The Spirit Stone (33 page)

‘I was wondering about that, not that I wanted to say it first.’
That little viper!
Nevyn thought to himself alone.
If I ever get hold of him –

‘Well, now he’s gone,’ Aderyn said. ‘Probably to Bardek. Doubtless I’ll never see him again.’

‘Oh, don’t believe that,’ Nevyn said. ‘He’ll come back to Deverry one day. I’m sure of it. He’s set forces in motion that will drag him back, and he’ll want to take out his rage on you again, if naught else.’

‘Perhaps so. If he does, it’ll be up to me to deal with him, too. I’m torn in half, hoping he does come back but wishing he’d stay away forever.’

Aderyn sounded so exhausted that Nevyn said nothing more that afternoon but comforting platitudes. He mulled the situation over in his mind for days, however. He knew with the wordless surety of a great master of magic that dark dweomer lurked somewhere on the fringes of Loddlaen’s life. Exactly where and how he couldn’t know—not yet. He could only watch and wait for him to come back to Deverry.
His own kind will draw him,
Nevyn thought.
Ai! None of us ever dreamt that there was so much hatred in the lad!

From time to time during his unnaturally long life, Nevyn had to leave whatever place he’d been living in and relocate somewhere else. If he stayed in one home too long, the local folk would have noticed that he was living for far too many years. That summer, after the murder, Nevyn left Cannobaen. He travelled north-east, heading for Cantrae province and his hidden dwelling in Brin Toraedic. He stopped in Cerrmor, however, when he received an obscure hint from the Lords of Wyrd that someone of great interest happened to be there.

Although the Lords of Wyrd were once ordinary human beings, they have evolved so far, and live on such an exalted plane of existence, that communicating in words lies beyond them. All they can do is send hints, intuitions, odd twists of feeling and thought—the sort of thing men call omens—down to the dweomermasters who live so far below. Nevyn interpreted this particular omen as meaning that Lilli or Morwen had been reborn in Cerrmor. Unfortunately, he’d misread the intent, though not the impulse.

On his second day there, Nevyn turned onto a street leading to the docks and noticed a stout fellow walking ahead of him – a successful merchant, judging by the brightly checked wool of his brigga and the heavy embroidery on his fine linen shirt. At a tavern door the fellow turned in, pausing to glance back. Nevyn received the impression of a typical Cerrmor man, with a broad face, blue eyes, and thick pale hair, but the impression was all he got, because the fellow blanched, ducked, and practically leapt into the tavern. Nevyn glanced behind him and saw no one on the street.
It must have been me who frightened him,
Nevyn thought.
I wonder who he is?
He hurried over to the tavern door, but when he looked in, he found no sign of the fellow except the swinging of the back door, as if someone had rushed out and flung it closed behind him.

Nevyn trotted through the tavern and out the back, but he saw only empty ale barrels and a dungheap in the narrow alley. With a shrug he went on his way, but for the rest of his time in Cerrmor, he kept on guard in hopes of seeing the mysterious merchant again. He never did, and no more could he place the fellow among the crowded memories of his unnaturally prolonged life. Once he even remembered Tirro, the shifty-eyed little wastrel of a merchant’s son, but he never equated the two—which was a great pity, because many years later, that sight of a grown, prosperous, and utterly corrupt Tirro, or Alastyr to give him his full name, would have stood him in good stead.

Eventually his search for those souls to whom he owed debts of wyrd made Nevyn forget about the mysteriously frightened stranger. After wandering the kingdom for some years in the hopes of finding Lilli and Morwen reborn, he returned to Eldidd and the small town of Cannobaen. He decided he’d stay there, too, until the Lords of Wyrd sent him an omen that indicated otherwise. Not even such a powerful dweomermaster as he could realize, however, just how right his choice was, nor could he know that hundreds of years later he would be reborn on the western border at a time when its folk would stand in the gravest peril they had ever faced.

PART II
The Westlands 1159

The spiral, not the circle, is the key to the fulfilment of Wyrd.

The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid

I
n a pair of old man’s hands
, the black stone glittered. They sat inside a tent, and soft voices talked incomprehensibly as Evan—he knew his real name was Evan—stared into the stone. In the black glow a man with daffodil-yellow hair and cherry-red lips held out a white flat thing with a picture of a black lizard upon it. Or was it a raven?

Salamander woke suddenly with the dream vivid in his mind. He sat up on the bed and ran his hands through his sweaty hair while he stared at the braided rushes covering the floor. He reminded himself that he was sitting in a chamber in the Red Wolf dun, not in a Westfolk tent. After a few good yawns, he rose and went to the window. Down below in the ward servant lasses were carrying baskets from the cookhouse into the great hall. On the far side of the ward he could see grooms leading horses to the watering trough. The dun had woken for the day.

Salamander dressed, ready to go down for breakfast, but he lingered in the chamber, thinking over the dream, trying to dissect its residue. The obsidian pyramid was calling to him. He could understand it no other way than that the stone was trying to reach him. He sat down on the bed and considered the stripe of sunlight while he let his mind reach out to the stone.

In vision he saw the obsidian pyramid standing upon an altar beside an oil lamp. The pyramid glowed with its strange black light—a spirit, he suddenly realized, was indwelling the gem. Nothing else would explain the glow and the bright black sparks that occasionally flashed from its surface. What sort of spirit? With the Sight as his only tool the answer lay beyond him. He widened the vision. He could clearly discern the stone altar, the oil lamp, and behind both, a painting of Alshandra in the Bardek manner. Beyond, he saw only a misty void, hiding the rest of Alshandra’s Inner Shrine.

Scrying out Zakh Gral made him think of Rocca. Instantly his vision jumped to daylight and the Outer Shrine. Rocca was leaning over the rough stone outer altar, scrubbing it with a handful of rags. On the ground beside her sat a bucket of water. The job would make every muscle in her torso ache. She’d be glad of the pain, he supposed, because she’d see it as yet another sacrifice to her goddess. Nearby stood one of the Gel da’ Thae priestesses, waving her hands while she spoke. Rocca paused in her cleaning to listen, her face grave, almost troubled. Salamander wished for the thousandth time that he could hear while scrying, but only the greatest masters of the dweomer could manage that.

Rocca began talking. The Gel da’ Thae woman listened intently, then suddenly smiled, showing her teeth, filed to sharp points in the Horsekin manner. She seemed deeply relieved about whatever problem had brought her to her fellow priestess. Rocca patted her on the shoulder, as if to comfort her. The other woman nodded, then walked away. Rocca returned to her work.

And Sidro—where was she? The Sight took him flying upriver to the forest edge. Rocca had led him out of the forest at just that point, or so he remembered, following the same road that Sidro now walked in the opposite direction. She was trudging along in her painted leather dress with a blanket tied around her waist for a skirt and a bulging sack of supplies over one shoulder. She walked with her head down as if she were already profoundly weary with the journey just begun.

In the sunlight her cropped hair shone like a raven’s wing. He noticed for the first time that the back of her neck bore a string of green tattoos. Those and the width of her shoulders, her oddly round eyes, the strong modelling of her features
– ye gods!
he thought.
I’ll wager there’s Horsekin blood in her veins!
He focused in closer and saw that she was weeping. She raised her head and looked up at the sky while tears ran down her cheeks, a gesture that cost her when she stumbled over a rock in the path. She stopped, dropped her sack, and covered her face with her hands while she sobbed, her shoulders shaking from the pain of bare flesh meeting stone.

He pitied her. His involuntary stab of compassion surprised him so badly that he nearly lost the vision then and there, but he managed to stay focused for a few moments more, until she suddenly lowered her hands and twisted around to look behind her. Her tear-streaked face showed panic as she looked this way and that, just as if she knew someone watched her.

Salamander broke the vision fast. He sat still for a few moments, staring out at nothing, then tried to stand. The chamber swelled and swirled around him so violently that he nearly lost consciousness. Eventually his physical sight steadied down, but the stones of the chamber seemed to be breathing, a hundred swellings and flattenings of little lungs.

‘Star goddesses help me!’ he whispered aloud. He wanted to contact Dallandra, but he was suddenly afraid of using any dweomer at all.

A sound struck the chamber door from outside. He cocked his head to one side, puzzled, but when it sounded again he realized that someone was knocking.

‘Who is it?’ Salamander called out.

‘Neb. Are you ill or suchlike?’

‘I’m not. The door isn’t barred. Come in.’

Neb pushed open the door and walked in, stood looking down at him with his hands on his hips. ‘You look ill,’ he said.

‘Do I? Well, most likely it’s just the heat of the summer’s day. I didn’t sleep well last night.’

‘Then you’d best get out of this chamber, hadn’t you? It’s sweltering in here.’

‘Splendid idea! Have I missed breakfast?’

‘You’ve not. The lasses are just setting it out.’

After a bowl of porridge and a chunk of fresh bread and butter, Salamander felt his normal self. Still, he reminded himself that Dallandra had been right as usual. He needed to limit his scrying and to refrain from any other dweomer workings—unless some crisis demanded them.

The Northlands rise into a wilderness maze, cut up by streams and rivulets that tumble down to join one or another of the south-flowing rivers. At the time of which we speak, primeval forest covered its hills and clustered at the bottom of canyons and valleys. Even those who travelled through it regularly would have been lost after a few days if it weren’t for the existence of a secret pathway. Alshandra’s initiates had devised a set of symbols that, carved high up on tree trunks or chipped into boulders, marked an east-west route leading to northern Deverry and the little villages and farms of those Deverry folk who believed in the goddess.

Although she’d been a priestess for some years now and thus should have trusted in Alshandra, Sidro still feared the forest road. She’d been born and raised in Taenalapan, one of the towns the Gel da’ Thae had built among the ruins of an ancient city. In her view, stone walls meant safety and comfort, while every crack of a branch or rustle of leaves and bracken in the forest signalled bears and wolves, searching for a tasty two-legged meal.

The damp woodland smell frightened her even more. She had enough Horsekin blood in her veins to pick up scent-marks too faint for a merely human nose, but she lacked a gamekeeper’s knowledge to identify their makers, so to her, the leavings of the smallest weasel reeked of as much danger as those of a big black bear. When night fell, she climbed into the cleft of a tree and twisted her blanket into a rope to tie herself to a branch. She drowsed, clutching her sack, rather than slept, until at last the sun rose.

As chief acolyte in Zakh Gral, Sidro had been free of missionary work and its long treks through wild places. Her humiliation over the matter of Evan the gerthddyn and his supposed miracle had lost her that high position in the order. As she trudged along, her mind rehearsed grievances beyond her power to stop it.
Rocca worked that very well, the scheming shrew!
she would think. Now Rocca held the post of chief acolyte and the favour of the high priestess while Sidro found herself back as a simple traveller for the goddess, the lowliest rank in their order, Alshandra’s Elect.
I know he was a fraud, but they’d never let me tell them why!
That thought brought her a scatter of tears.

Late on her third day out of Zakh Gral, Sidro came to a narrow strip of meadow crossed with a stream of clear water. In the sunlight she felt safe enough to rest. She laid her sack of supplies and her blanket on the grassy bank, then considered the shallow stream. Although by the rules of their order the priestesses of Alshandra scorned such comforts as bathing, Sidro had never been able to break herself of the desire to be clean.

She pulled off her leather dress, laid it on the grass, and, still dressed in her linen shift, stepped into the cold mountain water. Gasping and splashing she sank into a shallow pool, then knelt on comfortable white sand to let the water run over her back and shoulders. Without soap she could do little more than rinse off loose dirt and old sweat from skin and linen both, but even that little felt like luxury.

‘Alshandra forgive me,’ she murmured, several times over.

She was scooping up water and splashing it onto her face when a shadow swept across her. Overhead a raven circled, an enormous raven, so large that she knew exactly what—or rather who—it had to be. She rose and climbed onto the bank just as the raven landed with a flurry of shiny black wings, which he folded before he spoke. Although he used the Horsekin tongue, his rigid beak distorted his speech so much that she understood him only because she’d known him since childhood.

‘Turn away!’

Sidro did as he asked. A sudden shimmer of blue light cast a brief shadow onto the grass in front of her. When she turned back, Laz Moj sat cross-legged and naked on the grass, holding a single raven feather in his long fingers. His mach-fala, that is, his mother-clan as the Gel da’ Thae call their extended families, had mingled human and Horsekin blood for a good many centuries. He was as tall and heavily muscled as a typical Horsekin, but he wore his brown hair cropped short and slicked straight back, as sleek as the raven’s feathers. His dark brown eyes dominated his face and its slender nose, thin lips, and sharp jawline—a face like a knife-edge, or so most people described it. Between the welter of blue tattoos on his face, neck, and shoulders, his skin was tanned, not the pure white of Horsekin skin, though his chest and stomach were pinkish-pale from a lack of sun.