunnel had closed so suddenly, very nearly leaving him on the astral. Had he not escaped, he would have died. Worse yet, he might have been trapped on the astral with no hope of rebirth. As he perched on a dead tree, out in the Northlands barrens, remembering the risk gave him pause. He knew now how deadly a dweomer working could turn, when the sorcerer understood only some of its properties.

Yet, in the end Laz decided that the rewards of the mother roads outweighed the risk. They had a peculiar property that made them useful for more than one reason. Since they were driven by thought, they responded to thought. On a sunny morning, once the Dwrvawr and its water veil lay well behind him, Laz opened a tunnel through the higher worlds. He knew that he had only a few moments to travel before his physical body began to dissolve into a stringy mass of etheric forces, so he flapped hard, flew fast, faster, panting for breath, his wings aching, until he saw at last a pale brown meadow, where a dead river flowed in a sluggish stretch of thick silver water. Nearby stood a tree, half of which burned with perpetual fire whilst the other half bloomed green in full leaf. Beyond that tree lay forest, dark, tangled, and forbidding, where he’d never dared venture.

Laz landed on the riverbank to rest and to examine the sack he carried in his talons. It appeared to be whole and unharmed, though he decided to wait to open it to see what had happened to the objects inside until he was safely back on the physical plane. Sometimes they survived these trips; sometimes he found only a strange mass of fibers and a greasy sort of ectoplasmic slime, which tended to evaporate fast in actual physical air, leaving a stink of decay behind it.

As soon as he recovered his strength, Laz pictured Faharn in his mind, brought back every memory of him that he could, and combined them into an image of Faharn, still based on memory. He visualized Faharn’s neatly braided mane of black hair, glittering with silver charms in the sunlight, his cornflower-blue eyes that marked him as the member of a clan with slaves among its ancestors.

All at once the image changed and lived: Faharn was standing beside his bay horse, unfastening an empty nose bag from the horse’s halter. Laz focused on the image and kept his mind upon it as he hopped up onto his sack. With a caw that echoed, strangely hollow, across the dead meadow, he leaped into the air and flew. The image hovered in the air in front of him, always seemingly just a few yards away, never coming closer, till at last it disappeared into a shimmering silver lozenge of pure force: the gate out.

Laz swooped through the gate and found himself flying over a herd of horses, tethered out in a sparse patch of grass. He circled around and saw below him a scatter of crude tents, a campfire burning, and men, pointing up at the sky, yelling and waving. Voices floated up to him, “The raven, the raven!” With a squawk of greeting Laz circled lower until finally he found Faharn. He dropped his sack at Faharn’s feet, then tried to land in front of him. His damaged wing tips betrayed him yet again. He skidded to a halt on his tail feathers, then leaped up with a shake and a croak of rage.

“You’re back!” Faharn sounded on the edge of tears. “Feathers and all!” Tears or no, he grinned as if his face would split from it. “Thank the gods! Thank all the gods!”

Laz formed an image of his physical body, transferred his consciousness over to it, and banished the raven. He heard a click, saw a flash of blue light, felt every nerve in his body vibrate, and regained his human form. For a moment he stood dazed, blinking at the sunlight around him. The men—those he could recognize— started hurrying over to greet him. The strangers stayed some distance away, staring, murmuring among themselves. More than once Laz heard someone say “mazrak” in a hushed voice.

“Back, indeed,” Laz said. “With many a strange tale to tell you, too. Here, let me get dressed.” He knelt down and opened the sack. His clothing had stayed intact and free of the obnoxious ectoplasm. The black crystal, too, lay safely wrapped in rags.

Laz pulled his shirt over his head, then put on his brigga and laced them, a slow process with his maimed hands. When he finished, he paused to look around him. The camp sat in the middle of open land, mostly grass, though trees grew along the streams that wound through it. Stretching off to the horizon were grass-covered mounds of varying sizes, ranging from a mere ten feet or so across to massive artificial hills. They were all too circular in shape for natural features. Some, in fact, looked as if giants had leveled their tops with huge knives, while others peaked like roofs.

“Where are we?” Laz said, pointing. “What are those?”

“First question: about three hundred miles east of Braemel, as close as we can reckon,” Faharn said. “Second question: the Horsekin around here, and there aren’t a lot of them, call this the Ghostlands. Those barrows are the graves of our ancestors, I suppose. I don’t know who else would be buried in them.”

“A very good point.” Laz flashed him a grin. “And I’d guess that no one’s going to look for you out here. Barrows always harbor evil spirits, right? No one’s going to come poking around them, therefore.”

“That was my thinking, yes. Though I can see how the superstitions got started. There have been times when we’ve heard things in a barrow, a funny scraping sound, and something else.” Faharn paused, then shrugged. “Almost like someone talking. The wind, probably, or the earth shifting inside.”

“Probably. Spirits or no, you look well.”

“We’ve done well enough, though the winter was hard. We had some deserters desert.” Faharn smiled with a twist of his mouth. “We’ve lost men since you left us, but then I picked up a few, too.”

“So I see. What happened between you and Pir?”

“We split the band between us.” Faharn’s voice turned flat. “That woman of yours chose to surrender to the Ancients, and he went with her. So did a lot of our men.”

“That I know. I scried for them.”

“Oh? How much did you see? He’s taken your place with her.”

“I’m not in the least surprised.” Laz fished his belt out of the sack and wrapped it over his shirt. “Pir has always had a way with the fillies.”

Faharn hesitated on the edge of speaking. Laz finally got the buckle fastened and looked up to find Faharn staring at him with a peculiar expression.

“You’re not angry?” Faharn said.

“It’s her right to take a second man, isn’t it?” Laz said.

“According to the laws, yes, but—” Faharn hesitated, and he looked oddly disappointed by something. “But it’s none of my affair, of course.”

“Of course. I’ll be her first man still.” Laz knelt down again and pulled his boots out of the sack. “What about these new men? I see that some of them are carrying falcatas.”

“Deserters, all of them. Can I help you with your boots? I’m guessing those crystals are what injured your hands.”

“You’ve guessed right. No, I can get them on eventually. It’s a bit of a struggle, is all. Here, deserters from what?”

“Regiments. They’re Gel da’Thae horse warriors. They’re more than a little fed up with the direction this Alshandra cult has taken. The rakzanir get more control over the priestesses every day, or so they tell me.”

“Oh, do they? Now that’s extremely interesting.”

Laz got the first boot on, tucked in the brigga leg, then glanced up. Faharn was watching him, his head cocked to one side, his eyes narrow.

“What’s wrong?” Laz said.

“Nothing, nothing,” Faharn said. “I suppose I thought you’d be angry about Pir and your woman.”