The Gold Falcon

by Katharine Kerr

  “Oh.” Cal considered this for a moment. “I tend to forget that you’ve got dweomer, Ebañy. You play the prattling fool so well.” He turned on his heel and stalked off.

  “I sincerely hope he gets over this fit, seizure, or spasm of unfortunate emotion,” Salamander said, “or my life is going to be difficult. Difficult? Not that alone! It might even be shorter than the gods intended.”

  “He wouldn’t dare harm you. He knows that we need every bit of dweomer we have if we’re going to win these battles.”

  “How nice to be useful! But I’m grateful, mind.” Salamander mugged relief and wiped his brow with an exaggerated wave of one hand. “On to the work ahead! I take it you want me to guard your body while you’re off scouting.”

  “Just that. We’ve got to take a good look at that wretched temple.”

  On the way to her tent, Dallandra saw Neb, hailed him, and brought him along. He would have the important duty of sitting directly outside of the tent door and keeping out anyone who might want to enter, including Calonderiel.

  “I’ll gladly try,” Neb said, “but I fear me that Cal won’t listen to a word I say.”

  “Then stand up and block the door,” Dallandra said. “If you need to, summon Wildfolk and threaten him. I love him dearly, but I cannot be disturbed. Tell him that if he comes charging in, he could break my concentration and kill me.”

  “Is that true?” Neb sounded shocked.

  “It is. Very true.”

  “Then don’t worry.” Neb laid his hand on the hilt of his table dagger. “No one will get past me.”

  “Good. Come on, Ebañy.”

  Once inside, Dallandra made a ball of light, then flung it to the center of the roof of her tent, where it stuck, glowing silver. Shadows danced around the circling walls. Salamander knelt on the floor cloth and stared at the flickering play of light.

  “I see Govvin,” he said after a moment. “Not much else, but I do see Govvin. He’s lying on a pallet of straw on the floor of what appears to be a tiny chamber. There’s a candle lantern burning on a table near the bed, if you’d call that miserable heap a bed. He’s lying so still that I’d say our priest was asleep, but his eyes are open.”

  “He’s not dead, is he?”

  “No. I can see his bony ribs rising and falling.”

  “He might well be exhausted from this morning.”

  “Or in trance?” Salamander turned to her.

  “Maybe. Let’s find out.”

  Dallandra lay down on her blankets, and Salamander moved over to kneel at her head. She crossed her arms over her chest, then slowed her breathing to a steady rhythm. First, she summoned the mental image of a silver flame. She visualized it so clearly that it seemed to be glowing in front of her rather than in her mind. Slowly, she enlarged the flame until it became the height of a tall woman, glowing above her, fed by her own life-energy, streaming from her solar plexus like a silver cord. At that point the image had become her body of light.

  Dallandra transferred her consciousness over to the body of light. She imagined herself looking out from a silver hood, as if the flame were a cloak she wore. She heard a strange hissing sound, a click. It seemed that she floated within the flame and looked down at her sleeping body, lying far below, and Salamander, encased in his pale gold aura. Behind her, the silver cord paid out like a fisherman’s line as she rose higher, swooped through the tent roof, and out into the open night.

  Above the stars hung close, vast silver globes that echoed her body of light. The encampment far below blazed red and gold from the auras of the men inside it. On Honelg’s dun walls a gleam of auras rose from the archers on guard. The stone, the rocky hill, all the dead things in both dun and camp looked black, so black in fact that they seemed more like shapes cut out of the very fabric of life than objects with an existence of their own. All around them the grass, trees, and other vegetation shone a dim reddish brown.

  Dallandra swept away from the camp and headed back along the road to the fortress of Bel. When it came into view, looming on its squat hill, she paused to study it. Here on the etheric plane, its stones loomed black and dead, but the timber of the actual temple inside the walls displayed a faint reddish light, like the last gleam of a sunset, indicating that the temple’s wood had been cut fairly recently. She saw no astral dome, no seals of blue light, nothing that would indicate the presence of dweomerworkers inside, whether they followed the light or cherished the darkness.

  Cautiously, slowly, she drifted closer. She saw no one outside in the dun’s ward, not that she worried about the usual kind of sentries, those whose consciousness lay on the physical plane alone. She was expecting an etheric challenge, should a dark master be dwelling there, but no inverted pentagrams shone to ward away the dweomer of light. She wove herself a shield of bluish etheric substance, just in case a dark master should suddenly appear, clothed in lurid images of evil instead of a body of light.

  Closer, closer—no one rose up to threaten her, yet it seemed she could sense—something. Arzosah had told her that above the temple itself the etheric forces seemed to be beating like a heart. Dallandra had no idea of what such an image might mean; etheric forces in her experience swirled, flowed, or occasionally spurted up and twisted like waterspouts, but she’d never seen any throb. Yet, as she drifted over the dun walls, she could see, high above the temple, an area, roughly circular, where the silver blue etheric light brightened, then dimmed, in a fairly regular rhythm.

  She paused again, turning to scan all around her for enemies. Again, nothing. She rose higher until she hung in her flame-shaped body just below the pulsing circle, which proved to be the mouth of a tunnel stretching into a bluish-black darkness. Within the tunnel swirled images, strange geometric shapes, human faces, little twisted stars, deformed creatures, flowers and leaves and tendrils, all floating through an indigo haze. Someone had opened a gate to the lower astral plane and left it there, a trap and a danger to any etheric creature, such as the Wildfolk, who might drift into it.

  Dallandra moved away from the tunnel mouth, then rose higher until she could look at it from above. Hanging below her, it appeared as a long tube, wide at the mouth, dwindling down and disappearing into a haze at the far distant end. The tube’s surface seemed velvet-soft or perhaps slightly furred, but utterly unnatural in any case. As she studied it, she realized that the far end of the construct was moving, twitching back and forth like the tailtip of an impatient cat. The motion would account for the pulses of etheric force.

  But what was it? It was much too complex for a simple astral gate. Her first instinct was to retreat, to return to her body and consult with Salamander and Valandario, but the astral gate was a potentially fatal hazard to the weak creatures whose world it had invaded. Within her cloak of fire she raised the images of her hands and called upon the Light, the pure Light that shines behind all gods, the Light that the dark dweomer hates above all else. She dedicated the working with its name.

  All around lay the raw power of the etheric plane. Dallandra sent her body of light spinning in a slow dance, gathering in the blue light the way a spindle gathers in the freshly spun thread. She used the magnetic force she collected to fashion a pentagram, and within the glowing silver points of the inner star of the pentagram she placed the sigils of the elements, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, and Aethyr. In the center she placed the holiest of names.

  “In the name of the Light,” she called out in a wave of thought. “I banish thee!”

  With a thrust of will she sent it floating toward the gate. She was expecting the tunnel to simply vanish when the two collided. The pentagram sailed forward, touched the tunnel shape, and burst into black flame. The tunnel exploded.

  Force, pure force that burned like acid surged and caught her. She felt her body of light rip and tear as a great wave flung her upward, tumbled her this way and that, threatened to throw her into the stars themselves, or so it seemed to her as she careened this way and that. Her useless shield fell away in
tatters. All of her concentration, all of her will went into strengthening the silver cord that linked her to her body, so far below. If that broke, she would be dead beyond recovery. Wave after wave of power, a burning power, battered her. The silver cord was stretching thin. She had no choice but to retreat, to spin away, to follow the cord before it snapped and rush back to her body. The waves of force followed her, burning, tearing.

  Someone was coming to meet her, another silver cloak of flame—Ebañy. From his own substance he was weaving a rope of light. He tossed it, she caught it, and she felt his energy flowing toward her, renewing her torn body of light. Together they spiraled down toward the Westfolk encampment. She could see the auras of men, glowing beneath them, and dots of fire between the tents—safety at last. She had just the energy left to look back and see the remains of the tunnel collapsing inward. As they fell, they dissolved back into the blue light. She had closed the gate.

  Down and down—suddenly they were in the tent, hovering over their bodies. To her surprise she realized that her body was lying twisted on the opposite side of the tent from her blankets. Salamander’s lay flopped on its back, arms outstretched. He drifted over it, then dropped. The flame that encased him shrank, dwindled, turned invisible. The body below sat up, its aura glowing gold, though a fair bit less brightly than it had been before.

  Salamander got up, staggered over to her physical body, and dragged it back to the blankets. He laid her out like a corpse—though the silver cord hung unbroken though dangerously thin—in order to minimize her pain when she returned to her flesh. Dallandra slid down the cord, felt her consciousness slip free of the body of light, then fell gratefully into the physical world. A click, a rushy hiss, and she was back, aching in every muscle and tendon, with Salamander leaning over her.

  “My thanks,” she whispered. “You saved my life.”

  He smiled, too exhausted to speak.

  From outside she heard a voice—Cal’s voice—yelling and threatening Neb in two languages with vile things if he didn’t step aside at once. Dallandra staggered to her feet and managed to walk to the tent door. She flung it aside to find Calonderiel grabbing Neb by the throat.

  “Stop it!” she said. “He’s just following my orders.”

  “Thank every god in the sky!” Cal said and let Neb go. “You’re alive!”

  Neb staggered back, rubbing his throat. With a shock Dallandra realized that half the Westfolk camp was standing around gawking and that the other half was running to see what the disturbance was.

  “We were going to stop the banadar from killing him,” one of the archers said, pointing to Neb. “We’d just got here when you came out.”

  “I see,” Dallandra said. “My thanks. Why don’t you all go away again? There’s nothing wrong anymore. Neb, bless you! Come in, and Cal, you, too.”

  With Dallandra safe, Calonderiel turned apologetic. He insisted on arranging the softest cushions for Neb to sit upon and poured him mead in a silver goblet to ease the ache in the scribe’s throat. That done, he rummaged through tent bags until he found a slab of honeycake, purloined from the gwerbret’s wedding, which he divided between Salamander and Dallandra. She bit into it greedily.

  “I’ll fetch water,” Calonderiel said.

  Dallandra was too busy stuffing the cake into her mouth to answer. She and Salamander both needed to anchor their consciousness firmly to their bodies, and food was the best way to do so. Neb sat sipping his mead and watching them with a stunned expression. No doubt his daydreams about mighty dweomer workings hadn’t included raw hunger. Calonderiel returned with a waterskin and filled more goblets all round. When Dallandra held out her sticky hands, he squeezed the waterskin and washed them clean, but he handed the water to Salamander and let him clean his own hands.

  “A thousand thanks, my love,” Dallandra said in Deverrian. “You’ve been around dweomermasters for a very long time, haven’t you?” She managed to smile. “Do you realize that Salamander saved my life?”

  “I got that impression,” Cal said. “I was walking up to the tent when I heard you scream, and Ebañy start cursing. Then Neb and I heard the sound of some heavy thing flopping like a caught fish on a riverbank.”

  “I somehow knew that the noise came from you.” Neb’s voice rasped and croaked. “So I told the banadar that your body was suffering some kind of repercussion from whatever you were doing out there.”

  “But he wouldn’t let me by him.” Calonderiel looked honestly contrite. “My apologies, Neb.”

  Neb smiled weakly and had another sip of mead.

  “As for me, I couldn’t hold you down,” Salamander said, “so I went out after you.”

  “And a cursed good thing you did,” Calonderiel muttered. “I was afraid Dalla would break her neck.”

  Dallandra drank another sip of water. She was wondering how much Calonderiel actually understood of what had just happened. Even more, she wondered if she wanted him to understand.

  “Dalla, what was that construct?” Salamander went on. “I caught a glimpse of it before it collapsed. It didn’t look like a normal astral gate to me.”

  “It wasn’t,” Dallandra said. “I’m not sure what it was, frankly. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  “Do you think Govvin made it?” Salamander said.

  “I don’t know for certain, but I doubt it very much.”

  Salamander turned slightly and began staring at one of the tent bags hanging on the wall, but his eyes moved as if they were following some living thing. His skin was far too pale, his hair plastered down with sweat. Dark blood was gathering under the skin below his eyes.

  “What are you seeing?” Dallandra said.

  “Govvin. He’s up and walking through the ward. Some of the priests are following him.” Salamander paused, his mouth slack, for a long moment. “Ah, they’re leaving the dun now through the postern gate.” Suddenly he laughed, a small exhausted sound. “He’s setting a guard over the remaining cattle.”

  “If he’s doing somewhat as mundane as that,” Dallandra said. “He can’t have the slightest idea of what just happened on the etheric above his wretched temple.”

  “Just so.” Salamander paused for a yawn. “Which means he can’t have made the thing. I doubt me if the man who did build it realized you were destroying it either, or he’d have come charging up to defend it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Neb broke in. “Do you mean this dark dweomerman’s not in the temple?”

  “I’m guessing he’s not,” Salamander said. “We don’t know, unfortunately.”

  “True spoken,” Dallandra said. “We’ll have to keep a watch on that wretched temple, though. If he does come back, I want a good look at him. He must have been staying in the temple. Why else build above it? Let’s hope he returns before the siege is over.”

  Calonderiel growled, a whisper of frustrated rage. “I don’t want you putting yourself in danger like this again.”

  “I don’t want you putting yourself in danger by riding to battle either, but will that stop you?”

  Calonderiel opened his mouth and shut it again without speaking.

  “Neb?” Dallandra turned to him. “The gwerbret’s going to send messages back to Cengarn on the morrow. Write Branna and tell her to be on her guard every moment of every day.”

  “I will.” Neb’s voice seemed a little less raw. “You know, you told me that I shouldn’t rush ahead with dweomer. I didn’t want to be patient, but truly, now I see what you mean. I don’t understand what happened to you, but one thing’s clear. There’s danger in working dweomer, more than I ever thought possible.”

  “True spoken,” Dallandra said. “Tell her that, too. Thanks be to all the gods that she can read.”

  With Ridvar on campaign, overseeing the life of the dun fell to his lady. Each morning Drwmigga sat in Ridvar’s chair at the head of the table of honor by the dragon hearth. Keeping her company there were Galla and her two serving women, Branna and Solla, as well
, of course, as the four women Drwmigga had brought with her from her father’s dun. Drwmigga would lean back in her chair and smile at everyone, her large eyes as placid as always, as the various servitors and servants came forward to listen to her orders of the day. She tended to agree with everyone and grant their requests with a minimum of discussion.

  “I’m still learning the ways of the rhan,” she remarked several times. “Dear Solla, you’ve been such a great help to me.”

  Solla would smile in return but say nothing. At first Branna thought that Drwmigga was pouring vinegar on Solla’s wounds, but finally she realized that Drwmigga truly didn’t understand her sister-in-law’s situation. After that, Branna found herself more and more tempted to respond to Drwmigga’s comments with a moo.

  Five days after the army rode out, Ridvar’s first messenger arrived. Branna, who was up in her chamber, heard a strange sound outside, an odd thwacking noise, as if someone were cleaning an enormous tapestry by beating it with an equally enormous stick. She went to her window and leaned out. Down below in the ward, a scattering of servants had stopped whatever tasks they were about. They stood still, heads tilted back, staring at the sky. All of a sudden a maidservant screamed aloud and went careening across the ward to duck into the great hall. The others stood as if frozen for a brief moment, then rushed after her. The dun dogs began howling, running this way and that across the ward before they too sought shelter inside.

  Branna looked up to see a dragon circling the dun. In the bright light of afternoon her coppery-black scales gleamed with a greenish undertone as she dropped lower, aiming for the flat roof of the main broch. Without thought or hesitation Branna called out, “Arzosah! Arzosah Sothy Lorezohaz!”

  “I am that,” the dragon called back. “I’ll just land.”

  Branna rushed out of her chamber and ran, panting a little, up the stairs to the trapdoor that led to the roof. She climbed up the ladder and emerged into sunlight to find the dragon settled, her huge wings neatly folded, her tail tucked round her haunches. Yet despite her comfortable posture, reminiscent of a hearthside cat, under her scales muscles bulged, and when she yawned, she displayed teeth as long as Branna’s arms.