by DAVID B. COE
“Before you do, Wolf-Master,” Baden said, stopping him, “you should know that the traitor died unbound today. He is now one of the Unsettled as well.”
Phelan considered this for a moment. “It should not matter. Given time, he will be able to stop us, but he is new to our circle yet. He should not be a problem.” With that, the Wolf-Master closed his eyes. A few seconds later, Kalba did the same.
The six mages waited silently for what seemed a long time, as Phelan, his massive frame rigid and his brow creased in concentration, attempted to contact the other spirits roaming Tobyn-Ser. The forest was utterly still, save for a soft, salty breeze that glided in off the water, and the sound of the waves drifting gently from the beach. Jaryd glanced at Baden, who returned the look with a slight shrug and an anxious expression.
Several moments later, Phelan opened his eyes again. “The link has been forged,” he told them, his bright eyes seeming clouded, as if slow to regain their focus. He turned to the young mages, a strange smile tugging at his lips. “Theron sends his greetings to the two of you. And he congratulates you all on the slaying of the traitor.”
Jaryd looked quickly at Alayna, but she offered no reaction.
“Thirteen of the outlanders remain,” the Wolf-Master continued, “spread throughout the land in small groups.” He paused.
“Where, exactly?” Baden asked. “Can you tell?”
“Of course.” The spirit closed his eyes again. “There are two groups of three, one in the east-central portion of the Great Desert and the other on the Northern Plain. Six are traveling in pairs. They can be found in the southern corner of Tobyn’s Plain, the Emerald Hills, and in Tobyn’s Wood, not terribly far from here. And there is one traveling alone in Leora’s Forest.” Once more, he opened his eyes.
“So what do we do now?” Baden asked. “What are our options?”
Phelan opened his arms in a gesture of invitation. “The choice is yours. The possibilities are as boundless now as they were limited a moment ago. You must decide what you want us to do with the intruders. If you want them dead, we can kill them for you with little—”
“No,” Baden broke in, shaking his head. “We want them alive. When this group is defeated, another may be sent, and we’ll be no better off than we are now. We need answers that only these people can give us.”
The Wolf-Master nodded slowly. “Very well. Then we will bring them to you.”
“We cannot fight them all at once.”
Again the spirit grinned. “You will not have to fight them at all,” he returned. “We are able to track the outlanders by their strange birds and weapons. They are alien to this land—far more so than the people themselves—and so we are tuned to them in a way. We can sense them. And, when we bring the intruders to you, we can take these objects from them.”
Baden cocked his head slightly. “Can you bring the weapons to us as well, perhaps later, after we’ve subdued the outlanders? They shouldn’t be left scattered throughout the land.”
“I believe we can, yes.”
“That would be satisfactory,” the Owl-Master replied. “Although,” he added with a sheepish grin, “we may also need you to transport all of us, including the outlanders, back to the Great Hall.”
“You ask a great deal, Owl-Master,” the spirit observed with a grin. “We can do that as well, once the intruders are here. We will need your aid, however,” Phelan went on. “How did you come here?”
Baden regarded the luminescent figure with uncertainty. “We used the Summoning Stone,” he said after a moment. “Why?”
“I thought as much,” the Wolf-Master remarked. “Then you are familiar with the concept of the conduit.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Phelan explained, “just as you needed someone to envision this place, we need one of you to visualize the outlanders for us.”
“But I thought you could see them,” Jaryd said. “Theron told us that he saw them.”
“We do see them. But as with all things that we see, including those, like yourselves, that stand directly before us, we see them . . . differently.”
“What do you mean?”
The spirit gave a small, self-conscious laugh. “I am not certain that I can explain. It has been so long since I observed anything in any other way.” He made a small, helpless gesture, which looked strange coming from such a formidable figure. “It is just different.” He faltered again. “It is as if I see you from very far away, but not so far that I cannot make out details, like the color of your eyes, or the plumage of your bird.” He shook his head in frustration. “I cannot explain it,” he said again, impatience creeping into his tone. “What is important is that we need one of you to act as our conduit, so that the image we use resembles those we transport. Without your help, the outlanders will be lost, just as you would have been had you been sent here without a proper image of the spur to guide you.”
“I saw the two who died at Watersbend,” Baden volunteered. “You can use that image.”
“No,” Phelan replied flatly, after conveying Baden’s offer to the other Unsettled. He leveled a meaty finger at Jaryd. “Theron wants him, for the vision he had. The Owl-Master believes it will be stronger than any memory.”
Jaryd shrugged. “All right,” he agreed. “What do you need me to do?”
“In a few moments,” Phelan told him with sudden kindness, “when I tell you we are ready, you must stand with your ceryll held out before you and empty your mind of all, save the image of the outlander you have envisioned.”
Jaryd waited for more. “That’s all?” he asked finally.
“That is all. We will do the rest.” The spirit turned to Baden. “The rest of your company need only wait, although you should remain alert. The outlanders will have no weapons, but once they have arrived, I cannot control what they do. It will be up to you to keep them from escaping.”
“We’ll be ready,” the Owl-Master replied. He glanced at Jaryd and started to say something. Then he stopped himself, and placed a hand on Jaryd’s arm. “You’ll do fine,” he said. “I know you’ll do fine.”
Alayna held Jaryd close for a moment and then, with the others, stepped a short distance away. Jaryd struggled to calm himself, but the sense of foreboding had returned. It all seemed almost too easy.
“Ready yourself, Hawk-Mage,” Phelan commanded, as the Wolf-Master and the great animal beside him closed their eyes again.
Jaryd did the same, focusing his mind as best he could on the vision that first came to him so many weeks ago, as he and Baden slept in the mountains above Taima. At first, the memory remained hazy, as if seen through a curtain or a fine mist. But, gradually, it grew clearer. As he had that night in the late spring, Jaryd saw a man in a long green cloak, carrying a baleful red ceryll in one hand and bearing a huge, alien bird on his opposite shoulder. Jaryd watched the figure approach him, saw the outlander remove a black feather from his cloak, waited as the man came nearer. Concentrating on this image, Jaryd was but dimly aware of the mounting gale that had begun to whip through the hollow. An instant later, however, he did perceive another presence in his mind. It took him a few seconds to realize that it was the Wolf-Master.
Be easy,the spirit sent.Hold fast to your vision, but open your mind to us sothat we might encompass it. The image is strong; you are doing well.
Then Phelan was gone, replaced by a new consciousness, one Jaryd did not know. It seemed to move through him and over him, like the wind he so vaguely felt on his skin and cloak. Others followed in a seemingly endless procession. Time came to be measured by their passage. At one point, Theron was there, proud and fierce.You have done well, Hawk-Mage, he conveyed.Remember me. Some time later, another passed through him, one who was familiar somehow, though Jaryd could not name the presence.I am the last, this one sent. But these words rode a wave of harsh, malicious laughter that chilled Jaryd like ice water running down his spine.
And in that moment, the image in Jaryd’s mind abruptly sha
ttered into shards of blinding, cutting light, and Phelan erupted with a deafening, inarticulate roar. Jaryd felt himself toppling to the ground, and though he could see nothing, he was suddenly aware of the howling wind that raged all around the company.
“What is it!” he heard Baden cry out, somewhere behind him.
“It is impossible!” Phelan bellowed, his tone colored in equal measure by outrage and shock. “How can he already be so strong?”
Sartol, Jaryd realized, of course. That was the voice he had heard. “He is new to our circle yet,” Phelan had said. “He should not be a problem.” Oh, but he was so very strong. Jaryd had faced his power just this morning. All of them had nearly died at the Owl-Master’s hands. They should have known that he would find a way to thwart them, even now. They should have known. There was a taste like ashes in Jaryd’s mouth, and he could still hear Sartol’s laughter echoing in his ears like vengeance.
“He has resisted us!” Phelan cried out. “He has betrayed us!”
Then the Wolf-Master’s voice changed again, growing severe as he shouted out a warning. “Guard yourselves!” he cried out, his words crashing over the gale and the cold memory of laughter. “They are coming! And they can fight you!”
22
He made his way slowly through the dense woodland—Leora’s Forest, they called it here, although the crude maps he had memorized prior to leaving Lon-Ser merely referred to it as “the Northwest Timber Stand”—and he navigated the rough, wooded path by the ghostly light of the moon, which filtered past the leaves and branches overhead, and by the deep, crimson glow of the stone mounted atop his weapon. There was a village a few miles ahead; already he could detect the faint scent of the smithies and cooking fires riding the light wind.
Tomorrow night, if all went according to plan, others approaching the settlement along this path would smell smoke of a different kind pouring into the night sky. He tried to smile, but even this notion could not clear the shadows from his mind. Normally he preferred working alone; he valued his solitude. But tonight, his mind churning with dark thoughts, and his stomach clenched with a fear that went far beyond the vague sense of disquiet that had gripped him for the past several days, Calbyr found himself hungry for companionship.
If someone had asked him yesterday, he couldn’t really have explained what was bothering him or what had prompted these feelings of foreboding, other than to attribute them to superstition. And that was still not an admission that came to him easily. Over the past year, during his time in this strange land, he had grown increasingly superstitious, even allowing his beliefs to influence his decisions as leader of the crew.
Nothing important, nothing substantial, but he had altered the timing of certain actions to coincide with fortuitous dates, or to avoid full moons. Obviously, he would never have admitted this to the men working under him. None of them would have understood. Indeed, back in the Nal, he would never have tolerated such irrationality himself. Perhaps here, where the people were backward and unsophisticated, where the culture was underdeveloped and the wilderness unrefined, superstition was accepted. In Lon-Ser, though, people had moved beyond believing in signs and omens, at least the people he knew. Lon-Ser’s technological advances had brought a more pragmatic sense of the workings of the world, and a deeper understanding of science. All of which left little room for cabalism and the foolishness that went along with it. But he had been away from home for too long. He had spent too many days wandering through forests and mountains, learning to hunt and to orient himself by the position of the sun and the moon and the stars. He had become so tuned to this blasted country that he had even begun to think like its people. That, of all things, did make him smile: the thought of himself as some sort of man of the land, or mountaineer, more like an Oracle than a Nal-Lord, was funny. Only for a moment, however. And then the black mood descended on him again. At times like these, he barely recognized himself as the man who had left the Nal two years ago to begin training the band of break-laws for this mission. He was the agent of Lon-Ser’s expansion, Tobyn-Ser’s conqueror. Those were the phrases Cedrych had used, anyway, and he liked the sound of them, particularly the second. But agents of expansion didn’t fall prey to these invisible demons of the mind, and conquerors didn’t spend so much time afraid.
Cedrych, of all people, might actually have understood. As much as Calbyr mistrusted his Overlord, and, yes, even feared him, he also felt a certain kinship to the man. Cedrych would appreciate the difficulties of this job and of functioning for so long in this alien culture. For all that had passed between them over the years, and despite the tense, at times even violent nature of the Lord-Overlord relationship, Cedrych had offered words of compassion and encouragement just before Calbyr’s departure.
“We two are alike, Calbyr,” he had said unexpectedly, passing a hand over his smoothly shaven head, the gaze of his one good eye and the empty, scarravaged socket both fixed on Calbyr’s face. “We’re visionaries. We see not only the future, but also the path, as yet unforged, that will lead us to it.” He had placed a large though delicate hand on Calbyr’s shoulder. The hand of an artist, Calbyr remembered thinking. The hand of a killer. “You will build that path, my friend. I can give you the tools, the resources you’ll need. But it falls to you to use them well. I envy you, actually,” Cedrych had gone on, surprising Calbyr a second time. “You are to be the agent of Lon-Ser’s expansion and the conqueror of all Tobyn-Ser. You will construct the future of which the rest of us can only dream. To be sure, not everyone here would approve of our tactics, were we to ask them now. They might not even share our aims. At least not yet. But they will, and they’ll thank us. They’ll thank you, Calbyr, for saving Lon-Ser, for giving it a future. Remember that when things aren’t going so well. Remember it when you’re weary of being so far from your beloved Nal,” he had added with a crooked grin, before leading Calbyr to the door and dismissing him for the last time.
Yes. Cedrych would have understood. The recognition of this eased Calbyr’s mind a bit, allowing him to consider more calmly the circumstances that had brought on this latest sense of dread. Certainly, it had begun as mere superstition. Things had been going very well for over a year now. Too well, he had begun to realize recently. In an operation like this one, there were always problems of some sort. Always. And the longer you waited for the first one, he believed, the worse it would be. But no, everything had been perfect. For over a year now. Sure, Sartol had stumbled across them early on, startling them all, and killing Yarit when the buffoon foolishly tried to blast the mage with his thrower. But Sartol proved to be a most valuable ally, giving them access to the inner workings of the Order, and helping them plot their strategy for the discrediting of Tobyn-Ser’s mages and masters. And, while losing a man in a crew this small could have created difficulties, Calbyr had recognized almost from the start that Yarit had been a poor choice. He was too edgy and too stupid. If he hadn’t messed up then, with Sartol, he would have later, probably at a much greater cost to all of them. All in all, their inadvertent encounter with Sartol had turned out quite well, far better than Calbyr had any right to expect.
So, too, had his own chance meeting with the man and boy he had killed on the island in South Shelter. Other people had spotted him from a distance just as this man had done. That in itself was not a problem. But the others had waved and watched him go on, thinking nothing of his failure to stop and speak with them. But this man, inexplicably, had turned and fled. Calbyr never learned why. Perhaps he just sensed something was wrong; perhaps he had a premonition of some sort. Calbyr smiled to himself, noting the irony. Whatever the reason, Calbyr had realized immediately that the man had to die, and the boy, too. Initially, he worried that this sudden escalation of the incidents for which he and his gang were responsible would create problems for them; that it might alert someone to the presence of what Sartol called “outlanders.” But, as it happened, the time was right for an escalation of the attacks. Rather than complicating matters,
the incident provided a convincing bridge between the relatively restrained mischief of the autumn and winter, and the more serious attacks that commenced late in the spring and intensified during the summer.
Even their mistakes, it seemed, worked out for the best. Certainly those two had. Moreover, the attacks had come off without a hitch. From all that Sartol had told him, the vandalism and the killings were having the desired effect. The people’s faith in the Order was deteriorating; mages were accusing mages of treason; and the Order’s chief suspect in all of these crimes had been dead for a thousand years. All of it was going according to plan. Exactly. Perfectly. And Calbyr was terrified. Sooner or later, things were bound to fall apart. That’s what he had been thinking yesterday, even as he lamented his superstitious nature.
Today, though, all that had changed. Vague forebodings had given way suddenly to a deeper, more urgent dread. It had come at last, it seemed, this collapse of the good fortune they had enjoyed. Abruptly, finally, things did not appear nearly so perfect.
First, he had not heard from Glyn and Kedar for well over a week. All the others had checked in as usual, using the communicating devices installed in their weapons to punch in their coded sequence of beeps and buzzes. But not Glyn and Kedar, not since a few days before their planned assault on Watersbend. And Calbyr was worried. All of his men knew that they were supposed to contact him just after a job. It was part of the routine: complete the task, retreat to a safe location, and send him a message giving their codes and two extra beeps to indicate that all had gone according to design. If it had just been Kedar, he might not have been so worried. The huge man had proven the value of his vast, deadly strength on several occasions, but he was somewhat slow-witted; in the excitement of the work, he could easily have forgotten to make contact. But not Glyn, whose savvy and reliability made him Calbyr’s favorite among the men in his charge. Glyn understood the importance of such things. He would not have forgotten. Which could only mean that something had gone wrong at Watersbend. Calbyr shuddered involuntarily. Superstition was one thing, but when superstition and logic led to the same conclusion, that frightened him.