The Silver Mage

by Katharine Kerr

  “Not enough.” Leejak glared at her. “What say you, Kov?”

  “I agree,” Kov said. “Last summer I was part of an army fighting Horsekin. They’re ruthless, and we’d best not take chances.”

  Lady moaned under her breath and tipped her head to rest it against the back of her chair. “I’m so afraid.” Her voice trembled on the edge of tears. “There are so few of us. The risk—if we lost more—” She let her voice trail away.

  “There be risk in doing naught.” Leejak said.

  But what can we do? Kov thought. Frail Dwrgic spears would never pierce Horsekin armor. Leejak cleared his throat as if he were about to speak again, but Lady sat up straight and with a wave of one hand forestalled him.

  “We’ll do naught till I know more.” Her voice turned firm. “There are so few of us. We can’t risk losing anyone in some rash way.”

  Leejak shrugged, rolled his eyes, but said nothing. Kov bowed to them both and left the chamber with the spearleader close behind. Out in the corridor the servant lass waited with a pair of light baskets. Leejak took one from her.

  “Go sleep,” he said. “I walk him back.”

  With a bob of her head and a smile, the Dwrgi lass hurried off down the corridor. Kov and Leejak strolled after, silent until the blue glow from her basket turned a corner and disappeared.

  “When Lady be like this,” Leejak said in a soft voice. “There be no use to argue.”

  “I got that impression, my lord.”

  The spearleader snorted and shrugged. “Later mayhap we do talk more, make her think more.”

  “Do you think she’ll change her mind?”

  “I do. She does this other times, before.” He paused, struggling for words. “She does think good after while. There be a need on her for time to think good, I do mean. Soon you do see this or so I do hope.”

  “So I do hope as well, my lord. I can assure you of that.”

  They walked up a long ramp and turned into a corridor that Kov knew well. Through an open doorway, a bluish glow greeted them.

  “Here’s the treasure chamber,” Kov said. “I have a light basket in there, my lord. I’ll just fetch it and see myself home.”

  Leejak nodded and strode off. Kov went inside, picked up the basket of fungi then lingered for a moment, letting the gold and its invisible mist soothe his troubled mind. Horsekin nearby—ah ye gods, he thought. Will we never escape these savages? As he turned to leave, the light in his basket flickered on a heap of coins and cast the blocky shadow of some object protruding from the heap. Kov pulled it free and found a crumbling codex, missing its front cover, deeply torn along some of its folds. In the dim light he couldn’t properly read it, but he could decipher the Deverrian writing enough to realize that the codex contained dweomerlore.

  “I wish I could show you to Dallandra,” he said to it. “I’ll take you along on the off chance I can escape from this ghastly place.”

  With the codex tucked under his arm, he went back to his chamber, where Grallag had taken up his usual station. Kov greeted him and went inside, shutting the door behind him, to catch what sleep he could with worry for unpleasant company.

  The more he mulled over what he was learning about this peculiar folk, the more Kov wished he could consult with Dallandra. She had the strange lore to understand these things better—he was certain of that. She has dweomer, too, he thought, which would come in handy about now. With the thought he realized that despite what he’d always been taught, he now believed in the existence of sorcerers.

  Out on the grasslands, as Laz’s mood grew blacker and blacker, and his temper worse and worse, more and more of his men deserted him. Even though Drav had started drilling his ragtag collection of deserters with military discipline, the Westfolk camp offered enough comfort and amusement to make Drav seem tolerable, or so Krask informed Laz as he left. Finally, after some days of these slow desertions, Laz ended up with a band comprised of himself and one man.

  After the last deserter had walked off in a huff, early one evening, Faharn built a small fire of twigs and dried horse dung. By its smoky light they ate dry flatbread and cheese washed down with spring water. The evening breeze brought them the drift of distant music and the occasional burst of laughter from the elven camp. Now and then, Laz caught a faint scent of roasting meat. At those moments Faharn would stop fanging his leathery dinner and look wistfully across to the painted tents, glowing from the fires scattered among them.

  “Why don’t you just go join the others?” Laz said. “Ye gods, just because I can’t bear seeing Sidro doesn’t mean you have to fester out here with me.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” Faharn snapped. “I’m not going to desert you.”

  “Why not? I must be the worst company in the Northlands at the moment.”

  Faharn shifted his weight on the log, shrugged, and scowled at the stale flatbread in his hand. “I was hoping,” he said at last, “that we could take up my lessons again.”

  Laz felt so sour that he was tempted to tell him the truth, that Faharn’s small talent for dweomer had blossomed as much as it ever would, that in fact there was no use in his studying any more dweomer than he already knew. But Faharn was watching him so hopefully, so patiently, like a dog who knows that sooner or later his master will share the meat he’s engaged in eating, that Laz threw him a morsel of reassuring lie.

  “There is that,” Laz said. “Which reminds me. I promised Salamander that I’d keep scrying for that wretched dragon book. I might as well give it another try. Now, I want you to watch me as I concentrate. To scry you have to absorb yourself in the thing you’re scrying for. You can’t let your eyes or your attention wander.”

  Faharn nodded, his eyes bright with anticipation. Laz laid his own food aside and concentrated on the tiny flames of their campfire while he sent his mind out to the dragon book. He was expecting the usual murky dark, but this time an image built up of Wynni’s saddlebags, lying upon a table, with the book open on top of them. He was so startled by success that he nearly lost the vision, but with a long exhalation of breath, he steadied himself.

  Men clustered around the table. All he could see were dim shadowy shapes, their blood-red auras flickering this way and that as they leaned forward to peer at the book. One of them laid a hand upon it; with that gesture, his image clarified. Laz could discern his face, strangely jowly and bloated for someone as young as this man seemed to be. His thick, glossy hair, half-hidden by the flickers of his sullen greenish-gray aura, was as pale as Evan the gerthddyn’s. Laz caught a quick sight of one ear when the fellow turned his head to speak to someone. The ear, abnormally long, curled like a lily bud. A Westfolk man? Laz thought. The fellow turned his head the other way, and Laz saw a brand bitten into his cheek: a crude image of a Boar. A slave! And an elven slave at that! Dalla will want to hear of this.

  Laz tried to widen the vision, but much of the view around the fellow with the book stayed murky and dark. He got an impression rather than a clear view of stone walls, roughly circular, of battered tables and rush torches, a straw-strewn floor gleaming beneath the auras of a pack of large dogs. When he returned to the book, the vision began to break up. The slave was putting it back into its wrappings, and as it slid into its leather prison, Laz lost sight of everything. He looked at Faharn, who was watching him wide-eyed.

  “Horseshit and large heaps of it!” Laz said. “I saw it, but I have no idea where it is. Here, I need to talk with Dallandra. Come with me, and they’ll feed you, most likely.”

  Sure enough, when Laz and Faharn came to the edge of the Westfolk encampment, the men at the nearest fire hailed them like long-lost friends. They shoved a drinking horn of mead into Laz’s hand and a wooden skewer threaded with chunks of cooked lamb into Faharn’s. One of their number trotted off to fetch the Wise One.

  “This bodes well,” Laz said in the Gel da’Thae tongue. “I don’t see Sidro anywhere nearby.”

  Faharn, his mouth full of roast lamb, nodded and went on ea
ting. Though the Westfolk offered Laz meat as well, he turned it down. He had no desire to smear himself with grease in front of Dallandra. He did allow himself a few small sips of the mead, though he had to clutch the horn in both hands to compensate for his dearth of fingers.

  The Wise One herself appeared just as Faharn was starting on his second skewer of meat. As she approached, the men around the fire fell silent; two of them knelt; the rest took a step back. To Laz’s hungry eyes she looked particularly beautiful that night, her skin glowing in the flickering light of the tiny fire, her ash-blonde hair, freed of its usual braid, swirling around her shoulders in long silvery waves.

  “It’s good to see you here, Laz,” Dallandra said. “You’re welcome to come to my fire.”

  “Not where I might see Sidro,” Laz said. “But I have news. I finally got a glimpse of that wretched book.”

  Dallandra gasped with a toss of her head. “Let’s go discuss this privately.”

  “Splendid idea.” He glanced at Faharn, who had acquired a pottery stoup of mead whilst Laz had been looking elsewhere. “Don’t get drunk. I’m going to consult with the Wise One.”

  Laz handed the drinking horn to one of the Westfolk, then followed Dallandra out into the rustling grass. Since, unlike her, he couldn’t see well in the dark, they didn’t go far, just a hundred yards or so away to put some silence between them and the noisy camp. The soft night wind lifted her long waves of hair, shining as silver as the river of stars that flowed across the sky.

  “Could you see where the book was?” Dallandra said.

  “Inside what appeared to be a Lijik dun,” Laz said. “Not much of one, either. Alas, I have no idea where it might stand, but I did see some of the men who were looking at it. Typical Lijik warriors, except for one.”

  When he described the slave and his brand, Dallandra agreed with him that the fellow had to have elven blood in his veins.

  “He seemed well-fed for a slave,” Laz said. “Plump, in fact. That surprised me.”

  “He may well have been castrated. The Horsekin do that to lads they capture young.”

  Laz winced. “That was outlawed in the cities years ago.”

  “Well, I didn’t think these men were Gel da’Thae.” Dallandra smiled briefly. “Have you heard the tale about the temple of Bel that the Horsekin raiders destroyed?”

  “Evan mentioned it, truly. Didn’t they find a bit of writing there?”

  “Of sorts. A single letter carved into wood next to a Boar clan mark. Prince Dar wondered if someone had left it there to tell others where he was, or where the raiders came from, or suchlike.”

  “Are you wondering if this slave was the one who did? From the way he was paging through the book, I’d say he can read.”

  “It’s likely.” Dallandra turned her head and looked out over the grass, sighing like the sea under the night wind. “Let me talk with Cal about this. He was there at the temple, and I wasn’t.”

  Cal again, always Cal. This is ridiculous, Laz told himself. You have no hope of getting this woman to warm to you, none! Sidro, on the other hand—if he could only find the right key, he was sure he could unlock her heart once again. He always had before. If he could find some way to impress her, something grand, some feat of dweomer that Pir could never match—maybe then she’d see him in the old light.

  Laz returned to the fire to find Faharn stuffing himself with still more roast lamb and a half-round of thin fresh bread. Dallandra must have noticed Faharn’s appetite as well. Not long after dawn on the morrow, Neb arrived at Laz’s camp, his arms full of sacks of food.

  “Gifts from the Wise One,” Neb said.

  Faharn hurried over to take some of the sacks. Together, the two apprentices went off to stow them in the tent. Laz felt an odd unease at the sight of Neb—odd because he’d liked the lad when first they’d met back in Trev Hael. Neb had been miserable and thus weak, back then, in deep mourning for his hearth kin, carried off by the pestilence that had ravaged the town. Now something about him warned of danger, but the danger lay under his surface, like an ebb tide waiting for the unwary swimmer under a pleasant-seeming sea.

  Odd and twice odd, Laz thought. Wait—what was that name Dalla mentioned? Nevyn. Neb and Nevyn. Hearing the names sound together in his mind turned him suddenly cold with dweomer warning. Why? He had no idea. He decided that he’d best see if he could find out.

  Neb came out of the tent with Faharn right behind, carrying a basket of bread and dried apples. Laz took a chunk of bread between his thumb and forefinger and waved it in Neb’s direction. “Did Dallandra mention that I’d scried out the dragon book?” Laz said.

  “She did.” Neb sat down on one side of the cold firepit. “She also told me that spirits of Aethyr were guarding it.”

  “That’s what I saw, truly.” Laz sat down on the other side.

  They considered each other, with Neb as wary as Laz. Faharn joined them, but since he knew only a few words of Deverrian, he ate steadily and said little.

  “Do you have any idea where it might be?” Laz said at last.

  “I don’t,” Neb said. “But Salamander thinks it must be at the Boar dun. Evan, I mean.”

  “I’ve heard all his names now, my thanks. I am amazed by the number of names the Westfolk have, and Evan Ebañy Salamander tran whoever his father was is no different.” Laz paused, thinking. Salamander himself had acquired that same odd aura of dangerous interest. Did I know these men in my former life? Laz wondered.

  “Things are different among the Gel da’Thae?” Neb said.

  “They are. A name’s something to be guarded most carefully. You only get two if you’re freeborn, one if you’re a slave.”

  “Is that why you made up another one? You were calling yourself Tirn when first we met.”

  Laz winced. He’d quite forgotten that.

  “My apologies,” Laz said. “I felt I was on dangerous ground, there among your people.”

  “Ah.” Neb considered this for a few moments. “Understandable, I suppose.” His tone of voice made it clear that he neither understood nor approved. “But about the book, Dalla told me what you saw. You know, that would fit a rough dun built by men who are basically renegades, and the slave had the Boar on his cheek, too.”

  “So you’re guessing it’s at the Boar dun, then?”

  “I am, which is a pity, because if it’s there, it’s doomed.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Prince Voran’s planning on razing the dun, that’s why.”

  “Razing it? You mean burning it? And who’s this Voran person?”

  “The Justiciar of the Northern Border. The Boars have been raiding into Cerrgonney, so it’s his duty to gather an army and burn the place in retribution. Eventually he’ll slight the dun, too, that is, he’ll knock down the walls.”

  “It’s not likely that a mere book’s going to survive all that.”

  “True spoken. That’s my point.” Neb paused for a wry smile. “Dalla really needs that book, too.”

  “Just so.” It occurred to Laz that retrieving the book would be a splendid way to improve Dallandra’s opinion of him. “Let me think on this. There must be some way to get it out safely.”

  “Good luck.” Neb rose and smiled, a thin twitch of his mouth. “I’d best be getting back.”

  “By all means,” Laz said. “My thanks for the information about the Boar dun.”

  Seeing Neb leave made Laz sigh in genuine relief. Danger and twice danger! Laz thought. And I don’t have one cursed idea why I feel that way. Unless, of course, he’d known Neb back in that previous life when he’d betrayed his own kind to run after a false goddess and serve the enemies of his true people. If that were true, no wonder he felt shamed by Neb’s scorn. If. Everything, these days, seemed to depend upon some hidden truth, each bit of knowledge like one strand of a spider’s web, fragile with dew, hanging from the thinnest of twigs.

  All that day Laz let his mind ramble around the problem of the dragon book. He w
as beginning to want another reason beside Sidro to leave the Ancients’ camp behind. Going after the book would provide a splendid, pride-saving excuse. Like Neb, however, Faharn doubted that anyone could rescue that mysterious volume.

  “I did have one idea,” Laz told him. “Which also reminds me.You really have to work on learning the Lijik language. We’re going to be stuck among these people for the rest of our lives, most likely.”

  “You’re right about that.” Faharn’s voice wavered, but when he spoke again, it sounded as strong as always. “So what was this idea?”

  “Suppose we pretended to be sutlers. There’s always a crowd of them following the armies along. Whilst there, showing our wares, we could casually ask if they had any interesting trinkets or other items they’d want to sell. I’d wager that someone would bring out that book. Prince Dar would give us the coin to buy it, no doubt.”

  “And what if someone’s there from Taenbalapan?” Faharn said. “And recognizes you?”

  “Under all these scars? And with my dirty cheap clothes, and maimed hands, and the like, do I look like the First Son of a powerful mach-fala? I’ve not been in Taenbalapan in years and years. Neither of us have. I doubt if anyone would recognize us.”

  “What about Bren?”

  “Who?”

  “That Deverry rider Pir captured. The one prowling around our horses last summer.”

  “Oh. Him. What about him?”

  Faharn sighed in sharp exasperation. “He may well still be at the Boar dun, that’s what.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s he doing there?”

  “Ye gods, Laz! Haven’t you ever wondered what became of him?”

  “No, frankly. What did?”

  “Your woman insisted we give him weapons and supplies and sent him off to the Boars to warn them about the army heading for Zakh Gral.”

  “Her name is Sidro, and she’s not mine any longer.” Laz heard the snarl in his own voice and noticed Faharn flinch. “My apologies. It’s still a raw wound, I’m afraid, anything to do with Sidro. But let us return to this Bren.” He forced out a smile. “Why would he remember me?”