The Spirit Stone (36 page)

He looked up and grinned. ‘No, I won’t,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to come look for yourself.’

‘Damn you, Laz!’

‘I’m already damned, according to you.’ The grin grew broader. ‘So curse away!’

‘Will you put that thing back in its box, then? I’m tired, and I want to sit down.’

‘Come sit. You don’t have to look. Turn your back to it. But I’m a wretchedly bad host, aren’t I? My poor love, you must be starving. Here, let me dress, and I’ll go get us some food.’

He pulled on his trousers, laced them up, then sat on the stump to put on his boots. When he stood up, he glanced back at the white pyramid. ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Evan the minstrel.’

With a vague smile in her direction he walked out without putting the crystal away. Sidro thought of lying down on the mattress again, but if one of his men should come in—besides, her back hurt her—and she might fall asleep—her mind produced so many reasons to sit at the table instead of on the bed that she knew she’d already lost her battle with curiosity.
I’m damned, too,
she thought.
Nothing matters any more.
She walked over to the table, sat down on one of the cut stumps, and looked into the crystal.

At first she seemed to be peering through a crack in a wall and seeing a very small painting on the other side. All at once the vision widened. She was seeing a painting, indeed, the picture of Alshandra hanging over the altar in the Inner Shrine, although the colours were oddly dull, and the details hard to distinguish, as if she were looking through smoke. She sobbed aloud as her broken vows stabbed her conscience. The gesture changed her focus. She was looking through deep smoke or mist at the interior of the shrine. Rocca knelt before the altar. Her lips moved as she stared directly into the smoke.

‘Sow!’ Sidro spoke aloud. ‘Ugly sow!’

Rocca raised her head fast and drew back in shock. The vision wavered, then disappeared, leaving Sidro staring into the clear depths of a piece of rock crystal, sitting on a table in Laz’s cabin. That smoke—of course, she’d been seeing the shrine through the obsidian of the black pyramid. The white had somehow or other linked her to its black twin. Rocca must have been working the ritual devoted to the holy witness Raena, which entailed staring into the obsidian crystal.

As Sidro thought about it, she remembered the times that she’d worked that ritual herself. In most instances she’d seen nothing but obsidian, though now and then she’d picked out a murky form or an indistinct shape that might have been a face. Had she been seeing Laz here in this cabin? And how had Laz seen Evan in the white crystal? Maybe that loathsome viper of a minstrel had returned to Zakh Gral. Maybe he had the gall to enter the holy shrine itself.

She took a few breaths to calm herself, then sent her mind looking for Evan. Occasionally she could scry people out. Before she’d always attributed the power to Alshandra’s favour, the goddess’s reward for her chastity. Thanks to her broken vow Sidro was expecting to see nothing, but much to her surprise, the vision built up more strongly than it ever had before.

She seemed to be hovering in the air above a vast round room where Lijik Ganda men and women sat at wooden tables and drank from pottery mugs or metal tankards. On a table near a cold hearth Evan was standing and talking, his hands moving gracefully as he mimed his way through some sort of tale. Her heart fluttered at the thought that he might be describing Zakh Gral, but he reached up and appeared to pluck an egg out of the air.

Suddenly he dropped it, and everyone in the round room laughed. A marketplace trick like that would have no place in any serious recital. Her heart steadied itself.

Behind her the cabin door opened with a thump and a kick. She turned around to see Laz carrying a big pottery bowl in both hands. Behind him came a skinny Horsekin boy whose skull sported the thin dark fuzz of his first hair-growth. He carried a basket in one hand and a pitcher in the other. She smelled burnt bread and venison stew.

‘This is Vek,’ Laz said. ‘He has the unfortunate habit of going into trances and mumbling omens, so he had to flee Taenalapan for his life.’

The boy gave her a watery smile and set his burdens down on the table. With a nod towards Laz, he turned and trotted out of the cabin. Laz put the bowl of stew down in front of her, then picked up the white stone and began to wrap it in its various sacks.

‘What did you see in it?’ he said.

‘The black pyramid on our altar back in the shrine.’

‘What?’

‘Just that. It was like I was looking out of the black stone and seeing the shrine. You said you saw Evan, but I don’t understand how you could have.’

‘No, no, I must confess something. I was just guessing. I saw some sort of figure, but it’s very cloudy to me, that crystal, so I didn’t know who it was.’

‘It was Rocca. I wish you’d stop lying to me.’

‘I wasn’t lying. Merely guessing.’

She decided against starting an argument. In the basket lay thin rounds of soda bread, blackened along one edge. They would do, she supposed, for spoons.

‘I have some cheese in that sack,’ she said, ‘and some apples. They’re still a little green, but they’re ripe enough.’

‘We’ll save those for our breakfast.’

The stew contained carrots, onions, and turnips as well as chunks of venison, and though luke-warm, it tasted half-way decent and safe enough to eat. Sidro scooped up mouthfuls with the bread, then ate the scoop when it grew soaked with cold gravy. She’d refrained from eating meat for so long that she could only manage a little before she felt disgustingly full.

‘Where do you get all this food, anyway?’ she said.

‘Raiding,’ Laz said. ‘Where else? We hunt for the deer, though.’

‘Raiding? You mean stealing from farmers.’

‘Who else raises food?’ He paused to wipe his mouth on his sleeve.

‘I suppose you kill anyone who objects.’

‘Of course. We’re not Gel da’ Thae any longer, Sisi. We’ve reverted to our savage tribal roots. We’re outlaws, you know, and that’s what outlaws do. Why should we stay civilized when our fellow citizens would like to torture us to death? And in the public square, too! The gall! If I’m going to be forced to scream and moan and piss all over myself, I’d at least like to do it in private.’

‘I’ve heard about those raids on the Lijik border. They get blamed on Alshandra’s men.’

‘Most of them are done by Alshandra’s men, that’s why. I happened to witness a particularly nasty incident myself earlier this summer, when I was flying over a farming village. They killed all the men in cold blood, just lined them up and cut them down. Then they dragged the women away—to sell, I suppose, in Taenalapan and Braemel.’

‘As if your pack is any better!’

‘But we are. If the farmers don’t object, we don’t kill them, and we only steal what they can spare. Farmers who starve to death plant no crops. Besides, we don’t take slaves—hence our lack of hard coin to pay the farmers with. I’ve come to the conclusion that taking slaves is a very bad thing.’

‘What?’ She was honestly shocked. ‘Why? Everyone keeps slaves, well, except for Vandar’s spawn.’

‘I wish you’d stop calling the Ancients Vandar’s spawn. The name is meaningless and really rather stupid, given as he fathered none of them.’

‘But—’ She choked the words back. The sacred teaching no longer mattered, she reminded herself, now that she was damned.

‘As to why,’ Laz continued, ‘consider yourself, born into slavery and utterly incapable of living free even though I made you legally free. As soon as we had our difficulties, what did you do? You joined a cult of fools and madmen who ordered you around, and why? Because you were so accustomed to being ordered around. You couldn’t stand being free, could you, Sisi? You didn’t know how. That’s a horrible thing to do to someone, like pulling the wings off a butterfly.’

Sidro felt as stunned as if he’d struck her in the face. Laz flashed her a brief grin and returned to eating his dinner. She took another piece of griddle bread, had one bite, then merely crumbled the rest between her fingers while she tried to bring to heel the yapping pack of thoughts that Laz had awakened in her mind.

Every evening after dinner, Salamander would entertain the great hall with his patter and sleight-of-hand tricks. Gerran enjoyed them as much as anyone. At Tieryn Cadryc’s insistence, during these shows he stayed with the noble-born at the table of honour. He was thus close enough to see Salamander’s slip that evening. The gerthddyn was prattling away as usual when he reached up and plucked an egg out of mid-air—only to drop it. His audience laughed, thinking he’d done it on purpose, but Gerran noticed how troubled he looked. For a moment Salamander stared out at nothing. While it was hard to be sure in the uncertain candlelight, Gerran thought he turned a little pale.

‘Ye gods!’ Salamander recovered himself with a sickly grin. ‘My apologies, one and all! I seem to be oddly clumsy tonight, and now I’ve quite forgotten what I was saying.’ He jumped down from the table that he’d been standing on. ‘If you’ll forgive me?’ He bowed to the tieryn and Lady Galla, then strode off to the staircase without another word.

In a stunned silence everyone watched him hurry upstairs. Finally Cadryc shook his head and shrugged.

‘And what was all that about, I wonder?’ Cadryc said. ‘He looked so startled that I thought mayhap he was seeing a ghost stroll in the door.’

‘This dun’s too new to have ghosts,’ Galla said. ‘I hope he’s not been taken ill.’

Neb swung himself free of the bench and stood up with a half-bow in her direction. ‘I’ll go see, my lady,’ he said, ‘with your permission of course.’

‘You have it,’ Galla said, ‘and my thanks.’

Neb returned some while later with the news that Salamander was suffering from a headache. ‘Councillor Dallandra left me some medicinals,’ Neb told Galla, ‘so I gave him some willow bark to chew upon.’

‘That should help, certainly,’ Galla said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re a herbman as well as a scribe.’

‘I’m not, my lady, not yet. Those books she sent? One of them’s a herbal, so I’ve been studying.’

‘A very accomplished young man!’ Galla favoured Neb with a smile.

Gerran, however, had the uneasy feeling that Neb was hiding something about Salamander’s condition. If so, he suspected that dweomer, not headache, lay at the root of the gerthddyn’s strange behaviour. Late that evening, when the great hall was clearing out, he had a chance at a private word with Neb.

‘Did the gerthddyn truly have a headache?’ Gerran said.

‘He didn’t,’ Neb said with a slight smile. ‘You’ve got good eyes, Gerro.’

‘Dweomer?’

‘Just that. I’ll explain more if you like.’

‘No need, no need! Don’t trouble yourself.’

‘Answer me somewhat. Why are you fighting men so troubled by talk of dweomer?’

Since it was a serious question, asked with no hint of mockery, Gerran considered his answer. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘But I’ll wager it’s because we don’t understand it, and we can’t understand it, no matter how hard we try. It doesn’t seem real, because we can’t see it or touch it, and yet it
is
real. How can a man fight an enemy he can’t even see? It creeps my flesh, it does.’ All at once he grinned. ‘Besides, if we can’t use it to slash someone to bits or bash his head in, well, then, what good is it?’

‘Ah. That makes it perfectly clear.’

They shared a laugh.

On the morrow, the first lords and their warbands arrived for the muster. Cadryc’s vassals showed up first. Each brought as many men as he could spare from guarding his own holdings, generally five to ten. Although the noble-born slept in the broch, with so many guests expected, their riders ended up camping out in the meadow behind the dun. Next came Cadryc’s allies, among them Branna’s father, Tieryn Gwivyr, who brought twenty-five men and provisions for sixty days. When Gwivyr rode in, Branna dutifully went out to greet him. They spoke briefly, an odd pair, with him so tall and stout, her young and slender, though she’d obviously received her yellow hair from him. He patted her on the head, then strode past her into the great hall. With a shrug Branna followed him in, but as far as Gerran could tell, she seemed neither pleased nor distressed.

Later that day, Gerran came across Gwivyr down by the dun wall. The tieryn stood with his hands on his hips and scowled at the bundles of hay leaning against the stones. Gerran stopped and greeted him with a pleasant ‘good morrow, your grace’.

‘Same to you, my lord.’ Gwivyr jerked his thumb at the bundles. ‘What are these supposed to be, targets?’

‘Just so. Goodman Gwervyl’s archers need practice.’

‘I don’t like it, all these cursed archers. What would our ancestors say about noble-born warriors fighting behind a shield of common folk? It’s dishonourable!’

Gerran realized an unexpected advantage to having been ennobled. He no longer had to keep a polite silence around lords like Gwivyr.

‘Is it, your grace? What about letting the commoners face Horsekin raids without weapons to defend themselves?’

‘Well, true spoken, that would be a graver dishonour. But for a thousand years and more we noble-born have fought like men, facing our enemies sword in hand. Why bring these common-born archers to battle with us?’

‘Why?’ Gerran paused to consider how to keep his answer in the bounds of courtesy. ‘Because they can kill some of our enemies, your grace, while we kill the rest.’

Tieryn Gwivyr stared at him for a moment, then laughed, a long braying bellow.

‘A good answer, my lord,’ Gwivyr said, still smiling. ‘But come now, doesn’t it ache your heart? You’re the greatest swordsman in the Northlands, but some oaf with a longbow could put an end to all that skill from a hundred yards off.’

‘That’s true spoken. I can’t say it gladdens my heart. You’re right about another thing, your grace. That thousand years you spoke of? It’s coming to an end, whether we want it to or no.’

Gwivyr’s smile disappeared. He raised one hand in a strangely clumsy wave, then turned on his heel and strode off.

Gwivyr’s heart would be a cursed lot more troubled,
Gerran thought,
if he knew about the dweomer mixed up in this.
He thought of Neb, discussing dweomer so calmly and at times drawing upon it the way Gerran would rely on his sword.
Better him than me!
Yet he felt in an odd way that dweomer had somehow touched him and stained his thoughts. He was sure—though he tried to dismiss it as mere superstition—that in the coming battle he would find his father’s killer and face him.
It was sixteen years ago!
he reminded himself. By now that Horsekin warrior was most likely dead, or too old to be posted to a frontier fortress, or just simply living elsewhere. Yet deep in his soul he felt—no, he knew—that he wouldn’t merely face the killer. He would recognize him.